By the time the last German pilot had taken off, there were nearly 1,000 machines in the air: 350 bombers and more than 600 fighters stacked up in towering ranks. At the bottom were the Dorniers, Heinkels and Junkers cruising in layers that began at 14,000 feet. At the top were the Messerschmitts, ready to plunge on the British fighters, which would have no choice but to accept the challenge and come up to be annihilated. The enemy force moved through the still, warm air across a front twenty miles wide in a tight, throbbing grid, the biggest mass of aeroplanes ever till then to be assembled. Dowding had only one course of action open. At 4.17 p.m., twenty-three minutes after the first radar sighting, he ordered eleven squadrons to scramble. By 4.30 every Hurricane and Spitfire fighter within a seventy-mile radius of London was in the air or awaiting the order to take off.
Pilot Officer Richard Barclay of 249 Squadron was already airborne. He had been patrolling over the Essex coast, looking down at Clacton, Burnham-on-Crouch, Westgate, places he knew from childhood holidays, baking in the haze. When the alert came, he told his parents in a letter home, the squadron ‘started to climb hard, turning to get a good look around and there several miles away was a black line in the sky – 35 Hun bombers in close formation – and I gradually began to distinguish about 70-100 other little dots: Hun fighters.’ As the squadron turned to attack, he
‘switched on the electric sight and turned the gun button from ‘SAFE’ to ‘FIRE’. And then things began to happen. We went in at the bombers and as I broke away I saw two dropping back from the formation streaming white smoke from one engine but before I could take stock of the situation the Messerschmitts were on me. I say ‘me’ rather than us because from this time on I never noticed another Hurricane in the sky until the end of the fight…I turned quickly to see if there was anything on my tail and at the same moment two Messerschmitt 109s went past beneath my nose. I turned quickly diving on one and gave him a burst. Nothing happened. Presumably I missed him but the noise of my 8 guns gave me great confidence. I gave the second Me 109 a burst and whoopee! A sudden burst of brilliant flame, a cloud of smoke and a vast piece flew off and down he went, but no time to watch because there’s something behind me shooting…I turned to the right and saw [an] Me 109 go past with a vicious yellow nose and the large black crosses on the fuselage.’1
Barclay dived away from the German fighters, levelling off at 6,000 feet. Ten thousand feet above he could see the bombers beating inexorably on. He climbed up, keeping his distance so as not to be spotted. As he approached, the formation swung towards him and he raced into the leader in a head-on attack, but had to break off when he ran out of ammunition. He thought he had hit an engine. His own had certainly been damaged. Oil obliterated his windscreen. He switched off and glided down over the Thames estuary. Thick coils of black smoke hung over the water from oil-storage tanks blazing from an attack the previous day. There was no chance of making it back to North Weald. He slid the Hurricane into a belly landing on a field five miles from the base. When he got back the squadron had landed, rearmed and refuelled and was setting off again. There was no aeroplane for Barclay and his fighting was over for the day. The squadron had spent much of the summer in the north and had only arrived in Essex a week before. The sights he had seen that afternoon disturbed him. ‘The odds today have been unbelievable,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘and we are all really shaken.’
Similar frantic scenes were taking place inside an 800-square-mile block of summer sky as hundreds of aircraft clashed. The cerulean blue over the fields of Kent and Essex was scribbled with the white curlicues of condensation trails and stitched with the glitter of cannon and tracer. Alone, frustrated, awaiting the return of his comrades, Barclay saw three bombers approaching the aerodrome at 16,000 feet. He assumed they ‘had come back to finish the job they had started on the 3rd’ when 200 bombs had been dropped on North Weald. But the bombers sailed on. They were no longer interested in the airfields of Fighter Command. Their target was London.
The decision to attack had been made inevitable by Churchill’s ordering of retaliatory raids on Berlin for the Luftwaffe’s mistaken bombing of the capital on the night of 24/25 August. Hitler was at Berchtesgaden when the RAF Wellingtons and Hampdens arrived over Berlin early the following morning. They returned two days later, then again on the 30th and 31st. Hitler went to Berlin and promised in a speech on 4 September: ‘If they attack our cities then we will wipe out their cities.’ Earlier General Jodl, Chief of Staff of the OKW, the Armed Forces Supreme Command, had warned his deputy that Hitler now intended to strike back ‘with concentrated forces when the weather is favourable’. Considerations of revenge, taken in hot blood, should not have been allowed to alter the course of the invasion preparations.
The climate of sycophancy pervading Hitler’s court and the desire for self-preservation meant that no one would contradict the Führer. Goering, anyway, seems to have approved of the plan. The mass raids could have several beneficial effects. They would continue the campaign of destruction of Britain’s infrastructure. Inevitably, they would draw the RAF even more tightly into the war of attrition. Fighter Command had no choice but to defend the capital. It was now becoming obvious to the Germans that Churchill’s government was unlikely to seek negotiations without further, more violent coercion. A devastating attack such as those that had traumatized Warsaw and Rotterdam might fatally undermine civilian morale and turn the population against its political and military leaders, forcing them, essentially, to surrender.
Almost every bomber unit in France was thrown into the attack. General Fink, the forty-five-year-old veteran at the head of Kampfgeschwader 2, told his men to make their wills before they took off. So much time was spent forming up that the fighter escort had run out of petrol by the time it reached Sevenoaks and had to turn back. The bombers’ target was the Victoria Dock. The huge bend in the Thames at Docklands, the U-Bogen as the Luftwaffe called it, glinted treacherously in the sunlight, pointing the way. Despite the lack of an escort, Fink’s formation was relatively untroubled by British fighters on the way in. The order to scramble had been given too late for many of the squadrons to reach attacking height by the time the first waves of bombers crossed the coast. Once over London, though, the Spitfires and Hurricanes began to appear. ‘They dived through the bomber formations from a terrific height,’ Fink remembered. ‘Obviously we had too many machine-guns for them to attack any other way. We had the impression that each fighter had chosen one bomber and was diving to attack it…It was a horrible feeling when they came down on you.’2 But the fleet succeeded in dropping its bombs and got away still holding formation. The fighters inflicted some damage. Fink was the only one of his four-man crew not to be wounded and it was a tribute to the sturdiness of their Dornier 17 that it managed to make it back to the base at Arras.
Oberstleutnant Paul Weitkus was commanding 11 Gruppe of the Geschwader with orders to attack Tower Bridge and the docks. ‘We all had sketches of our targets. When we reached [the] Docks there were not many fighters but the guns seemed quite good.’ They ‘placed the bombs very well and large fires started’. Weitkus had time to take photographs of the burning docks, for his own amusement, with his Leica. By the time they had finished, the sky over London was chaotic. ‘You couldn’t tell a 109 from a Spitfire in the chaos of diving machines and bursting flak. Whoever saw who first was the victor.’3
Coming in to land at Arras, Weitkus swung round and there, 150 miles distant, a great banner of smoke stained the horizon above the stricken city. The sirens had sounded at 4.43 p.m. People were slow to move to the shelters, reluctant to leave the sunshine. The first bombs to ripple across the docks were incendiaries that started blazes that acted as beacons to the bombers that would flow in an almost continuous stream throughout the evening and early morning. The first raid lasted less than half an hour. The all-clear was sounded at 6.15 p.m. The shattered streets were full of rescue workers when the next bombers arrived at 8 p.m., dumping their loads of high explosiv
e into the churning smoke and flame beneath. The docks were hit again, and the Royal Arsenal near by at Woolwich. Bombs landed on Victoria and Charing Cross stations and Battersea power station. Those who had remained in the city centre ran for the steps of the underground stations. Hours passed without the comforting wail of the siren announcing the Germans had gone, the air continuing to get heavier and more foul. People spread out newspapers and tried to sleep. The banter slackened and conversation turned serious. A raid as heavy as this must surely mark the start of the invasion. Even below ground in the shelters they could hear the noise and vibration of the anti-aircraft batteries.
The gunners were unable to identify their targets as it was impossible for the searchlights to penetrate the filth and murk that rolled overhead. The warehouses and stores around the Port of London were stacked with combustible goods which, as the bombs landed, blossomed into flames that ran hungrily from each dry, flammable structure to the next. A Thameside refinery disgorged a torrent of molten sugar that covered the river in burning sheets. A rum store caught fire, the barrels exploded like bombs and the streets ran with blazing spirit. The air was choked with soot, oil, chemicals, burning paint and rubber, bound together into a slimy viscous vapour by the water of hundreds of hoses playing on the inferno as ineffectually as a shower of rain on a volcanic eruption. Firemen were surrounded, cut off, vaporized by the superheated oxygen. Whole areas were abandoned to burn themselves out. This was the hell that the pessimists peering into the future of war in the 1920s and 1930s had predicted, the proof of what would happen when the bomber got through. London was experiencing a firestorm. The fire rose, sucking in huge draughts of cold air at its base that fed its intensity, giving it a demonic life of its own that could only end when there was nothing left to nourish it.
It was the poor quarters, clustered around the Port of London where the work was, that suffered most: Bermondsey, Woolwich, Deptford, Poplar, Wapping. It was easy for the bomb-aimers. They had only to wait for the sight of the big bend in the river, then release their loads. They were almost bound to hit a worthwhile target. If not, the bombs tumbled into the blank, terraced workers’ streets, toppling the thin walls, pulverizing the little houses into dust and splinters. That day and night 306 people were killed in London and 1,337 seriously injured. Another 142 died in the suburbs. This was just the beginning. The raids would continue, with one exception caused by bad weather, for seventy-six consecutive nights.
The fighters had been unable to provide any serious protection for the population of London or prevent the German bombers from smashing and disrupting vital installations. Once night fell, the Luftwaffe was free to bomb unmolested and flew hundreds of sorties. The RAF had only two squadrons of Blenheim night fighters at its disposal, one of which, 600 Squadron, had been prevented from taking off by the clouds of smoke blanketing Hornchurch.
Even in the daytime fighters had performed poorly. The order to scramble had been given late. The caution was understandable. Until now the practice had been to hold back until the direction and size of an attack had revealed itself before committing resources, a tactic designed to make the most effective use of Fighter Command’s ragged assets. By the time the nature of the first raid of the afternoon of 7 September became clear, the fighters were too late to position themselves to block the air armada or to scatter the formations and dilute their destructive power. They were able to inflict a certain amount of punishment as the first raiders turned for home, usually with their defensive formations intact. But by then the damage was done. The final total for the day was unimpressive. They shot down thirty-eight German bombers and fighters. But in the process they lost twenty-eight machines. More important were the pilots who had been killed.
But to Dowding and Park, standing at Bentley Priory on the western edge of London and watching the fires reflecting off the underside of the smoke massif rising over the city, the day offered hope. The Germans appeared to have shifted the focus of violence away from the airfields and defence installations towards the commercial and political target of the capital. But was this a permanent change, or merely a fluctuation? It seemed unlikely that the Luftwaffe would concentrate its effort on London without first having satisfied itself that it had ground down the RAF to the point where it no longer posed an insurmountable obstacle to an invasion.
The destruction of the air force, and in particular Fighter Command, was the starting point for all German planning for a landing. Goering had consulted the two Luftlotte commanders about the attack on London. Sperrle was dubious but easily persuaded. Kesselring was supportive. He assumed that if the southern fighter stations were obliterated, the squadrons would merely be evacuated to bases further north, so the destruction of airfields was not a vital objective. The doctrine prevailing in Goering’s headquarters was anyway that the RAF was down to its last handful of men and machines, posing only a minor threat to the bombers. This misapprehension was understandable. Dowding and Park’s tactics of using limited numbers of fighters meant the Luftwaffe rarely encountered large defensive forces. The Germans’ inclination confronted with a similar situation would have been to have used whatever machines were available en masse. The assumption was that the RAF’s resources were draining away and the residual resistance could be swept aside in the fighting over the capital. The timetable for ‘Operation Sealion’ was pressing. A decision on the announcement of the final preparations was imminent. The barges and boats that were to carry the Wehrmacht across the Channel were clogging the ports. It was time to move on.
It was true that the RAF pilots were weary and apprehensive. The week before the London attack the strain was becoming intolerable. They were under attack in the air and on the ground, flying three or four missions a day before returning to shattered bases where they were always half-listening for the whistle of falling bombs. When Sunday, 8 September, dawned cloudy, the relief among pilots and commanders was profound. ‘The weather was bad today, thank goodness, so we had a reasonable rest,’ wrote Richard Barclay. ‘I think we are all still a bit shaken after yesterday.’4 It had been a bad day for 249 Squadron. Pilot Officer Robert Fleming had been shot down and managed to bale out, but was severely burned and died of his wounds. Flying Officer Pat Wells was missing, though he was located five days later, burned and in hospital. Two others were wounded. But the pilots were young and recovered quickly. Two days later Barclay was recording his pleasure that he was now ‘on state’ almost all the time, an improvement on the beginning of the month when a surplus of pilots meant his flying opportunities were limited.
Dowding and Park had placed their faith in a system of rotation, moving squadrons out of the front-line stations of 11 Group when they judged they had had enough and replacing them with units which had benefited from a period in the relative quiet of a base in the north or west. It was the only way to approach an open-ended struggle which would be decided when one side or the other recognized that its losses were unsustainable. There had been times when the temptation had been strong to throw all Fighter Command’s resources, dispersed round the country, into one great confrontation with the Luftwaffe. But Dowding had resisted.
Nor was there any question of falling in with the German assumption and withdrawing the main fighter force from its positions in the south-east around London to less vulnerable bases well behind the capital. Whatever the military logic, political considerations, and above all the morale of the civilian population, would not allow it. It was for this reason, it was said, that Dowding had clung to exposed satellite bases like Manston until they were impossible to hold, to the dismay of even such lion-hearted pilots as Al Deere. It was an approach that required strong nerves and a fine appreciation of each unit’s stamina and ability to absorb punishment. The system functioned more smoothly if there were occasional gaps in the intensity of the fighting to allow redeployments to be made with a minimum of difficulty. Its existence depended on the bases in the south-east actually being able to operate.
Only two rai
ds were launched during the mainly cloudy daylight hours of 8 September: on the Kent coast and the Thames estuary. The controllers ordered a limited response, which allowed most squadrons a day of partial respite. Pilots flew 65 patrols involving 215 sorties. The previous day there had been 143 patrols involving 817 sorties. In the evening the bombers returned to London in force and pounded the city until dawn. On the 9th there was a flurry of attacks in the late afternoon on the suburban belt south of London, apparently mainly directed at aircraft factories. Once again the damage was limited. The defenders were given good warning and at least twenty-six bombers and fighters were shot down.
Park was now using his squadrons in pairs, throwing them into the formations in concentrated force. The tactic had a demoralizing effect, causing the Luftwaffe commanders to modify their orders. A signal was intercepted from Gruppe headquarters directing crews to ‘break off task if fighter opposition is too strong’.5 The decision to combine squadrons was welcomed by advocates of the Big Wing as a tacit admission of the value of the tactic. Several squadrons from Duxford led by Douglas Bader had arrived to take part in the fighting of the 9th. Once again they were slow forming up and were low on petrol by the time they sighted the enemy. They claimed to have destroyed nearly twenty aircraft, but there was little evidence from ground observers or debris to support this. What was certain was that five Hurricanes were lost in the encounter and two pilots killed.
Fighter Boys and Bomber Boys: Saving Britain 1940–1945 Page 41