Many Not the Few: The Stolen History of the Battle of Britain

by Richard North

  This was harping back to the views of the British Chiefs of Staff on 25 May, and subsequently – the sentiment shared by Räder, by Jodl, by much of the German High Command and even by Hitler himself. Seven days into what Dowding believed to be the decisive battle, both sides were convinced that the war would be decided by the civilian population’s ability to withstand the effects of mass bombing.

  DAY 8 – WEDNESDAY 17 JULY 1940

  On this day the newspapers were not following that war in any great detail. They were complaining about proposals for new administrative courts. These were to be without juries yet would have the power to hand down death sentences. As the enabling measure went before parliament, the Daily Mirror published a lament that would not look out of place today:

  Many MPs, appointed as guardians of the people’s liberties, did not bother to attend the House when this measure, gravely affecting the liberty of the subject, was debated. Until the debate was ending, there were never more than fifty or sixty members in the Chamber. At times, even when vital points were being discussed, the number fell to barely thirty.

  Meanwhile, for “indiscreet repetition of unfounded rumours” that British troops had fired on refugees at Boulogne to prevent them boarding ships transporting troops to England, labourer John Dodd was imprisoned for three months. Such prosecutions, according to Home Intelligence, were now being widely criticized. “Informed circles” were nervous about the way the law was being interpreted and working-class people were “suspicious and afraid”. “We are fighting for freedom but losing what freedom we’ve got” was one comment.

  Beaverbrook’s Express joined the chorus of criticism, declaring: “[A]lready there are many prosecutions of a rather foolish kind directed against talk liable to cause alarm and despondency”. It added: “Aged and silly people are being sent to prison for offences which could in the first instance be met by a good talking to and a warning. The difficult task of police and magistrates must be done with level-headed common sense”.

  In the evening, the government tried to stoke up public interest in the air war, with a broadcast by Air Minister, Sir Archibald Sinclair. Another of Churchill’s appointees, he warned listeners of a “great onslaught” to be launched within the next month, by land, sea and air simultaneously. Colville wrote of it being “expected daily now”, adding that it might be “followed perhaps by a peace offensive rather than by an invasion”. There again was another hint that Hitler might want to make peace. Of any air offensive, Colville noted that, since St Swithin’s Day, it had rained and blown ceaselessly, “so we may expect a respite until the sun shines again”.

  Certainly, there was very little happening on the air front. Dull weather and occasional rain limited activity to the occasional raider as far apart as Dundee and Cornwall. The focus again had been on shipping. Overnight, aircraft were out laying mines in the Thames Estuary and between Middlesbrough and the Wash. The Bristol Channel and Severn Estuary were mined by Heinkel 111s. Fighter Command flew 253 sorties, losing one Spitfire. Bomber Command lost a Blenheim. The Luftwaffe lost four aircraft. It was low intensity warfare.

  For the German General Staff, though, it had been a busy day; it had issued an order allocating forces for Sealion, instructing thirteen divisions to move to the coast for use as first-wave troops. Six divisions of General Busch’s 16th Army were to depart from the Pas de Calais and land between Ramsgate and Bexhill. Four divisions of General Strauss’s 9th Army, embarking in the area of Le Havre, would land between Brighton and the Isle of Wight. Three divisions of General Reichenau’s 6th Army, leaving from the Cherbourg peninsula, would land in Lyme Bay between Weymouth and Lyme Regis. Some 90,000 men would be put ashore in the initial assault. Numbers would increase by the third day to 260,000.17

  This was the “broad front” strategy, first outlined by Jodl. But Räder believed its risks were so great that he feared the entire invading forces could be lost. Unequivocally, he refused to guarantee the safety of the transports if the crossing stretched from Ramsgate to the Isle of Wight. As Navy chief he could not, of course, override Army decisions. Thus he told the Commander in Chief of the Army, Colonel-General Walther von Brauchitsch, that he intended to appeal directly to Hitler to get the plan changed.18

  DAY 9 – THURSDAY 18 JULY 1940

  While a major dispute was brewing between the heads of his Army and Navy, Hitler had something else on his mind. The clue was in despatches from Spanish correspondents in Berlin. They were affirming he would make a peace offer to Britain at the end of this week. A rejection of the offer, they said, would probably be followed immediately by an attack. Reuters noted that a meeting of the Reichstag to hear a statement by Hitler “may be announced in Berlin tomorrow”. No announcement was made. Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler was afraid the British bombers might come over.19

  But there was definitely to be a meeting on the Friday. “There is some speculation whether it will be … an occasion to announce a new Blitzkrieg – this time against Britain – or an offer of peace”, said Reuters. One can easily sense the tension, the feeling that momentous events were about to unfold, the dark, brooding presence of Nazi Germany poised to rip Britain apart, but for the Führer desperate to give her one last chance to come to terms.

  On the other side of the Channel, however, there was no such sense of foreboding. The Express had a banner headline which proclaimed: “Don’t muzzle free speech”. In a commentary on the train wreck of Cooper’s “Silent Column” campaign, it reported that Ministers were “perturbed at the way in which their exhortations to exercise discretion in speech are being interpreted”. Reports were being sent to Whitehall for examination of recent cases in which minor offences had been visited with heavy punishment by magistrates. And Cooper had had to write to his “Sensible Persons” all over the country, telling them that the idea was certainly not to make people frightened to open their mouths – that there was no intention to stifle criticism.

  Oblivious to such assurances, British authorities were throwing people in jail with undiminished enthusiasm. Thomas Graham, aged 50, was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for telling an LDV platoon commander and three of his men that what they were doing was “a lot of rot”. John O’Hara, aged 58, an Irishman, of no fixed abode, got fourteen days hard labour for saying in a pub: “The English are a lot of traitors”. Preston Percy Cockburn, a 42-year-old aircraft fitter, was remanded for a week after telling his landlady that a north-eastern town had been “bombed to hell”, and that “the Government dare not publish it”.

  Not only was Cooper’s policy being criticized. MPs were not happy to learn that he had sent his son abroad to safety. Labour MP Jim Griffiths demanded equality. Ministers who had sent their children to the USA were “showing an example which is resented and which makes the people think that after all this is the old class Britain”. Nor was this the only discomfort for Cooper. Commander Sir Archibald Southby, MP for Epsom, challenged him over apparent favouritism to the BBC. Censors were permitting it to broadcast material which had not been cleared to the press. The hapless Cooper was forced to admit that the BBC was not censored by his department. The newspapers made a meal of this, also citing occasions when clearance by the censor had been slow and inefficient.

  That was the public face of the war in Britain. Behind the scenes, in Whitehall, Lord Halifax had in front of him a report from an official by the name of Frank Roberts who had been reviewing the diverse peace feelers. Among those he reviewed were approaches from the Papal Nuncio in Berne, the Portuguese Dictator Dr Salazar in his capital, Lisbon, the Finish Prime Minister, Max Hohenlohe, via Sir David Kelly and also Birger Dahlerus. Roberts took the view that the Nazi feelers were calculated to lull the British into a false sense of security and to divide opinion in the country. Hitler was also seeking to strengthen his hand in negotiations with Spain, France and even Japan, all of which countries he was hoping would go to war against Britain.20

  The day itself was most definitely not part of the
long hot summer. Generally cool, there was occasional rain in southern districts and the Straits of Dover were cloudy. The Germans used the cloud to sneak a group of thirty Me 109s over the Channel. It adopted a standard bomber formation to fool the radar, and when an unsuspecting British fighter squadron tried to intercept, it lost a Spitfire. The raiders escaped unharmed. German aircraft then bombed a coastguard station and sunk the East Goodwin Light Vessel. The day was then marked by a series of small actions, all over the country, some against shipping, others inland. Most caused little damage and few casualties. In the Govan and Scotstoun area of Glasgow, however, a mid-morning raid saw eight bombs dropped near the Royal Ordnance factory. Only slight damage was caused to it, but a number of nearby tenements were seriously damaged and an occupied communal shelter was blown up.

  At the close of play, Fighter Command had lost three Spitfires, one in a collision with a Miles Master trainer, with one pilot killed. Three Blenheim fighters had been lost, and three bomber versions had also been downed. A Wellington had failed to return from a raid on Bremen. That brought total RAF losses to ten. The Luftwaffe lost five aircraft. No fighters or their crews were lost.

  DAY 10 – FRIDAY 19 JULY 1940

  For much of the British public, their day had started with a rationed breakfast and the daily newspaper. Some would have been reading Mirror journalist William Connor, still writing under the pseudonym Cassandra. He declared that Cooper’s campaign had reached “preposterous proportions”:

  You just daren’t open your trap. Ordinary sensible criticism has become something like verbal treason and harmless decent citizens are being clapped in jug before they can say “God Save the King!” For instance, a court the other day was invited to decide whether calling a Cabinet Minister a fool was defeatist talk.

  “Well, I mean to say …”, Connor added wryly. Even the Guardian had noticed something amiss. The campaign, it intoned,

  [was] certainly never intended to encourage a sort of amateur Gestapo movement in which a few people with nothing better to do would use a lull in the actual operations of war in order to foment baseless suspicions against their neighbours.

  The Daily Express reported on William Garbett, a 25-year-old Birmingham clerk, who was jailed for a year on the charge of making a seditious speech. He had said in a Cardigan café: “I see we are being beaten. It will be a good job when the British Empire is finished. We are fighting to provide dividends for the ruling classes”. A 50-year-old artist, Bernard Wardle, from East Dulwich, was jailed for three months for telling two Canadian soldiers not to fight for England. “The whole Government is rotten to the core”, he had said.

  Taking time from the greater affairs of state, it was this to which Churchill had to give priority. “I have noticed lately,” he wrote to the Home Secretary, “very many sentences imposed for indiscretion by magistrates’ and other courts throughout the country in their execution of recent legislation and regulation.” It was time for action: “All the cases should be reviewed by the Home Office, and His Majesty moved to remit the sentence where there was no malice or serious injury to the State”, Churchill instructed.21

  The Chiefs of Staff’s Friday résumé was in front of the British War Cabinet, to which was appended a secret commentary on “German Air Force tactical policy”. This revealed the British perception of the battle. It was seen as a preliminary phase. The two protagonists were sizing each other up, testing each other and getting ready for a major offensive. The “variegated pattern of tactics” showed that there was “no settled policy”. The Germans, it was thought, were experimenting to devise the best tactics.

  Despite this, with nine British convoys at sea, Fighter Command was expecting heavy raids – and it got them. The day started with Stuka attacks on Portland and Dover. These were driven away but British fighters encountered stiff German resistance.

  Then a notable disaster started to unfold. Just past midday, No. 141 Sqn had been moved forward and ordered to patrol over Folkestone. The squadron had formed a month previously and had only recently arrived in the No. 11 Group area, a squadron with no combat experience. Worse still, it was equipped with the Boulton Paul Defiant “turret fighter”, armed only with four .303 machine guns in an electrically-powered turret abaft the pilot. The aircraft had been designed to attack bombers and was not equipped to take on conventional fighters. Its deployment was based on the assumption that the Luftwaffe would be unable to escort bombers on raids to Britain. However, even though the fall of France had changed that, the Air Ministry kept the aircraft in service since they had enjoyed limited success – mainly when mistaken for Hurricanes and attacked from the rear.

  This fateful sortie started badly when three pilots had to abort with engine faults. Thus, by one o’clock there were nine Defiants patrolling in the middle of the Channel. Completely unaware of their peril, they were bounced by twenty Me 109s, flying “up sun”. Four Defiants were shot down immediately, the remaining five desperately trying to evade their attackers as the Me 109s pressed home their attack. Two more were shot down and the remaining three badly damaged. Those escaped only after the intervention of Hurricanes from No. 111 Sqn. In 15 minutes, six machines had been destroyed and ten men killed. One Me 109 had been severely damaged and crashed back at its base. No. 141 Sqn was withdrawn from the battle. Its partner No. 264 Sqn was soon to follow.22

  Dover now took its usual pasting. The port had been designated the anti-invasion base for the 1st Destroyer Flotilla – the first naval line of defence if the Germans came. And the destroyers got plenty of attention. During the day’s raids, HMS Griffin was slightly damaged by near misses but sustained no casualties. HMS Beagle, en route from Dover to Devonport, suffered slight damage from near misses. There were no casualties there either. Fleet oiler War Sepoy was not so lucky. Damaged beyond repair, she was later broken in two and used as a block-ship to seal off the western entrance of Dover Harbour to keep out E-boats. Minesweeping trawler Crestflower was badly damaged by bombs, foundering off Portsmouth. Two ratings were killed.

  Anti-Aircraft Command had better luck. A Condor was brought down by its guns during a minelaying sortie and crashed into the North Sea between Hartlepool and Sunderland. There were two survivors.

  Illustrating the breadth of the battle, in the morning, four Dorniers had arrived over Glasgow and bombed the Rolls Royce works, causing heavy damage and casualties. In Berwick upon Tweed, four bombs were dropped on a field east of the town wall. One demolished an empty army air raid shelter. In Sunderland, the first enemy bomb fell – also in a field. At about six in the morning, bombs were dropped on the aerodrome at Norwich causing some damage, followed by Milton Aerodrome near Pembroke taking a hit. In the early evening, a boy’s school on the coast at Polruan, twenty miles west of Plymouth, was demolished. Just before midnight, RAF Manston was hit. No damage was reported.

  Fighter Command flew over 700 sorties, losing ten aircraft. Five pilots had been killed and one rendered hors de combat with serious burns. Bomber Command lost three aircraft. The Luftwaffe only lost five. A triumphant Göring called his crews together to praise their actions. As for the mood in Berlin:

  there was an air of sombre expectation among the people of that great city still unharmed by bombs. The light summer evening of Northern Europe lay over the dark shadows of its massive Wilhelmian apartment houses. The pale rays of the sinking sun painted the wide avenues through which Hitler’s cortège drove to the Kroll Opera House, for a great Reichstag session. Around the entrance there was a multitude of fanioned automobiles, a commotion of uniforms, a sense of self-conscious importance. “Tonight,” Göbbels said excitedly, “the fate of England will be decided”.

  The speech started a few minutes after seven, an hour ahead of British time. Arrangements had been made for the text to be transmitted to London piecemeal, with segments being translated and sent to the prime minister’s office at roughly five-minute intervals.23

  This was Hitler’s “Last appeal to reason”. Openin
g with a history of recent events, which he described as the “most daring undertaking in the history of German warfare”, the bulk of the speech was addressed to the British people – his attempt to bypass the British Government. “If this struggle continues,” he warned, “it can only end in the annihilation of one of us. Mr Churchill thinks it will be Germany. I know it will be Britain. I am not the vanquished, begging for mercy. I speak as a victor”. Echoing the words of his 11 June interview with Wiegand, he declared: “Mr. Churchill ought perhaps, for once, to believe me when I prophesy that a great empire will be destroyed – an empire which it was never my intention to destroy or harm”.24

  The BBC devoted six minutes to the speech on the nine o’clock news and, on its own initiative, issued a rejection. Insulting in tone, it was delivered in German by Sefton Delmer, former Berlin bureau chief for the Daily Express and still its roving correspondent. Shirer found the Germans unable to understand the rebuff. “They want peace”, he wrote in his diary.

  Anticipating the “last appeal”, the German chargé d’affaires in Washington had already sent a message to the British Ambassador, Lord Lothian. It stated that “if desired”, details of peace terms could be obtained from Berlin. Lothian, a figure around whom rumours of conspiracy swirled, was said to be in touch with “dissidents in the war cabinet”, who would be prepared to negotiate. An important figure here was Lord Halifax.

  The fourth son of the 2nd Viscount Halifax, this tall, angular Englishman had been born on 16 April 1881 with an atrophied left arm that had no hand. His family had been visited by tragedy, his three elder brothers having died before he had reached the age of nine. He became heir to the title and great estates in Yorkshire. Serving as Foreign Secretary for Chamberlain, he had been one of the primary architects of the appeasement policy, and had met most of the top Nazi leaders. He had openly expressed his admiration for the Nazi regime, and especially its robust stance against the Communists.25