The subsidiary question that Eden and Dill put to the officers was ‘Whether our troops would, if called on, embark at a northern port, say Liverpool, while it was still in our hands, in order to be withdrawn to, say, Canada? Without such a nucleus of trained troops from the Home Country, the Prime Minister’s declared policy of carrying on the fight from overseas would be infinitely more difficult.’ Hudson related that it soon became very apparent that the officers were all of much the same opinion. While the proportion who would respond to the call among Regular officers would be high, and of Regular NCOs and men who were unmarried nearly as high, ‘No one dared, however, to estimate any exact proportion amongst those officers and men who had only come forward for the war; a smaller proportion of unmarried men might respond but the very great majority of these would insist on either fighting it out in England, as they would want to do, or on taking their chances whatever the consequences might be.’ The upper reaches of the British Army were therefore of the view that the majority of its troops would refuse to embark for Canada to continue the struggle from abroad, just as many French had not embarked for Britain for the same reason earlier that month. It was all the more vital, therefore, to prevent the Germans from landing in the first place.
Although Britain’s gold reserves were transferred to Canada, and plans were made for the royal family, the Cabinet and ultimately whatever was left of the Royal Navy to follow them, it was not even certain that the British Establishment would be universally welcomed by the North Americans. Ever loyal Canada was sound, of course, but on 27 May 1940 Churchill’s private secretary, John ‘Jock’ Colville, noted in his diary that the British Ambassador to Washington, Lord Lothian, had telegraphed that afternoon to say that President Roosevelt had told him that ‘provided the Navy remains intact, we could carry on the war from Canada; but he makes the curious suggestion that the seat of Government should be Bermuda and not Ottawa, as the American republics would dislike the idea of monarchy functioning on the American Continent!’3 (Churchill and Roosevelt were to clash over the concept of monarchy later on in the war with regard to Italy, when Churchill showed himself to be as instinctively monarchist as FDR was knee-jerk republican.)
Despite that discouraging message, however, a fortnight later, on 11 June 1940, the United States transferred to Britain – for legal and political reasons it was done via the US Steel Corporation – 500,000 Enfield rifles with 129 million rounds of ammunition, 895 guns of 75mm calibre with 1 million rounds of ammunition, more than 80,000 machine guns, 316 mortars, 25,000 Browning automatic rifles and 20,000 revolvers plus ammunition. This helped arm the Home Guard and those members of the Regular Army who had returned from Dunkirk without their weaponry. Furthermore, ninety-three Northrop light bombers and fifty Curtiss-Wright dive-bombers came over, which were soon used to attack German ships and barges assembling for invasion. By February 1941 the US had shipped over 1.35 million Enfield rifles, and, as the US Army historians point out, this ‘resulted in a serious shortage of rifles for training the vastly larger [American] forces mobilized after Pearl Harbor’.4
In the complicated maelstrom of fury and resentment that made up Adolf Hitler’s political philosophy, hatred against Britain was hardly present, at least until the British behaved so illogically as to refuse his peace offer, dropped over Britain in mid-July 1940 in leaflet form and entitled ‘A Last Appeal to Reason’. Nothing in the National Socialist canon prescribed war against the Reich’s fellow Anglo-Saxon empire, and references in Mein Kampf to the British were in general highly complimentary. ‘How hard it is to best England’, Hitler wrote, ‘we Germans have sufficiently learned… I, as a man of Germanic blood, would, in spite of everything, rather see India under British rule than any other.’5 In direct contrast to perceptions of national stereotype, when it came to the projected invasion it was the British who were ruthlessly efficient and the Germans who attempted to muddle through haphazardly. Because Nazi ideology did not call for the invasion of Britain – in the way that it called for that of Poland for racial reasons, France for revanchism and eventually Russia for Lebensraum – the Nazis and the OKW had failed to plan coherently for Operation Sealion.
Even during the campaign against France, Hitler had spoken of his ‘admiration of the British Empire, of the necessity for its existence, and of the civilization that Britain had brought into the world’, saying of the ‘harsh’ measures that Britain had employed in creating it: ‘Where there is planing, there are shavings flying.’6 He went on to tell his Staff officers General Rundstedt, General Georg von Sodenstern and Colonel Günther Blumentritt that the English were an essential element of stability in the world – along with the Catholic Church – and that he would offer troops to Britain to help her keep her colonies. Small wonder, therefore, that he did not exert himself to make Sealion a reality. ‘He showed little interest in the plans,’ recalled Blumentritt after the war, ‘and made no effort to speed up the preparations. That was utterly different to his usual behaviour.’7 His love-hate relationship with Britain, curiously reminiscent of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s, is also clear from Mein Kampf and must partly explain his lack of energy in attempting invasion in 1940.
An indication of how slapdash the Nazi plans for the subjugation of Britain were is provided in the Sonderfahndungsliste G.B. (Special Search List for Great Britain) drawn up by Walter Schellenberg, head of the counter-espionage unit of the Directorate of Reich Security, the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (Head Office of Reich Security, or RSHA). This document, known as the ‘Black Book’, listed the 2,820 Britons and European exiles who were to be ‘taken into protective custody’ after the invasion. Of course it included Churchill – whose address was given as Westerham in Kent, as if he would be quietly waiting there for the Germans to call – but also writers such as H. G. Wells, E. M. Forster, Vera Brittain and Stephen Spender. (When the list was published after the war, one of those featured on it, the writer Rebecca West, telegraphed another, Noël Coward, to say, ‘My dear, the people we should have been seen dead with!’) Yet the Black Book was out of date before it was even printed: Sigmund Freud and Lytton Strachey had both died, the latter a full eight years earlier, and it featured others who were no longer living in Britain such as Aldous Huxley, who had been in America since 1936; Colonel Kenneth Strong, the former military attaché in Berlin, was shown as being in the Navy. The Germans’ attitude to neutrality can be seen from the inclusion of several American journalists working in London. To their shame, George Bernard Shaw and David Lloyd George were absent from the list, because of the public statements they had made in favour of peace after the war had started. They would have escaped an unpleasant fate: the man who would have been responsible for commanding the six Einsatzkommandos (action groups), to be based in London, Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester and Edinburgh, SS Colonel Professor Dr Frank Six, went on to be indicted for war crimes in the USSR.
If, on coming to power in 1933, Hitler had developed long-range heavy bombers, built more fighters than he did and trained the Wehrmacht for amphibious operations; if he had not dissipated his naval forces by invading Norway; and if he had attacked much earlier to give himself months of better weather in the Channel, then the always risky Sealion would have stood far greater chances of success. If he had landed large numbers of well-supplied paratroopers on the major British airfields of southern England during the opening stages of the battle of Britain, though such an operation would undoubtedly have been risky, it might also have paid off. Yet as Eden sagely observed after the war: ‘If you think, it took us four years of tremendous effort with all the resources of the United States behind us to prepare for the invasion of France, it’s hard to see how Hitler… could find the resources to switch quickly to attack Britain.’8
As it was, surprised by his successes in France in May and June 1940, Hitler wasted precious time going sightseeing to the Great War battlefields and Paris – he and the Eiffel Tower shared an 1889 birth year – and then he retired to the Berghof, his Alp
ine retreat at Berchtesgaden, a clear indication that his heart was not truly in the next necessary step. ‘The British have lost the war, but they don’t know it,’ he told Jodl at Compiègne on 22 June; ‘one must give them time, and they will come around.’ Clearly he could not have been reading their prime minister’s speeches. The British meanwhile used those precious weeks to bring their squadrons up to strength and prepare airfield defences.9 Lord Beaverbrook, as minister of aircraft production, managed to treble the rate of aircraft production during 1940, when the Germans only doubled theirs.10
That Hitler was wrong about the Churchill ministry and the condition of the British psyche should have been revealed to him by the sinking of part of the French fleet by the Royal Navy at Oran (or Mers-el-Kébir) in Algeria on 3 July, and even more surely on 22 July when Lord Halifax rejected the peace offer that Hitler had made at the Kroll Opera House in Berlin three days earlier. The fratricidal nature of the action at Oran was underlined by the fact that the commander of the Vichy fleet, Admiral Marcel Gensoul, had commanded a force at the outbreak of war that had included HMS Hood, one of the ships that fired upon his fleet at Oran six months later and helped kill 1,297 French sailors, disabling three of the four French capital ships there.
Of course the OKW was already drawing up plans for Sealion, but these served only to show how differently the Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine viewed the operation. Whereas Franz Halder and the German Army wanted to cross the Channel ‘in the form of a river crossing on a broad front’, with thirteen divisions assaulting the 190 miles between Ramsgate and Lyme Regis, Admiral Raeder’s losses in Norway persuaded him that only a far narrower front – between Folkestone and Eastbourne – would be possible, which Halder thought ‘complete suicide’. Meanwhile Göring boasted that the RAF could be smashed with relative ease, allowing an altogether less dangerous crossing. What none contested was that, before any invasion could be launched, total air superiority needed to be established over southern England, which could then be translated into naval supremacy once the British Home Fleet was driven from the south coast by unfettered German dive-bombing, as Norway had shown might be possible.
Despite the Luftwaffe’s undeniable successes in Poland, Norway, France and the Benelux countries, these had been won fighting as merely the air arm of Blitzkrieg, with surprise on their side, close to their own bases and over areas that were shortly to be occupied by the Wehrmacht. In the battle of Britain, however, the Luftwaffe was acting on its own, with Stuka dive-bombers flying horizontally at speeds much slower than when diving, over hostile territory far from their bases, and where surprise was on the side of the RAF owing to the fortuitous invention only half a decade earlier of Radio Direction Finding (RDF or ‘radar’).
The first phase of the battle opened on 10 July, with the systematic bombing of British naval and merchant shipping and port installations. Even this shows how uncoordinated German plans were, because the Luftwaffe was often bombing harbours and airfields that would have been needed by the Wehrmacht if it had landed.11 On 16 July, Hitler issued his Directive No. 16, which ordered that ‘The British Air Force must be eliminated to such an extent that it will be incapable of putting up any substantial opposition to the invading troops.’ Twenty divisions would be landed following the Jodl plan between Ramsgate and Lyme Regis, although issues such as how to transport across the Channel the vast number of horses needed to pull the majority of the Wehrmacht’s artillery were not directly addressed.
Hitler’s failure to grasp the fundamental principles of air warfare were in large part responsible for his defeat in the battle of Britain. ‘The Führer had little understanding of a strategic plan by which Britain could be forced to sue for peace by the employment of air power,’ concludes an historian of the battle. ‘He never demonstrated wide awareness of the value of either air fleets or navies; subsequently the waters of the Channel proved too great an obstacle for his land-based military thinking. The crossing of a boisterous and unpredictable sea was too much for his vision, which therefore travelled elsewhere across the map table, allowing the impetus of the attack on Britain to be lost.’12 Just as bad a strategist, though with far less excuse, was Göring, who not only spent much of the coming battle 735 miles away from Calais at his country house, Karinhall near Brandenburg in Prussia, but also regularly displayed an ignorance of the detail of logistics, strategy, technology and the capabilities of aircraft which was all the more reprehensible because he had been a First World War flying ace. For the coming assault, the Luftwaffe was split into three Luftflotten (air fleets), altogether totalling 1,800 bombers and 900 fighters and consisting of Marshal Albert Kesselring’s Luftflotte II based in northern France, Marshal Hugo Sperrle’s Dutch- and Belgian-based Luftflotte III and General Hans-Jürgen Stumpff’s Norway- and Denmark-based Luftflotte V. A further two, Luftflotten I and IV, were kept in defensive reserve. There were over fifty air bases in northern France and Holland available to the Luftwaffe, but their wide distribution afforded them none of the tight, centralized, interior defensive lines enjoyed by the RAF waiting for them in England. Nor did Kesselring and Sperrle properly co-ordinate their attacks.
The Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, had an initial total force of fewer than 700 fighters, divided between fifty-two squadrons.13 He admitted to Lord Halifax that when he heard of the fall of France he ‘went on my knees and thanked God’ that no more RAF squadrons would be sucked into that losing battle.14 A calm, resolute, highly intelligent and somewhat unemotional man, ‘Stuffy’ Dowding, based at Bentley Priory in Middlesex, kept as many squadrons as he possibly could in reserve throughout the battle. As Churchill had said of Admiral Jellicoe at the time of the battle of Jutland in 1916, Dowding was ‘the only man on either side who could lose the war in an afternoon’.
Führer Directive No. 17, issued on 1 August, stated that very soon the verschärfter Luftkrieg (intensified air war) would begin, in which ‘The Luftwaffe is to overcome the English Air Force with all means at its disposal and in the shortest possible time. The attacks are to be primarily directed against the planes themselves, the ground organization, and their supply installations, also against the aircraft industry, including plants producing anti-aircraft material.’15 This would have been devastating had it been adhered to. The second phase of the battle of Britain began at 09.00 on Thursday, 8 August, with a series of vast, virtually continuous German raids against British targets over a 500-mile-wide front. The 1,485 sorties undertaken that day had risen to 1,786 by the 15th. Owing to the invention of radar in the mid-1930s by Professor Robert Watson-Watt of the radio department of the National Physical Laboratory, and its enthusiastic endorsement by the Chamberlain ministry – which also produced the majority of the fighters that won the battle – the country was ringed by a network of radar stations that transmitted generally accurate information about the position, numbers, height and direction of Luftwaffe planes to the RAF sector control stations. Dowding secured funding for Watson-Watt’s research and encouraged Air Ministry officials to attend trials. Sophisticated ground-to-air communications meant that once RAF squadrons had been scrambled, usually only minutes after receiving warning of a raid, they could be constantly updated by radio-telephone with virtually real-time intelligence as they flew off to intercept. In what was known as the Dowding System, radar operators, Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) plotters, sector controllers, ground crew and of course pilots each had their interactive roles efficiently allotted, and although there was some tension between Dowding and the Air Staff in Whitehall, the System ran remarkably smoothly during the battle. The life-or-death stakes generally surmounted the usual pleasures of departmental infighting and blame-gaming.
By contrast, as the German flying ace Colonel Adolf Galland of Jagdgruppe (hunting group) 26 was to complain, ‘When we made contact with the enemy our briefings were already three hours old; the British only as many seconds old.’16 Since, as Galland also pointed out, ‘The firs
t rule of all air combat is to see the opponent first,’ the RAF started off with an edge over its opponents. Of their radar and ground-to-air control, Galland wrote that ‘The British had an extraordinary advantage which we could never overcome throughout the entire war.’ Wing Commander Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook’s fighter-pilot son, thought that ‘Radar really won the Battle of Britain… We wasted no petrol, no energy, no time.’17
The standard German plane, the Messerschmitt 109E (Me-109), was a shade faster than the Supermarine Spitfire fighter and the Hawker Hurricane, and better in diving and climbing, although crucially not at turning.18 ‘The bastards make such infernally tight turns,’ reported one German pilot. ‘There seems no way of nailing them.’ The Me-109 had three 20mm cannon and two 7.9mm machine guns, a top speed of 350mph and a ceiling of 35,000 feet, but it could only carry enough fuel to keep it airborne for a very little over an hour, which meant that, with twenty minutes spent flying across the Channel and back, it had very little time for fighting. The twin-engined Me-110 had greater range but much less manoeuvrability, a distinct disadvantage when pitched against the highly mobile Hurricanes and Spitfires.
The Me-109’s effective range of only 125 miles was likened by Galland to ‘a dog on a chain who wants to harm his foe, but cannot’. As a result, much of the dogfighting took place in 1940’s glorious summer weather above ‘Hellfire Corner’, the region of southern Kent around Folkestone, Dover and Lympne that is closest to France: more fighter pilots on both sides died over Hellfire Corner than over the whole of the rest of the UK during the battle.19 The contrails their exhaust fumes made in the stratosphere that summer – as caught so perfectly in Paul Nash’s 1941 painting The Battle of Britain – might have been thought beautiful had they not depicted murderous gladiatorial struggles to the death. These were watched by the civilian population below, and when a German plane was shot down there would be, in the words of one spectator, ‘cheering as if it had been a goal in the Cup Final’.20
The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War Page 12