The Third Reich at War

by Richard J. Evans

  Hitler still hoped that Churchill would be overthrown by the advocates of a separate peace in his own government. In reality, however, there was no chance of this happening. Not only Churchill but also his cabinet knew that a peace with a Germany now dominant in Western Europe would open up the way to increasing German interference in Britain’s domestic affairs, growing demands for a tougher policy towards the Jews, German backing for the potential British equivalent of Quisling, the fascist politician Sir Oswald Mosley and, in the long run, the undermining and destruction of British independence, especially if in the meantime Germany had managed to conquer the Soviet Union. Time and again Hitler’s peace offers had proved to bring not ‘peace for our time’ but only further demands, as the experience of Czechoslovakia had shown, and by July 1940 few British politicians had any illusions about this fact.67

  With a reluctance that was obvious to his entourage, therefore, Hitler began preparations for the invasion of Britain. Planning had begun the previous winter for ‘Operation Sealion’. A fleet of 2,000 flat-bottomed river barges was assembled in the Channel and North Sea ports (most of them entirely unsuitable for a sea-crossing except in conditions of flat calm), landing manoeuvres were held, and signs erected along the Channel coast showing soldiers the way to the embarkation points.68 Walter Schellenberg prepared a handbook for German troops and officials as a guide to the British institutions they would encounter.69 Senior figures in the armed forces were sceptical. The navy, Raeder warned, would not be ready until mid-September at the earliest, but the best course of all would be to wait until the following May. The Chief of the General Staff, Franz Halder, debated interminably with the naval planners on the best place for a landing. While the army wanted to land on a broad front so as to maximize the military advantage, the navy wanted to land on a narrow front so as to minimize the danger of attack by the Royal Navy. But in any case, in order to clear the way for the invasion, Britain’s aerial defences had to be destroyed. On 1 August, therefore, Hitler signed the order for the launching of air strikes against Britain. Events in Norway and France had given Hitler the confidence that a mixed airborne and seaborne invasion was in principle feasible provided his planes possessed unchallenged domination of the skies. The British naval control of the Channel and the North Sea might pose an obstacle of a kind not encountered in a land invasion, but without aircraft to protect them, the ships of the Royal Navy would surely be easy prey for German dive-bombers.70

  German planes had already carried out small-scale bombing raids on British targets from 5-6 June 1940 onwards; the raids became heavier from 10 July, and then intense after 18 August 1940. Although there were scattered raids on a large number of towns and cities, the main thrust of the attack from mid-August onwards was against the airfields of the Royal Air Force’s Fighter Command. Contrary to the British myth of ‘the few’, the two forces were evenly matched: in mid-August 1940 there were 1,379 British fighter-pilots in a state of operational readiness, as against some 870 German pilots, although of course the British pilots were stationed all over the country, while the Germans were concentrated along the Channel coast. German bombers depended on fighter-planes for protection, and were ill equipped to outmanoeuvre and shoot down the British fighter-planes sent to intercept them. The British deployed two of the fastest and most advanced fighter-planes in the world, the Hurricane and the Spitfire, which had been and were being mass-produced at breakneck speed to strengthen Britain’s defences. They were ‘scrambled’ into the air well before the attacking German force arrived, thanks to the invention and deployment of radar, first developed in 1935, to British interception of German radio messages, and to thousands of observers stationed along the Channel coast. Thus the German planes never arrived in time to catch the British fighters on the ground.71

  As the skies above south-eastern England began to be crisscrossed by the brilliant white vapour trails of aerial dogfights, it gradually became clear that the Germans were not going to achieve their aim. Although the principal German fighter plane, the Messerschmitt Me109, was arguably better than its British equivalents at heights of over 20,000 feet, it lost its advantage because it had to protect the bombers by remaining at lower altitudes, where the Spitfire and Hurricane were more manoeuvrable and could turn and bank more quickly. The Messerschmitt Me110, a heavy fighter designed to escort the bomber squads, was even less capable of evading the attacks of the fast-moving British fighters. The German air force in general was also built to give ground forces close support, and found it difficult to adapt to protecting squadrons of bombers in the air. Air bases from which to launch the attack had to be hurriedly improvised in the recently conquered areas of northern France, supplies were difficult to organize, and repairs often took too long to carry out. There was no difference in skill or standards between the fighter-pilots of the two forces, but both were in relatively short supply. However, while many British pilots whose planes were shot down managed to parachute safely on to British soil and rejoin the fray later on, the same, obviously, was not true of their German counterparts. The outcome of the battle can be read off the casualty figures: almost 900 German planes, including at least 443 fighters, shot down between 8 and 31 August 1940, as against 444 British planes in the slightly longer period from 6 August to 2 September. The British had no difficulty in making good their losses, with 738 Hurricanes and Spitfires operational on 6 September 1940 as against 672 on 23 August. By early September, the British had more than twice as many pilots ready to fly as the Germans did.72 Crucially, too, German aircraft production by this time was lagging substantially behind that of the British. Immediately after the German annexation of Austria, in April 193 8, the British government had pushed through a massive acceleration that was designed to build 12,000 new combat aircraft over the following two years. By the second half of 1940, the British were producing twice as many fighter-planes as the Germans.73

  Yet the German air force commanders, in particular the two most immediately involved, Field Marshal Albert Kesselring and the former head of the Condor Legion in Spain, Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle, had received very different intelligence about the outcome of the battle. According to the information they were given, 50 per cent of all British fighters had been lost as against only 12 per cent of their German counterparts, or 791 planes as against 169. Many German pilots believed they had won. Already on 17 August 1940, William L. Shirer, encountering a Messerschmitt fighter-pilot in a Belgian caf’ - not, he thought, an inherently boastful character - was impressed when the young man said quietly: ‘ “It’s a matter of another couple of weeks, you know, until we finish with the RAF. In a fortnight the British won’t have any more planes.” ’74 Ulrich Steinhilfer, a young Me109 pilot, wrote to his mother with unbridled enthusiasm about his missions. On 19 August 1940, attacking an airfield at Manston, he told her, ‘I aimed at a fuel tanker which was filling a Spitfire, then at two other Spitfires, one after the other. The tanker exploded and everything began to burn around it. My other two Spitfires began to burn on their own. Only now do I realise what power is given to a pilot with these four guns.’75 On the last day of August his optimism was undiminished. ‘One of the missions today,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘was a ground-attack on Detling with two sessions of dog-fighting as well. Our squadron bagged three without loss and the Group score was ten. This is the way it should go on with our fighting experience and skill growing. Tally-Ho!’76

  Such optimism was accepted at face value in Berlin. The moment had come in early September, therefore, it was thought, to launch the next phase of the attack, namely the destruction of British industry, transport and morale by the mass bombing of major British cities. Bombing raids of this kind had already begun, though not in any co-ordinated way, and an attack on the East End of London on 24 August 1940 had prompted the Royal Air Force to launch a counter-raid on Berlin the following night. Although it was not very effective in terms of destructive power, it caused dismay in the German capital, and outraged Hitler, who declared
at a public meeting held in the Berlin Sports Palace on 4 September 1940 that if the Royal Air Force dropped a few thousand kilograms of bombs on German cities, ‘then we will drop . . . one million kilograms in a single night. And should they declare they will greatly increase their attacks on our cities, then we will erase their cities!’77 Yet neither the British nor the German raids at this stage of the war, however, were what Hitler on 1 August called ‘terror attacks’. He referred to this tactic only in order to insist that it should not be employed except on his explicit orders, which he did not in fact issue until 4 April 1942, after the first major British air raid on a non-military target, the north German city of Lübeck.78

  Whatever the propagandists said, aircrews on both sides were under orders only to release the bombs when they could see a suitable target of economic or military significance - such as, for example, the London docks. In practice, of course, such instructions were less than wholly realistic, given the impossibility of accuracy with the bombing equipment of the time. Moreover, the bombing of London had begun almost a fortnight before Hitler’s speech of 4 September. What was different now was the frequency and intensity of the raids. On 7 September, 350 bombers attacked the London docks in a daylight raid, causing massive damage. Both the bombers and the accompanying fighter squadrons had to fly at high altitude to avoid anti-aircraft fire, so the British withdrew their fighter squadrons westward from the coastal airfields so as to gain time to scramble, and maintained a permanent roster of airborne patrols in anticipation of German raids. As they climbed, the British pilots gave false estimations of their altitude over the radio, so as to fool the German fighter-pilots into staying relatively low. All of this reduced British losses, while the Germans were soon forced to carry out raids mainly at night in an attempt to minimize theirs. Between 7 September and 5 October 1940, the German air force carried out 35 large-scale raids, 18 of them on London. In the week from 7 to 15 September 1940 alone, 298 German aircraft were shot down as against 120 British. On 15 September, more than 200 bombers attacked London, accompanied by a substantial fighter escort. 158 bombers made it to their target, some being shot down before reaching the city, others being forced to turn back for one reason or another. 300 Hurricanes and Spitfires engaged them over the capital, shooting down 34 bombers and 26 fighters and damaging many more.79

  The Junkers 88, mainstay of the German bomber force, was slow-moving, it was too small to carry a really effective payload, and it lacked the manoeuvrability and the defensive capacity to ward off the British fighters. Other bombers such as the Heinkel 111 and the Dornier 17 were not only relatively small in size but were also antiquated in many respects; indeed they were being replaced by the Junkers 88 over time despite its defects. The German bomber force was simply inadequate to achieve its task. A quarter of the original 200 bombers did not return from the 15 September raid alone. Losses on such a scale were unsustainable. 80 Fighter planes and, still more, pilots were in increasingly short supply. Escorting a ‘large raid’ over London on 17 September, Ulrich Steinhilfer, in a new, upgraded Me109, ‘met amazingly strong fighter opposition’.81 On 29 September 1940, ‘when we got to London and the dog-fighting started I suddenly found that there were only the five aircraft from our squadron with me and about thirty to fifty Spitfires against us’. He only escaped because the British fighters flew off to attack a more important target. By October, he was telling his father that in his Group ‘there are only twelve left from the old crew’; they could not take inexperienced newcomers into battle for fear of losing them and there was a new type of Spitfire so fast that ‘our Me can hardly keep up with it . . . there is no more talk of absolute superiority’.82 ‘The leadership of our air force,’ Chief of the Army General Staff Franz Halder noted after a situation report on 7 October 1940, ‘has underestimated the British fighters by about 100% . . . We need 4 times as much to beat the English down.’83 By the time Steinhilfer himself was shot down, baling out on 27 October 1940, to spend the rest of the war in captivity, the fighter battle had effectively been lost.

  On 14 September 1940, the eve of the original deadline for the launching of ‘Operation Sealion’, the invasion of Britain, Hitler convened a meeting of the leaders of the armed forces to concede that ‘on the whole, despite all our successes, the preconditions needed for Sealion are not yet there . . . A successful landing means victory; but this requires total command of the air’, and this had not been obtained. ‘Operation Sealion’ was postponed indefinitely.84 Hitler was persuaded by Raeder to continue with night raids, especially over London, to destroy the city’s military and economic infrastructure. Increasingly also the raids were justified in terms of their impact on civilian morale. The decision was welcomed by many in Germany. ‘The war of annihilation against England has now really begun,’ wrote Lore Walb with satisfaction in her diary on 10 September 1940: ‘Pray God that they are soon brought to their knees!’85 This ‘war of annihilation’ was known in London as ‘the Blitz’. In all, some 40,000 British civilians were killed during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. But morale did not break down. A new German ploy of sending fighters and fighter-bombers flying at high altitudes - 253 such raids were carried out in October 1940 alone - was designed to wear down both civilian morale and British fighter strength. In October 1940, some 146 Spitfires and Hurricanes were lost. But the Royal Air Force had adapted its tactics by mounting high-flying patrols, and in the same month the Germans lost another 365 aircraft, mostly bombers. In November one raid on the midland city of Coventry by a fleet of almost 450 bombers destroyed the entire city centre, including the medieval cathedral, killing 380 civilians and injuring 865; British intelligence had failed to anticipate the raid, and the city had been left effectively without protection.86

  But this was a rare lapse. Mostly, the German bombers met heavy and well-prepared resistance. Deciding that such attacks achieved little, Raeder persuaded Hitler to switch the bombing campaign to Britain’s seaports from 19 February 1941, but while many raids were mounted, Britain’s night-time defences quickly became effective here too, as radar and radar-controlled guns came into operation. By May 1941 the raids were being scaled down. British civilian morale, though shaky during the initial phase of the bombing campaign, had not collapsed. Churchill had not come under any significant domestic pressure to sue for peace. British aircraft production had not been seriously affected. 600 German bombers had been shot down. Ordinary Germans began to get depressed about the outcome of the conflict. ‘For the first time since the war began,’ wrote Lore Walb in her diary on 3 October 1940, ‘my constant optimism has begun to waver. We are making no progress against England.’87 And in December 1940 Hans Meier-Welcker was forced to conclude privately, as many others had already done, that there was no sign of ‘a collapse of morale among the English people’.88 For the first time, Hitler had lost a major battle. The consequences were to be far-reaching.89

  ‘PATHOLOGICAL AMBITION’

  I

  As it became clear that the German air force was not going to win command over the skies between Britain and the Continent, Hitler cast around for alternative methods of bringing the stubborn British to their knees. His attention turned to the Mediterranean. Perhaps it would be possible to enlist Italy, Vichy France and Spain in the destruction of British sea-power and British naval bases there. But a series of meetings held in late October produced nothing of any concrete value. The canny Spanish leader, General Franco, while thanking Hitler for his support during the Spanish Civil War, made no promises at all, but simply said he would come into the war on Germany’s side when it suited him. In his view the war was still undecided, and he poured open scorn upon the German belief that Britain would soon be defeated. Even if there was a successful invasion, he said, the Churchill government would retreat to Canada and continue the fight from there with the aid of the Royal Navy. Moreover, it was quite possible that the USA would back Churchill; already, indeed, on 3 September 1940 US President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signe
d an agreement leasing fifty destroyers to the British navy. Given his unwillingness to force Vichy France to surrender any of its colonial territories in North Africa to the Spanish, Hitler had little or nothing of value to offer Franco in return for his entry into the war, and the Spanish dictator knew it. ‘These people are intolerable,’ Franco declared to his Foreign Minister after the meeting. ‘They want us to come into the war in exchange for nothing.’90 The meeting broke up without any concrete result. A furious Ribbentrop railed against Franco as an ‘ungrateful coward’ whose refusal to help was poor thanks for the aid Germany had given him in the Spanish Civil War, while Hitler told Mussolini a few days later that he would rather ‘have three or four teeth taken out’ than go through another nine such hours of negotiations with the Spanish dictator.91