Engineers of Victory

by Paul Kennedy

  The Battle of Britain: Lessons Learned, and Those Not Learned

  The first real chance to test the theory and the full possibilities of strategic bombing came during the Battle of Britain, waged during the summer and autumn of 1940, and, though less dramatically, during the next several years of German nighttime bombing of the cities and factories of the British Isles. As suggested above, no previous aerial conflict could compare. The First World War’s aerial battle had consisted chiefly of dogfights over the trenches, plus a few tentative forays at longer-range bombing. Italy’s merciless aerial attacks upon the tribes of Tripolitania and Ethiopia, the Kondor Legion’s devastation of towns such as Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, the Japanese air assaults on various Chinese cities in the 1930s—all of them were one-sided airborne attacks by an industrialized state upon poorer, usually defenseless populations, and the Luftwaffe’s onslaught against Poland in September 1939 was not much different. The spectacular Nazi conquests of the Low Countries, Denmark, Norway, and even France itself in April through June 1940 were manifestations of tactical airpower, for which the bulk of the Luftwaffe had been designed and trained.

  Only with the Battle of Britain did there arrive that Tennysonian vision of rival aerial navies grappling for command of the skies, day after day, month after month.15 During the long, hot summer of 1940, over the wheat fields and orchards of Kent and Sussex, strategic theory encountered logistical and organizational reality. It was not just the emotion-charged images—of aircraft’s vapor trails entangled across a clear blue sky, of St. Paul’s Cathedral standing out above the flames, of Churchill visiting the bombed-out houses of Londoners—that counted. This struggle also consolidated the resolve of the British to soldier on, and had enormous effects upon foreign opinion abroad, especially in neutral America. Strategically, it was also the first time the Nazi juggernaut had been checked. Britain and its empire would fight on, in their time carrying the battle back to Hitler, in the air and at sea, in commando raids and in support of the embryonic European resistance movements, and in the Mediterranean against Mussolini’s Italy, which had rashly joined the fray as France fell. Hitler himself, eagerly anticipating his eastern campaign by late 1940 and still confident in his destiny, might dismiss this as a setback. But the American special envoys and military experts sent to Britain in the summer of 1940 could return to an anxious Washington with assurances that the island state would not surrender, a message much reinforced by Churchill’s great radio speeches of this period and his many personal letters to FDR.

  Yet neither the human dimension of the Battle of Britain nor its larger strategic implications concern us here so much as the operational and tactical pointers it gives to understanding the successful waging of modern aerial warfare when two opponents possess large resources and good organization. It also offers us a nuanced, multilayered contribution to the eternal, more general debate about offense versus defense in war. The German strategic purpose here was clear: Hitler wanted Britain knocked out of the war, and if that could not be achieved through intimidation and some Vichy-like deal—surely unlikely after Chamberlain stepped down—it would be secured by an invasion. That in effect meant obtaining control over at least the narrow waters of the English Channel, across which the German armies would flow. Yet that operational aim depended in its turn upon gaining unqualified control of the air, not just by destroying the RAF but also by keeping at bay Britain’s powerful naval forces. To the newly formed Churchill government, its own strategic logic chain was also perfectly clear: by denying the attacker command of the air, he was also denied control of the waters around the planned invasion beaches, and landings themselves could never take place. This was to be Germany’s own situation from 1942 onward, when the Allies moved from defense to offense. Before launching a seaborne invasion, one needed to dominate the skies.

  In terms of institutional organization, the Germans were remarkably good. The Battle of Britain was not one for which they had really planned, either in air force doctrine or pilot training or in basic infrastructural investment in airfields, fuel tanks, and the rest; certainly the Luftwaffe had inherited an array of northern French air bases, but those were of mixed utility—the Bf 109s, with their delicate undercarriages, often found themselves flying from bumpy grass fields. There were many other weaknesses—German radar was way behind that of Fighter Command, intelligence was poor, and there was far too much interference (about targeting or close escort tactics) from Goering and more distantly from Hitler. The latter had only ordered preparations for Operation Sealion, the maritime invasion of Britain, on July 16, and it was not until August 6 that the operational commanders, Albert Kesselring and Hugo Sperrle, got detailed instructions for their air strike. So a fair-minded observer can only be struck (and not for the first or last time) by how impressive German organization was, even when switched from one operational challenge to a different one. It was no simple task to fling hundreds of fighters and bombers across the Channel—on September 7 it was almost one thousand aircraft—day after day, week after week. But that’s what they did.16

  Yet the British organization was even better prepared—in its chain of command and integrated defense systems, with radar, spotter stations, air raid precautions, sector command posts, and air traffic controllers, all decentralized yet networked, and all feeding into Dowding’s Fighter Command headquarters. To be sure, it should have been well organized, for this was the contest that British governments had been bracing themselves for all through the 1930s (even Neville Chamberlain did not stint on investments in air defense). Given the British Empire’s vast obligations and limited resources in the interwar years, it is noteworthy that a relatively large share of financial and industrial capital had gone into the very careful and sophisticated defense of the United Kingdom itself.17 Thus, while Britain encountered many setbacks in the early years of the war, it certainly was prepared for enemy assaults from the air.

  FIGHTER COMMAND CONTROL NETWORK, CIRCA 1940

  By this time, the British possessed the most integrated aerial defense system in the world: even this fine map of UK radar stations and RAF Fighter Command arrangements could not possibly also include the dense networks of aerial observation posts (linked via underground phonelines), antiaircraft batteries, and barrage balloons.

  In this epic and complex struggle between these rival, sophisticated war-making organizations, three aspects stand out above all the others in explaining the course of the campaign: geography, targeting, and men and their weapons—the pilots and their planes.

  By geography here we mean the critical roles of distance and space. The flying machine liberated human beings from the natural constraints of land and sea—man was now, writers claimed, “as free as a bird.”18 There was, unfortunately, one massive constraint: heavier-than-air craft had very limited range, even more so when they carried hundreds of pounds of bombs. A frigate in Nelson’s day was bound to the sea, but it could (with local provisions) stay out for months, even years, at a time. When the Second World War broke out, an aircraft’s time in the sky was shockingly limited by the size of its fuel tanks and the not inconsiderable fact that it also had to fly back to base. Liddell Hart noted long after the war that the superb single-engine Messerschmitt Bf 109, based in Pas-de-Calais, could just about reach the outskirts of London, and then had to turn back. If it had already had to fight with the Hurricanes and Spitfires over the Kent bases, it had about 75 minutes of tactical flying time and was, of course, no longer protecting German bombers.19 Obviously, Dowding’s squadrons, rising from those very bases with full tanks, had much more fighting time. And if an RAF plane was damaged, it had a fair chance of gliding down to an airfield or cornfield somewhere, and of the pilot surviving; a German plane force-landing on English soil was an aircraft lost and a crew captured.

  It is precisely here, in the matter of boosting Fighter Command’s range and accuracy of counterattack, that the remarkable air-tracking radar system developed by Sir Robert Watson-Watt
and his associates in the 1930s made its greatest contribution.b Its value was immeasurable. Those tall trifid-like pylons with pulsing machines, set up in a chain along the east and south coasts of England, could pick up objects in the sky a hundred miles away and relay that information into a home defense network; at the time, there was nothing like it.20 To Dowding’s hard-pressed squadrons, it gave two vital gifts. First, it gave the traffic controllers the direction and the size of the oncoming air fleets well before they reached the English coasts, and thus allowed Fighter Command to prepare itself. Perhaps the best example here comes not from the fighting in the southeast but from a flank attack on August 14 by the Luftwaffe’s No. 3 fleet (from Norway) against Newcastle, which was handily intercepted and cost the Germans fifteen bombers with no RAF losses; without radar, no such interception would have been possible.

  The second gift, of time, was equally precious. If those strange tall aerials sited along the shore really could pick up, say, sixty dots rising into the skies above their bases at Abbeville, then the RAF squadrons did not need to have more than a few patrol planes in the air (and wasting fuel) at any one time. The great bulk of their squadrons and their overworked aircrews and support mechanics could rest on the ground until the order was given to scramble. Those popular photographs of blond, tousle-haired young men resting on the tarmac beside their Hurricanes and having one last cigarette are really telling us that the British fighters had the great defensive advantage of not needing to take off until the enemy’s aircraft might already have depleted 30 or 40 percent of their fuel supplies. What is more, an RAF plane could slip down to any airfield and get swift refueling. The pilot of a Junkers bomber or a Messerschmitt fighter had to recross the Channel, get home to a base perhaps 30 miles from the coast, and then rise into the air again—which was, obviously, much more exhausting (as the Luftwaffe’s own detailed record shows), and was not helped by Goering’s refusal to give his aircrews any significant rest. Unsurprisingly, a lot of German crew casualties came at the end of a long, aching day.

  Then there was the factor of targeting. The issue was a pretty simple one, but the Luftwaffe did not think about it enough (and, as we shall see, they would not be alone in this defect). As a number of historians have observed, in this the Germans had, ironically, forgotten their Clausewitz—that is, the need to identify the key object of the campaign and the best means to achieve that object. The basic aim, as noted above, was that elusive concept “command of the air.” Yet by the beginning of September the Luftwaffe had failed in that aim and had lost more than eight hundred planes, with many more in need of repair. Thus it was clear that the RAF, while also losing hundreds of aircraft in these weeks, had a far greater capacity to contest the skies than the German commanders had originally expected. A continued failure to eliminate the British fighters and their airfields meant, simply, that the battle as a whole would be lost. This was the key. Fighter Command had to be destroyed.

  Unfortunately for Hitler’s ambitions, Goering and his air marshals made a couple of fateful decisions at a critical meeting held on September 3, 1940 (ironically, in The Hague, city of the international peace conferences). The bombers of Luftflotte No. 3, which always had a longer way to go from their Normandy bases to fight over Kent, were, at Sperrle’s urgings, released for night attacks upon the many ports of the southern British coast—Southampton, Portsmouth, Devonport, Cardiff, and the rest. More important still, it was resolved that Kesselring’s Luftflotte No. 2, based in Pas-de-Calais and heavily reinforced once again, would wage an unrelenting daylight and nighttime campaign against London. The result was to give the capital city, and especially its East End working classes, an ordeal by fire. The first mass attack on September 7 killed more than 300 civilians and seriously wounded another 1,300; the flames raging in the docklands and around St. Paul’s Cathedral could be seen for 50 miles and were an easy beacon for Goering’s night bombers. This pounding continued over the weeks to follow, as each side’s air force threw more and more planes into the struggle. On some occasions the Luftwaffe found a chance to ravage London; on other days Fighter Command’s counterattacks were punishing—sixty bombers were shot down on September 15 for the loss of twenty-six RAF fighters (half of whose pilots were saved by their parachutes). The struggle was new and titanic, and the world watched in awe.

  The London Blitz concealed the critical fact that the Luftwaffe’s decision to switch targets saved Fighter Command. Given the inherently strong defensive position held by the British, operational logic pointed to the priority of targets for the German attackers: (1) the key radar stations along the coast, (2) Fighter Command’s airfields in southeast England, and (3) the numbers and morale of the Allied pilots. Amazingly—and especially given the fact that the tall detection masts were being erected on coastal hilltops as early as 1938—German air intelligence failed to appreciate the critical importance of radar to the entire British defense system even when, again and again, RAF squadrons seemed to be waiting in the right spot to meet the raiders. The utility of some early attacks upon the stations was actually questioned by Goering on August 15, and such attacks ceased thereafter. Yet without radar, the defenders would have been reliant solely upon the Observer Corps and hugely expensive aerial patrols over the Channel. Goering’s September 3 decision to alter the targets also took the pressure off Fighter Command’s forward airfields, which had been under unrelenting attack during August—RAF Manston in Kent had had to be abandoned—and especially off-key sector stations such as Biggin Hill and Northolt, which controlled whole fighter groups. The absence of bombing and strafing of the airfields gave the weary crews a bit more time to rest and the engineers time to repair and refuel the planes without interruption. But the failure to attack the blatantly vulnerable radar stations continually amazed the British.

  Instead of concentrating upon the critical points of Britain’s aerial defense system, Goering, urged on by the Fuehrer, chose to attack the largest, most sprawling residential target in the world. The damage inflicted upon the city, as well as upon England’s southern and western ports, was huge and brutal. But it is doubtful that the Luftwaffe could have destroyed London even if it had had twice as many bombers—and even if it had done so, that did not guarantee a way of surmounting the rising problem of invading the entire island as summer 1940 gave way to autumn. Small wonder that the skeptical German naval and army chiefs just sat on their hands, content to let Goering prove himself or fail. Finally, attacking London from French air bases involved a lot more time over England and thus allowed the RAF a second chance to get at the weary German bombers on their return; it also allowed Dowding the chance to pull in fresh squadrons from East Anglia and the Midlands for afternoon counterattacks. “I could hardly believe the Germans would have made such a mistake,” Dowding later wrote.21

  “Fresh squadrons” meant the conjunction of two elements, planes and pilots. Each side deployed a small variety of aircraft types, the RAF squadrons flying the slower (and soon to be replaced) Defiants, most predominantly the Hawker Hurricanes, and a small but increasing number of Spitfires, while the Luftwaffe relied upon its fearsome Stuka Ju 87 dive-bomber, a mix of twin-engine fighter-bombers and medium bombers such as the Bf 110, the Dornier 17, and the Heinkel 111, plus the larger, slower Ju 52, together with the mainstay of the fighter force, the single-engine monocoque Messerschmitt Bf 109. For an entire year, all of these famous—or notorious—aircraft had terrorized Europe (British railway stations, post offices, and schools all had wall charts showing their dread silhouettes); now they were being shot out of the sky, and there were no newer, improved, longer-range bombers in the pipeline. As noted above, the Luftwaffe’s exploration of heavy bombers had been diverted in the 1930s, so there was no German equivalent of the enormous Anglo-American strategic air forces involved in the later attacks upon the Third Reich. Dorniers bombing the London dockyards were, at this stage in the war, the closest equivalent to strategic airpower, and with limited bomb capacity they were clearly ina
dequate to the task.

  The aerial campaign against London and the southern counties thus became another rock-paper-scissors game. If the German bombers reached their targets as planned—and many of them did, as was apparent from the raids on the East End—they could inflict appalling damage on the British people, housing, factories, and ports. If the Hurricanes and Spitfires got to them first, they suffered heavy losses; even the tough Bf 110s found it hard to handle a Hurricane, let alone a Spitfire. It was no doubt particularly satisfying to members of those Anglo-French regiments that had been battered at Dunkirk, and to those civilians who had escaped the relentless dive-bombings of refugee columns across northern France, to learn that the Stukas were easy prey for much faster RAF fighters and had to be withdrawn from the fight. On the other hand, if the Bf 109s tangled with the British squadrons before the latter got to the German bombers, it was a different story, and the odds were much more even. When, in late August, Goering showed alarm at his bombers’ losses by ordering the Bf 109s to stay close to the Bf 110 bombers, an enormous amount of tactical flexibility was lost. Coming under more and more criticism for failing to protect the bombers, the Messerschmitt fighter squadrons were forced into flying as many as three sorties a day to England, which was simply unsustainable.