The Battle of Britain

by James Holland

  Goebbels was also quick to emphasize the loss of civilian life caused by British bombing. ‘Churchill’s answer – cowardly murdering of a defenceless population!’ ran a headline in a Berlin paper following the rejection of Hitler’s peace offer. Few civilians were being killed but air raids were becoming a feature of life in the industrial and Baltic cities of Germany. Ulrich Steinhilper’s mother wrote to him towards the end of July telling him of two raids over three nights. She even heard the drone of the aircraft overhead. Yet when the American press claimed that Hamburg had been ‘pulverized’, he was livid and hastily arranged a press trip to the city, on which William Shirer was one of the journalists. He had to admit he could see little damage, but that was hardly the point. British bombing was annoying the Nazi High Command. More importantly, it was showing the world that it was possible to strike back at Germany. And in the summer of 1940 that was important.

  When the Führer had expressly forbidden hitting civilians, he had meant it. Bomber crews were given their quite specific targets and were expected to hit them, not splay bombs all over the place. Admittedly, they had far superior navigation and bomb-aiming instruments compared with those of the RAF, but it was still never an easy task hitting a target from a considerable height, even with Knickebein and X-Gerät. As Hajo Herrmann points out, ‘You had to see and recognize what it was you were trying to bomb.’

  Earlier in July, on the 2nd, his 9th Staffel was given the task of bombing the Vickers Armstrong factory at Newcastle upon Tyne, where tanks, guns and other war materiel was made. The works stood right on the banks of the Tyne, close to the city centre, so accurate bombing would be a challenge. Having been fully briefed and having studied aerial photographs, Hajo was left to decide when to carry out the operation. With a waning half-moon and a forecast of cloud cover along the east coast of Britain, he decided to carry out the strike by day rather than at night. They set off from Schiphol in the afternoon, landing at Bad Zwischenahn further north over the border in Germany, where they refuelled; then, climbing high, they headed out over the North Sea in a loose formation and on radio silence, beautiful sunshine beaming down upon them.

  As they approached the English coast, Hajo knew they could expect enemy fighters at any moment. Fortunately, just as the meteorological officer had predicted, he saw tall banks of cloud ahead. That was good; if any fighters appeared, they could dive straight for the cover it would offer. The cloud was spread like a carpet over the coast, then rose in layers like giant towers. It made him think of Valhalla, the Hall of the Gods, and he remembered what his father had told him as a boy: that it was to the sky that people went when they died.

  Suddenly, from near the top of these towering clouds, two fighters appeared. Hajo saw the rest of his Staffel either side of him dive away, but he waited a little longer, then dropped down into the cloud himself. On the altimeter he could see 2,300 metres, then 2,000 metres and then he was clear and ahead was the green patchwork of northern England and Newcastle itself. Having seen enough to orientate himself, he climbed a little way again, into cloud once more, wondering where the fighters now were. Desperately scanning the skies, he heard his wireless operator shout, ‘He’s coming!’ and then Hajo saw him too and dived once more. He emerged through the cloud at 1,800 metres, sweeping just over fat, bulbous barrage balloons. They had been lucky because there was a stiff wind and the balloons had been swept forward. ‘The stiff wind,’ noted Hajo, ‘was laying them flat like a stream does to water weeds.’

  The fighters had both gone so Hajo continued onwards, following the Tyne, sweeping left and right as flak began to open up. The really dangerous part of the operation was about to begin. Telling the rest of the Staffel to orbit, Hajo thought for a moment, and decided that a diving attack would be madness, because the slowness with which they pulled out of the dive after releasing their bombs would make them far too exposed. But by dropping from a greater height, more calculations needed to be made, not least the wind speed. This was crucial because their bombs would not fall vertically but at an angle, and wind could make a huge difference to this. These calculations took a nerve-wracking few minutes, in which Hajo’s Ju 88 was completely exposed in the clear, open sky. Hajo was sweating now; down below, he could see the dark outline of Hadrian’s Wall, but he was not interested in sight-seeing – he just wanted to get the job done, then get the hell out of there.

  At last his observer was finished and miraculously not a single fighter had spotted them. Having broadcast the bomb settings to the rest of the Staffel, he turned to begin his bomb run, which would be along the river, flying east–west. As they reached the start point, he began his stopwatch and rose up into the cloud ceiling. Tensely waiting for the flak to open up, they flew on, the seconds ticking by, and then the cloud thinned and there below was the target, just as it had looked in the photographs he had examined. More barrage balloons, and now flak tracer whizzed past them. ‘Come on!’ thought Hajo, ‘Drop the bloody things!’ The observer looked completely calm, his eye glued to the eyepiece. And then at last, bombs away. Hajo hauled the plane into a climbing turn and was soon enveloped in the clouds. Drawing a deep breath he headed south to take one last look, peeping briefly out of the cloud. He could see smoke rising and then there was another bang of flak. Darting back into the cloud, he roared over the port at full throttle and calling out to the rest of the Staffel wished them good luck for the journey home.

  They all made it back safely, and were writing their reports when a provost arrived and demanded to interview Hajo. According to the Führer Headquarters, word had reached them that German aircraft had just carried out a ‘terror raid’ on Newcastle and he had been ordered by 9th Fliegerdivision Headquarters to investigate. Scarcely concealing his anger, Hajo told him that he had no idea whether his bombs had hit the target and also explained that he had expressly ordered his men never to hang around after they dropped their bombs. He also pointed out that it took 20.7 seconds for their bombs to reach the ground from a height of 2,000 metres and that with fighters and flak around, that was a long time to loiter over a target in an attempt to see where the bombs landed. Hajo then advised him to report back that when they released their bombs, they did so with the target in their sights. Long-range reconnaissance crews would have to follow it up. ‘I was reprimanded,’ noted Hajo, ‘for having prevented my crews from being questioned, for my disrespectful attitude, and, quite absurdly, because neither I, nor any of my crews, knew what we had hit.’

  In fact, they had hit the grounds of the factory, and a little further on at Forth Street, and various warehouses near the King Edward and High Level bridges. They had missed the Vickers works, but not by very much as it happened. One man had been killed and five others wounded. Hajo was ordered to write up the entire episode, then long-range reconnaissance flew over, spotted the damage, and wrote a further report. Hajo then heard nothing more until eventually he received a letter complimenting him on his bombing accuracy, and ordering him to give a number of lectures to various bomber units in Luftflotte 2 on how to deliver a daylight bombing raid using cloud cover. It was signed by Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring.

  What this showed was that very accurate bombing was extremely difficult. It also demonstrated that if bombers were really going to make an impact, lots of them were needed with as many bombs as possible. And despite their more sophisticated navigational aids, this applied to the Luftwaffe as well as to Bomber Command.

  Massed bombing was what Hitler had in mind for Adlerangriff – the ‘Eagle Attack’ as the air war against Britain was dramatically called, although there were still to be no bombings of civilians. However, he did add a caveat. ‘I reserve to myself,’ he wrote in his Directive No. 17, ‘the right to decide on terror attacks as measures of reprisal.’

  Hopefully, it would not come to that. Hopefully, the RAF would be defeated by heavy and overwhelming attacks on British aircraft, their airfields, ground installations, their supply organizations, and aircraft industry. Once that was
done, then the Luftwaffe could turn on the ports and ‘stores of provisions in the interior of the country’. The Kriegsmarine was also to intensify operations. That meant the U-boats were to head back out to sea and the Schnellboote were to continue their good work.

  There is no doubting that in the Luftwaffe Hitler still had a mighty force. There were some 2,500 aircraft that could be brought to bear – a mighty armada indeed. Reports from the fighting so far suggested the RAF had already lost some 400 aircraft, more than half the force they had had at the beginning of July. The odds, then, looked good. The British army was also still in disarray. In Norway and in France and the Low Countries, the German armed forces had proved superior; indeed, British efforts had seemed disorganized, chaotic even. It was even possible to argue that the BEF’s escape from Dunkirk had been largely down to luck.

  But the Channel was more than a river. No leader, not even the arch risk-taker Adolf Hitler, would undertake an invasion lightly, and thus he viewed Operation SEALION more as a coup de grâce, to be put into force only once the RAF had been destroyed and the sea lanes secured. It was unclear, however, how long that might take. A few days? Weeks? Months even? Beyond the middle of September, it would be getting too late; equinoxial tides and poor weather would make a crossing too difficult, although there was a window at the end of September and the beginning of October. That gave him six to eight weeks only. In retrospect, his presumption that Britain would sue for peace had been wrong, yet if, in private moments, he regretted having waited so long for the peace talks that had never come, he never said so. His troubled mind, however, had, during these days of introspection, begun to think ahead.

  At the Führer’s Berghof conference with his senior commanders on 31 July, he made clear his thoughts. The intention was to bludgeon Britain into submission, with the air assault beginning now. ‘Its results,’ he said, ‘will determine our ultimate relative strength.’ He was confident of success and if the British began to crumble, then SEALION would go ahead. On the other hand, he had to consider the possibility that results might not be as hoped, in which case, an invasion would be put on hold.

  But Britain had to be taken out of the war. That was key to all future plans, so alternative means of achieving this now had to be considered. Britain was clearly placing her hopes on Russia and the United States, he told them. This was the old paranoia returning: East and West; the fear that Germany would be penned in either side, consumed by the Western powers and the Soviet Union. However, he now argued, if Russia was out of the picture, then America would also be lost for Britain, because elimination of Russia would increase Japan’s power in the Far East. This would threaten both British and American interests there. War between Japan and America would distract the United States from Europe.

  Hitler had already begun to feel a little twitchy about Russian intentions. The Soviet Union had recently absorbed the Baltic States, as agreed in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, but she had also occupied Bessarabia, an area to the south that bordered Romania. Intelligence also suggested that Russia was alarmed by the speed of Germany’s victories. Britain knew this, he claimed, which was one of the reasons she now held so much faith in Soviet intervention. ‘With Russia smashed,’ Hitler told his assembled commanders, ‘Britain’s last hope would be shattered.’ Germany would then be master of Europe and the Balkans. Therefore, Russia’s destruction had to be part of the struggle to defeat Britain, and the sooner the better. Such an attack would only achieve its purpose if the Soviet Union could be ‘shattered to its roots with one blow’. He now ordered planning for an attack on the Soviet Union to begin. The provisional date for this assault was May the following year.

  Incredibly, Hitler was now dramatically suggesting that Germany turn on Russia far earlier than he had ever envisaged, purely to hasten Britain’s exit from the war. General Halder, for one, was not convinced by this argument and believed a decisive blow could also be achieved in the Mediterranean and Middle East along with the Italians. At any rate, either option meant the continuation of war beyond the autumn, and would lead to a war on two fronts, which was precisely what Hitler had always feared; it was why he had gone for the all-out gamble against the West that May. Britain was frustrating his hopes, wrecking his plans. For Germany’s sake, the Führer and his commanders had to pray that these new ideas remained plans only, a fall-back and nothing more, and that in the days and weeks to come Britain would be smashed and out of the war for ever.

  36

  The Wall of England

  THE NEWLY PROMOTED Oberstgeneral Heinz Guderian had been having an easy time of it these last six weeks. His Panzer Group had been dissolved, although the staff had stayed on briefly in Paris, from where he had played the tourist, visiting Versailles, Fontainebleau and other sites. Then, at the beginning of August, since he was not involved in any way in invasion plans, he and his staff moved back to Berlin.

  Nonetheless, Halder had allocated both Army Groups A and B to the invasion, although the main landings along the south-east were to be conducted by the former. A number of panzer divisions were included in Halder’s planned second wave, including Rommel’s 7th Panzer. The division had been transferred to the west of Paris and Major Hans von Luck was now living in a comfortable villa on a loop in the Seine, right opposite the American singer Josephine Baker. Along the river – rather than on the coast – they practised loading and unloading converted barges under combat conditions. Hans found it wearisome in the extreme.

  What Halder was finding wearisome was the apparent diametrically opposed views of the army and Kriegsmarine over the planning of Operation SEALION. It was ironic that Germany, with the OKW, should have been enlightened enough to create the world’s only tri-service high command, yet thanks to the Nazi practice of divide and rule was rarely able to reap its benefits. Thus for SEALION no joint planning team had been organized. Rather, the Kriegsmarine had been left to make its plans and OKH had been told to draw up its own, almost entirely independently of each other. From their headquarters, Halder and von Brauchitsch had decided that the invasion should take place on a broad front. Six divisions from General Ernst Busch’s Sixteenth Army would cross from the Pas de Calais and land between Ramsgate and Bexhill-on-Sea, while four divisions from General Adolf Strauss’s Ninth Army, embarking from Le Havre, would land between Brighton and the Isle of Wight. Three further divisions from the Sixth Army, departing from the Cherbourg Peninsula, would land between Weymouth and Lyme Regis. Some 90,000 men would be put ashore in the initial attack, increasing to 260,000 by the third day. Airborne troops would play a part at Lyme Bay or in the Portsmouth area. A second wave of panzer and motorized divisions would follow, along with further forces until some forty-one divisions in all were landed. Bridgeheads would be established, then they would thrust forward. After initial heavy fighting, it was reckoned, British resistance would crumble. The whole operation would take about a month.

  But Halder had viewed the planning issues in terms of the land operation only, treating the English southern coast as merely the start line of an attack. Trifling issues such as how to get the men there was not the OKH’s concern. It had made its plan, and it was up to the navy to get them there. Konteradmiral Fricke, on the other hand, could only see a mountain of difficulties in getting across this troublesome stretch of sea, not for nothing once described as the ‘wall of England’. To start with, the scale of the OKH’s operation was way out of proportion to the capabilities of the Kriegsmarine, which was just 15 per cent of the size of the Royal Navy. The OKH also wanted to land at dawn, which would mean travelling through the night. But the Kriegsmarine needed a certain amount of light – at least half a moon, rising at around 11 p.m., and clear skies and weather. It also had to have a tide that was just beginning to go out, so that barges could run on to the beaches easily. Combining these requirements meant the invasion would have to take place between 19 and 26 September, a bad time from the point of view of weather prospects.

  Another difficulty was ob
taining and preparing a sufficient amount of shipping. Fricke reckoned that for six weeks he would need to make use of all domestic harbours and any naval dockyards along the Rhine, and down the whole stretch of the Dutch and Belgian coasts, which would be crammed with barges. ‘All repairs and construction of new boats,’ he added, ‘must be ceased at these docks during this time.’ He also reported that the Ministry of Economic Affairs had explained that taking more than 1,000 barges and some 24,000 men from the German shipping industry would have seriously detrimental effects on the German military and civil economies, because it would mean domestic water-borne transport would all but cease. ‘This would not only affect domestic shipping,’ Fricke added, ‘but also international shipping, and would also have an effect on the railways and this in turn will have very noticeable effects on the entire German economy.’

  All this Raeder repeated at the Führer Conference on 31 July. He also suggested landing on a much shorter front, a proposal that was rather left up in the air. Yet despite Raeder’s catalogue of difficulties and warnings, Hitler did insist full planning went ahead. Afterwards, he also told von Brauchitsch and Halder that they should continue to plan for a broad-front landing. Telling OKH this, whilst at the same time not disagreeing with the Kriegsmarine’s narrow-front preference, was typical of Hitler, and thoroughly unhelpful especially when time was so tight. The other problem was that each party was working slightly at cross-purposes. Hitler was certainly serious about the landing in as much as it would be an absolute necessity should the RAF be beaten and Britain be on her knees. There could be no letting the British off the hook, and he foresaw that an invasion would be the only means of securing that, even if Britain did subsequently sue for peace. The army was also assuming air supremacy would have been achieved and that the threat of the Royal Navy could be dealt with by massed air attacks combined with submarine warfare. Certainly, there was confidence amongst the Luftwaffe crews that the Royal Navy’s predominantly surface fleets could be destroyed, regardless of their current numerical advantage over the Kriegsmarine. ‘I dreamed of bombing the Rodney or the Nelson,’ says Hajo Herrmann, ‘battleships that were thirty metres wide, and I think it would have been possible.’