Stumbling backwards he was struck by how intact it still looked despite ticking and smouldering. Heading back to the cockpit, he got his flare pistol and fired two shots into the radio. ‘I suddenly felt rather lonely,’ he says. ‘So I took out a cigarette, had a smoke and waited to be taken prisoner.’ He did not have long. Plenty of people had seen him come down, and at length two elderly members of the Home Guard hurried across the field. Rather to Julius’s surprise, they immediately demanded a souvenir from him.
‘What kind of souvenir?’ he asked.
They weren’t really sure. But something. Julius pulled out his sunglasses, but there was only one pair, so he broke them in half and gave the men half each, which seemed to satisfy them. And then he was marched away.
As Tom Neil had discovered, it was perfectly possible to be scrambled, climb up to 15,000 feet or more, and then see no sign of the enemy whatsoever, while forty miles away a huge swirling air battle was raging. On this Sunday, David Crook, John Dundas and the rest of 609 Squadron had flown off to investigate some trails of smoke, had been scrambled to patrol over Ringwood, and then again above Middle Wallop, but had seen nothing at all.
Pete Brothers and the men of 32 Squadron, on the other hand, had seen rather too many enemy aircraft that day – some forty bombers and sixty fighters at around 1.20 p.m., then a further fifty or so bombers and thirty fighters shortly after five o’clock. In the first, the men had been hastily scrambled when it seemed the bombers were heading straight for Biggin Hill. Speeding off, they climbed up to 16,000 feet and then dived down into the bombers in an effort to disperse the formation. In a flurry of frantic shooting, they claimed a number of bombers shot down, including another for Pete, who hammered a Ju 88 and watched it plunge earthwards. By tearing into the bombers they saved Biggin, but exposed themselves to the enemy fighters. ‘Our casualties were P/O Pain,’ ran the rather dispassionate report in the squadron record book, ‘shot down and slightly wounded, in hospital. F/Lt Russell shot down and severely wounded. Sgt. Henson forced landed. Slightly wounded.’
During the second fight, north of Canterbury, another three of their aircraft were shot down, but once again all three pilots survived, two heading straight back to the squadron. It had, however, been a good day for Pete, who shot down his second confirmed enemy plane of the day, an Me 109 flown by Gerhard Müller-Dühe from Dolfo Galland’s III/JG 26. ‘His score was five,’ says Pete. ‘Curiously, he was my fifth. He should have known better.’
That Sunday was the Luftwaffe’s last big effort for a few days, as a front of bad weather once again scuppered German plans. Yet the first week had shown that the Dowding System was working. There had been moments of extreme anxiety, yet on the whole Fighter Command had come through well. Dowding’s rotation of squadrons was also allowing fresh squadrons to enter the fray. On the 19th, for example, 616 Squadron were sent south, to bomb-damaged Kenley, near Biggin Hill, to replace the battle-weary 64 Squadron.
Cocky Dundas was, like Tom Neil a few days earlier, excited by the move south, although the reality soon hit home when he reached Kenley and saw the ruins of the station. Wrecked aircraft and vehicles lay strewn around the perimeter, newly filled craters dotted the field, while a number of the buildings were blackened wrecks. Still there was 615 Squadron, which had lost one pilot killed and three wounded, as well as eight Hurricanes the day before, and many more during the past month. Cocky noticed the obvious strain on the faces of the 615 pilots; the tension and weariness in the mess were palpable.
Three days later, the Prime Minister arrived at the airfield. All the pilots lined up to shake his hand. No sooner had Cocky done so than Corporal Durham raced out of dispersal yelling to the pilots to scramble. As Cocky sprinted to his Spitfire, he wondered whether the whole thing had been put on especially for Churchill; certainly, it had been quiet since they had arrived with barely an enemy plane in sight.
Climbing to 12,000 feet, they were above Dover, and Cocky was thinking about going into London that evening, when several explosions suddenly burst around him. In seconds, the cockpit was filled with thick, hot smoke, blinding him entirely. Centrifugal force had pressed him back against his seat and he knew he was now spinning. Panic and terror consumed him fully. ‘Christ, this is the end,’ he thought, then told himself, ‘Get out, you bloody fool. Open the hood and get out.’ Using both hands, he tugged the handle where the canopy locked on to the top of the windscreen, but after he had moved it back an inch it jammed. Smoke gushed through the gap and suddenly he could see again – the earth and sky spinning round and round. Desperately he now tried to control the spin, but to no avail. Still plummeting at terrific speed towards the ground he knew that opening the canopy was his only chance. Giving it one more almighty heave, he at last wrenched it back. Pulling out his leads and unbuckling his harness, he now pushed the top half of his body up out of the aircraft, but with the aircraft spinning and with raw terror consuming him as the ground drew ever closer, he was unable to break clear. Sitting down again, time rapidly running out, he tried again, this time from the other side, and at last managed to slither out along the fuselage and fall free. ‘Seconds after my parachute opened,’ he noted, ‘I saw the Spitfire hit and explode in a field below. A flock of sheep scattered outwards from the cloud of dust and smoke and flame.’
He landed moments later, rolling to a halt underneath a hedge. His leg was sticky with his blood and he had dislocated his shoulder, which hurt like hell. A farmer with a gun arrived, then soldiers, and then an army ambulance, and he was driven away to the Kent and Canterbury Hospital.
‘Very sorry indeed to hear that a 109 – or rather 12 of them – inflicted grievous bodily harm on you,’ his brother John wrote to him. ‘Mummy sent me a wire yesterday and you were mentioned as wounded in an 11 Group Intell. Summary this morning. I haven’t heard any details, but I do hope the damage isn’t too bad.’
It was not; Cocky would soon recover and fly again. He had been lucky, very lucky. But Cocky’s survival and that of the 32 and 615 Squadron pilots on 18 August demonstrated what an enormous home advantage Fighter Command held over the Luftwaffe. For Julius Neumann, the war was over. Having been interrogated, he was now at a camp in the Lake District and would eventually be sent to Canada. But for Fighter Command, downed pilots could fly again – that day if they were unscathed, or a few days or weeks later if their wounds were not too bad.
Because more new and repaired aircraft were being produced than were being shot down, the crucial factor for Fighter Command was the number of pilots being lost, rather than Spitfires and Hurricanes. Between 8 and 23 August, Fighter Command lost 204 aircraft, but more than 300 had been built and a further 260 repaired in that period alone. In the same period, the Luftwaffe lost 397 aircraft, of which 181 were Me 109s and 110s, so only a fraction less than the number lost by Fighter Command. However, throughout the whole of August only 184 new Me 109s were built and 125 Me 110s, while for the whole of August 476 British fighters were built. Fighter Command was comfortably winning in terms of aircraft numbers, but was emphatically so in terms of pilots. Fighter Command lost 104 pilots killed in that same period; the Luftwaffe suffered 623 dead and around the same number again taken prisoner, permanent losses which were twelve times higher than those of Fighter Command. Despite the wrecked airfields, despite the numbers of British aircraft destroyed, and despite the visually overwhelming sight of vast armadas of German aircraft flying over Britain, in no way was the battle going well for the Luftwaffe. In fact, it was going really rather badly wrong.
40
Bombs on Berlin
HILDA MÜLLER MIGHT have loved dancing but second on her list of favourite pastimes was going to the cinema. Barely a week went past without her seeing a film, mostly stirring propaganda pieces. Beforehand, just as in cinemas throughout Britain, news reports would be shown. In Berlin that August, they would also repeatedly run a song, ‘Bomben auf England’, a suitably stirring march, and accompanied by footage of Stukas diving down
on ships and Me 109s tearing over the white cliffs of southern England. The march was undeniably catchy, relying on mass-chanted repetition of the chorus and plenty of trumpets. ‘Comrade! Comrade! Get the enemy!’ it ran, ‘Bombs on England! Do you hear the engines singing? Get the enemy! In your ears it is ringing! Get the enemy! Bombs! Bombs! Bombs on Eng-e-land!’ It was played over the radio, too, full of crackly static, and over public tannoys. ‘We used to add different refrains,’ says Hilda, ‘such as, we are swimming to England and so on.’
Hilda thought it quite fun, but it grated on the nerves of those it sought to glorify. ‘We pilots,’ wrote Dolfo Galland, ‘could not stand this song from the very start.’ Naturally, it did not help that neither their situation nor their mood was quite so relentlessly buoyant as the march. Dolfo had already been feeling decidedly disgruntled with what he viewed as faulty tactics when he and a number of other Gruppen commanders, as well as all senior commanders, were summoned away from the front to attend Göring’s latest conference. Flying to Berlin on 17 August, Dolfo found himself transported to what seemed like a different world. The weather was beautiful and Germany seemed swathed in peaceful serenity. In Berlin, everyone appeared to be carrying on as normal. Interest in the war seemed to have taken a nose-dive, which he found upsetting. No doubt the air battles over Britain and the U-boat war did seem a million miles away to many – and hardly like a proper war at all; it was the Continental mentality that wars were fought on land by armies.
But as Dolfo saw civilians and soldiers swanning about enjoying the summer sun, he wanted to shake them from their complacency. ‘Naturally,’ he noted, ‘we had no insight into the ramifications of this war, but we guessed fairly accurately that the battle we were fighting on the Channel was of decisive importance to the continuance and the final outcome of the struggle.’ It seemed to him that suddenly the burden of the war’s future now rested on the few hundred fighter pilots stationed on the Channel coast, and he felt their efforts were underappreciated. The contrast between the life and death struggle in the skies over England and the smug serenity of Berlin had a deeply depressing effect on him.
He had not shaken off this feeling of gloom by the morning of 19 August, when he was driven to Carinhall for the conference. There, in the luxurious and opulent surroundings of Göring’s palace, and with Kesselring, Milch, Jeschonnek et al. in attendance, even the supremely self-confident Dolfo Galland felt somewhat overawed.
The Reichsmarschall’s frustration with the way the battle was going was clear, even though all those present maintained they had inflicted large and crippling losses on the RAF. But they had not destroyed the British fighter force in three days as planned. Göring was still trying to look to tactical mistakes for the reasons, and had decided that it was the fighter force that was largely to blame. He reiterated his decision of four days before that three Gruppen of fighters should protect one Gruppe of bombers, and having singled out Dolfo and Werner Mölders (another young fighter leader and the leading German ace), to be invested with the Pilot Medal with jewels, announced that the older fighter leaders were going to be sacked and replaced with younger men – like Galland and Mölders, who, he announced, were to become fighter Geschwader commodores.
Dolfo’s heart sank – he liked being a Gruppe commander and wanted to continue flying, but Göring reassured him. The Geschwader commander, he said, must lead his pilots in the air, not from a desk. His intention was that these young commanders would lead by example, and inject some youthful dynamism into the fighter forces.
It was not the fighter force that was the problem, however, but the bombers. Pulverizing airfields and the aircraft industry required heavy bombers and lots of them. Göring simply did not have enough aircraft, of the right kind, for the job. But ever since Wever’s Ural long-range, four-engine bomber force had been scrapped, Göring and Jeschonnek had put their faith in the dive-bomber, convinced, as Udet had been, by its exciting potential.
Udet had become fixated with the idea of the dive-bomber during a trip to the United States in 1933. There, the aircraft designer Glenn Curtiss had developed his Hawk, a dive-bombing biplane that Udet had even been allowed to fly himself and then take two back to Germany. And, back home, Udet soon convinced his old friend Göring of the dive-bomber’s merit. The result was the development of the Junkers 87.
There is no doubt that, to a cavalier like Udet, dive-bombing, which required daring, skill and panache, was far more appealing than a fleet of bombers flying horizontally and releasing bombs from high altitude. But there were also sound reasons for backing the dive-bomber. No adequate bombsight had been developed, and German radar was very much in its infancy, making high-altitude bombing seem a costly and ineffective method of bombing. It was therefore surely much better to destroy a target with one accurately placed bomb than to paste an area with lots of bombs dropped haphazardly. And in addition to being a more accurate means of bombing, it was also more economical: the more accurate the bombing, the fewer bombs and aircraft would be needed.
Early trials with the Ju 87 had been hugely encouraging and led to what can only be described as an obsession amongst the General Staff for dive-bombing. Jeschonnek, in particular, along with Udet, became a confirmed proponent and they now insisted that the Ju 88, currently being developed as a fast, long-range, highly diverse bomber, also be given dive-bombing capabilities. After a lot of teeth-sucking, Junkers agreed that this would be possible, but in being adapted to these new requirements it changed fundamentally, putting on massive weight and losing speed. And it took time. Redeveloping an aircraft into something quite different was no easy task, but it was why the bomber that was supposed to be the mainstay of the Luftwaffe was barely ready by the beginning of 1940. It was why the Luftwaffe now, in the summer of 1940, was mostly using older Dornier 17s and Heinkel 111s travelling at speeds of 160 mph. The Junkers 88 prototypes had flown at 320 mph carrying 2,000 kg loads. That was faster than a Hurricane. The whole point of the Ju 88 had been to have an aircraft superior to any other of its kind. Yet having completely ruined this exciting, modern new medium-bomber, Udet and Jeschonnek next decided the He 177 heavy bomber should have dive-bombing capabilities too. It was this new specification that led Heinkel to try combining two engines, tandem-fashion, to drive one propeller, instead of sticking with the more stable design of four independently functioning engines and propellers. It was a disaster, because the double engines kept catching fire and lots of planes and their crews – as many as fifty – were lost in the process. That was fifty good pilots who could not drop bombs on England. Eventually, it was decided to go back to the four-prop model, but by then the entire project had been irredeemably delayed.
And Jeschonnek and Udet had even insisted the new, upgraded Me 110 project, the Me 210, should also have dive-bombing performance. It was partly this requirement that ensured the Me 210 project failed. The huge amounts of time, money and resources wasted on these machines, for a specification ill-suited to their original design, were quite astonishing.
What was more, their obsession with the advantages of dive-bombing made them overlook its inherent disadvantage, which was that to enable such a dive in the first place meant the aircraft was all but standing still the moment it recovered from releasing its bombs. This did not matter when cowing Poles with swords or rusty Norwegian troops or even intimidated Frenchmen taking shelter in their bunkers, but it was a major problem when there were efficient modern fighters above waiting for just that moment.
A further problem was that although it was extremely accurate when compared with a high-altitude horizontal bomber, it was still not pinpoint enough to hit moving ships or small – in terms of footage on the ground – RDF masts and operating huts. The best – men like Paul Hozzel – could regularly hit a ten-metre-wide circle, but less often when under enemy fire. The War Illustrated weekly magazine ran an article in one of its August editions entitled ‘Why the Bomber Often Misses the Convoy’. Undeniably intended to give its British readers h
eart, it nonetheless gave an informative and accurate explanation, pointing out that when attacking a 250-yard-long ship lengthways, a bomb aimer would have a window of around 1.5 seconds in which to release his bomb, a decision which had to take into account the speed of the moving ship as well as the path of the bomb, the time for the bomb to fall, and wind speed. In a cross-ways attack, that window would be a quarter of a second. In other words, it was very difficult.
These two fundamental problems with the Stuka had first really reared their heads during the air battle for Dunkirk, but such concerns, if voiced, had been swept under the carpet. They had then become increasingly apparent during the Kanalkampf, and since then the failings of the Stukas had been a major disaster. As of now, they were withdrawn from the battle entirely. The part of the Luftwaffe in which Udet, Jeschonnek and even Göring had placed so much faith, the terror of the world in 1939 and early 1940, was no longer fit for battle. It was a catastrophe, because it showed that much of their tactical and strategical thinking in the mid- to late 1930s had been fundamentally flawed.
Blaming the fighters was not the answer. Nor were the new measures going to miraculously turn things around – far from it. There were fewer Me 109s and 110s than bombers, but Göring now expected three fighters to protect every bomber. That meant the pilots would have to fly three times as much as the bombers during daylight operations, and to make matters worse, often at speeds that cancelled out their operational advantage. It smacked of panic. After all, it was he, the most senior officer in the world, who a month before had been insisting fighters should be allowed to operate to their strengths.
At his latest conference, Göring had also given new instructions for attacks on the enemy aircraft industry. During the day, he announced, these should be carried out by lone raiders making the most of cloud enabling them to carry out surprise attacks. How they were then to navigate their way to the target was not explained. Opportunistic attacks meant bombers could not really use Knickebein or X-Gerät, which needed to be fixed beforehand. Further attacks, Göring told his commanders, should be carried out at night. So far, his night-bombing raids had scarcely been more successful than those of Bomber Command. For example, between 14 and 23 August, the Bristol Aeroplane Company’s factory at Filton had been selected for attack eight times, but bombs fell on it only twice. In the same period, the Westland, Rolls-Royce and Gloster works had also been picked out nine times but only twice had bombs landed within five miles of their target. In all this time only one night bomber claimed to have successfully hit the Rolls-Royce works at Crewe – and he had been mistaken.
The Battle of Britain Page 60