With Wings Like Eagles: A History of the Battle of Britain

by Michael Korda

  Once again, just as he had before Dunkirk, Hitler hesitated, with the result that Dowding had a welcome, though unexpected, breathing space to review and consolidate his forces. His fighters were divided into four principal groups, the two weakest being No. 13 Group, covering the north of England and Scotland; and No. 10 Group, covering the west of England. Of the two strongest Groups, No. 12 Group covered the largest area, basically the industrial Midlands; and No. 11 the most likely target area, the south of England and London, as well as the beaches where the invasion would land when it came. No. 11 Group, commanded by Air Vice-Marshal Park, was the strongest, containing twenty-five squadrons (including one Canadian and one Polish squadron); No. 12 Group, commanded by Park’s ambitious and energetic rival Air Vice-Marshal Leigh-Mallory, consisted of nineteen squadrons (including four Polish and two Czech squadrons).

  By the end of June, Dowding had just over 1,300 fighter pilots. Most of them were British, and few of them had had any combat experience. During the course of the battle Fighter Command would also draw on fifty-six carrier pilots from the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm, as well as a mixed bag of twenty-one Australians, 102 New Zealanders, ninety Canadians,* twenty-one South Africans, two (white) Rhodesians, one (white) Jamaican, nine Irish volunteers, seven Americans, 141 Poles, eighty-six Czechs (one of whom, Sergeant Joseph František, would become the RAF’s second-highest-scoring ace in the Battle of Britain), twenty-nine Belgians, thirteen Free French aviators, and one Palestinian Jew.1

  Three of the more colorful Americans served together in No. 609 Squadron—they had volunteered to fly with the Finnish air force against the Soviet invaders; journeyed, with numerous adventures, from Helsinki to France when Finland surrendered to Stalin; and from there caught the last Channel crossing to England. They were spending the last of their money in a pub near the Air Ministry at lunchtime and told their story to a sympathetic RAF Air Commodore over a drink who told them “to get in touch with him tomorrow.” The next day they were given commissions in the RAF, and sent out with money to buy their uniforms. Pilot Officer “Red” Tobin from California had worked as a studio messenger at MGM to pay for his flying lessons. Pilot Officer “Shorty” Keough, was, at four feet ten inches, the shortest pilot in the RAF, and needed a couple of inflatable pillows under his parachute to see over the cowling of his Hurricane. Pilot Officer “Andy” Mamedoff, a stunt flier from Miami, had barnstormed his own plane all over America. None of them survived the war.2

  By the official end of the battle just over one-third of Dowding’s pilots would be casualties—killed, seriously wounded, or missing. There is a tendency in modern fiction about the Battle of Britain to present Fighter Command as a kind of happy-go-lucky multinational force, full of foreign volunteers and soldiers of fortune, but except for the Polish and Czech squadrons and the one Canadian squadron, foreigners were relatively few and predominantly English-speaking; the vast majority of the pilots were British, middle-class, and very young. That they were high-spirited almost goes without saying—for many it was the great adventure of their life, and a large number of them went straight from school to the cockpit of a Spitfire or a Hurricane.

  The Germans’ primary goal during the battle was to destroy Fighter Command, but thanks to Dowding’s cautious tactics—although he was not a card player, he had a deft poker player’s instinctive skill at concealing what was in his hand—they would never come nearly as close to doing so as they fondly believed. Although Dowding always complained that he was short of pilots, his strength actually grew during the four crucial months of the battle, from 1,456 to 1,727; and the number of fighter aircraft available for operations on a daily basis remained constant at about 700, with an average delivery of about 1,000 new fighter aircraft a month to the operational squadrons. At the height of the battle, in August and September, the number of new aircraft in storage units being prepared to operational readiness would certainly dip alarmingly (to the consternation of the prime minister), but at no point would the Luftwaffe come anywhere near to crippling Fighter Command, let alone, despite Göring’s boasts, to clearing the skies above the Channel and southern England for long enough to make a German invasion possible, or even plausible.

  Although it is usual to portray the Battle of Britain as a kind of modern, aerial contest between David and Goliath, with the Luftwaffe playing Goliath, the reality is that although the German bomber force in the three air fleets facing the British was very substantial—nearly 1,000 serviceable bombers on August 10, 1940—the number of single-engine fighters meant to protect them was not all that much greater than those available to Dowding: 805 serviceable Bf 109s versus Dowding’s 749 Hurricanes and Spitfires. In the category of fighter aircraft, the additional 224 Bf 110 twin-engine “heavy fighters,” far from being an asset, would themselves require the protection of the single-engine Bf 109s to survive in air combat.* (The 261 Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers would also prove almost useless.3)

  In pilot strength, the Germans had certain advantages. Luftwaffe major generals did not pick up foreign pilots in bars—first, because the vast, covert Nazi training schemes from 1933 on had created large numbers of pilots; and second, because the Völkische nature of Nazi Germany meant that service in the air force was limited to those young men of pure German (or Austrian-German) birth, who could satisfy the authorities that they were of Aryan descent. Ultimately, the British were willing (though not necessarily eager) to take anyone who was white (i.e., “European,” American, or from the dominions and colonies) and could fly an airplane, whereas in Germany, aircrew status was limited to those with “pure German blood.”*

  The actual number of German fighter pilots available was roughly similar to that of Fighter Command, but mere numbers do not of course tell the whole story. Since the battle would be fought largely over England (or the English Channel), in most cases when a German aircraft was shot down it—and more important, its pilot—would be gone for good, whereas British pilots, if they were lucky, could parachute or crash-land their aircraft on British soil, and might be back with their squadrons and in action again on the same day. (As for the aircraft, Lord Beaverbrook had made elaborate and very efficient arrangements for the immediate repair or salvage of downed Spitfires and Hurricanes, at Civilian Repair Depots, and for salvaging downed German aircraft to produce aluminum for building more British fighters.) The Germans could certainly replace pilots who were killed or captured, but in most cases they were obliged to replace an experienced fighter pilot with one just out of flying school—not the same thing at all.

  Thus, German losses of men and machines were final, whereas those of the RAF were not necessarily so. This was a factor that neither Göring nor anyone else in the Luftwaffe seems to have considered seriously when contemplating a full-scale aerial attack against Great Britain. Dowding, on the other hand, had given it a good deal of thought, in his typically logical and precise way. It explains his lack of enthusiasm for letting Park’s No. 11 Group loose to tangle with the Luftwaffe over Dunkirk, and his reluctance to use Park’s fighters to protect coal convoys in the English Channel from German air attack—in Dowding’s view, such protection was largely an exercise to prove to the Germans that the Channel was still English. Aircraft shot down over the Channel were gone for good, and pilots who parachuted or crash-landed in the Channel were difficult to recover, especially since they didn’t have the inflatable life rafts, fluorescent water markers, and bright yellow flying helmets with which the Luftwaffe equipped its aircrews.

  Dowding’s stubborn, logical mind often brought him to conclusions that surprised other people, whose judgment was more easily swayed by emotion. It was Dowding’s decision that the slow, cumbersome German He 59 air-sea rescue floatplanes, although painted white and marked with conspicuous red crosses, were not entitled to any protection under the Geneva Conventions. They were picking up from the Channel downed German aircrews who would be used again against Britain as soon as they were back with their units, and were also suspected of rad
ioing back the course and position of British convoys. He ordered Fighter Command to shoot them down, or to machine-gun them if they were on the sea performing a rescue (a position in which they were truly sitting ducks), an unsporting order that surprised his pilots and outraged the Germans. This gave the Germans a short-lived propaganda victory, until they gave up the red crosses, camouflaged the He 59s, marked them with a swastika and black Luftwaffe crosses, and armed them with a machine gun.

  Who but Dowding could have worked out in his mind, following the same line of reasoning, that under the Geneva Conventions the Germans were entitled to machine-gun British pilots in the air over England as they descended to safety by parachute, because they would return to their units to fight again; but British pilots were not entitled to machine-gun Germans parachuting from their damaged aircraft, since they would be made prisoners of war on landing? This decision struck many of Dowding’s colleagues as either inhumane or ridiculous, but that was because, unlike Dowding, they had not read the Geneva Conventions attentively or unemotionally and had not drawn the correct conclusion. As it turned out, in practice very few fighter pilots on either side were likely to deliberately machine-gun a man parachuting to the ground, or at 300 miles per hour had any way to determine if he was British or German. Dowding himself did not think it was likely; he merely wanted a neat, tidy resolution to the question. It was the kind of mental exercise, however, that did not win him friends among politicians or his fellow air marshals—indeed even the prime minister questioned his judgment, comparing a parachuting airman to “a drowning sailor”4—and made even a few of Dowding’s pilots wonder if their Commander-in-Chief might be cracked.

  By July 3, the underlying tension between Air Chief Marshal Dowding and Air Vice-Marshal Leigh-Mallory, the commander of No. 12 Group, had become apparent, at a conference about tactics held at Fighter Command Headquarters. Dowding and Leigh-Mallory disagreed about the length of time the Germans would spend attacking Fighter Command’s airfields before an invasion, and Dowding then proceeded to make it clear that he expected his group commanders to keep “a pretty good control” over their squadrons, and to ensure that each squadron received precise orders as to whether to attack the enemy bombers or enemy fighters. He was determined that fighter pilots should not become “obsessed” with the German fighter escort above instead of attacking the bomber force itself, which could be expected to be flying at a lower altitude. In short, Dowding wanted the Group Commanders to prevent “a free-for-all” battle in the sky over England—they were to use their squadrons judiciously, keep an ample number in reserve, support each other, and follow his orders. Since Dowding already knew that Air Vice-Marshal Park would do just that without being told, and since No. 10 Group and No. 13 Group would be on the fringes of the battle, it is hard not to guess that his remarks were aimed at Leigh-Mallory.5

  Leigh-Mallory was not Dowding’s only problem air marshal. Dowding had already clashed with the ambitious, hard-thrusting Air Vice-Marshal Sholto Douglas, Assistant Chief of Air Staff in charge of training and the purchase of new equipment at the Air Ministry, on the subject of the Boulton Paul Defiant and on the usefulness of twenty-millimeter cannon instead of .303-caliber machine guns in his fighters, among other things. Douglas was the polar opposite of Dowding, a burly, pugnacious, aggressive former fighter pilot and a member of the numerous Douglas family, which included Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s beloved Bosie, as well as his father, the ninth marquess of Queensberry, who was the popularizer of the famous rules for boxing matches and who brought about Wilde’s ruin.

  About the Defiant, Dowding had been proved right, an outcome that won him no friends at the Air Ministry; and on the subject of twenty-millimeter cannon he was not impressed by either of the two types that had so far been tested, or convinced that four cannon would necessarily give better results than eight machine guns. Dowding was all in favor of arming fighter aircraft with cannon in the long run, but first he wanted to make sure they were reliable, and in his opinion this was not yet the case. In the short run, he did not want to disrupt the production of Spitfires and Hurricanes by changing their armament. In the corridors of the Air Ministry, it was easy to portray Dowding’s caution on such subjects as a lack of enthusiasm for new ideas, and attribute this to his age, his stubbornness, and his own crank notions, as well as to the fact that it had been very long since he had flown himself.

  It is hard to know if Dowding was aware at this stage of the degree of hostility that already existed between himself and the two men who would be most instrumental in bringing about his downfall (and would benefit most from it), but it would have been out of character for him to have shown any concern or interest, still less to try to patch things up. After all, his enemies already included the Chief of the Air Staff and, in the aftermath of his blunt talk on May 13 about the danger of sending more Hurricanes to France, very likely the prime minister, even if Churchill’s enmity was at an unconscious level. A different kind of Commander-in-Chief might have made a man-to-man effort to win Leigh-Mallory over, or at least to keep him in line (Eisenhower would later do so quite effectively for a time), and to sweet-talk Sholto Douglas, a man with a considerable ego even for an air marshal, who was at once vain, prickly, and well-connected. Dowding had no gift for this kind of thing, however, and no taste for it. It was not in him to flatter, persuade, charm, inspire, or trade gossip with his fellow air marshals, still less to involve himself in their interminable intrigues.

  He understood how to win the battle, and that was that—he had been thinking about nothing else since 1936.

  Across the Channel, as the Luftwaffe moved into the French airfields of Normandy and Brittany and made itself at home, German strategy was still unclear, awaiting Hitler’s decision about the invasion. The navy was beginning to assemble a growing invasion fleet of tugboats, river barges, and sea barges, whose effectiveness has been depreciated by most historians, though it is worth remembering that an even less promising and much more hastily assembled fleet of Channel steamers, motor yachts, lifeboats, Thames River day cruisers, tugs, and fishing vessels had brought more than 250,000 British soldiers off the beaches of Dunkirk and home to England, despite the best efforts of the Luftwaffe to stop them. Compared with the “small ships” of the Dunkirk evacuation, the German navy’s fleet of tugs and barges seems quite impressive, especially considering that it was being improvised at high speed and with no advance preparation, since until Dunkirk, the prospect of invading Britain had never come up. The British and the Americans would labor for more than four years to create a fleet for the Normandy invasion, whereas the Germans were attempting to do it in less than three months.

  What hampered the Germans was a combination of sloth and wishful thinking at the top. Hitler was still stunned by the magnitude and completeness of his victory over France, and no doubt still expected to receive a call from England any day, from Lord Halifax or Lloyd George, to ask for peace terms; and Göring was enjoying himself in Paris and savoring the endless congratulations and promotions for himself and his favored commanders. Lower down on the totem pole, overburdened staff officers struggled to solve the problems of an improvised invasion and to produce a coherent strategy for victory once the troops were on shore in Britain, but the timetable was still unclear, and there was no single, energetic commander-in-chief—no equivalent of Eisenhower—to pull the three German services together in a single, united effort.

  Hitler’s patience came to an end abruptly and unexpectedly on July 3, when a British battle squadron, commanded by Vice-Admiral Sir James Somerville, appeared off the French naval base of Mers el-Kébir, near Oran in French Morocco, and demanded that the French fleet anchored there, commanded by Admiral Gensoul and including two battleships and the two powerful modern battle cruisers Dunkerque and Strasbourg, sail either to a British port or to a French port in the Caribbean, or that Gensoul should sink his own ships within six hours. Failing this, Somerville reported regretfully, he had orders from His Maje
sty’s Government “to use whatever force may be necessary to prevent your ships from falling into German or Italian hands.”6 Negotiations continued throughout the day, but Admiral Gensoul finally rejected the British demands. A few minutes later, at five-fifty-three that evening, Admiral Somerville opened fire, crippling the French fleet and killing more than 1,200 French sailors.

  French warships in Alexandria, Egypt, as well as Portsmouth and Plymouth, were boarded by British sailors and seized, and a modern French battleship in Dakar was fired on. Announcing this tremendous show of naval force (albeit against a former ally) to the House of Commons, Churchill concluded, with tears in his eyes, “A large proportion of the French Fleet has, therefore, passed into our hands or has been put out of action or otherwise withheld from Germany…. I leave the judgment of our action, with confidence, to Parliament. I leave it to the nation, and I leave it to the United States. I leave it to the world and history…. The action we have already taken should be, in itself, sufficient to dispose once and for all of the lies and rumors…that we have the slightest intention of entering into negotiations in any form and through any channel with the German and Italian Governments. We shall, on the contrary, prosecute the war with the utmost vigor.”7