Here was the long-awaited answer to Hitler’s “peace offer” speech, and, by the way, also to Halifax and Lloyd George. In a highly dramatic way, Churchill had demonstrated both Britain’s sea power and his own resolve to keep on fighting. For the first time as prime minister he received the loud, unstinting applause and cheers of his own party—for while the conservatives had accepted, with whatever reluctance, the inevitability of Churchill as prime minister on May 10, their hearts had until now remained with Neville Chamberlain, who had hitherto received warmer applause from his own side of the House than Churchill had even for some of his greatest and most memorable war speeches. But this time the lion had not only roared, he had struck, and struck hard, and all over the world (particularly in the White House) people took notice at last that whatever had happened to France, Great Britain remained an undefeated imperial power, with a measure of its old ruthlessness and defiance, and that the voice of Britain was not a plea for peace at any price, but the thunder of fifteen-inch naval cannon. Nowhere was this message heard more clearly than in Berlin.
On July 13 Hitler at last signed off on the army’s plan for Operation Sea Lion, setting a target date of August 15 for the invasion and turning the Luftwaffe loose to destroy RAF Fighter Command before that date. He was still not fully committed to the invasion: that is, he had mental reservations about whether he should do it or not. But it was no longer theoretical; it was a plump military plan, with fixed dates and elaborate maps, and it was now up to Göring to strike the first blow.
Still not in a hurry, the newly created Reichsmarschall (a unique rank placing Göring one step above a field marshal) did not meet with his Luftflotte commanders until July 20, at his baroque country estate, Karinhall, where they were left to their own devices to come up with a strategy. By now, the Führer was becoming impatient for action, though at the same time, giving way to the reality of the army’s and navy’s slow preparations for the invasion, he delayed the target date for the invasion to September 15, with the Luftwaffe’s grand full-scale air attack to begin on August 5. Even so, he retained firm control over the decision to launch the invasion, which he intimated he would make only after the RAF had been destroyed.
There are two observations to be made about this. The first is that any military undertaking of this size and complexity should not have too many “escape clauses” built into it—an army needs to know that on such and such a date an attack will begin, with no ifs, ands, or buts. The second is that May, June, and July are the months when a cross-Channel invasion has the best chance of succeeding, because of the weather and the long hours of daylight. In 1944, Eisenhower was obliged to postpone the invasion of Normandy from early May to early June, and was prepared to delay it if necessary until July, but he regarded September as dangerously late in the year—the days would be too short; the weather would be chancy; the possibility of major storms would be vastly increased. If Milch (now promoted to field marshal) had been able to persuade Göring to persuade Hitler to launch a hastily improvised invasion immediately after Dunkirk, before the British were organized to resist it and while the weather was most propitious, it might have succeeded. But choosing September 15 as the target date was a landlubber’s decision, and should have been resisted by the German admirals, who knew better.
In short, Hitler still resembled a man in bathing trunks on a beach, dipping his toe into the sea and unable to decide whether to plunge in or not. As for the Luftwaffe, pending the full-scale attack, it set about a series of smaller-scale raids on English coastal towns and seaports to test the British air defenses. On July 15, it bombed Yeovil (hardly a worthwhile military target); from the 16th through the 18th it was (shades of things to come) hampered by bad weather; on the 19th it took advantage of some good weather to bomb Dover; and from the 20th through to the end of July it raided shipping, concentrating on the Dover area. During July it shot down 145 British aircraft but lost 270 of its own—not exactly a triumph.* At the same time, this was hardly a triumph for Fighter Command, either. By attacking the seacoast of England from across the Channel in small numbers and at a low altitude the Germans were, without realizing the fact, depriving the radar operators of enough time to scramble RAF fighter squadrons. By the time the Germans appeared on the radar screens, it was too late. Things would be very different, Dowding realized, once the Germans began to come in force and attack inland. Dowding’s critics felt he should be getting his fighters scrambled sooner and in larger numbers, so that he could attack the Germans in force and “give them a bloody nose,” but that was exactly what he did not want to do. His strategy was to make the Germans think Fighter Command was weaker than it was, to concentrate on their bombers, and to bleed them to death by a constant rate of attrition. He did not want large losses, and he particularly did not want large losses over water.
As it happened, the Germans believed exactly what Dowding wanted them to believe. The relatively low numbers of British fighters they met convinced them that Fighter Command’s strength was small—Göring was informed that the British had left, at most, 300 or 400 fighters—and that, when the time came, a few massive full-scale attacks were all it would take to destroy them. The Germans were also lulled into not thinking seriously about the effect radar and Dowding’s system of centralized control would have over the battle once they attacked farther inland in large numbers—indeed, they seem to have paid hardly any attention to it.
The weather in the first days of August was marked by frequent low clouds, drizzle, and thunderstorms. As a result, Göring, who was waiting for four uninterrupted days of clear weather in which to launch the great attack that was intended to cripple Fighter Command—now grandiosely code-named Adlerangriff, “Eagle Attack”—kept putting it off, in anticipation of “a belt of high-pressure from the Azores” that stubbornly failed to appear. Adler Tag, “Eagle Day,” had been scheduled for August 5, but haze prevented it—in the event, a small, inconclusive fight between British and German fighters over the Channel resulted in the loss of six German aircraft to one British. August 6 and August 7 passed with little activity, since the German Luftflotten were busy preparing for the great attack. On the 8th, a large attack against Channel convoys by Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers guarded by Bf 109s gave further proof, if any was needed, that the Stuka was vulnerable in the presence of British fighters—the Germans lost thirty-one aircraft to nineteen British. (The Luftwaffe claimed to have shot down forty-nine British fighters, and the RAF claimed sixty German aircraft downed, causing rejoicing at 10 Downing Street, and showing just how far pilots’ claims exceeded reality on both sides.) Eagle Day was now moved to the 10th, then canceled once again because of bad weather; and the 11th resulted in a large-scale brawl over the Channel, apparently intended to draw large numbers of British fighters over Dover to be “bounced” * by Bf 109s while the German bomber force attacked Portland, a tactic that would have worked only if the British hadn’t had radar. The result was a day of bitter fighting, which ended in almost equal losses, thirty-eight German to thirty-two British. The most important event of the day, unbeknownst to the British, was the first sign of the high-pressure weather from the Azores that Göring had been waiting for. Eagle Day was hastily moved to August 13, with a preliminary “softening up” on the 12th, during which the Luftwaffe would knock out the forward British fighter airfields on the coast and the radar stations—ironically, the 12th was an important date on the British upper-class sporting calendar, the “glorious twelfth,” the opening of grouse-shooting season.
Though he was not normally an early riser, Reichsmarschall Göring himself, clutching his new baton, attended the beginning of operations at seven in the morning on the 12th, accompanied by field marshals Sperrle, the commander of Luftflotte 3; and Kesselring, the commander of Luftflotte 2, and surrounded by a glittering staff. Expectations were high.
August 12 would be a taste of things to come. The weather was fine; the Germans came in large numbers; and their strategy was well thought out, but largel
y thwarted by poor intelligence work, severe overoptimism, and faulty interpretation of reconnaissance. German bombers struck at Fighter Command coastal airfields like Manston, Hawkinge, and Lympne and dropped large numbers of bombs, but most of the airfields were back in service again by the next day, although the Luftwaffe wrote them off as “destroyed.” Certainly, a great deal of damage was done, but for the most part it was nothing that couldn’t be put right with shovels and a bulldozer—and of course a great many of the bombs fell in the surrounding fields, where they did no harm except to the crops of nearby farmers. The concentrated attack against the radar stations should have paid off, but the dive-bombers aimed at the tall radar towers, which looked fragile but were almost impossible to hit from the air, instead of concentrating on the more vulnerable underground operation centers and the plotting huts, without which the radar masts were useless. In most cases the radar stations continued to function, and Dowding’s decision to use young women from the WAAF as radar plotters was justified—without exception, they showed amazing courage and coolness, and continued to work even when under direct attack. The day proved, even to doubters, that the young airwomen could take it as well as men, and also saw the first casualties among the WAAFs.
Dowding’s foresight in burying the connecting telephone lines from the radar stations to the group and command filtering rooms deep underground and shielding them in concrete, a decision about which the members of the Air Council had been so skeptical, also turned out to have been money well spent. At the end of the day the Germans claimed to have destroyed seventy British fighters, whereas in fact the British lost twenty-two aircraft and the Germans thirty-one. Only one radar station was put out of action, and none of the forward fighter airfields was put out of action for long, although the Germans assumed they had been. The 12th ended on a bizarre note with a German night attack on Stratford-upon-Avon, birthplace of William Shakespeare, and then as now a quaint tourist town, of no strategic importance to Fighter Command. The day that had been intended to maul Dowding’s fighters in anticipation of Eagle Day and destroy Fighter Command’s “eyes and ears,” its radar stations, for tomorrow’s big attack, had done nothing of the sort, although the Luftwaffe high command was convinced that it had, and that Fighter Command was already on the ropes. One can understand why, of course—if you started with the assumption that RAF Fighter Command might have as few as 300 fighters left, then went on to assume that you had destroyed seventy of them, as well as putting the coastal airfields and two of the radar stations permanently out of action, then the day would seem to have been a promising, perhaps even a triumphant overture to the big attack. But, as it happened, this was not the truth.
Seen from the British side, however, the day seemed worse than it had in fact been. The attacks on the radar stations, although not particularly successful, seemed to demonstrate that the Germans understood the vital importance of knocking them out, and would concentrate on them from now on; and although the attacks on the forward airfields had been ineffective, they had nevertheless done a great deal of damage, and showed that the Germans had the right idea. A sustained and increasingly well directed bombing campaign, concentrated on the radar sites and his airfields, was what Dowding feared most.
Indeed, the day was serious enough that Dowding might have supposed that the 12th was the opening of the big Luftwaffe attack he was expecting, if he had not been tipped off by Churchill that it was planned for the next day. Although Dowding was not yet on the select list of recipients of “Ultra” information,* thanks to the Poles the code breakers at Betchley had already deciphered the mysteries of the German armed forces’ Enigma ciphering machine, and were able to read the flow of orders from Berlin to Luftflotten 2 and 3, including Göring’s grandiloquent order of the day:
REICHSMARSCHALL GÖRING TO ALL UNITS: ADLERANGRIFF! YOU WILL PROCEED TO SMASH THE BRITISH AIR FORCE OUT OF THE SKY. HEIL HITLER!8
CHAPTER 8
Adlerangriff, August 1940
I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too, and think foul scorn that Parma or Spain, or any prince of Europe should dare to invade the borders of my realm.
—Elizabeth I, speech at Tilbury, August 18, 1588
You must consider that no wars may be made without danger.
—Sir Roger Williams, in a letter to the Earl of Leicester, from the besieged town of Sluys, August 1588*
Despite all the modern technology at the disposal of the Luftwaffe—and although it consistently underestimated the importance of British radar, it had, as would shortly become apparent, a few tricks of its own up its sleeve—it was in one respect no better off than the duke of Medina Sidonia was as he led the Spanish Armada, 130 great ships in all, past The Lizard, the first landfall in Cornwall, into the English Channel on July 29, 1588. The weather would still determine the success or failure of the attack, in a part of Europe where bad weather was notoriously common.
Philip II’s ambitious plan for the conquest of England had been that Medina Sidonia should sweep through the Channel with his immense fleet, destroying the English fleet on the way, then meet with the duke of Parma—Europe’s most formidable soldier—off the ports of the Spanish Netherlands, and help ferry his army across to England in flatboats, to restore the Catholic faith. The Spanish Armada was defeated in part by the smaller and more nimble ships of the English and by the superior seamanship of the English captains in their own familiar waters, but the weather also played a large role. The duke required a good steady wind from the southwest, clear weather, and calm seas for the final stage of his campaign, but none of these was consistently forthcoming. Tacking about in rough seas, with patches of fog, many of his ships became separated from each other in the treacherous waters of the Channel, with its hidden rocks, shoals, currents, and sandbars, and its enormous tides, and fell prey to the English before the “invincible” Armada was anywhere near its goal.
Now, 352 years later, Göring faced a similar problem. He required a protracted period of good weather to bomb southern England on a scale sufficient to destroy Fighter Command’s airfields, and the factories in which Hurricanes, Spitfires, and the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine they both used were produced. Every day of fine weather was to the Germans’ advantage. On the other hand, every day of rain, fog, or low cloud cover was an advantage to Fighter Command, since it gave Dowding’s fighter squadrons a chance to rest, repair damaged facilities, and service their aircraft. We know everything about the weather in 1588—it was such an important factor that on both sides, every captain noted it in his logbook, with every change of wind and course. Likewise, in every detailed, day-by-day account of the Battle of Britain the description of the events of each day begins with the weather for that date. For the airmen, as for the sailors of the sixteenth century, weather was the single most important (and least predictable) element of the battle. Of course meteorology had improved substantially since the duke of Medina Sidonia’s time, but it was still by no means an exact science, and failure to get it right could still have serious consequences.
As if to demonstrate this, Adler Tag, the opening day of Adlerangriff, was a fiasco. Intended as a giant blow with the full strength of Luftflotten 2 and 3, it got off to a muddled and disastrous start. The RAF described the weather for the day as “Mainly fair…early morning mist and slight drizzle in some places and some cloud in Channel.” Perhaps only a British meteorologist would describe mist, drizzle, and cloud as “mainly fair”; in any case, the German meteorologists felt, on the contrary, that the weather forecast was bad enough to call for the delay of Adler Tag, and Göring, with whatever impatience, agreed, and ordered the attack postponed until the afternoon, when the weather was supposed to improve. Unfortunately, his signal canceling the morning attack did not arrive in time to stop some of his units, which had already taken off at dawn—a perfect example of the wisdom of Napoleon’s famous remark, “Ordre, contreordre—désordre,” and of Göring’s amateurish and self-indulgent behavior as a command
er. It is not clear whether the signal failed to reach the German units that went on with the attack or whether they were simply determined to “press on regardless,” to use the popular British military phrase for attacking despite an order to stay put or against insurmountable difficulties; but for whatever reason Kampfgeschwader (KG) 2,* with seventy-four Dornier 17 bombers under the command of Colonel Johannes Fink, a tough-minded, competent veteran aviator of World War I, went on even after the signal was relayed to it and many of its fighter escorts had turned back, some of the fighters because they had received the signal, others because they couldn’t find the bombers they were supposed to accompany in the clouds. Either way, it was exactly the kind of military muddle Napoleon had warned against.
The plans for Adler Tag had been drawn up with exemplary German precision, with exact times and courses for every unit involved—nothing was left to chance, and everything was spelled out in detail. It was a military masterpiece, intended to totally eliminate muddle, but it did not take into account human error (such as Göring’s impulsive decision to postpone the attack at the last minute, or the fact that some of the bombing force was equipped with radio crystals of a different frequency from those in the fighters, thus making it impossible for their fighter escorts to communicate with them, and vice versa), or the difficulty of unforeseen weather.
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