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

by Michael Korda

  Shortly after noon, nearly 150 planes from Luftflotte 5 struck at northeast England—the northern claw of the pincer movement that was intended to prevent No. 12 and No. 13 Groups from reinforcing No. 11 Group. Thus, during the course of the day, almost 1,000 German aircraft would be engaged over southern and northeastern England. To members of the Observer Corps counting them, as well to thousands of spectators on the ground, it was an awesome sight, as seemingly endless processions of enemy aircraft flew overhead in neat formations.

  To those who had read H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come, or seen the film Things to Come, it was exactly the spectacle Wells had described: the skies over Britain darkened by vast fleets of bombers silhouetted against the bright summer sky. But people seem to have been more fascinated than terrified by the sight, and those who knew anything about air warfare could see above the bombers the abstract, swirling zigzag patterns of white contrails* made by the fighter planes as they maneuvered and fought high above the bombers. No photographer was able to capture the sight fully—black-and-white film did not do it justice, and the camera reduced the aircraft to insignificant specks—but a number of painters were inspired to re-create it on canvas and capture something of the scale and awesome beauty of the battle as seen from the ground. The best of these paintings is The Battle of Britain by the distinguished British modernist Paul Nash (who also produced some of the most original and eerie paintings of the trenches and no-man’s-land during World War I); it is now in the collection of the Imperial War Museum in London. Nash managed to put on canvas the bright colors, and the immense sense of distance and space, of a huge and furious battle raging five miles above the ground, and it is as much an icon of patriotism, in its own way, as Lady Elizabeth Butler’s famous painting The Charge of the Royal Scots Greys at Waterloo.

  Those who looked up and saw the battle going on so far above them recall the strange silence—most of the action was too high above them to be heard—and the sunlight catching on the cascades of shiny brass cartridge cases as they tumbled down from the machine guns and cannons in the sky (children were sternly warned not to pick these objects up). Winston Churchill occasionally took time off to view the battle from Dover—a favorite destination of his, since he had caused to be established there, despite opposition from the army and the navy, huge naval guns and howitzers preserved at his command since 1918, with which to shell German positions on the French coast—and to visit fighter airfields along the way. On this day of days, however, he would eventually be driven to Air Marshal Park’s operations room at the headquarters of No. 11 Group at RAF Uxbridge, just outside London, to witness the greatest crisis of the day.

  Strategically, the day got off to a bad start for the Germans. To begin with, despite Beppo Schmidt’s optimistic estimate that the British were down to about 200 fighters, Fighter Command in fact began August 15, at 0900 hours, with 672 serviceable fighters, of which 233 were Spitfires and 361 Hurricanes. These were not a lot with which to hold off more than 1,000 enemy aircraft, but a lot more than Göring supposed. Then too, when it finally arrived after the long flight over the North Sea from Norway and Denmark, the northern “jaw” of the pincer movement, the bombers of Luftflotte 5 attacking across toward the Newcastle-Sunderland area and the airfields of No. 13 Group, failed to do any major damage to either No. 13 or No. 12 Group, or to present Dowding with any serious challenge on his northern flank. Unfortunately for the Germans, Dowding had insisted, despite opposition, on the importance of extending his radar network to the northeast, so the force from Norway, consisting of sixty-five He 111 bombers of KG 26 and the thirty-four Bf 110s of 1/ZG 26 escorting them, as well as a separate unescorted raid by fifty Ju 88 bombers of KG 30 from Denmark, were all identified while they were still far out to sea, and it was ascertained that they were not accompanied by any single-engine fighters. Without an escort of Bf 109s both the bombers and the Bf 110s were sitting ducks for No. 13 Group, and there was no element of surprise to the attack, since Dowding’s radar network extended farther north than the Germans expected—in fact, most of the British fighters were airborne early enough to attack the Germans well before they reached land.

  Dowding had stoutly resisted intense pressure to strip No. 13 Group of pilots and aircraft to replace losses in the south, much to the chagrin of the pilots themselves, who felt left out of the action; but he was proved right in this decision too. At first visual contact, the British pilots were startled by the sheer volume of prey as the Germans approached the coast—there were so many German bombers that when a ground controller impatiently asked Flight Lieutenant Ted Graham, acting commander of No. 72 Squadron from RAF Acklington, “Have you seen them?” Graham, who suffered from a mild stutter, replied indignantly, “Of course I’ve seen the b-b-b-b-astards! I’m t-t-t-rying t-t-t-o w-w-w-ork out what to d-d-do!”5

  But no fancy strategy was called for. In the end, Graham, and the rest of 72 Squadron, as well as 79 Squadron from Acklington, supported by a flight from 605 Squadron from farther north and by 41 Squadron from Catterick, simply attacked the dense pack of sixty-five Heinkels of KG 26, all flying in neat formation, from the side. In the absence of a fighter escort there was no need to maneuver, or to gain altitude and attack from out of the sun, so each British fighter just picked out a victim and opened fire at close range. It was like shooting fish in a barrel. “I saw two Huns simply disintegrate,” one RAF pilot commented. “We hacked them about so badly, the formation split apart and they made for home.” Many of the bombers jettisoned their bombs, causing one RAF pilot to remark, “The sea was churned white with bombs, as if a colony of whales had spouted.”

  The Bf 110s had an even harder time of it, and already running low on fuel and faced with the determined opposition of four squadrons of Spitfires and Hurricanes, they turned for home. The bombers they were supposed to escort that hadn’t already jettisoned their bombs and fled for home plunged on inland in ragged formation and managed to destroy merely a dozen homes in Sunderland.

  Slightly to the south a force of more than fifty Ju 88 bombers from Denmark was attacked by a squadron of Spitfires, a squadron of Hurricanes, and a squadron of the much-maligned Defiants, as well as a squadron of slow, unwieldy Blenheim twin-engine fighters. The Junkers managed to bomb a few houses in Bridlington, and to damage some hangars and destroy ten obsolescent Whitley bombers on the ground at RAF Driffield (once again, not a Fighter Command airfield), but at a cost of more than 10 percent of their force. All told Luftflotte 5 lost eight Heinkels, eight Junkers, and eight Bf 110 escort fighters, having inflicted minimal damage, none of it on any target of importance to Fighter Command. Not a single British fighter was lost. Even not counting the number of German aircraft that arrived home seriously damaged or obliged to crash-land on return, losses among the bombers and the twin-engine escorts were so high—approaching 10 percent, or twice what RAF Bomber Command would consider an “acceptable” rate of loss—that Luftflotte 5 never again attempted a mass attack in daylight.

  Churchill, who was not by any means an uncritical admirer of Dowding, would later comment on this phase of the day’s fighting,

  The foresight of Air Marshal Dowding in his direction of Fighter Command deserves high praise, and even more remarkable had been the restraint and the exact measurement of formidable stresses which had reserved a fighter force in the North through all these long weeks of mortal conflict in the South. We must regard the generalship here shown as an example of genius in the art of war.6

  Of course this was written eight years later, when the Battle of Britain had already become the indisputable emotional high point of Britain’s experience in World War II, and Churchill was anxious to present himself as having backed Dowding to the hilt, and also determined to paper over his eventual failure to protect Dowding from his enemies. That does not alter, however, the truth of Churchill’s judgment. Nobody was a shrewder judge of generalship than Churchill, and Dowding, with slender resources, had outfoxed the Germans brilliantly on Aug
ust 15, despite the criticism of Leigh-Mallory, Sholto Douglas, and Douglas Bader.

  However, hours before the Germans’ attack on the northeast failed, the sheer size of their attack on Fighter Command in southern England was causing even the usually imperturbable Dowding a degree of anxiety. In this attack, unlike the attack by Luftfloffe 5, the bombers were escorted with large numbers of Bf 109s, and the German raids were better aimed at targets that mattered. By mid-morning the forward airfields at Hawkinge and Lympne had been attacked by more than 100 Ju 88s; Lympne was put out of action completely for three days, its water supply and electricity cut off and its sick bay destroyed by a direct hit. Electricity to the coastal radar stations at Dover, Rye, and Foreness was cut off, putting them out of action and leaving a gaping hole in the defense; and two squadrons of British fighters were overwhelmed by superior numbers of Bf 109s. RAF Manston was strafed by Bf 110s and considerably damaged, and by the time the first waves of German aircraft began to withdraw new raids were already forming up. Fighter Command airfields all over southern England came under attack; the attacks were clearly visible to the radar plotters as a kind of electronic blur, too many to count. Not everybody’s nerves were as steady under fire as those of the WAAF radar operators whom Dowding had praised—at Manston, and several other Fighter Command fields, a few of the RAF ground personnel were taking to the shelters and staying there, not surprisingly, given the number of bombs that were coming down. At RAF Martlesham Heath accurate low-level attacks by bomb-carrying Bf 109 and Bf 110 fighters (something of a novelty) put the airfield out of commission.

  All over southern England No. 11 Group was struggling to keep going—pilots flew sortie after sortie, landing at emergency fields while their own were under attack or out of action, and sat exhausted in the cockpits of their fighters while equally exhausted ground crews hurried to rearm their guns and refuel the aircraft. Most of Park’s pilots had been at their dispersal points since before dawn, and could no longer even count the number of times they had taken off, or the number of aircraft they had shot down. Those who were hungry sustained themselves on plates of lukewarm baked beans and mugs of hot, sweet tea from the dispersal hut, and if they were lucky catnapped on the ground next to their aircraft, with a parachute for a pillow. Richard Collier, in his book on the Battle of Britain, lists some of the men who flew on August 15:

  Warrant Officer Edward Mayne, Royal Flying Corps veteran, at forty the oldest man to fly as a regular combatant in the battle, young Hugh Percy, an undergraduate from Cambridge University who kept his log-book in Greek; New Zealander Mindy Blake, Doctor of Mathematics, who approached each combat like a quadratic equation, the Nizam of Hyderabad’s former personal pilot, Derek Boitel-Gill, Randy Matheson, ex-Argentine gaucho; Johnny Bryson, a former Canadian Mountie; Squadron Leader Aeneas Mac Donell, official head of the Glengarry Clan; and Red Tobin from Los Angeles, with the [American] barnstormers, Andy and Shorty.

  But these were the more glamorous exceptions, of course. Most of Park’s pilots were ordinary young Britons, just out of school, commissioned pilot officers or noncommissioned sergeant pilots, tired, occasionally scared out of their wits, often sustained by a combination of adrenaline-producing excitement and a deep personal need “not to let the side down,” many of them unexceptional marksmen only recently promoted from flying trainers to flying real fighters. Very few of them were old-timers who had seen a lot of combat, but it was taken as a rule of thumb that anybody who had come through three combat sorties unscathed was either naturally good at flying a fighter or just bloody lucky, which was even better.

  Richard Hillary, who went straight from life as an Oxford undergraduate and intellectual to being a Spitfire pilot with 603 Squadron, and who would survive dreadful, disfiguring burns to write one of the most famous books about the RAF in World War II, The Last Enemy, before death finally caught up with him, wrote of his baptism of fire on August 15:

  We ran into them at 18,000 feet, twenty yellow-nosed Messerschmitt 109s, about 500 feet above us. Our squadron strength was eight, and as they came down on us we went into line astern and turned head on to them. Brian Carbury, who was leading the Section, dropped the nose of his machine, and I could almost feel the leading Nazi pilot push forward on his stick to bring his guns to bear. At the same moment Brian pulled back on his own control stick and led us over them in a steep climbing turn to the left. In two vital seconds they had lost their advantage. I saw Brian let go a burst of fire at the leading plane, saw the pilot put his machine into a half roll, and knew that he was mine. Automatically, I kicked the rudder to the left to get him at right angles, turned the gun button to “Fire,” and let go in a four second burst with full deflection.* He came right through my sights and I saw the tracer from all eight guns thud home. For a second he seemed to hang motionless; then a jet of flame shot upwards and he spun out of sight…. It had happened. My first emotion was one of satisfaction…. And then I had a feeling of the essential rightness of it all. He was dead and I was alive; it could so easily have been the other way round; and that somehow would have been right too.7

  On August 15 young men died who had not been with their squadron long enough to get a change of sheets, or buy somebody a drink at the bar, or in some cases to unpack their suitcases. One pilot who was shot down and parachuted from his fighter suddenly realized that he was going to come down in the Channel, and unwilling to get his brand-new handmade shoes wet and ruin them, he united the laces and let them fall while he was still over land, and was astonished when they were returned to him at his mess, neatly wrapped in paper, a couple of days later. Another, wounded, with a crippled plane, glided out of the clouds and crash-landed in what he took to be an English field and was surprised to be lifted gently out of his cockpit by two German soldiers.

  At noon Bf 109s attacked Manston again, destroying two Spitfires on the ground, and in the early afternoon two great attacks appeared, one of over 100 aircraft, the other of more than 150. Park was stretched so thin against these that he could put up only four squadrons of fighters, shortly followed by three more, and even so the British fighter pilots were now fighting at odds of two or three to one. Park brought in reinforcements from No. 10 Group, to the west, but his forces were still badly outnumbered, and groups of German aircraft seemed to be appearing all over Sussex and Kent. The Germans severely damaged the Short Brothers aircraft factory at Rochester, where the first of RAF Bomber Command’s new four-engine heavy bombers, the Short Stirling, was manufactured—a severe blow, but not a direct blow on Fighter Command. As this attack ebbed, two more began, a total of 250 German aircraft coming in over the Isle of Wight against Fighter Command’s airfields, particularly Middle Wallop, which had also been attacked the day before, and against which Park managed to put up eleven squadrons, one of whose pilots, Lieutenant J. Phillipart, a former pilot of the Royal Belgian Air Force, set the day’s record by shooting down three Bf 110s. A separate German attack was made against four radar stations, showing that at last the importance of Dowding’s radar system was beginning to sink in, though once again the aerials proved difficult to destroy from the air—the attempt was rather like finding (and destroying) a needle in a haystack.

  The afternoon went by in constant fighting, then, just when it seemed that the day was over, a raid of more than seventy German aircraft was plotted coming in over the Channel to attack the Fighter Command airfields at Biggin Hill and Kenley. Attacked by two British fighter squadrons, the mass of German aircraft broke up. Some of them attacked the airfield at West Malling, Kent, but the most significant attack of the day was that of Erprobungsgruppe 210, which specialized in pinpoint, low-level attacks with a mixture of Bf 109s and Bf 110s, and which was aiming for RAF Kenley. Its commander, Hauptmann Walter Rubensdörffer, one of the most daring and dedicated bomber specialists in the entire Luftwaffe, brought his aircraft in so low that he could read the street signs and see the startled faces of pedestrians, relying for navigation on the railway lines he had memorized.
He decided at the last moment to fly north of Kenley, and then turn back and attack the airfield from the direction where an attack would be least expected, but in the confusion of the heavily built-up suburban area beneath his aircraft he lost his way and seeing hangars, a runway, and aircraft—all airfields look pretty much alike from a few hundred feet up at 250 miles per hour—led his aircraft into an attack on RAF Croydon instead.

  This was in every way the wrong airfield to strike. Croydon had until 1939 been London’s major civil airfield, with a luxurious terminal for the day, and long runways built for the big aircraft that linked the capital with glamorous flights to the great cities of Europe and the far-flung empire, in the days when air travel was an expensive luxury. Now it housed several fighter squadrons, so it was in every sense a legitimate military target, except that Hitler had explicitly reserved for himself the decision about whether or not to bomb London. (Göring had passed this on to his commanders as his own order, embellished with angry threats against anyone who disobeyed it.) This was partly a matter of domestic policy—the Germans had so far been untouched themselves by the war they had begun, and neither Hitler nor Dr. Goebbels was entirely confident about how they would react to being bombed. The last thing Hitler and Goebbels (and the Nazi Party in general) wanted was a sharp decline in civilians’ morale—like everybody else, the Führer overrated the effect of bombing, as well as the strength at the time of RAF Bomber Command. As for Göring, he had loudly and publicly promised the Germans that they would never be bombed, that his Luftwaffe was so strong that such a thing could never happen. Nobody in the German government doubted that so long as Winston Churchill remained prime minister, bombing London would produce some form of retaliation.