Unlike most battles, this one was being fought in full view of the public and of war correspondents from all over the neutral world, like a spectator sport on a vast scale, and with the involvement of countless numbers of civilians—as well as firemen, policemen, and the Home Guard, many of whom were more than happy to talk to the press. It was, to be blunt—and although the thought does not ever seem to have crossed Dowding’s mind—great propaganda. The fighter pilots were young, photogenic, clean-cut, cheerful, and enthusiastic. There was no equivalent here to the hundreds of thousands who had died in the mud, barbed wire, futile mass attacks, and gas clouds of World War I. The fighting took place in the air, watched by thousands, sometimes at low altitudes; aircrews on both sides parachuted down onto English fields, villages, golf courses, and gardens; damaged aircraft crashed in bucolic spots or urban streets, or made forced landings in parks and on the lawns of stately country mansions; bombs fell not only on the airfields and radar stations but on the homes of ordinary people, more by accident than by design at this stage of the war, and not in the numbers of the Blitz, when the cities and those who lived in them became the targets of the Luftwaffe.
This was not a war people merely read about in the newspapers or heard about on the nine o’clock BBC news—it was fought right overhead, and, interestingly, the effect was to raise British morale, and to capture the attention and admiration of many people in America who in other circumstances might have been indifferent or hostile to what was happening on the other side of the Atlantic. The British Army had been badly beaten in Norway, and had lost again in France, but now, quite unexpectedly, the British found that Dowding’s “chicks,” few and young as they might be, had proven themselves heroes in the eyes of everyone in the world except the Germans. Even the Soviet Union’s spies in the United Kingdom sent accurate, admiring messages back to Moscow, including one from a spy who managed to get into Croydon on August 16 to report on the damage there, and also got very close to Kenley on the 18th, and reported correctly that there was no panic in the surrounding civilian population, and that Kenley’s Hurricanes were back in the air—although whether Stalin saw this, or was informed, is unknown.
During this battle, unlike other great battles in history, life went on as usual close to the fighting, despite the bloodshed in the skies above, bringing to mind W. H. Auden’s lines:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along….
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster…
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky…
“A boy falling out of the sky…” People went on with their lives, picnicking, playing tennis, having lunch outdoors in the glorious (and very un-English) summer weather, while young men four miles above their heads fought and died, or did indeed fall out of the sky. Occasionally they looked up from what they were doing at the maze of contrails in the blue sky, or more rarely, saw an orange flash and a puff of black smoke as an aircraft was hit, and from time to time watched a parachute slowly descend, and wondered whether it was one of theirs or one of ours. No less important a figure than Anthony Eden, the debonair Secretary of State for War, saw a Spitfire and a Messerschmitt flash past at rooftop level as he stepped out of his bath, and later remarked on how strange it was to see the fighting going on in the sky as he and his guests played tennis. Harold Nicolson, the writer and member of Parliament, and his wife, poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, watched the air fighting high above their heads day after day from their famous garden at Sissinghurst. People grew accustomed to having the war drop in on their lives suddenly and unexpectedly—literally out of the blue—as bombs, pilots, aircrews, empty cartridge cases, flaming fragments of damaged aircraft, and even whole airplanes streaming smoke, flames, or white clouds of glycol, descended on them out of the sky. One RAF pilot who had been shot down and wounded was helped by friendly golfers to a nearby golf club, and parked at the bar in his bloodstained shirt while an ambulance was summoned, only to hear one member say to another, “Who’s that scruffy chap at the bar? I don’t think he’s a member.” The rousing patriotic popular song of the period “There’ll Always Be an England,”* (played almost as frequently as “The White Cliffs of Dover”), comes to mind when we read about incidents like this. However long England might last—and the issue was still in doubt—there were some things about it and the English that would never change, even at the supreme moment of national crisis: in the ironic words of John Betjeman’s poem,
Think of what our Nation stands for,
Books from Boots’ and country lanes,
Free speech, free passes, class distinctions,
Democracy and proper drains.
The England that was being fought over in August 1940 was not yet that of the Beveridge Plan, the nationalization of industries, and the National Health Service that the Labour Party would introduce in 1945, still less that of our own day, when it has become, with whatever reluctance and mental reservations, crisscrossed with six-lane motor highways and part of Europe. It was still, at any rate south of London, in Kent and Sussex, slightly stuffy, dotted with neat suburbs and beyond them deliberately and self-consciously “picturesque” rural villages, then open fields rolling down to the old-fashioned seaside resorts, the shingle beaches and the famous white cliffs. The swashbuckling young airmen, whether German or British, seemed, on landing, to be out of place in their flying kits, warriors from a futuristic and technological world. H. G. Wells had imagined it vividly, but its impact had not yet been felt in this tidy, prosperous corner of Britain, with its narrow roads, its flocks of sheep, its yearly hop picking, and its tidy fields full of horses and ponies. This was the part of England that the Germans proposed—improbably, as many people thought—to invade the moment Göring succeeded in sweeping the skies clear of British fighters.
Perhaps the most important event of the day, therefore, occurred many miles away, and unbeknownst to the British. Given the severe losses of the Luftwaffe and the continuing resistance of Fighter Command, Hitler postponed the date for Operation Sea Lion to September 17.
In fact, the events of August 18 led to some further thinking on both sides of the English Channel. On the German side, it was now abundantly clear that whatever promises Göring had made to the Führer, Fighter Command was not going to be eliminated in two weeks. The Germans finally bit the bullet on the subject of the Stuka and the Bf 110, in view of their high rate of loss—Stukas were at last taken out of the order of battle altogether for the time being, and Bf 110s were restricted to combat in areas where they could be protected by Bf 109s, a plan that made no sense at all, since it essentially involved using one fighter to protect another, and limited the use of the big, twin-engine fighter to the short range of the single-seat fighter. Also, the decision was made to concentrate the attacks on Fighter Command airfields and the factories in which the Spitfire and the Hurricane were manufactured, to the exclusion of everything else.
In Britain, Dowding ignored the triumphant headlines in the press regarding German losses—which announced that as many as 165 German and only twenty-seven British aircraft had been shot down, more than twice the actual number of aircraft the Germans lost. Instead, he concerned himself with his dwindling resources. If the Germans continued attacking in the strength they had shown on August 18, and if they concentrated their attacks on the aircraft factories, as he had already guessed they would, Fighter Command might soon be reduced to the point where it could no longer hold its own against them. Despite the admiration that was being showered on his fighter pilots, their actual number was now well below 1,000, and the rate at which new fighter aircraft were being built was leaving him with an increasingly slim reserve of machines. His margin of strength was paper-thin. Dowding could do the numb
ers better than anyone else, and what they told him was that the rate of attrition was now in danger of working against him faster than against the Luftwaffe. In No. 11 Group, which had borne the brunt of the casualties so far, it was decided to move those squadrons in which the casualties exceeded 50 percent “to quieter areas for a rest and a refit,” and to replace them with squadrons from the west and the Midlands. Air Vice-Marshal Park gave his controllers orders not to send fighters out over the sea in pursuit of German reconnaissance aircraft or small numbers of German aircraft, and to avoid sending up large numbers of aircraft against German fighter sweeps. In short, Dowding and Park were pursing (and intensifying) a strategy that was the exact opposite of what Leigh-Mallory was demanding with increasing vehemence (and with Bader as spokesman for the fighter pilots of No. 12 Group), which was to engage the enemy over the Channel with “big wings” of fighters, instead of single squadrons.
On August 19 the weather took a turn for the worse—“Mainly cloudy, occasional showers in the east,” the RAF report notes—and poor weather continued until August 23, to the great irritation of Reichsmarschall Göring. The Germans were not idle for five days, of course. They carried out massive “fighter sweeps,” hoping to provoke No. 11 Group’s fighter squadrons into the air, where they would be outnumbered, and also undertook random bombing, particularly at night. In fact, Göring had ordered an increase in night bombing against industrial targets, since the stretch of bad weather predicted for the next few days made daytime bombing impractical. He sensibly ordered a list to be drawn up of likely targets (a little late, one might think), including aluminum and aircraft engine plants, reserving to himself the decision to bomb targets in London and Liverpool by night.
In this area, at least, the Germans were formidably well prepared, and light-years ahead of the British. As long ago as June, Churchill had been startled by the surprising accuracy of German night bombing, which argued for the existence of a “secret weapon.” Although the Air Ministry was reluctant to admit it, the Luftwaffe in fact benefited from an advanced system of radio beams code-named Knickebein, enabling bombers to fly a course along a given beam until a crossbeam, aimed at a specific factory or location, told them exactly when to drop their bombs. The most knowledgeable man on the subject turned out to be a twenty-eight-year-old scientist, R. V. Jones, then on the Air Ministry staff. Churchill summoned Jones to 10 Downing Street on June 21 to explain the bad news to him and the War Cabinet. It was, for Churchill, as he would later remark, “one of the blackest moments of the war,” when he realized that the Germans could bomb as accurately by night as by day, knowing as he did that radar-equipped night fighters were still in their infancy—indeed, Fighter Command’s inadequacy in this area was very soon to become a major issue, ostensibly the major issue between Dowding and his colleagues.
Dowding took the sensible but pessimistic and unpopular view that only the introduction of radar-equipped, twin-engine night fighters, with a trained radar operator on board as well as a pilot, would enable Fighter Command to intercept German bombers successfully at night, and that until such time as he had enough of them (and the bugs in the airborne interception, or AI, radar equipment were eliminated), the German night raids could not be stopped. Sholto Douglas, his old antagonist in the Air Ministry, wanted him to send up large numbers of Spitfires and Hurricanes at night to intercept the German bombers. This was a tactic which, as Dowding pointed out, was bound to fail—his pilots had no practical way to find an enemy aircraft by night, and since most of them were in any case woefully inexperienced at taking off and landing in the dark, large numbers of fighters and pilots would inevitably be lost in accidents. Originally, both the Hurricane and the Spitfire had been optimistically designated by the Air Ministry as “day and night fighters,” but nobody had taken that seriously—the only modification made to them for night fighting was to rivet a piece of sheet metal above the exhaust stubs on either side of the engine cowling so as to prevent the pilot’s night vision from being blinded by the flames from his own exhaust. Come to that, the only way for a fighter pilot to aim at an enemy bomber at night—if he could find one in the first place—was to search in the darkness for the telltale bluish-red flare of its exhausts.*
The gloom at the War Cabinet on June 21 about Knickebein had been lifted somewhat by Jones’s breezy, youthful optimism; he believed that countermeasures could be developed to “bend” the second beam so that the German bombers would miss their target and drop their bombs over open country. But in August 1940 Knickebein was still functioning well enough, and in the event, the Luftwaffe more than justified Churchill’s apprehension, virtually destroying at least one aircraft factory and hitting the Dunlop tire works in Birmingham with night raids.6 This was pinpoint accuracy with a vengeance, and Fighter Command was virtually powerless to prevent it. The single-engine fighters were unable to find an enemy aircraft in the dark, and the only twin-engine fighter available was a conversion of the now venerable Bristol Blenheim bomber. The night fighter version of the Blenheim was slower than the German bombers it was supposed to hunt, and no more maneuverable—even equipped with the early AI radar set it was not much of a threat.
From August 19 through 23, the Luftwaffe demonstrated just what it could do by night using Knickebein, striking Portsmouth, Bristol, Liverpool, Hull, Newcastle, Glasgow, and Edinburgh with the loss of only six aircraft on the night of the 19th. On the night of the 20th the Germans managed to put more than 150 aircraft over England, despite very poor weather, and again on the 21st. On the night of the 22nd more than 230 aircraft attacked, rendering the airfield at RAF Manston unserviceable, and hitting the Bristol Aero factory, as well as the somewhat unlikely targets of Harrow and Brighton. On the night of the 23rd there were smaller but still damaging raids over Bristol, Cardiff, and Birmingham. Many of these, of course, inevitably hit civilians rather than military or industrial targets—a typical example, chosen at random, was the bombing of a café in Bridlington, Yorkshire; several people were trapped and four of them were killed. No matter how accurately the Luftwaffe bombed by night, bombs were bound to go astray, and in any case, bombers jettisoned their bombs, or dropped bombs at random if they were damaged, lost, or unable to find their target. This was not, as yet, the deliberate, wholesale attack on cities, intended to break civilians’ morale, of the Blitz to come, but it was a big step down the slippery slope toward it.
It is worth keeping this firmly in mind, for most accounts of the Battle of Britain concentrate on the pilots, but no twenty-four-hour period in the official RAF “Campaign Diary” is without its sad little note at the end of each day of “Casualties on Ground,” split into “RAF Ground Personnel” and civilians (the latter referred to, typically, as “Others”). On August 15 civilian casualties were twelve killed, forty-one injured; on August 16, seventy-two killed, 192 injured; on August 17, a day when the RAF described enemy activity as “very light,” ten killed, sixty-six injured; on August 18, forty-four killed, 108 injured. So it goes day by day throughout the Battle of Britain—twenty-three killed, seventy-four injured on the 19th; twenty-three killed, 135 injured on the 20th; four killed, 178 injured on the 21st; three killed, thirty-six injured on the 22nd; thirty-four killed, 107 injured on the 23rd. Even when there was, according to the RAF, “little” or “light” enemy activity, civilians—men, women, and children—died, blown to bits by bombs, or buried under the rubble of their homes, shops, schools, and workplaces, or—on rare occasions—even machine-gunned by a low-flying German plane. Casualties on the ground almost always exceeded those among fighter pilots. To pick a day at random, on August 15 Fighter Command lost thirty-four Hurricanes and Spitfires, with eighteen pilots reported killed or missing, while on the ground twenty-five civilians were killed and 145 injured. This is not to denigrate the fighter pilots—it took extraordinary courage to go up and fight, often several times a day, as well as youth, physical fitness, good reflexes and eyesight, and hundreds of hours of training—but day after day the sad, i
nglorious little toll of the civilian dead mounted up, a toll of those who died not because they were in combat four miles above the ground but because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, even if it happened to be their own bed.
On August 24, the weather cleared at last, and the Germans’ air offensive resumed at full strength. It would shortly be apparent that their strategy was simple and effective—to bomb the major RAF Fighter Command airfields in the south by day, rendering them unusable; and to bomb specific industrial targets by night, with the aim of bringing the production of components for fighter aircraft to a halt. With this in mind, Göring moved most of the fighter strength of Luftflotte 3 to the Luftflotte 2 area, in the Pas-de-Calais, within closer range of England, to give the maximum protection to his bomber force, and ordered frequent sweeps over the Channel to confuse and distract the British.
The 24th was a day of heavy fighting and losses on both sides. Between six in the morning and noon the Luftwaffe sent large numbers of aircraft over Kent, some of them feints to draw the British fighters away from a major raid on RAF Manston. The airfield at Manston was bombed so heavily that the RAF was obliged to evacuate it by one in the afternoon—all the buildings were destroyed or ablaze, the runways were made unusable by bomb craters and unexploded bombs, and the telephone and teleprinter lines were cut. “Forward” airfields nearer the coast had been attacked so heavily that many of them were put out of action. Sheer numbers were beginning to tell—the Luftwaffe sent more than 500 aircraft over the south of England during the course of the day, putting a huge strain on No. 11 Group’s squadrons. Park was obliged to ask Leigh-Mallory for help, and Leigh-Mallory obliged him with two squadrons; but since these squadrons proved unable to do much to protect Park’s airfields—it would have taken much more than their number to have made a significant difference—the antipathy between Air Officer Commanding No. 11 Group and Air Officer Commanding No. 12 Group was only sharpened. Part of this may have been caused by Leigh-Mallory’s attempt to form a “big wing” from the three squadrons at RAF Duxford, which, just as Dowding and Park had predicted, took so long to form up that the Germans had already left for home by the time it arrived. At every airfield in No. 11 Group, ground personnel worked under constant bombing—ground crews had been ordered to dig slit trenches next to their aircraft so they could take cover when attacked, but many continued to refuel and rearm their aircraft even when being bombed. Throughout No. 11 Group’s area, hangars, mess halls, sick bays, and living quarters were severely damaged or destroyed. The airfields at Hornchurch and North Weald were heavily attacked, and several cities were bombed, mostly by errors of navigation, Ramsgate and Portsmouth among them. The end of the day brought no relief. Practically speaking, the Germans appeared to have settled on a division of labor—Luftflotte 2, with its reinforced fighter force, would attack by day; Luftflotte 3 would attack by night. London was heavily bombed for the first time, and in addition Birmingham and Cardiff were hit. The night raid on Birmingham was the most dangerous, since it was aimed at the “shadow” Spitfire factory at Castle Bromwich, but the scattered attacks on London were to have the most serious effect on the battle.
With Wings Like Eagles: A History of the Battle of Britain Page 22