The City and the London docks were more seriously damaged, and fifty-three people were killed. Dover was not only bombed but also shelled, by German long-range coastal artillery; Kenley and Biggin Hill got another pasting; and the London–Brighton railway main line was closed for a time by unexploded or delayed-action bombs. Though he himself was as skeptical about the invasion as Dowding, Winston Churchill thought that apprehension about its imminence was sufficiently widespread that he should speak to the British people about it on the night of the 11th. This broadcast is not usually counted among his greatest war speeches, and though it was brief by his standards, it was masterly. He did not try to conceal or minimize the danger—indeed, he was very frank, telling almost as much as he knew, and drawing his listeners into his confidence. He pointed out firmly, “The effort of the Germans to secure daylight mastery of the air over England is of course the crux of the whole war,” one of the rare points on which he and Hitler were in full agreement. Then he went on to say that preparations for “invasion on a great scale,” were nevertheless “going forward steadily,” and to predict that it would be, for the enemy, “a very hazardous undertaking,” as was certainly true. He made it clear that if the invasion was to take place, it must be very soon, since the weather would break at any time—something of which Hitler was also acutely conscious. Then, in words that still ring with optimism, he drew on two stories of English victories over powerful continental enemies, stories with which everybody in Britain, irrespective of education or class, was familiar: “We must regard the next week or so as a very important period in our history. It ranks with the days when the Spanish Armada was approaching the Channel, and Drake was finishing his game of bowls; or when Nelson stood between us and Napoleon’s Grand Army at Boulogne.”11 He had placed the Battle of Britain firmly in the minds of his listeners among the greatest heroic victories of the past—the Armada and Trafalgar—striking exactly the patriotic note that was most likely to appeal to them, and increasing their resolution for whatever the next few days would bring.
From September 12 to September 14, the German attacks slackened off a bit, in part because of “unsettled weather,” in part because the Germans were rethinking their own bombing tactics. They were using more frequent attacks by smaller units, rather than a single big raid, and sending over masses of fighters to keep the radar operators guessing (and to keep Fighter Command busy). Increasingly, German bomber units returning from London flew a course that took them through their own “stream of bombers” flying toward London, since air traffic flying in opposite directions on a parallel course tended to confuse the British radar operators. On the 12th, in one of the most dramatic episodes of the Blitz, a very heavy delayed-action bomb fell close to Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, and the bomb disposal unit had to dig down nearly thirty feet to disarm and remove it before it could destroy one of London’s most famous and cherished historical landmarks. On the 13th central London was hit badly again, with bombs falling on Downing Street, Trafalgar Square, and Buckingham Palace. On the 14th, London was bombed in a day of confused and widespread fighting, which ended in the loss of fourteen aircraft on each side, and from which the Germans drew the impression that Fighter Command was at last beginning to weaken.
Although in Britain the invasion was now expected at any moment, in Berlin there was still hesitation. Hitler gathered his service chiefs for a conference, and once again postponed Operation Sea Lion. The intention was to give the Luftwaffe a chance to complete the destruction of the British fighter force, on which the navy continued to insist, as well as an uninterrupted four to five days of good weather and calm seas (only a few days ago the German navy had asked for just two days of good weather). The bombing raids on London during the night of September 14–15 were noticeably less strong than they had been over the past few days, causing many people in the RAF to wonder if the Germans might be preparing something special for September 15.
This, as it happened, was a good guess—September 15 would turn out to be the decisive day of the Battle of Britain, and indeed very possibly the decisive day of the war.
A prediction (for once accurate, despite some early-morning mist) of almost perfect weather for September 15, coupled with a general feeling in the Luftwaffe high command that the RAF was weakening, made it certain that the Germans would undertake a major effort. It was not attended by all the fanfare of Eagle Day, especially since that had been so disappointing, but both air fleets were under strict orders to produce a maximum effort for the day. Two separate attacks were planned: one in the late morning, consisting of more than 250 aircraft; the next in the early afternoon, consisting of nearly 300 aircraft (to be followed by a night attack). Each would take place in two separate waves, but perhaps out of overconfidence, no fancy tactics were planned—there were no sweeps of German fighter aircraft, and no attempts to deceive the RAF about the direction of the attacks. This was to be a trial of brute force and numbers, with London as the principal target. The Luftwaffe formed up over France in full view of British radar operators, who had, for once, ample time to take a careful count and warn Fighter Command of what was in store. This time even Douglas Bader’s Duxford big wing would have time to form up and hit the Germans before they bombed. Well before noon, Air Vice-Marshal Park had twenty-one squadrons of fighters in the air to attack the German formations as they crossed the Kent coastline, from Biggin Hill, Northolt, Kenley, Hendon, Hornchurch, Middle Wallop, and Duxford. For once, the quarrel between Park and Leigh-Mallory did not affect operations; nor were there any arguments about the “big wing.” Ground controllers had ample time to form big wings, even in No. 11 Group, and by the time the massive force of German aircraft was over Kent, it was attacked from every quarter.
It should not be thought that at the outset either side regarded Sunday, September 15, as a “historic” day. Certainly, Göring had hopes of striking a knockout blow that would fatally cripple Fighter Command and demoralize Londoners, but by now many of his aircrews—not to speak of their commanders—were disillusioned and exhausted. On the British side, it merely looked like another brutal day of battle, and the British had experienced such days before. The invasion scare had spread to the newspapers, where there was much speculation on the subject, to which the Ministry of Information responded sternly by announcing that if an invasion were to take place, the public would be informed of the fact on the BBC. (“Only in England!”) Pilots, as they woke before dawn on the 15th, were warned there was “a flap on.” This warning made many of them assume that the invasion was taking place, whereas all that was happening was the intrusion of German reconnaissance aircraft into British airspace—almost always the precursor of a major effort on the part of the Luftwaffe. (One of the German early-morning reconnaissance aircraft was shot down by an RAF pilot who had taken off in his pajamas, before even drinking his morning cup of tea.)
Churchill had an infallible sense of timing for the historic moment, and the good weather prompted him to visit Park’s headquarters at Uxbridge after breakfast on Sunday morning. He and Mrs. Churchill were driven over from Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence, and arrived at Uxbridge at eleven in the morning. Rather to his disappointment, Churchill found that nothing much was happening. “I don’t know whether anything will happen today,” Park told him. “At present all is quiet.”
Churchill took a seat in what he called the “dress circle” (in American theaters, this is the most expensive front-row seats in the balcony) of No. 11 Group Operations Room. “Below us,” he wrote later, “was the large-scale map-table, around which perhaps twenty highly-trained young men and women, with their telephone assistants, were assembled. Opposite to us, covering the entire wall, where the theatre curtain would be, was a gigantic blackboard divided into six columns with electric bulbs, for the six fighter stations, each of their squadrons having a sub-column of its own, and also divided by lateral lines.”12
At No. 11 Group the “dress circle” balcony from which the batt
le was directed was separated from the big map table on the floor below by a modernistic curved glass wall, which made looking down into the “orchestra pit” where the action was going on a little like being in an aquarium. The object had been to isolate the decision makers above from the inevitable hubbub and excitement below. The prime minister had only fifteen minutes to wait there before the plotters began to move around the map table, marking raids with their long croupier’s sticks, and the lamps on the big wall “tote board” began to light up one after another. German raids of “forty-plus” and even “eighty-plus” were forming up over Dieppe, Calais, and Boulogne until more than 250 approaching enemy aircraft were being plotted on the table, and very shortly Park had sixteen squadrons of his own, plus five from No. 12 Group, in the air to meet them. Between the German attackers and the British defenders there would soon be more than 500 aircraft in the small airspace over Kent, most of them between 15,000 and 20,000 feet high. The German formations were attacked all the way from the beach to the suburbs of London, and inevitably their neat formations broke up. This breakup on the one hand allowed RAF fighters to pick off the stragglers, but on the other hand allowed some of the German bombers to slip through singly and drop their bombs on London. Before noon bombs had fallen on “Westminster, Lambeth, Lewisham, Battersea, Camberwell, Crystal Palace, Clapham, Tooting, Wandsworth and Kensington,” as well as “the Queen’s private apartments at Buckingham Palace.”
Had the German bombers been able to stay in close formation and concentrate on a few strategic targets, they might have done more serious damage, but with one British fighter in the air for every German aircraft, there was no chance of this, as the German formations of bombers broke up under relentless attack. Dropping a bomb on the queen’s apartments or near the palace of the archbishop of Canterbury, and scattering them around the London suburbs, was not going to bring the British to their knees, as Göring had promised. Of course from the point of view of those who were bombed, this was no consolation, even had they known it. For hundreds of thousands of people, life was suddenly and savagely disrupted. A Dornier crashed into Victoria Station, and its crew landed by parachute in a famous London cricket pitch, the Oval; bombs and British and German aircraft fell all over the Greater London area. The Strand (one of London’s famous shopping streets, and home to many clubs and the Savoy Hotel) was bombed, and the Gaiety Theatre was almost destroyed. Guys and Lambeth hospitals were badly hit. Water and gas mains, railway and tube lines were broken or destroyed; electricity generating plants were put out of commission; and fires started everywhere. But serious as all this was, it was a long way from a Wellsian vision of total urban destruction and collapse.
From Park’s Operations Room, where the prime minister sat, the danger was in the sky, not in the streets of London. By noon all of Park’s squadrons were in the air, and “some had already begun to return for fuel…. There was not one squadron left in reserve.” Park requested another three squadrons from No. 12 Group to patrol over his airfields while his squadrons landed for fuel and ammunition, and this was done, for once, with no hesitation or complaint. “I became conscious of the anxiety of the Commander, who now stood behind his subordinate’s chair,” Churchill wrote. “Hitherto I had watched in silence. I now asked, ‘What other reserves have we?’ ‘There are none,’ said Air Vice-Marshal Park. In an account which he wrote about it afterward he said that at this I ‘looked grave.’ Well I might. What losses would we not suffer if our refueling planes were caught on the ground by further raids of ‘40 plus’ or ‘50 plus’! The odds were great: our margins small; the stakes infinite.”13
Churchill, with his usual perspicacity, had understood what Göring apparently failed to think about in advance—in order to win, the Luftwaffe needed to be able to catch Park’s squadrons on the ground as they refueled, and deal them a smashing blow, but for that the Germans needed better intelligence and a perfect sense of timing. At two o’clock in the afternoon, they were to send another 150 aircraft in three waves against central London, but if instead they had sent those same aircraft against Park’s airfields at noon, just as his fighter squadrons were landing, No. 11 Group might well have been wiped out. It was the critical moment of the battle, perhaps the one point at which victory was almost within Göring’s grasp. But the German morning raid fled home in disorder, having suffered heavy losses—some of the German bombers actually turned back, having lost faith in their own fighter escorts and in their commanders’ promises that Fighter Command was all but defeated—and by the time the afternoon raid formed up, Park’s squadrons were refueled, rearmed, and waiting for them.
Again, in the afternoon, No. 11 Group broke up the German formations, so instead of a concentrated raid, the bombers, fiercely attacked by fighters, dropped their bombs indiscriminately all over the London suburbs, in places like Woolwich, Stepney, and Hackney, killing people; destroying homes, shops, schools, and small factories; disrupting train service; but not in any way seriously threatening the continued existence of Britain’s capital, or—more important still—the fighting capacity of No. 11 Group.
Seldom has so rich an opportunity been wasted by lack of fore-thought and planning. The Germans were certainly not short of aircraft or aircrews—that night they sent another large raid of nearly 200 aircraft against London, and Southampton, Portland, and Cardiff were also attacked. But the opportunity for the really damaging blow that Göring expected his forces to deliver had been missed at noon, and would never recur.
At eight o’clock in the evening, when Churchill, exhausted by the day’s drama, woke from a nap, he rang for his principal private secretary, John Martin, who brought him the latest news. “This had gone wrong here; that had been delayed there; an unsatisfactory answer had been received from so-and-so; there had been bad sinkings in the Atlantic. ‘However,’ said Martin, as he finished this account, ‘all is redeemed by the air. We have shot down one hundred eighty-three for a loss of under forty.’”14
In fact the Germans had lost only sixty aircraft—in the chaos of battle the claims of pilots (and antiaircraft gunners on the ground) tended to overlap. Still, the Luftwaffe had made its maximum effort, and had lost sixty aircraft to twenty-six British fighters destroyed and thirteen pilots killed. The Daily Telegraph’s subhead on Monday, September 16, got the facts right: “Massed Day Attack on London Smashed.”15
More important still—more important than anything else—on the next day, September 17, Hitler sent a signal postponing Operation Sea Lion “indefinitely.” The continuing heavy losses of German aircraft and the evident survival of Fighter Command, meant that the precondition of the German navy for the invasion of England—control of the air—could not be met, and with the autumn weather approaching it was useless to keep up the pretense.
Very soon, the great fleet of barges would be dispersed back to their ports, canals, and rivers, and the Führer’s attention would be drawn east toward the Soviet Union. The worst of the Blitz was still to come, the night fighters’ problem had still not been solved, and the British Army still patrolled the beaches of southern England just in case Hitler changed his mind; but Dowding’s strategy had worked. The invasion would never come, Fighter Command had never lost control of the air for even a single moment, and “the Few” had won one of the four most crucial victories in British history—the Armada, Trafalgar, Waterloo, and the Battle of Britain.
Perhaps without even realizing it, in mid-September 1940 Hitler lost the war, defeated by the efforts of perhaps 1,000 young men. Unable to invade and conquer Britain, he would turn against the Soviet Union, sacrificing the German army, and thereby prolonging his war until, at last, the Americans were dragged into it by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, pitting Germany against three of the most powerful industrial countries in the world.
All this was to come, and nobody, not even Churchill, could foretell it in the autumn of 1940, when Britain still stood alone. But Dowding and “his chicks” had prevailed, and it is perfectly fitting t
hat September 15 should be celebrated every year as “Battle of Britain Day.”
CHAPTER 10
The Turning Point
Napoleon’s comment that no moment in war is more dangerous than that of victory was perfectly illustrated by the events that followed September 15. First of all, on the British side there was no immediate recognition that a great victory had been won—the Luftwaffe kept on bombing, though increasingly it did so at night, thus inevitably drawing attention to the weakness of Dowding’s night fighters. The worst of the Blitz would begin in the autumn, with night after night of sustained bombing that would eventually cost the lives of more than 50,000 British civilians. As the days grew shorter, however, and the autumn storms began to lash the seas in the Channel, it began to dawn on most people that invasion was no longer an immediate prospect, if indeed it was still a prospect at all. To those in the know, the fact that the barges and tugs so painstakingly assembled in the Channel ports for Operation Sea Lion were being dispersed back to where they had come from was a certain sign that Hitler had changed his mind, if he had ever been serious about invading. As far as the public and the armed forces were concerned, it was thought more prudent not to dismiss the threat of an invasion, for fear that complacency would replace alertness, so the Home Guard and most of the British Army in the United Kingdom continued to go through the motions of patrolling the beaches and preparing for invasion long after the threat had ceased to exist.
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