With Wings Like Eagles: A History of the Battle of Britain
Page 27
In the air the glamour of the fighter pilots was rapidly eclipsed by that of night fighter aces such as “Cat’s Eyes” John Cunningham, and by the need to place greater emphasis on Bomber Command, as it took the first steps toward paying back the enemy in kind. Soon the bomber crews got the lion’s share of the publicity, leaving the fighter pilots with an ever diminishing role. (Despite contemporary retroactive angst in the English-speaking world about the “strategic” bombing of Germany in World War II, much of it centered on the firebombing of Hamburg in 1943 and the destruction of Dresden in 1945, it would be difficult to overstate the enthusiasm of the British public for giving the Germans a taste of their own medicine after the Blitz began in earnest in the autumn of 1940 and the winter of 1941.) Fighter Command took to making “sweeps” over occupied France, bringing the Luftwaffe fighter squadrons up to fight in strength—a strategy that was as costly for the British as it was for the Germans, if not more so.
A long grim period in the war began for the British after September 15, obscuring to some degree the magnitude (and permanence) of their victory. At sea, losses of shipping to the ubiquitous U-boats (which benefited now from the fact that French ports on the Atlantic were in German hands) soared. Initial successes against the Italians in North Africa would soon be followed by calamitous and even shameful defeats in Greece and Crete and by the arrival in Libya of the first elements of General Erwin Rommel’s Deutsche Afrika Korps. At home, the British became accustomed to the dreary rigors of rationing (one egg a month, and only a few ounces of doubtful meat), the blackout, and the bombing. Clothing was rationed; electric heaters glowed a dull red because of the reduced wattage; coal and coke were rationed; the whole nation darned, mended, patched, did without, and shivered. The British had faced Hitler down and given him his first military defeat, but until June 1941, when he attacked the Soviet Union, they stood alone, facing an occupied continent and a determined enemy. Quite apart from the feeling of many people in Britain (outside the extreme left) that Stalin and communism were not much better than Hitler and Nazism, the Russians did not at first seem like promising allies. The Soviet Union rapidly lost its entire air force, all of western Russia and the Ukraine, and millions of troops as the German armies advanced toward Moscow. At the same time, it made imperious demands in terms of aid and supplies that the British could not possibly provide, given the precariousness of their own situation and the perils of sending shipping to the Soviet Union through seas dominated by German U-boats and aircraft from Norway. Even to the optimists, there was still no sign that the United States would ever enter the war, despite the flow of Lend-Lease supplies across the Atlantic to an increasingly impoverished Britain, which had long since exhausted its dollar reserves and its credit to buy arms.
Precisely because the world around them looked so grim in the winter of 1940 and the spring of 1941, with no end to the war in sight, and with diminishing resources forcing people whose belts were already pulled tight to tighten them some more, Britons were already looking back at the warm summer of 1940 as a moment of triumph, when the “fighter boys” in their Spitfires and Hurricanes had gained a glorious victory in the clear blue sky above Kent. The Battle of Britain was already becoming a patriotic myth before it was even over. No time was required to turn it into a legend, or to transform the pilots into airborne knights of the Round Table, reminders of the days when the British public had thought of itself as heroic, rather than merely alone and beleaguered.
In the remembered glow of those summer days, much of the pain and bitterness of the Battle of Britain was eventually suppressed in favor of a more glamorous picture. That picture did not necessarily include the young WAAFs in the operations rooms listening to the screams of pilots trapped in the cockpits of flaming airplanes plunging to the ground. Nor did it include the faces of the “guinea pigs,” so called in RAF slang not just because they were the subjects of experimental burn surgery, but also because someone whose lips, nose, and ears had been burned off had the smooth, featureless face of a guinea pig—until the surgeons began a long, excruciatingly painful series of operations to graft on some semblance of features. (Even less could be done about hands that were burned to shriveled claws.)* The picture also left out the rows of dead WAAFs in improvised mortuaries on the badly bombed airfields of No. 11 Group; the pilots who died at sea, bobbing in their inflated Mae Wests in sight of the white cliffs of Dover as hypothermia overcame them; and the aircraftmen of the ground crews who died of shrapnel wounds or machine-gun fire while rearming “their” aircraft during a German low-level bombing attack rather than take shelter. In much the same way, the discharged legless or armless sailors begging on the docks of Portsmouth or Plymouth after the Armada or the Battle of Trafalgar were soon expunged from the patriotic myth—it has always been so.
The Battle of Britain rapidly developed its own mythology, with the result that in many people’s minds the Spitfires, the Hurricanes, and radar appeared spontaneously in 1940, rather than as a result of decisions made by the two principal appeasers of prewar British political history, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. But without their determination to provide Britain with a modern, credible fighter defense, and without the immense amounts of public money needed to build the aircraft and the factories that would produce them (and the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine) in quantity, Britain would have been overwhelmed after Dunkirk. Whatever their other shortcomings as prime ministers, Baldwin and Chamberlain were responsible for the creation of Dowding’s Fighter Command—often against the advice of (and despite dire warnings from) the Air Ministry, where the cult of the bomber as the only reliable deterrent against attack remained unshaken until events in 1940 suddenly, unexpectedly, and briefly made the fighter the all-important weapon on which Britain’s survival depended.
There is also a tendency today toward retroactive complacency: historians look at the numbers of aircraft the British were producing, compare them with production in the German aircraft industry, and conclude that the outcome was never in doubt—that the margin was never as slim as people thought at the time. But this, too, is an illusion. Certainly, the output of the German aircraft industry in 1940 ought to have been higher—neither Hitler nor Göring had expected or prepared for a long war with Great Britain—and, like the British, the Germans produced too many aircraft that were inappropriate and ineffective for the kind of air war they found themselves in.* Nevertheless, time and time again the Luftwaffe came very close to crippling Fighter Command. Had the Germans been able to follow August 18 with another couple of days of attack on the airfields of No. 11 Group on the same scale and at the same level of intensity, the story might have ended quite differently. True, the Germans would have stood a better chance of winning if Göring had not canceled the four-engine bomber program in 1937, and if a rush program had been instituted in 1939 to enable the Bf 109 to carry an external jettisonable fuel tank (this was a problem shared by the Spitfire and the Hurricane). However, the Luftwaffe was defeated not because of its technical shortcomings but because of poor intelligence work, a fatal tendency to bomb the wrong targets, and the severe underestimation of the importance to Fighter Command of the radar stations and the interlocking series of operations rooms to which the radar stations fed information. Had the Germans known which building at Biggin Hill contained the Sector operations room and destroyed it, they might have come very much closer to paralyzing No. 11 Group, at least for a time. But fortunately, they had no idea—the real culprits of the Germans’ failure, if there were culprits, were General Martini, the commander of the Luftwaffe signals force; and Colonel Schmidt, whose intelligence reports on Fighter Command were hopelessly flawed.
Of course the most important culprit was Göring, whose self-indulgence, short attention span, arrogance, overconfidence, and failure to institute (or respect) a disciplined and well-organized chain of command, rather than ruling the Luftwaffe by a combination of cronyism and a calculated policy of divide and conquer, doomed the air attack again
st Britain from the start. Had Göring been willing to delegate the air war against Britain to a single commander, and back him up—Kesselring would have been an obvious choice for the role—the Germans might have succeeded. But giving that kind of authority to anyone other than himself would have gone against Göring’s instinct for self-preservation, and against his inflated pride and his self-image as Germany’s first soldier and airman. There was simply no place in the Luftwaffe for a man with the untrammeled authority that Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris would have over Bomber Command from 1942 on, or that Dowding had as Commander-in-Chief, Fighter Command, during the Battle of Britain. Still less, of course, was there any possibility of putting one determined man in charge of every aspect of Operation Sea Lion, the army, the Luftwaffe, and the navy, and giving him full authority to get on with it—a German equivalent of Eisenhower in 1944. The only person who could play this role, to the extent that it existed, was Hitler himself. But quite apart from his lack of interest in naval matters and his delegation of the air war to Göring, his ability to command Sea Lion was destroyed by his never altogether banished hope that in the end it wouldn’t be necessary, that the mere threat of an invasion might be enough to bring the British to their senses and make them recognize that they had been defeated.
Perhaps for no one did the Battle of Britain have a more unexpected end than for Dowding himself. As the battle continued throughout the rest of September, and the German aircraft ranged farther north over London, instead of concentrating their attacks against No. 11 Group’s airfields south of the capital, Leigh-Mallory’s No. 12 Group was drawn increasingly into the fighting, rather than being used merely when Park called for fighter protection over his Sector airfields. A consequence of this change in the balance of British forces was that Douglas Bader’s “big wing” began to play a larger role in the battle, despite Park’s doubts about its wisdom and his preferences for “squadron strength” attacks, which had in any case hitherto been accepted dogma for fighter operations. Bader did not hide his anger at Park’s reluctance to use his big wing as he saw fit, and one of his pilots, who happened to be a member of Parliament, passed this growing dispute about Fighter Command tactics on to the Undersecretary of State for Air and, more disturbingly, to the prime minister. The fat was now in the fire, and with a politician’s natural sense of self-preservation when faced with a sharp difference of opinion between senior officers of any service in wartime, Churchill urged the Chief of the Air Staff to arrange for a meeting of the interested parties and discuss “Major Day Tactics in the Fighter Force.” Since Churchill was more than capable of intervening directly in service matters when he wanted to, he was clearly throwing a hot potato back to the air force. That there was no urgency to the matter in his mind is proved by the fact that it did not take place until October 17, more than a month after the greatest and most successful day of the battle.
Much has been made of this meeting by those who see it as a trap carefully set and baited by Air Marshal Sholto Douglas and Air Vice-Marshal Leigh-Mallory to catch Air Chief Marshal Dowding and Air Vice-Marshal Park; and there is no doubt, even in supposedly objective accounts, that it reflects one element in a very determined campaign on the part of Dowding’s many enemies in the Air Ministry to get rid of him. Dowding’s supporters—and there is no lack of them decades after the fact—tend to portray him as an innocent victim of backstairs intrigue and jealousy, but he had not reached the rank of Air Chief Marshal and Commander-in-Chief, Fighter Command, without some natural political instincts of his own, and a large part of his career had been spent amid the intrigues and cabals of the Air Ministry. He was, in fact, a skilled infighter himself, when it came to the Air Ministry and the Cabinet; and if he had a lot of enemies, it has to be said that he had made many of them himself, by his brusque manner, his impatience with those who disagreed with him, and his aloof, distant, eccentric personality.
It may be that Dowding was simply too tired by October 1940 to perceive that he was walking into a trap, or that he put too much reliance on Churchill’s promises of support (though given his long experience with politicians that seems unlikely); or perhaps he had simply had enough of repeatedly being given new dates for his retirement. Certainly, he can have had no illusions about the meeting; nor can Park—it was a grim, hanging jury of his peers that he was facing, barely disguised as an impartial inquiry into the facts. His old rival Newall, the Chief of the Air Staff, was too ill to attend, and this ought to have been a warning, since he was replaced at the meeting by Sholto Douglas, now the Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, with whom Dowding had clashed many times before. Douglas was younger than Dowding, sleeker, an altogether jollier and more outgoing personality, at least on the surface, a decorated war hero, happily married, and a good mixer, and he had set his eyes long since on Dowding’s job. The presence of Leigh-Mallory cannot have surprised Dowding—the whole purpose of the meeting was ostensibly to thrash out the differences between Park and Leigh-Mallory—but it must have come as a shock to realize that Leigh-Mallory had brought Bader along to represent the views of the fighter pilots. That Sholto Douglas had allowed Leigh-Mallory to introduce into the meeting a mere squadron leader (the equivalent of a major), however highly decorated and celebrated, to dispute the views of the Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Fighter Command, and of Air Vice-Marshal Park, who commanded No. 11 Group, would have been enough to tell Dowding that his neck was on the block.
Nothing of this is reflected in the minutes of the meeting—it took place in England, after all. Everybody gave his point of view politely, making full allowance for the other fellow’s point of view. Park conceded that there was something to be said for the big wing, Leigh-Mallory admitted that there were occasions when an attack by one or two squadrons might be called for, and even Bader was restrained in front of his superiors. Sholto Douglas gave an impartial summing up, and Dowding promised to increase cooperation between the two groups, though he did not suggest how he hoped to achieve this. It was all very polite and English, but there is no question that his failure to get his two principal subordinate commanders to cooperate with each other was being criticized, with some reason.
Reading between the lines in Churchill’s history of World War II, it is possible to wonder if matters regarding Dowding had gone farther—or faster—than Churchill had ever intended. He almost certainly assumed that whatever happened, Dowding could be brought into line, as could his fellow air marshals—Churchill always thought he could deal with senior officers the way he did with politicians, smoothing things over with a strong dose of flattery, a new appointment, or, when all else failed, an emotional appeal to their sense of duty or friendship. It was a mistake he had already made during World War I, with his friend Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher and with that more remote potentate Field Marshal Lord Kitchener of Khartoum. Every great man has his faults, and among Churchill’s was the belief that his powers of persuasion were unlimited, and that when he had concluded an argument he had invariably changed the other person’s mind. He consistently underrated the stiff neck of most senior officers in the armed forces, a mistake he was to make again with Generals Auchinleck and Wavell in the Western Desert, in 1941. Though he had been a cadet at Sandhurst and had begun his adult life as a professional soldier, Churchill was a born politician, not necessarily a born military man, and he never fully understood that whereas politicians could differ and remain friends, or quarrel in public and make up in private, admirals, generals, and air marshals were cut from different cloth—they believed in rank, duty, and what we would now call the chain of command. This was perhaps the one area of statecraft in which Churchill’s wisdom was exceeded by that of George VI, who was constitutionally the head of the armed forces and took seriously the opinion of their senior officers, most of whom he knew.*
In the end, what brought Dowding down was not the “big wing” controversy but the poor performance of his night fighters. As the Luftwaffe moved from day bombing to night bombing
, it became increasingly (and embarrassingly) clear that Dowding’s night fighters, for the most part, remained unable to find enemy planes, let alone shoot them down. Politically, this was unacceptable to the prime minister, who not unreasonably felt that the British deserved and expected something better from Fighter Command while bombs and incendiaries fell on them every night. Another committee was set up to examine the matter, this time under the leadership of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Salmond, another longtime adversary of Dowding’s. Salmond accepted the recommendation of Sholto Douglas that some of Dowding’s fighter squadrons, with their single-engine Spitfires and Hurricanes, should be retrained to fight at night, and that the centralized fighter control system, which Dowding had installed at such pains at Fighter Command headquarters, and which had been one of the principal factors in winning the Battle of Britain, should now be decentralized, to give each Group more direct control over its own fighters. (This was both a blow against Park’s conduct at No. 11 Group and a gesture of support for Leigh-Mallory’s opinions.)
Dowding vigorously resisted both these directives, and wrote a letter to the prime minister rebutting them in detail, which was surely a mistake, since although Churchill wanted results, the last thing he wanted was to be drawn into a technical dispute between feuding air marshals. Dowding certainly understood at once that decentralizing Fighter Command’s operations center was an attempt to take control of the fighter squadrons out of his hands, and he rightly predicted that to send up Hurricanes and Spitfires at night in any meaningful quantity would merely be to sacrifice pilots and aircraft for no purpose, and that nothing useful could be accomplished until Fighter Command received a new twin-engine aircraft—the Bristol Beau-fighter, which was still being flight-tested—suitable for night fighting, and equipped with an improved AI set, as well as a quantity of trained aircrew radar operators, to form a two-man team with the pilot. The solution to the problem of the night fighters depended, therefore, on three things that were still in development: the Beau-fighter, the new AI set, and the fully trained pilot–radar operator two-man crew. There was no way to rush any one of these, or to put one into service without the others.