*He would be placed on the list October 16th by Churchill personally (Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour, page 849).
*Sir Roger Williams is thought by many to have been the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Captain Fluellen in Henry V.
*A Geschwader was (very) approximately the equivalent of a British Group, and should contain a strength (on paper) of about 120 aircraft of the same or similar type, though by this time few had anything like that number in fact. A Kampfgeschwader consisted of bombers, a Jagdgeschwader of Bf 109 fighters, a Zerstörergeschwader of twin-engine Bf 110 fighters, and a Stukageschwader of Ju 87 dive-bombers.
*This was one of the fruits of an immensely ambitious nationwide industrial program going back to the days of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, in which a second “shadow” factory was set up for each of the most critical weapons of the three services, so as to be able to increase production swiftly in the event of war and to ensure an alternative and fully functioning manufacturing site in case the original one was bombed. Once again, the “appeasers” were more foresighted than their critics (or the Germans) guessed.
*Emphasis is Malan’s. Rule number ten was “Go in quickly—Punch hard—Get out!” The poster is reprinted on page 170.
*“Only” is, of course, a relative term, and is used here in the full knowledge that every death in war is a tragedy. Still, on a day when the RAF put up “192 patrols involving 916 aircraft,” the loss of three fighter pilots in combat was remarkably low, and only one-fourth of the total RAF deaths of the day.
*Although Dowding’s eventual dismissal from his post as Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief of Fighter Command is not unrelated to “the big wing controversy,” as well as to Churchill’s resentment over Dowding’s objections to sending more Hurricanes to France, the most important reason, as we shall see, would be his failure to come up with an effective night fighter defense once the Luftwaffe took to large-scale bombing by night.
*A.1.B was the category for those medically fit for flying.
*In the German army of World War I, a Rittmeister was the cavalry equivalent of a Hauptmann, i.e., a captain. The distinctive rank eventually vanished along with the horses.
*A contrail is a white vapor trail usually left by each wingtip of an aircraft flying at high altitudes.
*As bird shooters know, you don’t aim at a bird in flight; you aim ahead of it, so that it will fly into your shot. The same is true of fighter marksmanship, but at vastly greater speeds and distances. In deflection shooting, a pilot aims not at the enemy plane but rather at the spot where he expects it to be when his “stream” of bullets converges there. Judging the lead or deflection is an essential skill for a fighter pilot or an air gunner. Note also that a “four-second burst” is about twice as long as that which a more experienced fighter pilot would consider necessary, or even prudent, considering how quickly a fighter plane’s ammunition is expended, and how easy it is to overheat the gun barrels.
*I am indebted to Alfred Price’s The Battle of Britain: The Hardest Day for his detailed, minute-by-minute account of the battle of August 18, both in the air and on the ground.
†The Luftwaffe mostly used standard German bombers, as well as the Bf 110 twin-engine fighter, for photo reconnaissance, but there is some evidence that they had also been using, over England, the futuristic, high-altitude, diesel-powered Ju 86 P, which flew at over 38,000 feet, well above the reach of British fighters, and carried two cameras, each weighing nearly 200 pounds, and a crew of two in a pressurized cabin.
*The possibility that the Sector operations room at Kenley might be destroyed had led to the preparation of an “alternative site” in a vacant butcher shop in nearby Caterham, on Caterham High Street, less than a mile from Kenley. It had been chosen because it was directly over the GPO’s main underground telephone cable for the entire area.
†Others included the “sticky bomb” to be thrown or launched at enemy tanks (not a success), and the “proximity fuse,” which exploded an antiaircraft shell when it passed near an enemy aircraft, and which would turn out to be one of the Allies’ most significant “wonder weapons” of the war.
*As late as 1943 RAF Bomber Command, despite the help of radar and “Pathfinder” Mosquitos laying a flare path to the target, was still capable not merely of missing a specific target but of hitting the wrong city (see Bomber, by Len Deighton). The same was true of the USAAF bomber force, which in broad daylight managed to bomb Schaffhausen, in neutral Switzerland, twice, in 1944 and 1945.
*“There’ll always be an England/And England shall be free/If England means as much to you/As England means to me.”
*The legend that eating raw carrots improves night vision came about in part as a propaganda cover story invented to conceal the existence of AI—a small radar set mounted in an aircraft. Raw carrots were placed conspicuously on the table at every meal for night fighter pilots, and the story about their effect on eyesight was skillfully spread by the Ministry of Information—so skillfully that parents today are still urging children to eat carrots. The famous night fighter ace Squadron Leader John “Cat’s Eyes” Cunningham was said to eat them in large quantities, but whether he did or not, the truth was that even Cunningham never managed to achieve a single kill at night until he began flying a twin-engine Beau-fighter, with a radar operator and a working AI set.
*It was for this reason that the planners of Overlord (formerly Round-Up), the Allied invasion of Europe in 1944, chose mid-May as the date. Eisenhower postponed the invasion to mid-June because of the shortage in landing craft, and would have been prepared, but reluctant, to postpone until mid-July; but he regarded the weather and the decreasing daylight hours as making even the first week of September undesirable. As it was, even in mid-June the weather was bad enough to make the Normandy invasion one of the riskiest operations in military history.
*A more sensible use for Bomber Command might have seemed attacking the Luftwaffe airfields in the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, but the bombers had no way to find them by night, and no way of defending themselves effectively over enemy-held territory by day.
*“Something else” would prove to be Rommel’s attempt to take Egypt and the Suez Canal, and the German invasion of the Soviet Union, intended to remove from the playing board Britain’s last potential European ally (although it was not initially an ally the British particularly sought out or valued).
*An intriguing event was the capture of a German soldier dressed in civilian clothes and carrying a loaded pistol, a wireless set, a Swedish passport, and a forged British identity card; he had been dropped by parachute to report on the extent of damage to British airfields.
*It would be dwarfed in 1942 when Air Chief Marshal Harris launched Millennium, the first 1,000-bomber raid, on the cathedral city of Cologne.
*The volunteer firemen were often men who were medically unfit for the armed services. In the West End, as Evelyn Waugh pointed out, they included, among many others, a unit of book publishers, and famous poets, sculptors, novelists, and painters. Post-debutante volunteer drivers in the Motor Transport Corps helped remove the dead and wounded from the East End; these volunteers included Kay Summersby, who would later become General Eisenhower’s driver and confidante, and the author’s stepmother, Leila Hyde.
*Although both Heinkel and Junkers had produced a successful prototype four-engine bomber by 1937 (known as the Uralbomber, since it had to be capable of bombing beyond the Ural Mountains), the project fell victim to internal squabbles in the Luftwaffe high command, and to Göring’s insistence on aircraft that could be produced in large quantity at once. With stronger engines, either of these prototypes would have given the Luftwaffe the equivalent of the American B-17 or the British Lancaster.
*The RAF had prudently set up special burns units in anticipation of such casualties. The presiding genius of burn rehabilitation was the plastic surgeon Archibald Mclndoe, of Queen Victoria Hospital, in East Grinstead.
*The Luftwaffe was not alone.
British bombers in 1940 were inadequate, the Defiant was a disaster, and the RAF would have no specially built night fighter until later in 1941.
*George VI—like his father, George V (and unlike his older brother, Edward VIII)—took a personal, proprietary interest in the opinions and careers of his senior officers. Because he had been educated as a naval officer (and had fought at the Battle of Jutland in 1916 as a midshipman), this was an area in which the king was never a rubber stamp for his prime minister, and had strong opinions and preferences of his own.
*The tradition was eventually altered in 1945 because the newly elected Labour government was unwilling to raise Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris, the outspoken commanding officer of Bomber Command, to the peerage. A peerage might have implied their approval of the bombing of Dresden, among other things. The goverment raised him to the rank of Marshal of the Royal Air Force instead.
†Leading Churchill to minute Sinclair, “This is not a good story…. The jealousies and cliquism which have led to the committing of this offence are a discredit to the Air Ministry”(Gilbert, Finest Hour, page 1061).
With Wings Like Eagles: A History of the Battle of Britain Page 33