The Dangerous Book of Heroes (8 page)

For the benefit of the German public and the occupied countries, Luftwaffe propaganda announced only half its losses and higher RAF losses than even its pilots claimed. Fighter Command on the other hand announced its true losses, which the Luftwaffe assumed were false figures like its own. This resulted in the Luftwaffe believing it was doing better than it was. For the British public, Fighter Command accepted its pilots' high claims of enemy aircraft destroyed, claims that were naturally error-prone from emotion, from two or more pilots claiming the same aircraft, and from the fact that everything happened in three dimensions at 300 miles per hour.

Fighter Command lost 145 aircraft in July, the majority of which had been replaced by Beaverbrook's supply chain, but it was the loss of pilots that was the major concern. Of all aircrew lost in July, eighty were experienced flight and squadron commanders of the Fighter Command, irreplaceable and vital men.

On August 8 another convoy battle took place in the channel, over which several hundred aircraft fought. The Germans had 31 aircraft destroyed for the loss of 19 British fighters.

Still Dowding held Fighter Command back, so that the intercepting fighters were heavily outnumbered by both German fighters and bombers. This caused some questioning, even by the pilots themselves.
It must also have reduced the chances of destroying German aircraft and increased the chances of losing more British aircraft, but Dowding knew that the crisis was yet to come. It began on August 12, coincidentally the opening of the grouse-shooting season.

Radar stations along the southeast coast were bombed, Portsmouth was hit by 150 bombers, and airfields of 11 Group were bombed, while hundreds of Luftwaffe 109 and 110 fighters protected their bombers. RAF Biggin Hill in Kent was in the thick of it, and its close-of-day intelligence report was typical for 11 Group: “Operational sorties: 36. Enemy casualties: 5 confirmed, 16 unconfirmed, 4 probables and damaged. All pilots safe. 1 in hospital.” The average age of the fighter pilots at Biggin Hill was several months under twenty-one. A headline in the following day's newspapers read: “The Battle of Britain Is On.”

August 13 was Göring's “Eagle Attack” day. The Luftwaffe flew 1,485 sorties and night-bombed cities in all four countries of the kingdom, including two aircraft factories in Belfast and Birmingham. The RAF responded with 700 sorties, shooting down 46 enemy aircraft for the loss of 13 fighters but losing a further 47 assorted aircraft on the ground. Overall it was the Luftwaffe's day. On the fourteenth more airfields, radar stations, and factories were bombed.

The fifteenth saw the largest attack of the battle, with more than 1,800 German aircraft launched in five massive assaults. It included all German aircraft stationed in Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, and France in an all-out attempt to smash Fighter Command and bring the RAF to its knees. Hurricane and Spitfire pilots shot down 75 aircraft for the loss of 34 fighters shot down and 16 destroyed on the ground. That was the RAF's day. The Luftwaffe called it “Black Thursday,” yet the following day it continued the onslaught, flying another 1,700 sorties against Britain.

By mid-August, the Luftwaffe had lost a total of 363 aircraft as well as most of their pilots and crews. The RAF had lost 181 fighters shot down and 30 destroyed on the ground, a total of 211, but Fighter Command also had lost 154 pilots, of which only 63 could be replaced. In addition, a further 80 percent of squadron commanders
had been lost to death, injury, or exhaustion, so that by then, inexperienced commanders were leading inexperienced pilots into battle. Fighter Command was wavering.

The smiling young pilots in their white silk scarves, leather-and-sheepskin flying jackets, blue uniforms, and shaggy flying boots were becoming drawn and exhausted. During standby, they lounged in the mess or sprawled outside in deck chairs and on the grass, reading, smoking, chatting, drinking tea or coffee, waiting for the inevitable telephone call from Control to scramble once again. Some dozed under the wings of their airplanes; one squadron's pilots remained in their cockpits. In the few hours off-duty, they slept, socialized at the local pub, scrawling their names on the ceilings and walls, went to the movies, fell in love, or made the occasional trip to London on a twenty-four-hour pass.

The ground crews, too, suffered heavy casualties and were tired, working throughout the day and night repairing, servicing, re-arming, and refueling the planes, then repairing the airfields. The effectiveness of the Hurricanes and Spitfires depended as much on the ground crews as on the pilots. Dowding rotated his squadrons—pilots and ground crews—whenever possible; during the three months of the battle of Britain, six different squadrons flew from Biggin Hill.

Yet there were simply not enough replacement pilots, and at the end of each day even more were required. From the Fleet Air Arm, 58 pilots were transferred to Fighter Command, a few suitable bomber pilots were retrained as fighter pilots, and RAF technicians who at least knew about fighters were sent to flying school. On the other side of the channel, Göring was fuming
at his Luftwaffe's inability to destroy the RAF. His pilots, too, were frustrated. Every time they attacked, there were the Hurricanes and Spitfires, always waiting, no matter how many they shot down.

Copyright © 2009 by Graeme Neil Reid

At a meeting on August 19, Göring asked his two most experienced and successful fighter pilots what they required to defeat the RAF. Major Moëlders asked for a more powerful engine for the Messerschmitt 109 to counter the Rolls-Royce Merlins, while Major Galland famously asked for an “outfit of Spitfires for my Group.”

Göring changed tactics to twenty-four-hour attack. He relocated most of his fighters to airfields around Calais to provide even closer support for his bombers and concentrated the assault on fighter airfields. He was forced to withdraw the Stuka dive-bomber because of its high casualty rate. Dowding and Park countered by ordering their pilots to concentrate on the bombers, to leave the fighters alone whenever possible and not to pursue over the English Channel. The bombers were the priority. The battle of Britain now entered its critical period.

On the night of the twenty-fourth, during a 170-bomber raid against the Thames Haven oil tanks, a German aircraft dropped its bombs on the center of London, apparently because of a navigational error. Already bombs had been dropped around the capital and in the suburbs as well as other British cities and ports, but never before on the center of London. Similarly, no raids had been made against Berlin by Bomber Command, which itself was beginning strategic night-bombing.

Churchill naturally assumed it was intentional and, as in May when Rotterdam
was blitzed by the Luftwaffe, ordered a retaliatory raid. The target was Berlin, which Göring had boasted would never be bombed.

On the very next night, August 25, Bomber Command sent 81 twin-engine bombers to Berlin. Of those, 29 reached the target and dropped their bombs on the city. Enraged, Hitler pledged to annihilate London. He ordered Göring to commence the wholesale bombing of London and other British cities by day and night, a destruction he hoped would bring Britain to demoralized defeat. So began “the Blitz,” which Hitler called “terror raids.” The first city to catch it badly was Liverpool, bombed four nights in succession.

On August 30 a feint by the Luftwaffe to the Thames estuary was followed by repeated and heavy raids on airfields. Fighter Command destroyed 49 German aircraft for the loss of 25 fighters and 10 pilots, but its southeastern airfields were a mess. A shop in the village became the operation room for Biggin Hill, yet Fighter Command still flew 1,000 sorties for the first time.

The next day the Luftwaffe struck again, bombing airfields and radar stations. It lost 39 aircraft, but Fighter Command also lost 39 fighters and 13 pilots. Several squadrons were forced to relocate to the grass fields of private flying clubs. Dowding told Churchill: “We are fighting for survival, and we are losing.”

To a major extent, both air forces were boxing blind, not knowing how much damage they were inflicting on the other. Fighter Command had destroyed 800 Luftwaffe aircraft but thought that they'd destroyed more. The error didn't matter, for while the Luftwaffe continued its assaults across the channel, they had to be countered. On the other side of the coin, between August 24 and September 5 the Luftwaffe destroyed 466 RAF fighters, killed 231 pilots, damaged several radar stations, and put 6 fighter airfields out of action. German intelligence reported that Fighter Command was on its knees. Yet somehow Hurricanes and Spitfires rose from the green fields to meet every attack.

Dowding could no longer rotate his squadrons—there weren't enough left—so resorted to A, B, and C designations. A squadrons
were in the southeast front line commanded by Keith Park, B squadrons were in the center and west of Britain commanded by Leigh-Mallory, and C were as far from the fighting as possible, training new pilots. In those appalling two weeks to September 5 Dowding lost a quarter of his remaining fighter pilots. With the best will in the world, their replacements were rookies with only a few flying hours—often as little as ten—in their logbooks and under two weeks' squadron experience. Their survival in battle was numbered in just days.

There were instances of Luftwaffe pilots machine-gunning RAF pilots in parachutes. There were also isolated incidents of the machine-gunning of British civilians, as earlier machine-gunning of civilians on the Continent had been common. Göring was a fighter ace from World War I, but he was also the creator of the German secret police, the Gestapo.

In September 1940, Göring announced on radio: “I myself have taken command of the Luftwaffe's battle for Britain.” The two air forces were now trading punches, losing as many of their own aircraft as they destroyed of the other, the Luftwaffe flying about 770 sorties a day and Fighter Command just under 1,000. On one horrific day, for the first time, Fighter Command lost more aircraft—and pilots—than it shot down.

September 7 began as usual with Luftwaffe attacks on airfields, but on this occasion it was a feint for the first mass attacks on London. In the afternoon, 1,000 aircraft crossed the English Channel from France in a formation two miles high, flying over Cape Blanc-Nez and a watching Göring below. No intelligence reports suggested such a raid was planned. The controllers expected further attacks upon their airfields and so delayed the fighters from taking off until the last moment, too late for London.

There had never been an attack on a city on that scale before, anywhere in the world. The bombings of Guernica, Warsaw, and Rotterdam paled into insignificance. From 16,000 to 20,000 feet, new high-explosive bombs and incendiaries hammered the London docks and homes. There were more raids in the evening, and raids throughout
the night until dawn on the eighth. At night the bombers followed radio beams to London, although little navigation was required: the East End was burning and the glow of its fires could be seen ninety miles away. That was a day for the Luftwaffe.

They bombed London again on the night of the eighth, and a second massive daylight attack was launched on the ninth, again with almost 1,000 enemy aircraft, in two formations crossing the coast above Dover and Beachy Head. Park's A Group squadrons scrambled to meet them in the air south of London. So fiercely did the Hurricane and Spitfire pilots fight that they literally forced back the first formation above Canterbury—upon which the Luftwaffe dropped their bombs as they retreated—and scattered the second formation away from the docks into the south and west of London. There, Leigh-Mallory's B Group met them. Bombs were jettisoned anywhere as the Luftwaffe retreated. That was the RAF's day.

At the end of that momentous week, Fighter Command's airplane reserves reached their lowest—just 80 Hurricanes and 47 Spitfires.

September 15 saw the climax of the struggle. It was also the day Prime Minister Churchill chose to visit A Group Operations Headquarters, the underground command center at Uxbridge in Middlesex.

That day the German attacks on Britain came in two waves at very high altitude, 20,000 feet and higher, above radar. However, British intelligence had monitored the increased radio traffic, giving Park time to move his squadrons forward. They fought the 500 enemy aircraft all the way to London and all the way back. RAF ground crews refueled and re-armed aircraft in a frenzy of servicing when
ever and at whatever airfield the pilots landed, so that from the ground it seemed as if the skies were permanently full of aircraft. Vapor trails and smoke trails scrawled the signature of battle across the summer sky.