Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (17 page)

Unfortunately for Hitler’s ambitions, Goering and his air marshals made a couple of fateful decisions at a critical meeting held on September 3, 1940 (ironically, in The Hague, city of the international peace conferences). The bombers of Luftflotte No. 3, which always had a longer way to go from their Normandy bases to fight over Kent, were, at Sperrle’s urgings, released for night attacks upon the many ports of the southern British coast—Southampton, Portsmouth, Devonport, Cardiff, and the rest. More important still, it was resolved that Kesselring’s Luftflotte No. 2, based in Pas-de-Calais and heavily reinforced once again, would wage an unrelenting daylight and nighttime campaign against London. The result was to give the capital city, and especially its East End working classes, an ordeal by fire. The first mass attack on September 7 killed more than 300 civilians and seriously wounded another 1,300; the flames raging in the docklands and around St. Paul’s Cathedral could be seen for 50 miles and were an easy beacon for Goering’s night bombers. This pounding continued over the weeks to follow, as each side’s air force threw more and more planes into the struggle. On some occasions the Luftwaffe found a chance to ravage London; on other days Fighter Command’s counterattacks were punishing—sixty bombers were shot down on September 15 for the loss of twenty-six RAF fighters (half of whose pilots were saved by their parachutes). The struggle was new and titanic, and the world watched in awe.

The London Blitz concealed the critical fact that the Luftwaffe’s decision to switch targets saved Fighter Command. Given the inherently strong defensive position held by the British, operational logic pointed to the priority of targets for the German attackers: (1) the key radar stations along the coast, (2) Fighter Command’s airfields in southeast England, and (3) the numbers and morale of the Allied pilots. Amazingly—and especially given the fact that the tall detection masts
were being erected on coastal hilltops as early as 1938—German air intelligence failed to appreciate the critical importance of radar to the entire British defense system even when, again and again, RAF squadrons seemed to be waiting in the right spot to meet the raiders. The utility of some early attacks upon the stations was actually questioned by Goering on August 15, and such attacks ceased thereafter. Yet without radar, the defenders would have been reliant solely upon the Observer Corps and hugely expensive aerial patrols over the Channel. Goering’s September 3 decision to alter the targets also took the pressure off Fighter Command’s forward airfields, which had been under unrelenting attack during August—RAF Manston in Kent had had to be abandoned—and especially off-key sector stations such as Biggin Hill and Northolt, which controlled whole fighter groups. The absence of bombing and strafing of the airfields gave the weary crews a bit more time to rest and the engineers time to repair and refuel the planes without interruption. But the failure to attack the blatantly vulnerable radar stations continually amazed the British.

Instead of concentrating upon the critical points of Britain’s aerial defense system, Goering, urged on by the Fuehrer, chose to attack the largest, most sprawling residential target in the world. The damage inflicted upon the city, as well as upon England’s southern and western ports, was huge and brutal. But it is doubtful that the Luftwaffe could have destroyed London even if it had had twice as many bombers—and even if it had done so, that did not guarantee a way of surmounting the rising problem of invading the entire island as summer 1940 gave way to autumn. Small wonder that the skeptical German naval and army chiefs just sat on their hands, content to let Goering prove himself or fail. Finally, attacking London from French air bases involved a lot more time over England and thus allowed the RAF a second chance to get at the weary German bombers on their return; it also allowed Dowding the chance to pull in fresh squadrons from East Anglia and the Midlands for afternoon counterattacks. “I could hardly believe the Germans would have made such a mistake,” Dowding later wrote.
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“Fresh squadrons” meant the conjunction of two elements, planes and pilots. Each side deployed a small variety of aircraft types, the RAF squadrons flying the slower (and soon to be replaced) Defiants, most predominantly the Hawker Hurricanes, and a small but increasing
number of Spitfires, while the Luftwaffe relied upon its fearsome Stuka Ju 87 dive-bomber, a mix of twin-engine fighter-bombers and medium bombers such as the Bf 110, the Dornier 17, and the Heinkel 111, plus the larger, slower Ju 52, together with the mainstay of the fighter force, the single-engine monocoque Messerschmitt Bf 109. For an entire year, all of these famous—or notorious—aircraft had terrorized Europe (British railway stations, post offices, and schools all had wall charts showing their dread silhouettes); now they were being shot out of the sky, and there were no newer, improved, longer-range bombers in the pipeline. As noted above, the Luftwaffe’s exploration of heavy bombers had been diverted in the 1930s, so there was no German equivalent of the enormous Anglo-American strategic air forces involved in the later attacks upon the Third Reich. Dorniers bombing the London dockyards were, at this stage in the war, the closest equivalent to strategic airpower, and with limited bomb capacity they were clearly inadequate to the task.

The aerial campaign against London and the southern counties thus became another rock-paper-scissors game. If the German bombers reached their targets as planned—and many of them did, as was apparent from the raids on the East End—they could inflict appalling damage on the British people, housing, factories, and ports. If the Hurricanes and Spitfires got to them first, they suffered heavy losses; even the tough Bf 110s found it hard to handle a Hurricane, let alone a Spitfire. It was no doubt particularly satisfying to members of those Anglo-French regiments that had been battered at Dunkirk, and to those civilians who had escaped the relentless dive-bombings of refugee columns across northern France, to learn that the Stukas were easy prey for much faster RAF fighters and had to be withdrawn from the fight. On the other hand, if the Bf 109s tangled with the British squadrons before the latter got to the German bombers, it was a different story, and the odds were much more even. When, in late August, Goering showed alarm at his bombers’ losses by ordering the Bf 109s to stay close to the Bf 110 bombers, an enormous amount of tactical flexibility was lost. Coming under more and more criticism for failing to protect the bombers, the Messerschmitt fighter squadrons were forced into flying as many as three sorties a day to England, which was simply unsustainable.

Thus, although both sides experienced massive attrition rates in
frontline aircraft, that was the lesser worry. Both Germany and Britain were moving to “total war” production and receiving fresh aircraft every month, with output from U.K. factories surprisingly some way ahead. The greater mutual concern was the attrition rate of skilled pilots, who were much harder to replace than single-engine aircraft. As Williamson Murray’s detailed analysis reveals, both air forces were suffering enormous losses of fighter pilots as August 1940 unfolded into September. The RAF switched pilots from Bomber Command, borrowed from the Fleet Air Arm, cut the training time for new pilots in half, and—an enormous blessing—opened its arms to any Free French, Poles, Czechs, Norwegians, and Americans who could fly, not to mention the stream of fresh pilots from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Rhodesia.
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(The Luftwaffe, by contrast, received only an ill-fated Italian show of support during the Battle of Britain.) The key statistic is also supplied by Murray: at the beginning of May 1940 Goering commanded more than 1,000 “operationally ready” Bf 109 pilots, and their attrition rate that month was a mere 6.8 percent; at the beginning of September he had only 735 such pilots, and 23.1 percent were lost as the month unfolded.
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The great RAF counterattack of Sunday, September 15, when sixty fighters from No. 12 Group in the Midlands swept southward into the German formations late in the day, shocked Luftwaffe commanders by demonstrating the depth of Britain’s aerial defenses.

Overall, the strategic lesson of the Battle of Britain was very clear: against a well-defended and well-organized aerial defensive system, a force of bombers could not always “get through” in the Baldwinian meaning of the term; a few might make it, but most would suffer if flying alone or with only partial protection from escort planes. Getting protection for half of the journey was like getting hardly any protection at all, for the enemy simply moved his chief defensive lines farther back, waited, and then assaulted. A strategic bombing campaign by one industrialized
nation against another thus depended for its outcome upon which side’s fighter forces had cleared the skies of their direct opponents. Nothing else would do.

It is for this reason that we have spent much space and detail on a campaign that was waged almost two and a half years before Casablanca. Of course, the many differences between the (essentially) four months of the Battle of Britain and the unremittingly harsh fifty months (if one counts from January 1941 onward) of the British and American strategic bombing campaign against Germany were massive. But the basic operational principles of aerial warfare—that is, a true appreciation of geography, targeting, and men and planes—remained the same.

It is therefore remarkable how swiftly and completely both the American and British commanders dismissed the idea that there was a larger lesson to be learned from Fighter Command’s defeat of a numerically larger Luftwaffe in those epic months of 1940. American observers concluded that the German bombers had inadequate armament, flew too low, and had poor formation discipline; this would not happen to them. Since the Americans planned to deploy “large numbers of aircraft with high speed, good defensive power, and high altitude,” the USAAF would avoid all of Goering and Kesselring’s problems. True, the B-17 Fortresses and B-24 Liberators were vastly superior to, say, a Heinkel 111, yet all this assumed that the Luftwaffe’s fighting capacities would remain static and that flying at 24,000 feet rather than 12,000 feet would minimize losses. But what if newer German fighters flew at 30,000 feet? The conclusions of the RAF chiefs (though probably not Dowding himself) were even more egregious. The remarkably high morale and fighting spirit of the civilian populations of London, Portsmouth, and Coventry when under heavy bombing did not lead to any questioning of air force doctrine about striking at the enemy’s heartland. Instead, the C in C, Sir Charles Portal, and others simply assumed that the German people would not be as tough as the British—an exact mirror of the conclusion that the Luftwaffe’s prewar planners had come to regarding the weaker determination of the Western democracies compared with the iron will and national unity established by the Nazi movement.
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If the operating assumption was that the other side would crack first—which sounds awfully like Douglas Haig,
Erich Ludendorff, and trench warfare during the First World War—then it is no surprise that little attention was paid to really important issues such as distance, targeting, and detection.

On October 12, 1940, Hitler postponed Operation Sealion until the following spring at the earliest. By January, with his mind now fixed upon the coming attack on the USSR, he ordered a halt to most preparations for an invasion of Britain. Goering in turn instructed Luftflotte No. 3 under Sperrle just to concentrate upon night attacks on industrial targets. There would be no more epic fighter duels over the apple orchards of Kent.

And in fact there would rarely be any German fighters over England again. Sperrle’s force was augmented by the transfer of some bomber squadrons from Luftflotte No. 2 and became the single command for the continuation of the air war against Britain. He thus possessed a considerable fleet of up to 750 bombers (although repair, maintenance, and training made total operational numbers much smaller than that). There was no letup for the inhabitants of London and other British cities during the night attacks of the rest of the year—even after Hitler’s postponement of Operation Sealion, London was attacked for fifty-seven nights in a row before the Luftwaffe switched to a terrifying raid that flattened large parts of Coventry’s historic city center. The aerial Blitz continued until the end of December, when it was suspended due to continued poor weather, but resumed in the spring of 1941. As late as May 10 London was pounded again and again by very heavy nighttime attacks. After that, and although German raids would continue off and on throughout the war (until replaced by the V-bombs), the Luftwaffe’s bombing campaign would never again be as strong. By the middle of May 1941 most of Goering’s bombers and fighters were either heading to the Eastern Front or being diverted to the Balkan and Mediterranean theaters. Later, this had a very significant but unforeseen result: because German planes were no longer flying over England in daylight, there was no photo reconnaissance of the massive buildup of Allied forces in preparation for D-Day. Aerial weakness meant that Germany was blind.

While the Luftwaffe’s nighttime bombing offensive was much less dramatic than the great aerial duel of August and September 1940, there was a lot to be learned from it, had an acute observer bothered to do so. It showed how difficult it was to carry out a sustained night offensive, whichever air force was making the attack, for they all faced the task of finding their way in the dark. Once the German squadrons had passed over the coastal radar stations, finding them and then shooting them down became a game of hide-and-seek, so any losses inflicted were piecemeal rather than decisive. Over the next few years it galvanized the British into establishing a very sophisticated defensive system against aerial attacks at night—a combination of specially trained Spitfire and Mosquito squadrons, a much broader band of HF-DF detection stations, and interceptions of Luftwaffe Enigma messages (although, as with the Atlantic battles, detection and decryption breakthroughs did not automatically bring destruction of the foe).