Finest Years (15 page)

The bombs that were now falling upon city streets, as well as upon aircraft factories and dockyards, at first caused some government alarm. Cheering cockneys cried, ‘Stick it, Winnie!' and ‘We can take it!' as the prime minister toured blitz-stricken areas. But was this true? Tens of thousands of fugitives from cities became ‘trekkers', plodding out into the countryside at dusk to escape the night raiders. There was evidence of near social breakdown in some bombed areas. Fighter Command, with its primitive air interception radar, had no effective counter to Luftwaffe assaults in darkness. Industrial production suffered severely. The destruction of homes and property, the incessant fear of bombardment, ate deep into many people's spirits.

Yet as the blitz continued, the nation learned to live and work with its terrors and inconveniences. Ministers' fears about morale subsided. Churchill rang Fighter Command one September night to complain irritably to its duty officer: ‘
I am on top of
the Cabinet Office in Whitehall and can neither see nor hear a raider. Why don't you clear London of the Red warning? We have all been down too long.' The RAF's daily reports of losses inflicted on the enemy cheered Churchill and his people, but were heavily exaggerated. On 12 August, for instance, Churchill was told that sixty-two German aircraft had been shot down for twenty-five British. In reality, the Luftwaffe had lost only twenty-seven planes. Likewise two days later, Fighter Command claimed seventy-eight for three British losses, whereas Goering had lost thirty-four for thirteen RAF fighters shot down. The Duxford Wing once alleged that it had destroyed fifty-seven Luftwaffe aircraft. The real figure proved to be eight.

This chasm between claims and actuality persisted through the battle, and indeed the war. It attained a climax after the clashes of 11 September, when the RAF suggested that eighty-nine enemy aircraft had been lost for twenty-eight of its own. In fact, twenty-two German planes had been shot down for thirty-one British. Yet the inflated figures were very serviceable to British spirits, and a towering reality persisted: Goering's air groups were suffering unsustainable losses,
two-to-one against those of Dowding's squadrons. This was partly because almost all shot-down German aircrew became prisoners, while parachuting RAF pilots could fight again. More important still, British aircraft factories were out-producing those of Germany. In 1940, the Luftwaffe received a total of 3,382 new single—and twinengined aircraft, while 4,283 single-engined machines were delivered to the RAF. The wartime direction of British industry was flawed by many misjudgements and failures. Here, however, was a brilliant and decisive achievement.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, C-in-C of Fighter Command, was a difficult man, not for nothing nicknamed ‘Stuffy'. He made his share of mistakes in the Battle of Britain, for instance in being slow to reinforce 11 Group when it became plain that the German effort was overwhelmingly directed against south-east England. Most of Fighter Command's initial tactical doctrine proved mistaken. But Dowding was more far-sighted than the Air Ministry, for instance early in the war urging the need for radar-equipped night fighters and long-range escorts. He displayed notable tenacity of purpose and made fewer blunders than the other side, which is how all battles are won.

His most significant contribution derived from understanding that his purpose must be to sustain Fighter Command in being, rather than to hazard everything upon the destruction of enemy aircraft. Each day, he husbanded reserves for the next. Churchill never acknowledged this refinement. Dowding's policy offended the prime minister's instinct to hurl every weapon against the foe. The airman, an austere spiritualist, could not offer Churchill congenial comradeship. Dowding's remoteness rendered him unpopular with some of his officers. It was probably right to enforce his scheduled but delayed retirement when the battle was won. Nonetheless, the brutally abrupt manner in which this was done was a disgrace to the leaders of the RAF. Dowding's cautious management of his squadrons contributed importantly to British victory.

Some historians today assert that Hitler was never serious about invading Britain. This view seems quite mistaken. It is true that the
German armed forces' preparations were unconvincing. British fears of imminent assault were unfounded, and reflected poorly upon the country's intelligence and defence chiefs. But Hitler the opportunist would assuredly have launched an armada if the Luftwaffe had gained control of the air space over the Channel and southern England. Mediterranean experience soon showed that in a hostile air environment, the Royal Navy would have found itself in deep trouble.

The Luftwaffe failed, first, because Fighter Command and its associated control facilities and radar stations were superbly organised. Second, the RAF had barely sufficient Hurricanes and Spitfires, and just enough skilled pilots, to engage superior numbers of enemy aircraft—though not as much superior as contemporary legend suggested. The Luftwaffe started its campaign with 760 serviceable Messerschmitt Bf109 fighters, its most important aircraft, against some 700 RAF Hurricanes and Spitfires. Almost as important, the Bf 109 carried only sufficient fuel to overfly Britain for a maximum of thirty minutes. The Luftwaffe had the technology to fit its planes with disposable fuel tanks, but did not use it. If the Bf109s had indeed possessed greater endurance, Fighter Command's predicament would have been much worse. As it was, the Germans could not sustain decisively superior forces over the battlefield, and were handicapped by failures of strategy and intelligence. In the early stages of the battle, Luftwaffe fighter tactics were markedly superior to those mandated by Fighter Command. But Dowding's pilots learned fast, and by September matched the skills of their opponents.

The Royal Air Force, youngest and brashest of the three services, was the only one which thoroughly recognised the value of publicity, and exploited it with notable success. The Battle of Britain caused the prestige of the nation's airmen to ascend to heights where it remained through the ensuing five years of the war. The RAF gained a glamour and public esteem which never faded. Senior military and naval commanders, by contrast, disdained the press. ‘
Publicity is anathema
to most naval officers,' Admiral Sir Andrew Cunningham, C-in-C Mediterranean, wrote grumpily, ‘and I was no exception.
I could not see how it would help us to win the war.' Despite frequent nagging from the prime minister, the navy and army exposed themselves only sulkily to media attention.

Cunningham's lofty attitude, commonplace in his service, was mistaken. As Churchill always recognised, modern war is waged partly on battlefields, and partly also on air waves, front pages, and in the hearts of men and women. When Britain's powers were so small, it was vital to create an inspiriting legend for the nation, and for the world. To this in 1940 the RAF contributed mightily, both through its deeds and the recording of them. The RAF was a supremely twentieth-century creation, which gained Churchill's admiration but incomplete understanding. He displayed an enduring emotionalism about the courage and sacrifices of aircrew. The men of Bomber as well as Fighter Command were always spared the accusations of pusillanimity which the prime minister regularly hurled at Britain's soldiers, and also sometimes sailors. Like the British people, he never forgot that, until November 1942, the RAF remained responsible for their country's only visible battlefield victory, against the Luftwaffe in 1940.

On the night of 2 October, Churchill passed some cold, wet, unrewarding hours visiting anti-aircraft positions in Surrey amid the stygian gloom of the blackout. In the car returning to Downing Street with General Sir Frederick Pile, who commanded the AA defences, he suddenly said: ‘
Do you like B
o
vril?
' pronouncing the first syllable long, as in Hove. It was 4.30 a.m. Pile responded that he did. The prime minister lapsed into silence for a few moments, then said, ‘B
o
vril and sardines are very good together…We will see what the commissariat can do for us as soon as we get back to No. 10.' Pile wrote: ‘Very shortly afterwards we drew up in front of the door. The Prime Minister had a walking stick with him with which he rapped the door sharply: When the butler opened it the Prime Minister said: “Goering and Goebbels coming to report,” and added: “I am
not
Goebbels.”'

On 11 October at Chequers, Churchill said: ‘
That man's effort
is flagging.' Goering's Luftwaffe was by no means a spent force.
The months of night blitz that lay ahead inflicted much pain and destruction, which Fighter Command lacked adequate technology to frustrate. When John Martin telephoned the Reform Club from Downing Street one night to enquire how it had been affected by a nearby blast, the porter responded serenely: ‘
The club is burning
, sir.' But the RAF had denied the Germans daylight control of Britain's air space, and inflicted an unsustainable rate of loss. The Luftwaffe lacked sufficient mass to inflict decisive damage upon Britain. Hitler, denied the chance of a cheap victory, saw no need to take further risks by continuing the all-out air battle. Churchill's nation and army remained incapable of frustrating his purposes on the Continent, or challenging his dominion over its peoples. German attention, as Churchill suspected, was now shifting eastwards, in anticipation of an assault upon Russia.

The Luftwaffe continued its night blitz on Britain for months into 1941, maintaining pressure upon the obstinate island at minimal cost in aircraft losses. It was long indeed before the British themselves felt secure from invasion. Home defence continued to preoccupy Churchill and his commanders. He suffered spasms of renewed concern, which caused him to telephone the Admiralty and enquire about Channel conditions on nights thought propitious for a German assault. But the coming of autumn weather, and the Luftwaffe's abandonment of daylight attacks, rendered Britain almost certain of safety until spring. Churchill had led his nation through a season which he rightly deemed critical for its survival.

Across the Atlantic, a host of Americans were dazzled by his achievement. Nazi propagandists sought to exploit a famous photo of Churchill wielding a tommy-gun to suggest an image of Britain's prime minister as a gangster. But instead the picture projected an entirely positive image to Roosevelt's nation. Over there, what counted was the fact that the weapon was US-made. Americans were shown the leader of Britain putting to personal use a gun shipped from their country, and they loved it. By 30 September, a Gallup survey showed that 52 per cent of Americans favoured giving assistance to Churchill's people, even at risk of war.
Time
's cover story, ‘The Battle
of Britain', declared that ‘Winston Churchill so aptly and lovingly symbolizes Great Britain's unwillingness to give up when apparently cornered…There is an extraordinary fact about English democracy—namely, that at almost any given time some English leader turns out to be a perfect symbol of his people. At the time of Edward VIII's abdication, Stanley Baldwin was the typical Englishman. At the time of the Munich crisis, Neville Chamberlain was pathetically typical. But as of the fourth week of September 1940, Winston Churchill was the essence of his land. The three men are as dissimilar as fog, rain and hail, which are all water. But the country they ruled has changed. This England is different…[Churchill] is a Tory, an imperialist, and has been a strike-breaker and Red-baiter; and yet, when he tours the slums of London, old women say: “God bless you, Winnie.”' A few weeks later, by American readers' acclamation Churchill became
Time
's Man of the Year.

One evening at Chequers, in an irresistibly homely metaphor, he compared himself to ‘
a farmer driving pigs
along a road, who always had to be prodding them on and preventing them from straying'. He professed that he ‘could not quite see why he was so popular'. For all his undoubted vanity, almost everything that he had to tell the British people was bleak. His public confidence masked private uncertainty which goes far to explain his caution about government appointments and dismissals in 1940. For more than a decade he had been an outcast, clinging precariously to a handhold on the parapet of power. Though from May 1940 he acted the part of prime minister with supreme outward conviction, it was many months before he became assured of his own authority. ‘
For something like a year
after he took office, Winston had no idea of his political strength among the voters, which is a mercy,' observed his aide Major Desmond Morton.

Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, displayed in his reports home an increasing enthusiasm for Churchill: ‘
One can now say
confidently,' he told Moscow at the end of June, ‘that the govern-ment's decision to continue the war has gained overwhelming popular support, especially among the working class. The confusion and
despondency which I reported in the first days of the war are gone. Churchill's speeches have played a great part in this…Although Churchill thus far commands the support of the working class, the ruling classes are clearly split…[The faction] headed by Chamberlain is terribly fearful and willing to make peace with Germany on any acceptable terms…these elements are the real “Fifth Column” in England…The problem is that, for all Churchill's determination to continue the war, he is afraid to split the Conservative Party and rely upon a workers' coalition.'

Maisky's view of political divisions in Britain was not entirely fanciful. He was wrong to ascribe leadership of a peace party to Chamberlain, but correct in asserting that some old Chamberlain supporters, as well as a few Labour MPs, remained eager to parley with the Axis. In late June, Labour MP Richard Stokes was among a faction which wanted a negotiated settlement. In a letter to Lloyd George, Stokes claimed to speak for an all-party group of thirty MPs and ten peers. On 28 July, ‘Chips' Channon MP wrote deploring the news that Chamberlain was stricken with cancer: ‘
Thus fades the last hope
of peace.' Lord Lothian, Britain's ambassador in Washington, telephoned Halifax at about the same time, begging him to say nothing publicly that would close the door to possible negotiated terms. Harold Nicolson expressed relief that Halifax appeared unmoved by
Lothian's ‘wild' appeal
. Raymond Lee wrote after a conversation with a businessman: ‘
[He] was very interesting about
the City…he…confirmed my belief that the City is ready for appeasement at any time and is a little bit irritated because it has no hold at all on Churchill.'
David Kynaston
, distinguished historian of the City of London, notes that Lee gave no evidence for this assertion. But Montagu Norman, governor of the Bank of England, as late as autumn 1940 clung to hopes that Neville Chamberlain would ‘
come back into his own
'. City grandee Sir Hugo Cunliffe-Owen expressed a desire that Churchill might be supplanted by Labour's A.V. Alexander.