The Battle of Britain

In reality neither El Alamein nor the Battle of Britain was a clear-cut battle with a neat conclusion. This has not stopped historians from imposing clarity, nor has it dulled the popular perception that these were glittering milestones along the road to British military success. Both battles were really defensive triumphs: the one saved Egypt and prevented the collapse of Britain’s global war effort, the
other saved Britain from cheap conquest. It is avoiding defeat that we have applauded; victory came long afterwards, with more powerful allies in harness.

‘The Battle’ matters because it prevented German invasion and conquest and kept Britain in the war. This achievement was worthwhile enough. Nine European states (ten, counting Danzig) had failed to prevent German occupation by the summer of 1940, with the grimmest of consequences. Nevertheless, some historians have raised serious doubts about the traditional story of the battle, which gave birth to the myth of a united nation repelling invasion, and gave iconographic status to the Spitfires and the ‘few’ who flew them. There is another history to be discovered behind the popular narrative. The effort to uncover it has already challenged some of the most cherished illusions of the battle story.

Take, for example, the generally accepted view that the battle prevented German invasion of southern Britain. Documents on the German side have been used to suggest that this was not so. Invasion, it can be argued, was a bluff designed to force Britain to beg for peace; in the summer of 1940 Hitler’s eyes were already gazing eastwards, where there lay real ‘living-space’. The Royal Air Force did not repel invasion for the apparently simple reason that the Germans were never coming. This interpretation has prompted some historians to suggest that Britain should have taken the chance of peace with Hitler and let the
two totalitarian states bleed each other to death in eastern Europe.

Behind this argument lies still more revision. The picture of a firmly united and determined people standing shoulder to shoulder against fascism has been slowly eroded by the weight of historical evidence. The British were less united in 1940 than was once universally believed. Defeatism could be found, side by side with heroic defiance. Churchill’s government, so it is argued, had powerful voices urging a search for peace in the summer of 1940, just like the appeasers of the 1930s. Churchill himself has not been free of reassessment. He has become the butt of wide criticism for his conduct of the war and his style of leadership. Even his inspirational speeches, which have shaped our memory of that summer of 1940, can now be shown to have had a mixed reception among a public desperate for hard news.

It is the purpose of this short book to assess where ‘The Battle’ now stands in history. There is little point in pretending that the historical narrative of the battle is the same as the popular myth. But it is not necessarily the case that the significance of the battle is diminished by recreating the historical reality, any more than the effects of Churchill’s leadership must be negated by acknowledging that he was human too. For a great many reasons the Battle of Britain, myth and reality, was a necessary battle. The consequences of British abdication in 1940 would have been a calamity not just for the British people but for the world as a whole.

Almost immediately after Chamberlain broadcast the news from 10 Downing Street that Britain was at war, the
sirens sounded. No one had told Chamberlain about the possibility of an air raid and he was ‘visibly shaken’ by it. It was a false alarm. A second one sounded at 3 a.m. that night, getting all London out of bed. For days people waited for the blow from the air which they had been told to expect. Government observers reported that 70 per cent of Londoners carried their gas masks with them.
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The blow never came. The German Air Force had no plans to bomb London in 1939. Like the Royal Air Force (RAF), it was under strict instructions not to start the bombing war or to run the risk of killing civilians from the air. By the end of March only 1 per cent of Londoners could be seen carrying gas masks.

The war the British waged in 1939 was very different from the one they had expected to fight. Chamberlain’s government poured millions of pounds into air power between 1937 and 1939 in order to provide a defensive shield against the knock-out blow, a defence made possible thanks to the fast monoplane fighter and the invention of radar. Millions more went into the expansion of Bomber Command as a deterrent against air attack. Plans were drawn up to bomb the enemy if he would not be deterred. The civilian population was drilled in air-raid precautions so as to reduce the colossal casualties predicted from all-out air war. Much of the top-level thinking on future war presupposed that something like the Battle of Britain might well occur in its very early stages, perhaps without a declaration of war at all.

In Germany the air force took a less extravagant view of air power. There the emphasis lay on combined operations with the army in order to impose a decisive defeat on enemy armed forces. This was and always had been a central principle of German war-making. German air leaders certainly possessed by 1939 the technical means to create an operationally independent air force for long-range attacks on industrial sectors or civilian morale. It was not moral scruple that held them back. They simply did not believe that these were strategically desirable targets. Neither promised immediate results given the nature of current air technology; neither would necessarily bring the enemy armed forces any closer to defeat. The manual for ‘The Conduct of Air Warfare’ first drawn up in 1936, and revised in March 1940, directed German air fleets to seek out the enemy air and ground forces and inflict upon them debilitating blows. Joint manoeuvres carried out with the army from 1935 onwards showed what could be achieved when armies and air forces fought together. The proof was supplied in the swift demolition of Polish resistance in September 1939. When planning began for the next campaign against Britain and France, it was based on the same formula of fast, hard-hitting air and armoured forces, designed to win a swift battle of annihilation. What were defined as ‘terror attacks’ against civilian targets far from the scene of battle were to be permitted only in retaliation for terror attacks by the enemy.
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The British were largely unprepared for this kind of warfare. Until February 1939, when Chamberlain publicly pledged British military support for France, Britain did not even have a Continental ally to consider. British strategy in the 1930s was insular. The government’s first priority was the protection of the British imperial heartland, even if this meant starving the global empire of adequate resources for its defence. Hence the decision, taken when British rearmament began in earnest in 1936, to allocate the lion’s share of resources to the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy. Britain’s offensive capability remained dangerously underdeveloped. Even by 1939 only two fully equipped divisions were available immediately to fight in Europe; Bomber Command, the much-vaunted striking arm of the RAF, had fewer than 500 aircraft when war broke out, incapable of reaching very far into German territory. British preparations had been based on the narrow objective of avoiding defeat and conquest. This was scarcely the state of mind necessary to conduct a major land campaign in Europe.

The fundamental ambiguity at the heart of British military preparations explains the flawed response to the demands of coalition warfare. There was little the British could do to help Poland. Assistance to France was compromised by the small scale of the army Britain sent, and by an unwillingness to commit to the land campaign aircraft that had been assigned to Britain’s own defence. The aircraft that were sent out to make up the British Advanced Air
Striking Force (an organization only a little larger than the Polish Air Force, which German aviators had snuffed out in a few days) were rendered ineffective by the poor state of Allied communications and the French insistence that aircraft fight a short-range, army co-operation role to which the RAF had given almost no serious thought.

When the attack on France came on 10 May 1940, these deficiencies were soon exposed. There was often a lapse of four or five hours between sighting a fleeting battlefield target and the despatch of instructions for aircraft to attack it. British bombers in France (most of them light Battle and Blenheim aircraft, which were utterly outclassed in daylight combat) had to wait for orders to be routed from France, through Bomber Command headquarters near London, and back again to France.
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Co-operation with the army was rudimentary. While 380 dive-bombers gave close air support to advancing German troops, often reacting within minutes of a radioed request, the RAF managed between September 1939 and March 1940 to train a mere seven pilots in dive-bombing techniques, who between them dropped just 56 bombs in practice. When the French asked the RAF what Bomber Command could do to interrupt the remorseless progress of German forces, they were told that the most they could expect was the temporary disruption of three railway lines.
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The only serious contribution made by the RAF came with the deployment of squadrons of Hurricane fighters,
which had been intended for Britain’s own defence. As the battle in France deepened during May 1940, more and more Hurricanes had to be sent in piecemeal to stem the haemorrhage of Allied air power. Without the home advantages of prepared bases and radar warning, fighter losses were high. In May and June, 477 fighters were destroyed and 284 pilots killed, rates of loss not far short of those later in the summer. So severe was the drain on home defence that the commander-in-chief of Fighter Command, Sir Hugh Dowding, took the unprecedented step of talking directly to the War Cabinet on 15 May to plead for restraint. ‘I saw my resources slipping away,’ he later wrote, ‘like sand in an hourglass.’
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The politicians only half responded to his argument. Churchill insisted on sending further Hurricanes, but the French got none of the coveted high-performance Spitfires. Only when British forces were pinned back on Dunkirk and faced with annihilation in the last week of May did the RAF get drawn into the battle in strength. Flying from bases in southern Britain, at the limit of their range, they established brief periods of air superiority over the beaches, and inflicted 132 aircraft losses on the German Air Force in three days of fighting. Spitfires were used in this later phase of the battle in France, but 155 of them were lost, 65 of them in accidents as aircrew tried to master the new equipment. The Dunkirk evacuation was the starting point of almost a year of continuous air combat for the defence of Britain.
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The contest that Britain faced after Dunkirk was the war Britain had expected. It was in effect to be a ‘Chamberlain war’, for this was the kind of defensive conflict he had anticipated and prepared for in the 1930s. But it was not a campaign that Chamberlain was destined to lead. His government had fallen on 10 May, following widespread criticism of its spiritless and ineffectual leadership. On the day that German forces invaded France and the Low Countries, he was succeeded by Winston Churchill. Here was a man whose instincts were flamboyantly bellicose. He relished the conflict in France (Churchill ‘likes war’ Lloyd George once remarked, not altogether charitably). He was shocked at the defeat of France, and promised French leaders that he would ‘fight on for ever and ever and ever’. It was Churchill who on 18 June 1940 memorably defined the coming contest when he told the House of Commons that ‘the Battle of France is over. I expect the battle of Britain is about to begin.’
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If this speech inspired many, it alienated others. Churchill was not the conductor of a well-drilled orchestra playing in defiant unison. Defeat in Europe in May left British strategy in tatters. Under such dangerous circumstances it is perhaps unsurprising that arguments should surface for a compromise peace with Hitler. The critical turning-point came at the end of May. Prompted by feelers from the Italian ambassador in London, the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, asked the Cabinet to consider the
possibility that Britain might have to seek a peace. Halifax was repelled by Churchill’s rhetorical style and his
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zest for fighting to the death. After Cabinet on 27 May he complained that the prime minister ‘talked the most dreadful rot’, and persisted in his effort to base British policy on what he termed ‘common sense and not bravado’.
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A tense meeting on 28 May left Halifax isolated. Churchill had no intention of ending his brief wartime premiership sullied by surrender. The government remained committed to the fight. Though appeasement might have seemed irresistible at such a moment, Chamberlain supported Churchill, a factor overlooked by the many later critics. This was of profound importance, for it brought to his side the bulk of the Conservative Party – many of whom distrusted Churchill as a renegade and a charlatan – together with the Liberal and Labour ranks in Parliament upon whose support Churchill’s choice as prime minister had rested. Churchill could now fight Chamberlain’s war.

That same day, 28 May, Churchill was asked to approve pre-invasion preparations to ship Britain’s national treasures and gold to safe keeping abroad, including the Coronation Chair. He scribbled on the letter: ‘I believe we shall make them rue the day they try to invade our island. No such discussion can be permitted.’
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The public mood was in the main with Churchill. A Home Intelligence report on 28 May revealed a popular conviction that ‘we shall
pull through in the end’; three days later the people were reportedly more bullish, displaying a ‘general calmness’ and a ‘new feeling of determination’.
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But the decision taken in late May to fight on did not still all appetite for peace. A scattered population of defeatists, ‘realists’ and fellow-travellers endorsed the idea of exploring the prospects for peace with Hitler. They included Basil Liddell Hart, the military strategist; ‘RAB’ Butler at the Foreign Office; the pacifist socialist Charles Roden Buxton; and an unlikely coupling of British fascists and communists, temporarily bound together by the German-Soviet Pact of August 1939. The peace party’s most powerful spokesman was David Lloyd George, Britain’s outstanding war leader in 1916–18. His interest in peace stemmed from an inexplicably myopic respect for Hitler (he once described him as ‘the George Washington of Germany’, and in autumn 1940 numbered Hitler ‘among the greatest leaders of men in history’). Around thirty MPs joined in urging Lloyd George to campaign for peace in June 1940. Churchill thought about inviting him to join the Cabinet, but was encouraged by colleagues to think again. Lloyd George did not want to join anyway. He preferred to wait ‘until Winston is bust’, and waited in vain.
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A great deal has been made of the so-called ‘peace party’, but its historical significance has been vastly inflated. Even Churchill was forced by circumstances to admit the possibility of defeat, though not surrender. Halifax was never in
favour of peace at any price, certainly not at a price that would compromise British sovereignty in any substantial way, and he soon came round to accept that continued belligerency was the only honourable course. The other appeasers were marginalized or ignored. There was still much evidence of the British stiff upper-lip. When the Chiefs of Staff Committee discussed the instructions to be issued to the civil population to prepare for invasion, it was decided that they should be asked to behave ‘cheerfully and bravely’. Women, the chiefs of staff declared, were of ‘best service’ keeping ‘their own home running for their own menfolk’.
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On 30 May Churchill was shown a minute circulated to officials at the Foreign Office by the Permanent Secretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan, asking them not to reveal a glimmer of the appalling news from France: ‘We may in our own minds face very unpleasant truths and possibilities, but we have no right to let our friends or acquaintances assume from a chance word or an attitude of depression the anxiety we may feel.’ At the foot Churchill added the single word ‘Good’.
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None the less, the decision to fight on brought weeks of fearfulness and uncertainty. Popular opinion fluctuated with the final crisis in France, but on 17 June, when news came of French surrender, Home Intelligence found only a mood of ‘gloomy apprehension’, more prominent among ‘the middle classes and the women’.
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There were mutterings picked up by Home Intelligence agents,
stationed surreptitiously in bars and cafés, that a Hitler victory might not be such a bad thing. ‘Many workers say about Hitler,’ ran a report in mid-June, ‘ “He won’t hurt us: it’s the bosses he’s after: we’ll probably be better off when he comes.”’ Later reports suggested that the lower middle classes were also vulnerable: ‘The whiter the collar, the less the assurance.’ But in general, morale reports showed a strengthening resolve across the weeks before the air battles began. While only 50 per cent of respondents in one opinion poll regarded fighting alone with confidence, 75 per cent of those asked wanted war to continue (84 per cent of men, but only 65 per cent of women).
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In the prevailing atmosphere there were daily scares about invasion or sabotage or espionage. These fears began right at the top. At the end of May the War Office, responding to intelligence information, began to prepare for a possible German invasion of Ireland. Thanks to the existence of the IRA, described by the Joint Intelligence Committee as ‘a very formidable body of revolutionists’, whose members were ‘violently anti-British and many of them pro-German’, Ireland was regarded as prime fifth column territory. The three services were warned to expect ‘a German descent upon Eire, in conjunction with subservient members of the IRA’. Though the War Cabinet took the sensible view that southern England remained the key danger-spot, the possibility of diversionary action in Ireland, Scotland or Wales, where it was felt that the Germans
could exploit local ethnic grievances along ‘Sudeten’ lines, remained very much alive.
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