The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (324 page)

I
n England the Royal Navy was the Senior Service. The War Office deferred to the Admiralty, the oldest of England’s war ministries, founded during the reign of Henry VIII. Officers in the British army were respected and often distinguished, though army commands scattered throughout the empire depended upon the navy for supply and reinforcements. The various far-flung components of the British Empire were tethered together, nurtured, and protected by the Royal Navy. Cruisers and destroyers at Gibraltar protected the western end of the Mediterranean, while the fleet at Alexandria did likewise for the central and eastern Mediterranean. The Home Fleet, from its main anchorage at Scapa Flow, almost five hundred miles north of London, in far northern Scotland, had been charged by the Admiralty with protecting Atlantic merchant shipping and, most important, protecting the Home Island much as escort squadrons protect an aircraft carrier. Destroyers would play a key role in contesting a German invasion. The British began the war with more than eighty destroyers available for deployment in the North Sea and around the Home Island, and a dozen or more for North Atlantic operations. They were fast, could weave and shoot their way through an invasion armada at speeds of thirty-five miles an hour, and were vital to the blockade of Germany and to Britain’s survival. But since January, two dozen had been sunk by U-boats, German mines, and the Luftwaffe. The registry of Royal Navy destroyers might have been larger but for the Chamberlain government’s decision in 1938 to stop constructing ships, as a means to economize. That was why Churchill sought destroyers from Roosevelt.

By the end of June, the Home Fleet had stationed forty destroyers, several cruisers, and two battle cruisers in ports ranging from Aberdeen and Rosyth in Scotland, to Hull and Yarmouth down the coast, to Dover and Ramsgate in the southeast of England. In the south and southwest, warships were stationed in Portsmouth, Portland, Plymouth, Falmouth, Cardiff, and Swansea. The big ships were supported by more than 900 anti-submarine trawlers, gunboats, minesweepers, motor torpedo boats, minelayers, anti-aircraft ships, and cutters. Almost 200 corvettes—1,000-ton, 200-foot-long gunboats that carried depth charges—were available to escort Atlantic convoys into home waters or, if need be, to help repel an invasion. Three aircraft carriers were available for island defense; the Germans had no carriers. The Royal Navy would charge into the Channel if
the Germans came, and do so under the protective fire of 150 six-inch naval guns sited on bluffs along the Channel coast. Except for submarines, the portion of the Home Fleet that
remained
at Scapa Flow—a “fleet in being”—was larger than the entire German navy. Of Hitler’s eighty U-boats, the fifty assigned to the blockade of Britain posed a mortal threat, but only if they kept up the hunt for British merchant shipping on the high seas and the Northwest Approaches to Britain’s ports. Churchill expected Hitler to throw a dozen or two of his U-boats into the invasion. Even if they were to inflict pain on British warships, the Royal Navy and any surviving RAF fighters and bombers would hunt them to extinction in the narrow Channel. Hence Churchill’s confidence in his navy. Britannia still ruled the waves, and Hitler had to ride them to get to England.

Germany had lost its few colonies in 1918, and with them the imperative for a worldwide navy. Except for U-boat commanders—feared and respected by the British, glorified in Germany—German military glory was reserved for German soldiers, and if Göring had his way, German airmen. German naval officers were considered social inferiors in Germany; they lacked the self-assurance essential to military aggression. Thus, when the Führer issued the first reluctant order to “prepare a landing operation against England and if necessary carry it out,” and assigned the task of ferrying the Wehrmacht across the Channel to his admirals on the Bendlerstrasse, the response there was neither confident nor ardent, and for sound reasons. Unless the Luftwaffe hobbled the British Home Fleet along with British fighter planes and British bombers, any success in the daytime skies over southern England would be offset when the Royal Navy sailed forth—at night, as the invaders came on—to thwart the seaborne invasion.
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Destroying British ships was critical, and the British had a great many ships. The Germans had no large warships outside the Baltic (and had only four inside the Baltic) to counter the overwhelmingly superior numbers of Royal Navy destroyers and larger capital ships (cruisers, battle cruisers, and battleships). The German navy had begun the war with only twenty-one destroyers and had paid dearly for its April success in Norway, where ten destroyers were sunk or scuttled. Thus, when the subject of supporting an invasion of England was raised, the commander in chief of the German navy,
Grossadmiral
Erich Raeder, submitted a confidential report to the Führer listing his objections to an invasion. Raeder concluded: “The C. in C., Navy cannot for his part advocate an invasion of Britain as he did in the case of Norway.”
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The other German services were also wary. The Luftwaffe high command concluded that “a combined operation with a landing as its object must be rejected,” and Zossen curtly sent a memo that the army “is not concerning itself with the question of England. Considers execution impossible… General
Staff rejects the operation.” Nevertheless, Hitler persisted, as only he could, and in mid-July
Oberkommando des Heeres
(OKH), the army’s high command, drew up plans for an operation encoded
Seelöwe,
or Sea Lion. It was an ambitious strategy, envisioning the landing of 90,000 troops in the first wave. By the third day, 160,000 reinforcements would be landed, to be followed by forty-one divisions, six of them panzers and two airborne. Each force had a specific objective; one would block off Devon and Cornwall, for example, while another cut off Wales. OKH opinion, swayed by Hitler’s iron will, reversed itself. The generals now expected the operation to last less than a month. In fact, they thought it would be easy.
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But the Führer’s naval staff was appalled by
Seelöwe,
for many of the same reasons Churchill was encouraged. Just putting the first wave ashore on so wide a front would require 1,722 barges, 1,161 motorboats, 471 tugs, and 155 transports. Raeder protested that this was self-evidently impossible; naval protection for so vast an armada, even if it could be assembled, would expose every warship and merchant ship the Reich possessed to the gunners of the Royal Navy. He proposed a landing on a much narrower front between Folkestone and Eastbourne with fewer troops, thus minimizing the risk to his fleet. The General Staff rejected that. In such an operation, Zossen argued, the German soldiers might be overwhelmed by defenders.

Actually, there was no need to reconcile differences between the Nazi services. Churchill had been right at Briare. The decisive moment—an air assault on England—was yet to come. The enemy could not try to ferry the Channel until his warplanes were absolute masters of the daytime skies over Britain. OKW realized it. In a paper for the Führer,
“Die Weiterführung des Krieges gegen England”
(“The Continuation of the War Against England”), Jodl noted that administering the deathblow, a landing on British shores, could “only be contemplated after Germany has achieved control of the air.”
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Before Hitler could invade England, he must first destroy the Royal Air Force and hobble the Royal Navy. Hermann Göring declared that the Luftwaffe had changed its mind; they could do it, he said, and do it easily.

I
n christening what would come to be known as the Battle of Britain, Churchill envisioned a mighty struggle on the beaches between infantrymen, masterminded by admirals and generals and supported by armor and sea power. Scarcely anyone gave thought to the challenges of aerial warfare. Professional airmen were an exception, of course, but all they knew for certain was that the aerial combat of 1914–1918—the duels between individuals piloting wood and fabric biplanes while listening to the wind in the wires—had been rendered obsolete by advancing technology. Clearly future combat would be far more complex. However, the most influential of their leaders between the wars—Giulio Douhet in Rome, Lord Trenchard in London, Billy Mitchell in Washington, and Hermann Göring in Berlin—had made the wrong assumption. They believed that victory would belong to the air forces which launched the fastest, most powerful bombing offensives. Thus the Luftwaffe had leveled Spanish cities, the Italians Ethiopian villages, the Japanese Chinese cities. There was, air ministries told their governments, no defense against a knockout bombardment from the sky.

Stanley Baldwin was speaking for them in November 1932 when, endorsing unilateral disarmament, he told Parliament that there was no defense against “the terror of the air.” In an uncharacteristically emotional speech, he had warned the House of Commons, and hence the country: “I think it well… for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can prevent him from being bombed. Whatever people tell him, the bomber will always get through. The only defence is offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.”

That dogma still held after the fall of France. Even Churchill believed that victory lay through offensive airpower. On July 8, he told Beaverbrook that the “one sure path” to victory lay in “bombing Germany into submission.” It was understood that the targets would be military. Baldwin’s terrible thesis of killing women and children aside, the war planners took aim at arms factories, power plants, steel mills, rail yards, and the like, not residential neighborhoods.
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Airpower had been crucial in the defeat of Poland, but after the fall of Warsaw, little thought had been given to ways of countering it. During the phony war, RAF strategists, following the dogma Douhet had set forth in his futuristic book,
The War of 19—,
had proposed sending fleets of bombers against industrial targets in the Ruhr. To their chagrin, His Majesty’s Government vetoed unprovoked daylight raids. Dropping propaganda leaflets over the Reich that promised destruction to Germans on the ground was approved, but even this went badly; none of the raiders found their targets, and the bombers, unescorted by fighters, suffered such heavy losses that the project was abandoned. On the night of May 16, with General Guderian’s panzers beyond Sedan, the British had sent one hundred bombers to pound industrial targets in the Ruhr. The RAF official history acknowledges that the bombardiers “achieved none of their objects.” The crews, unable to find a single target, had jettisoned their bomb loads and returned to England having accomplished nothing. That should have given
the air marshals pause. It didn’t; in the words of A. J. P. Taylor, they continued to believe that “bombing unsupported by land and sea forces could win a war.”
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Little thought had been given to providing bombers with fighter escorts, and for a valid reason: Both British and German fighter planes lacked the range to escort their bombers on the 1,000-mile round-trip journey to the other’s homeland. British and German fighter planes had a maximum range of between 300 and 400 miles—150 miles out, 150 miles home. They could remain in the air for about 90 minutes and could not reach the other side’s borders, let alone linger there in support of bombers. Nobody in Bomber Command had considered the possibility that Germany would defeat France and Belgium, capture their airfields—some just 100 miles from London—and park fleets of bombers, dive-bombers, and fighter planes on them. Although the senior ranks of the RAF were convinced in the late 1930s that Bomber Command was the key to victory, and that, by implication, fighter aircraft and other defenses had marginal roles to play, their faith in air offensives was not without heretics. In 1937 a cabinet minister, Sir Thomas Inskip, facing the hard fact that Nazi Germany was winning the bomber race, argued that it really didn’t matter. “The object of our Air Force,” he said, “is not an early knock-out blow but to prevent the Germans from knocking us out.” The RAF, in other words, didn’t have to win; it merely had to avoid defeat. For that, the RAF needed fighter planes. The Air Ministry, appalled at this heresy, vehemently disagreed, but HMG accepted Inskip’s recommendation, and it was Britain’s good luck that the senior member of the Air Council agreed with it.

He was Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding. In retrospect, “Stuffy” Dowding—as anointed by his fliers—is seen as the true hero of the Battle of Britain, though his contemporaries were slow to realize it. One reason lay in the nature of the man. He was a difficult man to like. Ever since Trafalgar, Britons had expected their military heroes to be Nelsons, and Dowding was far from that. Tall, frail, and abstemious, he was a bird-watching widower whose career had suffered from tactlessness, unorthodox views, and a remarkable lack of social graces. That he dabbled in spiritualism and was a vegetarian only augmented the perception of his flyboys that he was a strange duck. In the mid-1930s, his seniority—during the first war he had been ten years older than Germany’s air ace von Richthofen—entitled him to the RAF’s highest post, chief of air staff, but his fellow marshals denied him it. Instead they sidelined him, or so they thought, as head of Fighter Command. If the war was going to be won by aerial bombardment, the only outcome they foresaw, there would be little glory for fighters.
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Ignoring them and their strategy, Dowding pursued his own goals with quiet tenacity. In his headquarters in Bentley Priory, an eighteenth-century
Gothic mansion outside London, he organized Britain’s anti-aircraft defenses, inspected the balloon barrage that would encircle London when war came, presided over the RAF’s change from biplane fighters to metal monoplanes powered by the Rolls-Royce V-12 Merlin engines, pressed for all-weather runways at fighter fields, and took the first, historic steps toward military use of Radio Direction Finding (RDF), or radar, as the Americans later called it.

By July 1940, Dowding had about eight hundred operational Spitfire and Hurricane single-engine fighter planes. He arrayed them in four groups—two frontline and two in reserve. In reserve were No. 10 Group in the southwest of England, and No. 13 in northern England and Scotland. Six hundred Hurricanes and Spitfires went to the frontline groups, No. 12 in the midlands, and No. 11 Group north and south of London, roughly from Ipswich to the Isle of Wright, and most predominantly on the Kent promontory. This was the sector the German invasion barges would most likely target, either north of the Thames estuary, or on the south coast, just west of Dover, or in both places. Therefore, it was the sector Göring targeted. No. 11 Group had to be destroyed before an invasion could be launched, for No. 11 Group served as the shield over southeast England.

But radar was destined to be England’s greatest shield in the critical months ahead. Dowding had been one of its champions from the beginning. Before his promotion to Fighter Command, he had commanded RAF research and development, and while there, he had studied the RDF experiments of Robert Watson Watt, a scientist at the National Physical Laboratory. Watson Watt convinced Dowding and those around him that airplanes could reflect radio beams. Yet in his push for radar, conducted with utmost civility and professional aplomb, Dowding had put himself on the wrong side of Churchill’s good friend the Prof, Frederick Lindemann. For this, Dowding would later pay. Meanwhile, the Nazis knew something about radar technology but had entrusted development of it to their navy, seeing it as a reconnaissance device, and there it had languished.

Even before the war, Dowding had believed that radar could become a priceless defensive weapon. In 1937 he had ordered work begun along the country’s eastern and southern coasts on a chain of coastal RDF stations, a mix of low-level stations, with an effective range of about 50 miles, and high-level, with a range of about 120 miles. By the spring of 1940, Britain possessed a mesh of radio beams comprising, as one Englishmen later called it, an “invisible bastion” against hostile aircraft. Thankfully for the British, Hitler had prohibited spending on any technological research that he believed would not contribute to his objective of a swift victory; radar was one such technology. In July 1940, German technicians were not even sure of the purpose of all those tall towers along the British coast, although
many suspected that they were radar towers. Thus, the Luftwaffe began its campaign with an imperfect, at best, understanding of the towers.

Fifty radar stations scanned the skies from northern Scotland on around the Home Island to Wales. Most were located in the east and southeast, facing the North Sea and the English Channel, just twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest point. The outgoing radio signal was sent from wires fixed between two 360-foot towers; the return signal reached twin fixed receivers perched on 240-foot towers. In wooden sheds beneath the towers, technicians studying monitors would phone details on the range, direction, and size of advancing Nazi forces to the central operations room at Bentley Priory, where blue-shirted members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) plotted their progress on a huge table map, using croupier rakes to move colored counters representing RAF and German aircraft. RAF officers radioed orders to the nine No. 11 Group operations centers—“sector stations”—scattered throughout the southeast and around London. There, orders were radioed to commanders of fighter squadrons, who then led their pilots aloft. German pilots listened in confusion as British pilots received updates by radio, updates that guided them toward the German fighters. How, the Germans wondered, could someone on the ground know where distant German planes were and where they were heading? They did not know that they faced two enemies in the Battle of Britain: RAF airmen in the sky and British radar crews on the ground.
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It was now possible for the British to detect enemy aircraft approaching England’s shores while they were still as far as 120 miles away—thirty or more miles inside Belgium and France, and more than 70 miles beyond Calais—flying at altitudes of up to 30,000 feet. Although the RAF’s long-range radar could peer 30 or so miles into the Low Countries and France, the altitude at which radar could “see” enemy aircraft increased with distance, due to the curvature of the earth. At the extreme range of the radar, that altitude was almost 14,000 feet. Anything flying beneath that altitude, at that range, was “below” the radar. The calculus of time, distance, fighter aircraft climb rate, altitude, and speed became absolutely critical, and would determine the outcome of the air battle over the Channel and the Kent promontory. The controllers at RAF sector stations, once notified by Bentley Priory of a radar fix, needed about five minutes to radio orders to fighter squadrons, during which time the German fighters climbed a further 6,000 to 8,000 feet. A Spitfire needed almost fifteen minutes to reach 20,000 feet. The Germans, therefore, had a head start of around twenty minutes. The “service ceiling” (maximum operational altitude) for both German and British fighter planes was beyond 35,000 feet, for German medium bombers beyond 26,000 feet. Not only could the RDF operators not “see” below certain altitudes, but they were finding that aircraft at tremendous
altitudes disappeared from their sight. And all other RAF problems were compounded by the fact that a Luftwaffe squadron could cross the Channel at its narrowest point in five minutes.

A
rrayed against the RAF were three German
Luftflotten
(air fleets).
Luftflotte 3
was stationed in France,
Luftflotte 2
in Belgium, under the command of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring, and
Luftflotte 5
in Denmark and Norway. Because of the distances
Luftflotte 5
had to fly, and the short range of Germany’s best fighter, the Messerschmitt Bf 109, the bombers of
Luftflotte 5
would have to fly without escorts. The burden of carrying out the German attack would therefore fall on
Luftflotten 2
and
3,
with a combined strength of 750 bombers, 250 Stuka dive-bombers, 600 Bf 109 fighters, and 250 twin-engine Bf 110 fighters. Hermann Göring issued his first operational directive for the Battle of Britain on June 30. The first step, code-named
Kanalkampf,
would be a struggle for mastery of the sky over the Channel.

Over
the Channel is not where Hugh Dowding thought the fight would take place. He believed the fight, when it came, would take place over southeast England, in No. 11 Group’s zone. The Germans kept a fleet of small seaplanes—white and marked with the Red Cross—at the ready, to rescue Luftwaffe pilots shot down over the Channel. British pilots who found themselves in the sea could only hope that a Royal Navy cutter or a local fisherman might happen upon them before they drowned, and many drowned. Göring intended to lure Dowding’s Spitfires and Hurricanes out over the Channel by the approach, at high altitude, of his Bf 109s. Then, Stuka dive-bombers, Bf 109s armed with a single 550-pound bomb, and Bf 110s carrying a single 2,200-pound bomb, would scoot far under the fray to attack coastal shipping, Royal Navy warships, and the Channel ports. One million tons of merchant shipping, escorted by the Royal Navy, passed through the Channel each week. Although the Battle of Britain is recalled in the collective consciousness as the first great clash of air forces in history—and it was—the German objective was to attain supremacy over the
seas
by attaining supremacy in the air. This, Göring pledged, was to be accomplished in July, setting the stage for
“Adlerangriff”
(“Eagle Attack”), the weeklong climactic assault on England’s military installations, railroad junctions, port facilities, oil depots, and aircraft factories, with the destruction of Fighter Command’s coastal airfields the first objective.
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