The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (325 page)

Dowding believed England’s only hope of survival lay in radar and the RAF’s single-engine fighters. He ordered his pilots to avoid direct combat with German fighters whenever possible, diverting them instead to
shooting down enemy bombers stripped of their fighter escorts. Thus the RAF would keep its Spitfires and Hurricanes in the sky until the autumn’s worsening weather ruled out any possibility of a seaborne Nazi attack across the Channel.

T
he
Kanalkampf
began on July 10, when twenty Nazi medium bombers, escorted by some two dozen twin-engine Bf 110 fighters and forty Messerschmitt Bf 109s, attacked a convoy off Dover. They were challenged by two squadrons (twenty-four to thirty aircraft) of Hurricanes. That day’s dogfights resulted in thirteen German and seven RAF planes going down, a ratio that would hold for the next two months. Heavy fighting—and these first collisions of the RAF and Luftwaffe were deadly—continued for a full month, most of it over the Channel and the southern coast of England. It was a testing time for both air forces, a time of feints, of probes, of changing tactics.

And for the Royal Navy it was a time of terrible losses, from the air, from mines, from U-boats. Early in the month—before the main air battle opened on the tenth—the anti-aircraft ship
Foylebank
was sunk off Portland by a swarm of Stukas, with the loss of one hundred seventy of its three-hundred-man crew. A U-boat sank the destroyer
Whirlwind
south of Ireland, with forty-seven dead. On the eighteenth, two anti-submarine trawlers and a minesweeper were mauled; on the nineteenth and twenty-second, armed patrol trawlers were sunk by the Luftwaffe, with the loss of eleven men. Two British submarines went down off England’s shores that month, with the loss of seventy-seven crewmen. On the twenty-sixth, the destroyer
Boreas
was raked by the Luftwaffe, with twenty-one dead. The next day, the destroyer
Wren
was sunk off Dover and the destroyer
Codrington
was sunk off Suffolk, with thirty-six dead. So severe was the air attack on Dover that the Royal Navy pulled its destroyers from the port. This was exactly what Göring had set his sights on. On the twenty-ninth, the destroyer
Delight
was damaged in Portland harbor, with six dead. The remainder of the crew were rescued, but without a ship they were effectively out of action. The Royal Navy had more sailors killed in July than the RAF would lose pilots during the next two months. New sailors could be trained in a matter of weeks, but even the smallest gunboats took several months to build.

Although the Royal Navy was being hit hard, it had no intention of withdrawing from the Strait of Dover without a fight. But Dowding took a hard line against daylight patrols in support of merchantmen and their
naval escorts. Grudgingly, the Admiralty barred the strait to destroyers in daylight. The merchantmen were given a choice: either they reached Dover at dusk, in which case they would be escorted, or they entered the Channel naked.

At dawn on August 8, twenty colliers took the risk. As the colliers formed themselves into a convoy off the Isle of Wight—a daily occurrence—
Kriegsmarine
radio operators at Wissant, opposite Folkestone, listened as the colliers and their Royal Navy escorts exchanged messages in preparation for the run through the Channel. A Luftwaffe strike followed. When the RDF station on the Isle of Wight picked up a strong blip, signaling the approach of a heavy raid, more than thirty Spitfires and Hurricanes went aloft to form an umbrella over the convoy. However, General Johannes Fink, after luring the RAF fighters away with decoys, sent in Stukas, which sank five ships and damaged seven others in less than ten minutes. The survivors scattered, tried to reassemble, and were attacked again, this time by a strong force of Stukas escorted by Bf-109s. The RAF lost sixteen planes, the Germans about twice that number.

The attacks on shipping continued throughout August, with the toll of cargo ships, tankers, armed trawlers, and sailors mounting. Late in the month, the destroyer HMS
Esk
hit a mine and went down off the Dutch coast, taking almost 130 tars with her. The coordinated attacks of the Luftwaffe and
Kriegsmarine
were yielding results, but Göring did not pursue his objectives with alacrity. Rather than trade his replaceable planes for irreplaceable British ships, he preferred the glory that devolved upon the Luftwaffe when his pilots engaged the boys of the RAF head-on, high in the sky, where contrails wrote the story of each day’s heroics. German planes flying at 26,000 feet did not sink ships. The German army and navy high command, Churchill later wrote, “regretted the lower priority assigned by Göring to the naval targets, and were irked by the delays.”
¹⁹²

Britain regretted the
Kanalkampf
sinkings but could spare the ships. On Friday evening, August 9, Churchill dined at Chequers with Pound, Ismay, Eden, Dill, and General Sir Archibald Wavell. Even under the threat of invasion Churchill cherished plans for British offensives. After the women had retired to the drawing room, he spoke at length about de Gaulle’s plan for an invasion of French North Africa, supported by the Royal Navy, at Dakar. His view of that day’s losses in the strait was philosophical; England, he said, would have to continue using her coastal vessels as bait, though he acknowledged that “the surviving bait are getting a bit fed up.” Pound, also undiscouraged, said that they “even had a surplus of coasting vessels.”
¹⁹³

During July, the RAF lost 70 aircraft and the Luftwaffe more than 180, more than half of them bombers. On neither side was the damage mortal. British spirits were high. All Britain was aroused by the RAF’s
heroism. The young pilots knew that every Englishman’s eye was on them; they were, in Liddell Hart’s phrase, “the heroes of the nation.”
¹⁹⁴

Each day the German raids grew heavier and more frequent. Afterward, those who fought in the sky were haunted less by memories of fear—their engagements rarely lasted more than ten or fifteen minutes—than by the relentless tension and nerve-sapping fatigue. After a third or fourth sortie, men would fall asleep in their cockpits as soon as they had landed. Two or even three more sorties would lie ahead of them, and although they may have brushed death more than once, their weariness was so great that when dusk fell and darkness gathered, they had no immediate recollection of that day’s fighting, not even of their kills. They awoke to the BBC’s report of the latest score and, thus rejuvenated by the BBC and the miraculous powers of youth, would head for the village pub.
¹⁹⁵

All of England and all of Germany—indeed, the entire world—anxiously awaited each day’s scores, upon which the outcome of the battle, and the likelihood of invasion, seemed to hang. No. 10 echoed with hurrahs after the Air Ministry reported, typically: “The final figures for today’s fighting are 85 certain, 34 probable, 33 damaged. We lost 37 aircraft. 12 pilots being killed and 14 wounded.” After dinner on Saturday, July 13, Colville wrote in his diary: “Winston said the last four days have been the most glorious in the history of the RAF. Those days have been the test: the enemy had come and had lost five to one. We could now be confident of our superiority.”
¹⁹⁶

Churchill believed it. He was citing the figures he had been given, and no one had deliberately deceived him. No one was deliberately misleading the Führer either, but the numbers sent to his Luftwaffe commanders were very different. According to them, those days had been among the most glorious days in Luftwaffe history, and therefore clear evidence of
German
superiority. In retrospect it is clear that the communiqués being issued by both sides were quite worthless.

The RAF accepted their pilots’ claims of German trophies without question. However, British accounts of their own losses were always correct. That was not true of Luftwaffe reports. Announcing light casualties for the Luftwaffe and severe British losses was a mighty tonic for Reich morale, and Germans concluded that their airmen were winning the battle.

One problem with deception is that the deceivers deceive themselves. That is what happened to the Luftwaffe’s high command. “The Germans,” as Churchill told Parliament later in the war, had “become victims of their own lies.” The Germans had lost control of the battle’s vital statistics, which, by the beginning of August, had become simply incredible. At one point William L. Shirer observed dryly: “German figures of British losses have been rising all evening. First (they) announced 73 British planes shot
down against 14 German; then 79 to 14; finally at midnight 89 to 17. Actually, when I counted up the German figures as given out from time to time during the afternoon and evening, they totaled 111 for British losses. The Luftwaffe is lying so fast it isn’t consistent even by its own account.”
¹⁹⁷

At his country estate Göring studied these bogus figures, counted the number of British ships sunk, and declared that the
Kanalkampf
had been a stunning German victory. After the French capitulation, he had been told that the Royal Air Force had been reduced to fewer than two thousand frontline aircraft, of which between five hundred and six hundred were fighters. That was largely true—then. The
Reichsmarschall
had written the number on a pad of paper and pocketed it. In the fighting that followed, he subtracted the day’s losses, as reported to him, at the end of each day. In a Luftwaffe intelligence report dated August 16, he read that the British had lost 574 fighters since July, and that since their factories had provided them with no more than 300, they were left with about 430, of which perhaps 300 were serviceable.

As the remainder on Göring’s pad approached zero, he was confident that the invasion could soon begin. But German pilots knew that RAF squadrons were still defending Britain’s skies. The
Reichsmarschall
was confused. He would have despaired had he been shown the latest figures from Ministry of Aircraft Production in London. In July alone, British workers had produced 496 fighter planes, four times the monthly rate before Dunkirk. By the end of August, Beaverbrook made 1,081 fighters available, with another 500 undergoing repair. Dowding, it seemed, would end the battle in the skies over England with more fighters than he had at the beginning.
¹⁹⁸

Moreover, the wrecks of aircraft downed over Britain could be recovered by Beaverbrook’s Civilian Repair Organization. So efficient was the Beaver’s CRO that by the end of summer, one-third of Dowding’s fighters comprised parts from crashed Hurricanes and Spitfires. Indeed, through CRO ingenuity, crashed German planes flew again as RAF aircraft. On August 10, Colville noted in his diary: “Beaverbrook, he [Churchill] said, has genius, and, what is more, brutal ruthlessness.” Never in his life, “at the Ministry of Munitions or anywhere else,” had he seen “such startling results as Beaverbrook has produced.” After studying the Aircraft Production charts, General Sir Henry Pownell, who was with them, “agreed that there had never been such an achievement.” To be sure, it was a backbreaking job, and one from which the temperamental Canadian was forever resigning. Churchill wouldn’t allow it. On September 2, at the end of one memorandum to the prime minister, Beaverbrook lamented, “Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen.” Beneath it Churchill wrote, “I do.”
¹⁹⁹

An elated Göring put his statistics before Hitler, declaring that the RAF was helpless. The Reich, he said, had mastered the sky over
Der Bach
(the
German nickname for the Channel). Now, he proposed preparations for the second phase of the battle:
der Adlerangriff,
the Eagle Attack—Germany’s all-out air assault in England. Yet Dowding was noting in his journal that he still believed time was on England’s side “if we can only hold on.” That day his pilots claimed to have destroyed sixty German planes, and though he may have thought that figure suspect, he was impressed by the skill with which the young Englishwomen at his radar stations had interpreted the direction and ranges of the attackers. In the long run, if the RAF were to prevail, the performance of the WAAF would be crucial.
²⁰⁰

Luftwaffe airmen were as dangerous as ever. Their superiors were not. Officers of higher ranks committed the blunders and mismanagement within the Luftwaffe. The intelligence that Göring was receiving was appalling. The Germans had only a meager understanding of the British defense system; indeed, at the outset they didn’t know where key British airfields were. Operational maps did not distinguish between fields used by Fighter and Bomber Commands. The two factories where Rolls-Royce built the Merlin engines that powered Hurricanes and Spitfires were never bombed, though their location was no secret. Vital orders miscarried. Weather reports were unreliable. Staff work was slow and sloppy. Göring summoned his generals and ordered that under no circumstances should he be disturbed by subordinates in search of guidance. Worst of all, he adopted no coherent strategy, no priority of targets. After the war, Adolph Galland, one of his officers, wrote that “constantly changing orders betraying lack of purpose and obvious misjudgment of the situation by the Command and unjustified accusations had a most demoralizing effect on us fighter pilots.”
²⁰¹