The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (326 page)

British RDF (radar) baffled the enemy. Picking up its signals, German airmen reported British radio stations with special installations. Nazi intelligence decided it was a communication system linking RAF pilots with ground controllers, and concluded, on August 7, that “as the British fighters are controlled from the ground by radio-telephone, their forces are tied to their respective ground stations and are therefore restricted in mobility,” which, had it been true, would have meant that resistance to mass German attacks was limited to local fighters.
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The commander of the Luftwaffe Signals Service, who was among the few Germans who understood the role of radar, urged that an attack on the RDF stations be given priority. A limited attempt on them, made on the day before the first major assault on the British mainland, was ineffective. At Dover, the Germans rocked a radar pylon, but the 360-foot-tall lattice masts were almost impossible to hit; returning after an attempt to destroy four of them, the pilots reported total failure. Göring assumed that the British electronic gear and crews were deep underground and hence safe. (In fact they were in flimsy shacks beneath the towers.) He issued the
order: “It is doubtful whether there is any point in continuing the attacks on radar sites, in view of the fact that not one of those attacked has so far been put out of action.”
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Nevertheless, this was still the mighty Luftwaffe, and its huge fleets of superb aircraft outnumbered the defenders by two to one. After the
Kanalkampf,
they completed plans for
Adlertag
(Eagle Day), the launch of
Adlerangriff
(Eagle Attack). The Führer, unaware that Göring’s figures were inflated, authorized him to open
Adlerangriff.
Depending on the weather and other imponderables, the
Führerordnung (Führer Directive)
decreed,
Adlertag
could fall as early as August 5. British intelligence officers in Bletchley Park relayed the decision to Churchill, and Dowding issued an Order of the Day to his men: “The Battle of Britain is about to begin. Members of the Royal Air Force, the fate of generations lies in your hands.”

On August 6, the Reichsmarschall set Eagle Day for August 10, a Saturday. The weather forced him to reschedule it for the following Tuesday, when heavy skies were expected to clear. They did, and that morning, 74 twin-engine Dorniers (which could carry 2,200 pounds of bombs) and 50 Bf 109s took off. The clouds returned; Göring issued a recall order. That afternoon, the clouds rolled away and the offensive was officially on, targeting a 150-mile arc of southern England from the Thames estuary to Southampton. Commanding it was Göring’s ablest subordinate,
Feldmarschall
Albert Kesselring, commander of
Luftflotte 2
. Kesselring’s men called him “Smiling Albert” (he liked to flash his perfect enamels). He had much to smile about. Soon after daybreak every RAF radar tower in the southeast was sending urgent warnings to Dowding’s headquarters.
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Among those awaiting the onslaught were a dozen American war correspondents on the cliffs of Dover, including H. R. Knickerbocker, Edward Murrow, Helen Kirkpatrick, Quentin Reynolds, Whitelaw Reid, Virginia Cowles, Eric Sevareid, and Vincent Sheean. Their mood was fatalistic. Among them, Sheean wrote, a “sense of inevitable tragedy had grown heavy.” Some had been covering the spread of global conflict since the Japanese seizure of Manchuria in 1931. The Reich seemed invincible. They heard the familiar hum of the desynchronized Messerschmitts, Heinkels—the workhorses of the Luftwaffe, with a range of 1,250 miles and a bomb load capacity of 5,500 pounds—and Dorniers, which grew to a roar as the glittering wings of the great Nazi armada emerged from the dazzling sun-drenched mist over the Channel and approached a coast that had not seen an invader in nine centuries. Experience had taught the newsmen to expect another defeat for democracy.
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And then, Sheean wrote, from RAF fields inland, they saw twenty-one squadrons—more than 300 aircraft—of challenging Spitfires rising “like larks, glittering against the sun,” maneuvering for position and attack.
They heard the “zoom of one fighter diving over another… the rattle of machine-gun fire, the streak of smoke of a plane plummeting to earth, and the long seesaw descent of the wounded fighter falling from the clouds beneath his shining white parachute.” Sheean and his companions no doubt saw a great flotilla of RAF fighters, but they could not have all been Spitfires. On any given day, No. 11 and 12 Groups could count only about 250 operational Spitfires, and around 320 Hurricanes.
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The scenes were repeated all that day and all week along the southern coast. Sheean wrote: “In every such battle I saw, the English had the best of it, and in every such battle they were greatly outnumbered.” Repeatedly “five or six fighters would engage twenty or thirty Germans…. I saw it happen not once but many times.” He remembered the Spaniards and the Czechs and wrote: “At Dover the first sharp thrust of hope penetrated our gloom. The battles over the cliffs proved that British could and would fight for their own freedom, if for nothing else, and that they would do so against colossal odds…. The flash of the Spitfire’s wing, then, through the misty glare of the summer sky, was the first flash of a sharpened sword; they
would
fight, they
would
hold out.”
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T
he battle reached its peak between August 24 and September 6, which became known to Fighter Command as the critical period. In the five weeks of fighting between July 10 and August 13, Luftwaffe tactics had been tested by Dowding’s strategy. His orders to his pilots to avoid Messerschmitts, to flee from them if necessary and go after the German bombers, had paid off. Nazi fighters flying escort had been at a disadvantage; enemy bomber losses had continued to be high; and, far more important, the RAF continued to be a force in being, warding off the threat of invasion.

With Eagle Day this pattern changed. Kesselring massed a great concentration of Messerschmitts in the Pas de Calais, in northern France. He meant to wipe out the sector airfields of Sir Keith Park’s 11 Group—London’s air defenses—leaving the capital naked. During this time Churchill repeatedly visited RAF bases at Stanmar, Uxbridge, Dover, and Ramsgate. These were the castle gates, from which its last defenders sallied forth, behind which all England waited. Colville noted that what Churchill saw at the bases “brought the war home to him.” The Germans, in fact, had brought the war to his home.
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On Thursday, August 15, the Germans decided to test RAF Fighter Command’s strength by attacking it from all sides simultaneously. For the first time, Luftflotte 5 (Air Fleet 5), in Norway and Denmark, was assigned
a major role, to sweep into northern England near Tyneside and seek out industrial targets near Newcastle and Bomber Command airfields.
Luftflotte 5
sent one hundred bombers escorted by forty twin-engine Bf 110s. The distance from Denmark precluded the possibility of using single-engine Bf 109s to protect the bombers. The Germans paid dearly for their lack of fighter cover. Days earlier, Dowding had moved eighty Spitfire pilots and their planes north, to give both a needed rest. They rose to meet the attackers. The Germans lost sixteen Heinkels and six JU-88s—one-fifth of their bombers—and seven Bf 110s. There were no British losses. Throughout the Luftwaffe, that day became known as
der schwarze Donnerstag:
Black Thursday.
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In the south, however, that day’s fighting was very different. Here the airfields of No. 11 Group were the targets. In Essex and Kent, airfields at Martlesham, Eastchurch, and Hawkinge were hit; then the enemy attacked two aircraft factories near Rochester and fighter fields at Portland, Middle Wallop, West Malling, and Croydon. Both sides suffered the highest losses for any single day. Before dusk the Germans had flown an unprecedented 1,786 sorties, and the total losses for both sides—109 aircraft—were the highest for any single day of the battle thus far.

Churchill followed the day’s fighting from No. 11 Group headquarters at Uxbridge, and he left clearly affected. Climbing into his limousine with Ismay, he said, “Don’t speak to me. I’m too moved.” His lips were trembling. They rode in silence for a few minutes. Then Churchill turned to Ismay and said something that “burned into” Ismay’s mind, so much so that he went home that night and repeated the words to his wife.
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Five days later, when the most difficult and dangerous period in the battle was about to begin, Churchill paused during a long address to the House of Commons on the overall war situation, and delivered his tribute to the RAF:

Then, he spoke the words that had so moved Ismay: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” Those words have become immortal, yet they were but a prelude to Churchill’s main point, the RAF bombing campaign:

Bomber Command had more than six hundred medium and light bombers stationed on airfields north of London. Churchill did not intend to restrain them much longer.

On Friday the sixteenth, Kesselring continued to press the attack.
Luftflotte 5
was grounded—indeed, for the remainder of the battle—but the Germans put up more than 1,700 sorties, raiding airfields almost at will and bombing the hangars at Brize Norton flight-training school. That Sunday the Germans lost seventy-one aircraft, nearly 10 percent of those committed. Nevertheless, after a day’s lull the enemy again arrived in force, undiscouraged by the costs of the offensive.
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Göring summoned his three
Luftflotten
commanders to Karinhall and ordered them to go after aircraft factories and steel mills as “bottleneck” targets. Four days later he summoned them again to announce: “We have reached the decisive period of the air war against England.” As in past conferences he was astonishingly ill-informed. He grossly underestimated the significance of Dowding’s radar chain, thus assuring its continued immunity, and his summation of Luftwaffe accomplishments in the battle was wildly unrealistic.
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Nevertheless, Fighter Command’s situation was critical. Unlike the enemy, Britain had no bottomless reserve of trained pilots. RAF bomber pilots were being retrained to fly Spitfires and Hurricanes. In a single week Dowding had lost 80 percent of his squadron commanders. One of their replacements had never even flown a Hurricane, yet after just three landings and three takeoffs, he led his men into battle. Often pilots had logged no more than ten hours of flight before sighting an enemy fighter. In August, Fighter Command’s operational training period was cut from six months to two weeks. Some new pilots had never fired their guns. Some were boys in their teens.
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The RAF pilots pushed the limits of human endurance, sleeping in their
cockpits between sorties, “undaunted by odds,” in Churchill’s words, “unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger.” On the final day of August, accompanied by Clemmie, Pamela, and Colville, he drove to Uxbridge, the frenzied headquarters of Sir Keith Park’s No. 11 Group, controlling all the fighter squadrons in southeastern England. The rest of his party took walks in the countryside, but he wanted to talk to the airmen, look into their faces, and hear their stories. That evening Colville wrote: “The P.M. was deeply moved by what he saw this afternoon at Uxbridge.”
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Park could replace his pilots but not his airfields. If the Germans knocked them out by bombing and strafing, British fighters could neither take off nor land; the Nazis would then command the air over southeast England, and Hitler’s invasion could begin. To protect No. 11 Group’s fields, Park told his pilots to engage the enemy as far out as possible, but when the Germans greatly increased the proportion of fighters to bombers, the Spitfires and Hurricanes of No. 12 Group had to stay behind to provide No. 11 Group fields with air cover, and there weren’t enough of them. The enemy onslaught was too great. Kesselring was putting up over a thousand sorties a day. Charging in from the sea each morning at an altitude too low for British guns, Bf 109s and 110s would sweep the RAF fields in strafing attacks, wrecking repair shops, destroying hangars, ripping apart grounded planes, leveling operations buildings, and leaving airstrips unfit for landing and taking off. The Bf 110s, armed with 2,200-pound bombs, were especially deadly. Once the RAF was shot out of the sky and its airfields smashed, Göring planned on sending his Bf 110s far inland in search of military and industrial targets.