The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (327 page)

RAF ground crews worked heroically, but before new craters could be filled in, a second flight of raiders would arrive. By dusk all British communications were paralyzed, and when the operations rooms were reduced to ruins, the whole ground-control system failed. One by one the advanced fighting fields were abandoned. And on the tenth day of the new Nazi offensive, a dozen Ju 88s slipped through Britain’s fighter protection and hit the Vickers factory near Weybridge, destroying the works and inflicting heavy casualties. The output of Wellington bombers dropped from ninety a week to four.
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Minister of Information Duff Cooper told No. 10 that British morale was “extremely high,” but the public did not know what its leaders knew. Fighter Command was in crisis. Under Beaverbrook, British factories were producing 115 or more new fighters each week—twice as many as the Germans—but the Nazis were now shooting down more than that. Dowding’s aircraft reserve was shrinking. On the last two days of August, the Nazi attacks reached a crescendo with 2,795 sorties. Their primary targets continued to be No. 11 Group’s vital sector stations at Biggin Hill and
Kenley. By September 1 both were destroyed. Hangars, aircraft repair shops, operations buildings, communication grids—all were leveled. Of No. 11 Group’s seven major airfields, six had been demolished and the five advanced airfields were hors de combat. Still, Churchill and Park conferred on the first and agreed that the Germans had reached their maximum effectiveness and “could not stand the strain much longer as far as an air offensive is concerned.”
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Incredibly, the German high command didn’t grasp the implications of the Luftwaffe’s successes. An exception was
Generalfeldmarschall
Fedor von Bock, one of the Wehrmacht’s highest-ranking officers. Bock realized that the tide of battle had shifted; while preparing to move his army-group headquarters from France to Poland, he tried to impress upon his commander in chief, Walther von Brauchitsch, the importance of the shift. Finding von Brauchitsch uncommunicative, Bock insisted that for the first time in the battle, the Luftwaffe was making some real headway.

Every day now the Germans were coming in larger numbers and they were threatening Britain’s inner defenses. When, after a visit to Fighter Command headquarters at Stanmore, Churchill dined at Chequers with Dowding, Lindemann, and Gort, the enemy bombed Great Missenden, just four miles away.

By the first week in September, the RAF was in desperate straits. Dowding’s pilots were no longer permitted to pursue enemy aircraft out over the Channel. Because he lacked rested and refitted squadrons, he could no longer rotate them. In just two weeks he had lost 230 pilots, killed and wounded—25 percent of his pilots. At that rate, in another week Fighter Command would cease to be a disciplined fighting force. The entire air-defense system of southeast England was in danger of destruction. Already the Luftwaffe could very nearly do what it pleased over the area that Sea Lion had targeted for invasion. “If what Göring wanted was air superiority over southeast England for the invasion,” Deighton writes, “then by 1 September it was almost his.” Air Marshal Park wrote that “an almost complete disorganization made the control of our fighter squadrons completely difficult…. Had the enemy continued his heavy attacks (against fields and the control system)… the fighter defenses of London would have been in a perilous state.” Group captain Peter Townsend believed that “on 6th September victory was in the Luftwaffe’s grasp.” On September 7, he said, Wehrmacht divisions, panzers, and artillery “could have begun massive landings on British soil.”
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But the key event determining the outcome of the air battle had taken place on the night of August 23–24. It was a matter of chance. A few of 170 German Heinkels that had been ordered to bomb oil installations at Thames Haven and Rochester became lost. Before turning for home, they jettisoned
their bombs. As it happened, the lost raiders were over London. Fleeing homeward, they left behind raging fires in Bethnal Green and East Ham.
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This was an error Hitler could not countenance. He had issued a directive to the Luftwaffe: “Attacks against the London area and terror attacks are reserved for the Führer’s decision.” This was a political rather than a strictly military decree. He was still hoping to bring Churchill to the conference table.
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Churchill saw his chance. A month earlier he had sought from the Air Ministry a guarantee that were the Germans to bomb residential areas of London, Bomber Command would be ready “to return the compliment the next day against Berlin.” The night following the errant German attack on London—August 25—eighty-one twin-engine Wellingtons and Hampdens carried the war to the heart of the Reich. Berlin was covered with dense cloud; only half the bombers found it. Railroad yards and utilities were the targets. Damage was slight. Ten German men were killed by a bomb that fell near the Görlitzer railroad station, and the Siemens electrical works suffered a temporary loss of production. Unable to locate their targets, many of the British pilots brought their planes home still fully loaded with bombs.
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The following morning Churchill sent a memo to the Chiefs of Air Staff: “Now that they have begun to molest the capital, I want you to hit them hard, and Berlin is the place to hit them.”
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The British had been targeting German military and industrial targets since May—sporadic raids over the Kiel Canal, Rhine River shipping, railroad junctions. But until that Sunday night, no bomb had fallen on the capital of the Reich. William L. Shirer wrote in his diary: “The Berliners are stunned. They did not think it could ever happen. When the war began, Göring had assured them that it couldn’t…. They believed him. Their disillusionment today is all the greater. You have to see their faces to believe it…. For the first time the war has been brought home to them.”
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The club-footed Nazi propaganda minister and former so-called journalist Dr. Paul Joseph Goebbels ordered German newspapers to run the headline E
IGER
E
NGLISCHER
A
GRIFF
(Cowardly British Attack). The bombers came again on August 28 and again the following night, and after the third raid, the headlines in the Nazi press screamed, E
NGLISCHE
L
UFTPIRATEN ÜBER
B
ERLIN
! (English Air Pirates over Berlin!)
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Bombing cities was still an issue in 1940. Both the Hague and the Geneva Conventions—which the Reich was pledged to support—outlawed indiscriminate assaults on peaceful civilians. In May, when a flight of Heinkels had mistakenly killed nearly a hundred German women and children in the old university city of Freiburg im Breisgau, the Germans had blamed it on the RAF. A Nazi communiqué had reported it as an “enemy attack.” Goebbels condemned it as the
“Kindermord in Freiburg”
(the “murder of
the innocents in Freiburg”), and the British traitor Lord Haw-Haw had denounced it as a “perfectly substantiated atrocity.”
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Granting London immunity had never been popular in the Luftwaffe. As the autumn of 1940 approached and with no victory in the skies over England, Göring repeatedly asked Hitler to reconsider. Discontent was particularly keen among German fighter pilots. In his postwar memoirs, Adolph Galland—then a Luftwaffe major and fighter pilot, later a general—described London as a target “of exceptional military importance, as the brain and nerve center of the British High Command, as a port, and as a center for armament and distribution.” He wrote, “We fighter pilots, discouraged by a task which was beyond our strength, were looking forward impatiently and excitedly to the start of the bomber attacks.”
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So was Göring, who, unaware of how much damage he had inflicted on the RAF, argued that a strategic shift from fighters over Dover to bombers over London might bring about the hoped-for peace conference, and preserve the Luftwaffe’s reputation in the bargain. Göring, Shirer later wrote, made a mistake “comparable in its consequences to Hitler’s calling off the armored attack on Dunkirk on May 24.” Admiral Raeder, too, championed terror attacks against London, in part as a means to preserve his navy, which he believed would be destroyed in an invasion attempt. If the Luftwaffe and the threat of invasion could not force Churchill to the conference table, perhaps a panicked London citizenry might do so. On August 31 Hitler approved massed raids—by day and night—against the London docks. They were to begin in a week.
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On September 4 Hitler delivered a withering attack on the British leadership in Berlin’s
Sportpalast,
a winter sports arena and the largest meeting hall in the capital. Addressing an audience of social workers and nurses, he dismissed Minister of Information Duff Cooper as a
“Krampfhenne”
(a Bavarian word for “a nervous old hen”), and said, “The babbling of Mr. Churchill or Mr. Eden—reverence for old age forbids the mention of Mr. Chamberlain—doesn’t mean a thing to the German people. At best, it makes them laugh.” He then took up the bombings. “Mr. Churchill,” he said, “is demonstrating his new brain child, the night air raid.” Hitler said he had believed that such madness would be stopped, but “Herr Churchill took that for a sign of weakness.” Now he would learn better: “We will
raze
their cities to the ground!” He shouted, “The hour will come when one of us will break, and it will not be National Socialist Germany!” The women leapt to their feet, joyfully shouting, “Never!
Never!
”

Hitler knew that the British were wondering when his invasion would begin. He said, “In England they’re filled with curiosity and keep asking ‘Why doesn’t he come?’ Be calm, he’s coming! Be calm, he’s coming!”
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Yet to those who knew the Führer and his byzantine court, there was an
air of uncertainty about the Reich’s intentions. After listening to Hitler’s speech, Count Ciano was baffled. Something about it was not quite right. He wrote in his diary that Hitler seemed “unaccountably nervous.”
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He was. He had conquered France in six weeks. Now, almost twelve weeks after the French surrender, the English—their army weak but rebuilding, their navy spread thin, their air force down on one knee—had fought him to a standstill. The strategic shift to massed bombings was his last option. If it worked, he would not need to invade England. But on that account, time was not on his side. Churchill understood that there existed one condition among many necessary, though not sufficient, for a successful invasion of England, a circumstance over which nobody had any control and that defied accurate prediction. To launch an invasion, according to the Joint Intelligence Committee, the Germans were dependent upon “a calm sea and restricted visibility.” The Channel weather in autumn, when it deteriorated into “equinoctial gales” (as Churchill called them) could prove England’s most steadfast ally. The North Sea in autumn was no place for flat-bottomed river barges made top-heavy by troops, artillery, and tanks. In winter it was even worse, and each day that passed brought winter one day closer. That was reassuring; that it was still only early September was not.
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O
n September 6, the Joint Intelligence Committee pored over a sheaf of reports, Enigma decrypts, and aerial photographs. The evidence before them seemed compelling. Enigma decrypts reported that all German army leave had been stopped; maps of English coastal areas had been issued to German officers in Normandy; the transfer of dive-bombers from Norway to France was complete; aerial photographs showed a “large-scale and disciplined” massing of barges (
Sturmboote
) in the Channel ports. Forty-eight hours after that moon and tide, the reports concluded, conditions would be “particularly favorable” for enemy landings. Warning of the “large-scale and disciplined” movement of troop transports toward forward bases on the Channel, the committee concluded that the last enemy preparations were complete. The next afternoon, the seventh, the director of military intelligence told the Chiefs of Staff that the invasion was imminent. At Bletchley Park the Naval Intelligence Section concluded that the landings might begin the following day. The chiefs therefore ordered all defense forces in the United Kingdom to “stand by at immediate notice.” The Air Ministry issued an “Invasion Alert No. 1” to all RAF commands, signaling the expectation that the Germans could be expected within the next twenty-four hours.
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Late on the cloudless afternoon of Saturday, September 7, Hermann Göring and Albert Kesselring stood with their staffs on the cliffs of Cap Blanc Nez, opposite the White Cliffs of Dover, and watched their huge formation of
Luftflotten,
one thousand aircraft, a third of them bombers, cross the Channel and head for London. It was an awesome spectacle. The enormous armada seemed to shut out the sun and rose nearly two miles high.
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