Winds of War (65 page)

At the start one must compare the opposed air forces. Ninety-nine out of a hundred people, including Germans, still believe that a vast and power Luftwaffe was defeated by a valorous handful of Thermopylae defenders in RAF uniforms – or, in the words of the great phrasemaker, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” In fact, both Germany and England had about a thousand fighter planes when the contest began. Germany’s bombers, at least the newer ones, were heavier, longer-ranged, and more powerfully armed.

Hitler and Göring, of course, voiced the most extravagant boasts about the Luftwaffe, to induce the British to make peace. Churchill, on the other hand, played up the fact that England was outnumbered and alone, so as to pull the United States into the war. As a result, the contest took on a false aspect of David against Goliath.

British Advantages

Not only is the conventional picture distorted on the comparison of forces; it takes no account of the handicaps under which the Luftwaffe operated.

Most of the battle was fought over the British air bases. Every German pilot shot down over land was lost, either dead or a prisoner. But a downed British pilot, if he were unharmed, could soon take another plane into the skies. The German pilot had only a few minutes of flying time in which to do battle, for our fighters had a fuel limit of ninety minutes or so, most of which was consumed simply in getting to the scene and returning to base. The British pilot, as soon as he had climbed to combat altitude, could fight until he ran out of bullets or gas.

Because of our fighter planes’ short range, we could reach only the southeast corner of England. The Luftwaffe was like a tethered falcon, with London at the far end of the tether. The rest of the United Kingdom was fairly safe from air attack, because unescorted bombers ran a high risk of annihilation. The Royal Air Force could retire beyond range at will for rest and repair; and far beyond the firing line could keep fresh reserves and could rush the building of new planes.

Our fighters were further handicapped by orders to fly in close formation with the bombers, like destroyers screening battleships. No doubt this gave the bomber pilots a sense of security, but it hobbled the fighters. In air combat, “seek out and destroy” is the rule of rules. Fighter pilot teams should be free to roam the air space, spot the enemy, and strike first. Göring could never grasp this elementary point, though his fighter aces kept urging it on him. As our bomber losses climbed, he insisted more and more violently that the fighters should nursemaid the bombers, almost wingtip to wingtip. This seriously depressed pilot morale, already strained by prolonged combat and the death of many comrades.

Finally, the British in 1940 had one lucky scientific edge. They were first in the field with battle-worthy radar and the fighter control it made possible. They could follow our incoming flights and speed their fighters straight at us. No fuel was wasted in patrol, nor were forces dispersed in search. If not for this factor alone, the Luftwaffe fighter command might have won a quick knockout victory. For in the end the Luftwaffe did all but shoot the Royal Air Force out of the skies. Churchill himself – and he is not interested in praising the German effort – states that in September the battle tilted against his fighter command.

Our attack at that point shifted to strategic bombing of London. Churchill asserts that it was Göring’s fatal mistake. In truth, given the onset of bad weather, the provocative terror-bombing of our cities which required stern immediate retaliation, and the fact that invasion had to be tried before October 1 or not at all, the shift was almost mandatory. I discuss this point in detail in my day-by-day analysis of the campaign.

The Purpose of “Eagle Attack”

Adlerangriff, the Luftwaffe’s “Eagle Attack” on England in the summer of 1940, was essentially a peacemaking gesture. It was a limited effort, intended to convince the British that to prolong the war would serve no purpose. The effort had to be made before the attack on Russia, to protect our rear to the westward. That it failed was of course a tragedy for Germany, since we were condemned to carry on this climactic world battle on two fronts. Historians are curiously slow to realize that it was more tragic for England.

Germany, after all, entered the war with little to lose, but in 1939 England was the world’s first power. As a result of the war, though a supposed victor, she lost her world-girdling empire and shrank to the size of her home islands. Had the Adlerangriff induced her to make peace with Germany in 1940, that empire would almost surely still be hers, so it is hard to understand why the so-called Battle of Britain was her “finest hour.” Her pilots performed with dash and valor, like their German racial cousins. But England threw away her last chance to prolong her world role, linked to a vigorous rising continental power; after that, she allied herself with Bolshevism to crush that power, Europe’s last bastion against barbaric Asia; and she became as a result a weak withered satellite of the United States.

This debacle was all the work of the visionary adventurer Churchill, to whom the people had never before given supreme office. Churchill cast himself in the role of St. George saving the world from the horrible German dragon. He had the pen and the tongue to push this legend. He himself always believed it. The English believed it long enough to lose their empire, before becoming disillusioned and voting him out.

Hitler and England

Of all things. Hitler wanted no war with England. To this, I can personally testify. I do not need to, for it is written plainly in his turgid and propagandistic self-revelation,
Mein Kampf
. I saw his face at a staff conference on the day that England gave its strategically insane guarantee to Poland. I saw it again by chance in a corridor of the chancellery, on September 3, when contrary to Ribbentrop’s assurances, England marched. That time, it was the face of a shattered man. It is impossible to understand what happened in 1940 without having this fact about Adolf Hitler firmly in mind, for from the start of the war to the end, German strategy, German tactics, and German foreign policy were never anything but this man’s personal will.

No world-historical figure, when entering the scene, ever made his aims and his program clearer. By comparison, Alexander, Charles XII, and Napoleon were improvisers, moving where chance took them. In
Mein Kampf
, Hitler wrote in bombastic street-agitator language what he intended to do upon attaining power; and in the twelve years of his reign he did it. He wrote that the heart of German policy was to seize territory from Russia. That effort was the fulcrum of the Second World War, the sole goal of German arms. He also wrote that before this could be attempted, our traditional enemy France would have to be knocked out.

In discussing England, Hitler in
Mein Kampf
praises the valor of the race, its historical acumen, and its excellent imperial administration. Germany’s grand aim, he says, must be a Nordic racial alliance in which England maintains its sea empire, while Germany as its equal partner takes first place on the continent and acquires new soil in the east.

From this conception Hitler never departed. When Churchill spurned his many peace offers, he felt a frustrated fury, which he vented on the Jews of Europe, since he felt that British Jewry was influencing Churchill’s irrational policy. Almost to the hour of his suicide, Hitler hoped that England would see the light and would come to the only sensible arrangement of the world that was possible, short of abandoning one half to Bolshevism, and the other half to the dollar-obsessed Americans – the outcome the world must now live with.

In these considerations lies the secret of the failure of Adlerangriff; of our arrival at the coast, facing panicky England, without an operational plan for ending the war; and of the persistently unreal air about the Sea Lion plan, which, after elaborate and costly preparations, never came off. In the last analysis, the set-piece invasion did not sail because Hitler had no heart for beating England, and somehow our armed forces sensed this.

The Air Battle

The battle went in several stages. The Luftwaffe first attempted to make the British fight over the Channel, by attacking shipping. When the RAF would not come out and fight for the ships, Göring bombed the fighter bases. This forced the British fighter planes into the air. After knocking them about pretty badly, Göring – pushed by Hitler because of unconscionable British bombing of our civilians – sent in his bombers in the great Valhalla waves against London and other major cities, hoping to cause the people to depose Churchill and make peace. Hitler’s July 19 speech, though perhaps a little blustery in language, had set forth very generous terms. But all was in vain, and the October rains and fogs closed gray curtains on the weary stalemate in the air. So ended the “Battle of Britain,” with honors even, and England badly battered but gallantly hanging on.

Most military writers still blame Göring for our “defeat” over England. But this falls into the trap of the Churchillian legend that the Luftwaffe was beaten. That Germany’s sparkling air force could do no better than fight a draw, I do, however, lay to Göring’s charge. Despotic political control of an armed force, here as in Case Yellow, again meant amateurism in the saddle.

Hermann Göring was a complicated mixture of good and bad qualities. He was clever and decisive, and before he sank into stuporous luxury, he had the brutality to enforce the hardest decisions. All this was to the good. But his vanity shut his mind to reason, and his obstinacy and greed crippled aircraft design and production. Until Speer came into the picture, the Luftwaffe was worse hit by bad management and supply on the ground than by any enemy in the air, include the Royal Air Force in 1940. Göring vetoed excellent designs for heavy bombers, and built a short-range air force as a ground support tool. Then in 1940 he threw the lightly built Luftwaffe into a strategic bombing mission beyond its capabilities, which nevertheless almost succeeded. As a ground support force, the Luftwaffe shone in Poland and France and in the opening attack on the Soviet Union. It fell off as our armies got further and further away from the air bases; but for quick knockout war on land, its achievements have yet to be surpassed.

In popular history – which is only Churchill’s wartime rhetoric, frozen into historical error – Hitler the raging tiger sprang first on Poland, then insensately turned and tore France to death, then reached his blood-dripping claws toward England and recoiled snarling from a terrible blow between the eyes from the RAF. Maddened, blinded, balked at the water’s edge, he turned from west to east and hurled himself against Russia to his doom.

In fact, from start to finish Hitler soberly and coolly – though with self-defeating amateurish mistakes in combat situations – flowed out the political goals laid down in
Mein Kampf
, step by step. He yearned to come to terms with England. No victorious conqueror ever tried harder to make peace. The failure to achieve this peace through Eagle Attack was of course a disappointment. It meant that our rear remained open to the nuisance attack from England while we launched the main war in the east. It meant we had to divert precious limited resourced to U-boats. Above all it meant the increasing intervention of America under Roosevelt.

The Final Tragedy

These nagging results of British obduracy festered in Adolf Hitler’s spirit. He had in any case an unreasonable attitude toward the Jewish people. But the regrettable excesses which he at last permitted trace directly to this frustration in the west. A Germany allied with England – even with a benevolently neutral England – would never have drifted into those excesses. But our nation was beleaguered, cut off from civilization, and we became locked in a mortal combat with a primitive, giant Bolshevist country. Humane consideration went by the board. Behind the line, in conquered Poland and Russia, the neurotic extremists of the Nazi Party were free to give rein to their criminal tendencies. Hitler, enraged by the Churchillian opposition, was in no mood to stop them, as he could have with one word. When crossed, he was a formidable personality.
This was the most important result of the “Battle of Britain.”

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TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:
Roon’s discussion of the battle of Britain is unacceptable. It is not a Teutonic trait to admit defeat gracefully. I have read most of the important German military books on the war, and few of them manage to digest this bitter pill. But Roon’s far-fetched thesis that Winston Churchill’s stubbornness caused the murder of the European Jews may be the low point in all this literature of self-extenuation.

His figures on the airplanes involved in the battle are unreliable. To be sure, few statistics of the war are harder to pin down. Depending on the date one takes as the start, the original balance of forces differs. Thereafter the figures change week by week due to combat losses and replacements. The fog of war at the time was dense, and both commands remained with tangled records. Still, no official source I have read calls it an equal match, as Roon calmly does. His assertion that the attack was a “peacemaking gesture” is as ridiculous as his claim that the outcome was a draw. If there is ever another major war, I devoutly hope the United States armed forces will not fight such a “draw.”

“Popular history” has it right. Göring tried to get daylight mastery of the air, the two fighter commands slugged it out, and he failed; then he tried to bomb the civilian population into quitting, first by day and then by night, and failed. The British fighter pilots turned the much larger Luftwaffe back, and saved the world from the Germans. The sea invasion never came off because Hitler’s admirals and generals convinced him that the British would drown too many Germans on the way across, and in Churchill’s words, “knock on the head the rest who crawled ashore.” A navy remains a handy thing to have around when the going gets rough. I hope my countrymen will remember this.