With Wings Like Eagles (22 page)

On August 15 young men died who had not been with their squadron long enough to get a change of sheets, or buy somebody a drink at the bar, or in some cases to unpack their suitcases. One pilot who was shot down and parachuted from his fighter suddenly realized that he was going to come down in the Channel, and unwilling to get his brand-new handmade shoes wet and ruin them, he united the laces and let them fall while he was still over land, and was astonished when they were returned to him at his mess, neatly wrapped in paper, a couple of days later. Another, wounded, with a crippled plane, glided out of the clouds and crash-landed in what he took to be an English field and was surprised to be lifted gently out of his cockpit by two German soldiers.

At noon Bf 109s attacked Manston again, destroying two Spitfires on the ground, and in the early afternoon two great attacks appeared, one of over 100 aircraft, the other of more than 150. Park was stretched so thin against these that he could put up only four squadrons of fighters, shortly followed by three more, and even so the British fighter pilots were now fighting at odds of two or three to one. Park brought in reinforcements from No. 10 Group, to the west, but his forces were still badly outnumbered, and groups of German aircraft seemed to be appearing all over Sussex and Kent. The Germans severely damaged the Short Brothers aircraft factory at Rochester, where the first of RAF Bomber Command’s new four-engine heavy bombers, the Short Stirling, was manufactured—a severe blow, but not a direct blow on Fighter Command. As this attack ebbed, two more began, a total of 250 German aircraft coming in over the Isle of Wight against Fighter Command’s airfields, particularly Middle Wallop, which had also been attacked the day before, and against which Park managed to put up eleven squadrons, one of whose pilots, Lieutenant J. Phillipart, a former pilot of the Royal Belgian Air Force, set the day’s record by shooting down three Bf 110s. A separate German attack was made against four radar stations, showing that at last the importance of Dowding’s radar system was beginning to sink in, though once again the aerials proved difficult to destroy from the air—the attempt was rather like finding (and destroying) a needle in a haystack.

The afternoon went by in constant fighting, then, just when it seemed that the day was over, a raid of more than seventy German aircraft was plotted coming in over the Channel to attack the Fighter Command airfields at Biggin Hill and Kenley. Attacked by two British fighter squadrons, the mass of German aircraft broke up. Some of them attacked the airfield at West Malling, Kent, but the most significant attack of the day was that of
Erprobungsgruppe
210, which specialized in pinpoint, low-level attacks with a mixture of Bf 109s and Bf 110s, and which was aiming for RAF Kenley. Its commander,
Hauptmann
Walter Rubensdörffer, one of the most daring and dedicated bomber specialists in the entire
Luftwaffe
, brought his aircraft in so low that he could read the street signs and see the startled faces of pedestrians, relying for navigation on the railway lines he had memorized. He decided at the last moment to fly north of Kenley, and then turn back and attack the airfield from the direction where an attack would be least expected, but in the confusion of the heavily built-up suburban area beneath his aircraft he lost his way and seeing hangars, a runway, and aircraft—all airfields look pretty much alike from a few hundred feet up at 250 miles per hour—led his aircraft into an attack on RAF Croydon instead.

This was in every way the wrong airfield to strike. Croydon had until 1939 been London’s major civil airfield, with a luxurious terminal for the day, and long runways built for the big aircraft that linked the capital with glamorous flights to the great cities of Europe and the far-flung empire, in the days when air travel was an expensive luxury. Now it housed several fighter squadrons, so it was in every sense a legitimate military target, except that Hitler had explicitly reserved for himself the decision about whether or not to bomb London. (Göring had passed this on to his commanders as his own order, embellished with angry threats against anyone who disobeyed it.) This was partly a matter of domestic policy—the Germans had so far been untouched themselves by the war they had begun, and neither Hitler nor Dr. Goebbels was entirely confident about how they would react to being bombed. The last thing Hitler and Goebbels (and the Nazi Party in general) wanted was a sharp decline in civilians’ morale—like everybody else, the Führer overrated the effect of bombing, as well as the strength at the time of RAF Bomber Command. As for Göring, he had loudly and publicly promised the Germans that they would never be bombed, that his
Luftwaffe
was so strong that such a thing could never happen. Nobody in the German government doubted that so long as Winston Churchill remained prime minister, bombing London would produce some form of retaliation.

Hitler’s hesitation at bombing London went beyond domestic policy, however, into the deeper realms of diplomacy and world strategy. Somewhere at the back of his mind he still nurtured the belief the British might yet be brought to the peace table, that the “right people” would eventually emerge to replace Churchill and his “gang,” people who accepted that Britain had lost the war and were willing to talk terms sensibly; and he was anxious not to frighten such people off by bombing London, shrewdly sensing that such bombing would strengthen Churchill’s hand. Even Göring still believed that time and patience were needed to deal with the British—along with a flair for diplomacy that he believed he possessed. Numerous amateurish private “peace feelers” were still being conducted, however ineffectively, by his agents in the neutral capitals of Europe.

Captain Rubensdörffer’s daring, if mistaken, attack on Croydon had the misfortune of violating this policy—Croydon was undeniably part of Greater London. Not only had he attacked the wrong airfield; he had attacked it while some of its Hurricanes were still in the air nearby, and his aircraft were bounced from above by nine British fighters of No. 111 Squadron, whose home airfield it was, just as the Germans were about to release their bombs. In the ensuing melee, Rubensdörffer’s
Erprobungsgruppe
210 was not only surprised and scattered but badly mauled, and many of his pilots released their bombs early on nearby brick and mock-Tudor homes of suburban Croydon, now the site of office towers, shopping malls, and infamous traffic jams, killing more than seventy civilian Londoners. The Bf 110s tried to climb and form a circle to defend themselves against 111 Squadron and, shortly, No. 32 Squadron from Biggin Hill, which was quickly directed to the scene. The 111 Squadron armorers tried to fight back from the ground with a machine gun mounted on a homemade tripod, but a number of aircraftmen as well as Gangster, a much-loved dog of No. 111 Squadron, were killed by a bomb. As for Rubensdörffer, the
Luftwaffe
expert on low-level flying was pursued across picturesque Surrey and Sussex at rooftop height, and finally brought down just outside a small English village, the aircraft, Rubensdörffer, and his gunner shattered into tiny, flaming fragments. The Führer, when he was informed of the raid on Croydon, was appalled and enraged.

So were field marshals Kesselring and Sperrle when they finally arrived back from Karinhall at their headquarters, with the warning from the
Reichsmarschall
no doubt still ringing in their ears—and they could not have doubted that it had been passed on directly from Hitler himself.

Hitler was not the only major political figure following the day’s fighting closely. In London, the Cabinet had been meeting at 10 Downing Street throughout the morning, its discussions interrupted from time to time as news of the great raids were brought to the prime minister. When, at last, the Cabinet was concluded, Churchill and Anthony Eden, Secretary of State for War, sat for some time in the Cabinet Room, trying to make sense of the somewhat scrappy news they had been brought so far, which seemed to indicate that Park had already committed his entire strength and that the Germans were still coming in great numbers. Obviously, a crisis was building, and, in Eden’s words, “At last Churchill announced that he would drive to Fighter Command HQ and I went back to the War Office, neither of us yet knowing that this was to be one of the most critical days of the war.”

Churchill was in a grumbling mood when he arrived at Dowding’s headquarters. American correspondents had been busy driving back and forth over southern England, counting the number of German planes that had crashed, and had come to the conclusion that the RAF was exaggerating the figures. This was true enough, for reasons we have seen, and the prime minister knew it, but he deplored attempts being made to persuade the American journalists otherwise. “There is something rather obnoxious in bringing correspondents down to air squadrons in order that they may assure the American public that the fighter pilots are not lying and bragging about their figures,”
⁸
he wrote to his old friend (and former adjutant when he had commanded an infantry battalion in the trenches in World War I) Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air. “We can, I think, afford to be a bit cool and calm about all this.”

Dowding, typically, was neither shaken nor apologetic when the prime minister brought the matter up, and simply replied, in his usual cool, thoughtful way, that if the Germans’ claims about the number of British aircraft they had brought down were true the German army would already be here.
⁹
The news that Dowding’s bold decision to retain his fighter strength in the north of England had led to the defeat of the attacks there, and that so far more than 100 German aircraft had been shot down, eventually cheered the prime minister, and when he returned in the evening to 10 Downing Street he put in a call to Neville Chamberlain, who was at home recuperating from cancer surgery, to tell him the good news. Churchill’s Junior Private Secretary John Colville (who had been Chamberlain’s secretary, and who would soon join the RAF himself) noted, “I…found Mr. Chamberlain somewhat cold at being disturbed in the middle of dinner. However, he was overcome with joy when he heard the news and very touched at Winston thinking of him. It is typical of W. to do a small thing like this which could give such great pleasure. ‘The Lord President [this was Chamberlain’s present position in the Cabinet] was very grateful to you,’ I said to Winston. ‘So he ought to be,’ replied W, ‘this is one of the greatest days in history.’”
¹⁰

At the end of the day, the RAF claimed 161 German aircraft “destroyed,” sixty-one “probable,” and fifty-eight “damaged,” with a loss of thirty-four British aircraft and eighteen pilots killed or missing. In fact, the British had shot down seventy-five German aircraft, but that was still better than two for one. The
Luftwaffe
claimed to have shot down 101 British aircraft, approximately three times the actual number. By now, bookies and the porters in hotels and clubs were taking bets on the number of planes the RAF would shoot down versus the
Luftwaffe
, as if it were a sporting event, and newspaper vendors scrawled the latest “score” on their boards as the news came in.

Any way one looked at it, it was a British victory—and a victory for Dowding’s strategy. His object, like that of General Kutuzov against Napoleon in 1812, was to keep his force in being. Kutuzov was widely criticized for letting Napoleon take Moscow after the stalemate of the Battle of Borodino—a profound humiliation for the czar—but he understood that the winter and starvation (and eventually the burning of Moscow) would force the French to retreat, and that if he kept his army in being long enough he would beat the emperor. In order to save England Dowding had only to keep Fighter Command in being and keep shooting down the Germans until the autumn weather finally put an end to the invasion season.

In the meantime, the shock to the Germans of the continuing strength of Fighter Command, and their own losses, persuaded Göring to issue two fatal orders. First, henceforth the fighters would no longer be allowed to roam free over England seeking out and attacking the enemy; they would stick close to the bombers at all times. Second, since he considered it “doubtful whether there is any point in continuing attacks on radar sites,” none of them apparently having been put out of action, they were taken off the target list.

Perhaps even more significant was his order that henceforth no more than one officer would serve in any aircrew, in order to cut down on the casualties of trained officers.

Whatever else the day had accomplished, it was no longer possible to believe that Fighter Command was on the verge of being destroyed. The German attacks would have to be increased in strength and number—what remained of
Luftflotte
5 in Norway and Denmark was used to reinforce the two air fleets in the Netherlands, Belgium, and France—and continued on a daily basis.

For both sides, the hardest and most brutal fighting was still to come.

A
ny notion that the Germans would pause for a day of rest after their losses on the 15th was dispelled the next day, when a raid of over 250 aircraft flew up the Thames estuary at noon to attack RAF Biggin Hill again, and when bombs fell for a second time on the suburbs of London, including Wimbledon, whose only major target was the famous tennis club.

The weather was warm and sunny, with a slight haze over the Channel—almost ideal for the attackers. The day was to be marked by three notable events. The first would be the award of Fighter Command’s first Victoria Cross to Flight Lieutenant J. B. Nicholson of 249 Squadron, who, though badly burned and wounded, kept on pursuing a Bf 110 and destroyed it before bailing out of his flaming aircraft (and then was mistaken for a German and wounded again by the Home Guard when he landed). The second event was the crash landing at RAF Tangmere, after a brisk fight with German dive-bombers, of a Hurricane flown by Pilot Officer W. M. L. “Billy” Fiske of No. 601 Squadron, the dashing, wealthy former captain of the U.S. bobsled team at the winter Olympics of 1928 in Saint-Moritz and of 1932 in Lake Placid. He died of his burns two days later, becoming the first American killed in action during the war. (A plaque was placed in Fiske’s memory in Saint Paul’s Cathedral; it reads, “An American citizen who died that England might live.”) The third event was the historic visit of Winston Churchill to Air Vice-Marshal Park’s Operations Room at No. 11 Group headquarters in Uxbridge, outside London.

Countless young pilots shared the experience of Pilot Officer Nigel Rose, a twenty-two-year-old Spitfire pilot with No. 602 City of Glascow squadron, which had flown down from Scotland the day before. Rose saw action for the first time that day, and survived to write home to his parents, “Six of us on patrol at 16,000 ft ran into about 50 Jerries and I had my baptism of firing. I made three attacks, and on the last I believe I may have got my man for he went into a vertical dive and hadn’t pulled out by the 10/10 clouds at 6,000 ft. It was terrifically exciting and I’m darned if I can remember what happened at the time.”
¹

Although slow to start after the huge effort of the day before, the
Luftwaffe
was back over England in force by the middle of the afternoon. Three separate big raids were aimed at the Portsmouth area and at RAF Tangmere. (Nigel Rose happened to witness the bombing of Tangmere, and wrote to his parents, in the spirit and style of
Biggles
, “We had a magnificent view of the whole affair and it was most thrilling to watch.”
²
) More than 170 aircraft were plotted approaching Hornchurch and Debden; in all, there were more than 350 German aircraft attacking Fighter Command airfields during the course of the afternoon. There were fierce fights all over southern and southeastern England, and Tangmere, one of Dowding’s most important airfields, took a repeated pasting. The runway was pockmarked with bomb craters and buried delayed-action bombs; aircraft caught on the ground were destroyed; hangars and workshops were set on fire; the sick quarters and the officer’s mess received direct hits. Ground crews were shaken by the repeated bombings, but cheered up when a van from the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) appeared in the middle of the bombing to serve tea.

The radar station at Ventnor was put out of action again, despite Göring’s order to ignore these, and by the late afternoon every one of Park’s squadrons—and by now all his squadrons were short of aircraft and pilots—was fiercely engaged. This moment was indelibly captured by General Hastings Ismay, Churchill’s chief of staff in his self-appointed (and self-created) second capacity as “Minister of Desfence,” who had accompanied the prime minister to Uxbridge:

There had been heavy fighting throughout the afternoon, and at one moment every single squadron in the Group was engaged; there was nothing in reserve, and the map table showed new waves of attackers crossing the coast. I felt sick with fear. As the evening closed in the fighting died down, and we left by car for Chequers [the country residence of British prime ministers], Churchill’s first words were: “Do not speak to me; I have never been so moved.” After above five minutes he leaned forward and said, “Never in the field of human combat has so much been owed by so many to so few.” The words burned in my brain and I repeated them to my wife when I got home.
³

 

The prime minister was to make this line immortal in a long speech on the war situation given four days later in the House of Commons, and it has since been burned into many brains and has come to represent the spirit of the Battle of Britain, and of the Royal Air Force as well. It is a statement of British patriotism right up there with Nelson’s signal before the Battle of Trafalgar, “England expects that every man will do his duty,” and Wellington’s “Up, Guards, and at ’em,” at Waterloo. As a result of it, those who flew in the Battle of Britain will be forever remembered as “the Few.”

On that day, the RAF claimed seventy-five enemy aircraft destroyed, twenty-nine probables, and forty-one damaged, with a loss of fourteen fighters and eight pilots, as well as sixteen RAF personnel killed on the ground, and seventy-two civilians. (In fact, the
Luftwaffe
had lost only forty-five aircraft, but that is still three for one, and since most of the German aircraft were bombers it was more like twelve to one in terms of irreplaceable trained aircrew personnel.)

The 17th was another day of partial haze, with scattered clouds—good weather for the Germans, but the exhausted British pilots waited by their aircraft sunbathing, playing cards, and in at least one case, playing cricket, for nothing—only a few German aircraft came over, and those were mostly reconnaissance flights, providing a good clue that preparations were being made on the other side of the Channel for another big attack. Dowding spent the day continuing to press the Air Ministry to transfer pilots from the so-called “light bomber squadrons” (equipped with the infamously slow and ineffective Fairey Battle) and the “army cooperation squadrons” (equipped with the even less effective Westland Lysander), both of which had failed so dismally in France, but which the Air Staff was reluctant to give up on in case of a German invasion. In the last nine days Fighter Command had lost 156 pilots, and the operational training units (OTUs) were turning out new ones at a very slow rate. New fighter pilots were coming out of the OTUs at about one-third of the rate at which Fighter Command was losing them. Dowding managed to persuade the Air Ministry to let five pilots volunteer for Fighter Command duty from each Battle squadron and three from each Lysander squadron, and managed to get fifty-six Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm pilots as well (hence the occasional presence of a pilot in naval uniform in photographs taken of fighter squadrons in 1940), but this was a drop in the bucket, compared with his needs. His supply of aircraft was holding up well enough, in part thanks to Lord Beaverbrook, in part thanks to an ambitious scheme in which damaged aircraft were repaired overnight and the parts of badly damaged aircraft “cannibalized” (to use a later word from the USAAF) to build a whole new one; but he was now in acute danger of running out of pilots. Even the pilots he managed to squeeze out of the light bomber squadrons, the army cooperation squadrons, and the Fleet Air Arm were of no immediate use to him—they required at least two to three weeks at an operational training unit to learn how to fly Spitfires or Hurricanes, and even then they would still be “new boys” rather than the experienced, battle-hardened fighter pilots they were replacing.

Most of the 17th was devoted to pick-and-shovel work, as station commanders all over southern England tried to fill in the bomb craters in their airfields, while the army’s bomb disposal units removed unexploded bombs. (Bomb disposal was perhaps the most hazardous job of all, since the Germans were already expert at building into their bombs ingenious, hidden fuses triggered by timers, by movement, or by a combination of both, so that not every unexploded, buried bomb—or UXB, in the service jargon of the time—was a dud). Churchill, with his usual keen eye for detail, noted that this process was slowed by a lack of earth-moving machinery, and proposed appropriately equipped mobile units to rush to each airfield that was bombed and not only fill in the craters, but create camouflage holes so that from the air the runways would still look unusable. But in the meantime the airmen and whatever civilian laborers could be found did what they could with spades, plenty of grumbling, and an occasional mug of tea from the urn of the WVS van.

Sunday, August 18, dawned clear. “Fine and fair early,” the RAF meteorologists would later report. “Rest of day cloudy.” By now Beppo Schmidt was reporting that Fighter Command had no more than 200 fighters left, although Dowding’s records indicate that he began the day with 706 serviceable aircraft, of which 228 were Spitfires and 396 Hurricanes. The No. 310 (Czech) Squadron was made operational at last, although Dowding and Park had some reservations about “foreign” pilots. The chief objections were that most of them couldn’t yet speak or understand English, a big problem for the air controllers and also for their British squadron commanders; that they had poor flying discipline in the air (mostly because they failed to understand orders rather than because they were deliberately disobedient); and that they chattered too much to each other on their radios in Czech, French, or Polish. (Dowding’s decision was quickly proved right—a Czech, Sergeant Joseph František, would become the second-highest scoring ace in Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain, with a total of seventeen kills before he was killed himself on October 8, 1940.) A Canadian squadron was declared operational as well, though the two Polish squadrons were being held in reserve. Still, on August 18, Dowding was short 209 pilots, a matter of increasing concern to him—and it had concerned Churchill for many weeks, in part because the Air Ministry’s figures changed continually. He had already expressed his distress at “this particular admission of failure, on the part of the Air Ministry” to Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Secretary of State for Air, commenting that “it would be lamentable if we have machines standing idle for want of pilots to fly them,”
⁴
a sentiment with which Dowding would surely have agreed.

There was no doubt that the entire system for training pilots remained slow and resistant to change, as opposed to the dramatic improvements that Lord Beaverbrook had made in fighter production—this was a severe indictment of the Air Ministry’s policy, and had for some time been a bone of contention between Dowding and Sholto Douglas. It was another of those disagreements that made Dowding increasingly unpopular with his colleagues on the Air Staff at just the moment when he was fighting (and winning) the country’s most important battle.

The flight training establishment was still working peacetime hours, and responded to pressure for more pilots simply by shortening the courses, so that a lot of young pilots (their average age was seventeen) reached their squadrons having logged only a few hours in a Spitfire or Hurricane, and without ever having used a reflector sight or learned deflection shooting. In the “old days,” it had been up to the squadrons to give new pilots a little polish and experience, but in the summer of 1940, nobody had the time—the most a young pilot reaching a squadron could expect was a couple of hours flying a fighter behind a tired, irritable flight commander not much older than himself, just to make sure the “new boy” remembered to put his wheels down before landing. No matter how often a new pilot was warned to keep looking behind himself, to stick “close as glue” to his leader, and never to fly straight and level for more than twenty seconds, the first few operational flights (if he survived them) were terrifying. One newcomer to a fighter squadron, intent on holding his position in the formation on his first operational flight, recalls hearing his squadron commander shout, “Jerries behind, break right!” on the wireless, reacted too slowly, and suddenly found himself alone in the sky surrounded by German fighters. By some miracle they ignored him, and he was soon flying all by himself at 20,000 feet, with no idea where the rest of his squadron had gone—perhaps an even more frightening situation. Things happened in a fraction of a second, and the life expectancy of a new fighter pilot was measured in minutes or, if he was lucky, hours. A veteran fighter pilot voiced the common complaint that the new pilots reaching his squadron scared him a lot more than the Germans did. Though Churchill and Dowding could not have known it, the same complaints about pilot training were being made to the Air Ministry in Berlin by the German commanders in the field.

Neither Dowding nor anyone else could have guessed that the 18th would produce an air battle so intense and prolonged that at least one book has been written about this day alone (
The Battle of Britain: The Hardest Day
, by Alfred Price, Macdonalds and Jane’s Publishers, 1979). The day was to see a sudden change in
Luftwaffe
tactics. Instead of scattered attacks against many airfields, this time the entire strength of the two German air fleets would be aimed at two of Dowding’s most important airfields: Biggin Hill and Kenley. Both were “Sector” airfields—each Group was divided into Sectors, six of them in both No. 11 Group and No. 12 Group, with one airfield controlling the Sector, and usually with a varying number of smaller, alternative airfields within the Sector. Sector airfields like Biggin Hill and Kenley usually had four squadrons of fighters each, though two of the squadrons might be stationed either at more “forward” airfields like Gravesend and Manston in the case of Biggin Hill, or at nearby Croydon in the case of Kenley, on the principle of not putting all one’s eggs in one basket in case the Sector airfield was attacked and put out of action.

Both these Sectors were shaped a little like roughly cut slices of pie, with the Sector airfield in both cases on the outskirts of London, at the sharper end of the slice, and the other end on the Channel. Biggin Hill and Kenley thus dominated the shortest and fastest approach from the Channel across southern England to London, and in order to attack London effectively (or to invade, if it came to that), they would have to be put out of action completely. The Germans understood this; what they did
not
understand was that the Sector operations rooms, each of which was like a miniature version of Park’s operations room at No. 11 Group headquarters in Uxbridge, were in fact far more important targets than an airfield’s hangars, its fuel supply, its runways, or even the aircraft on the ground.