With Wings Like Eagles (31 page)

Churchill had an infallible sense of timing for the historic moment, and the good weather prompted him to visit Park’s headquarters at Uxbridge after breakfast on Sunday morning. He and Mrs. Churchill were driven over from Chequers, the prime minister’s country residence, and arrived at Uxbridge at eleven in the morning. Rather to his disappointment, Churchill found that nothing much was happening. “I don’t know whether anything will happen today,” Park told him. “At present all is quiet.”

Churchill took a seat in what he called the “dress circle” (in American theaters, this is the most expensive front-row seats in the balcony) of No. 11 Group Operations Room. “Below us,” he wrote later, “was the large-scale map-table, around which perhaps twenty highly-trained young men and women, with their telephone assistants, were assembled. Opposite to us, covering the entire wall, where the theatre curtain would be, was a gigantic blackboard divided into six columns with electric bulbs, for the six fighter stations, each of their squadrons having a sub-column of its own, and also divided by lateral lines.”
¹²

At No. 11 Group the “dress circle” balcony from which the battle was directed was separated from the big map table on the floor below by a modernistic curved glass wall, which made looking down into the “orchestra pit” where the action was going on a little like being in an aquarium. The object had been to isolate the decision makers above from the inevitable hubbub and excitement below. The prime minister had only fifteen minutes to wait there before the plotters began to move around the map table, marking raids with their long croupier’s sticks, and the lamps on the big wall “tote board” began to light up one after another. German raids of “forty-plus” and even “eighty-plus” were forming up over Dieppe, Calais, and Boulogne until more than 250 approaching enemy aircraft were being plotted on the table, and very shortly Park had sixteen squadrons of his own, plus five from No. 12 Group, in the air to meet them. Between the German attackers and the British defenders there would soon be more than 500 aircraft in the small airspace over Kent, most of them between 15,000 and 20,000 feet high. The German formations were attacked all the way from the beach to the suburbs of London, and inevitably their neat formations broke up. This breakup on the one hand allowed RAF fighters to pick off the stragglers, but on the other hand allowed some of the German bombers to slip through singly and drop their bombs on London. Before noon bombs had fallen on “Westminster, Lambeth, Lewisham, Battersea, Camberwell, Crystal Palace, Clapham, Tooting, Wandsworth and Kensington,” as well as “the Queen’s private apartments at Buckingham Palace.”

Had the German bombers been able to stay in close formation and concentrate on a few strategic targets, they might have done more serious damage, but with one British fighter in the air for every German aircraft, there was no chance of this, as the German formations of bombers broke up under relentless attack. Dropping a bomb on the queen’s apartments or near the palace of the archbishop of Canterbury, and scattering them around the London suburbs, was not going to bring the British to their knees, as Göring had promised. Of course from the point of view of those who were bombed, this was no consolation, even had they known it. For hundreds of thousands of people, life was suddenly and savagely disrupted. A Dornier crashed into Victoria Station, and its crew landed by parachute in a famous London cricket pitch, the Oval; bombs and British and German aircraft fell all over the Greater London area. The Strand (one of London’s famous shopping streets, and home to many clubs and the Savoy Hotel) was bombed, and the Gaiety Theatre was almost destroyed. Guys and Lambeth hospitals were badly hit. Water and gas mains, railway and tube lines were broken or destroyed; electricity generating plants were put out of commission; and fires started everywhere. But serious as all this was, it was a long way from a Wellsian vision of total urban destruction and collapse.

From Park’s Operations Room, where the prime minister sat, the danger was in the sky, not in the streets of London. By noon all of Park’s squadrons were in the air, and “some had already begun to return for fuel…. There was not one squadron left in reserve.” Park requested another three squadrons from No. 12 Group to patrol over his airfields while his squadrons landed for fuel and ammunition, and this was done, for once, with no hesitation or complaint. “I became conscious of the anxiety of the Commander, who now stood behind his subordinate’s chair,” Churchill wrote. “Hitherto I had watched in silence. I now asked, ‘What other reserves have we?’ ‘There are none,’ said Air Vice-Marshal Park. In an account which he wrote about it afterward he said that at this I ‘looked grave.’ Well I might. What losses would we not suffer if our refueling planes were caught on the ground by further raids of ‘40 plus’ or ‘50 plus’! The odds were great: our margins small; the stakes infinite.”
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Churchill, with his usual perspicacity, had understood what Göring apparently failed to think about in advance—in order to win, the
Luftwaffe
needed to be able to catch Park’s squadrons on the ground as they refueled, and deal them a smashing blow, but for that the Germans needed better intelligence and a perfect sense of timing. At two o’clock in the afternoon, they were to send another 150 aircraft in three waves against central London, but if instead they had sent those same aircraft against Park’s airfields at noon, just as his fighter squadrons were landing, No. 11 Group might well have been wiped out. It was the critical moment of the battle, perhaps the one point at which victory was almost within Göring’s grasp. But the German morning raid fled home in disorder, having suffered heavy losses—some of the German bombers actually turned back, having lost faith in their own fighter escorts and in their commanders’ promises that Fighter Command was all but defeated—and by the time the afternoon raid formed up, Park’s squadrons were refueled, rearmed, and waiting for them.

Again, in the afternoon, No. 11 Group broke up the German formations, so instead of a concentrated raid, the bombers, fiercely attacked by fighters, dropped their bombs indiscriminately all over the London suburbs, in places like Woolwich, Stepney, and Hackney, killing people; destroying homes, shops, schools, and small factories; disrupting train service; but not in any way seriously threatening the continued existence of Britain’s capital, or—more important still—the fighting capacity of No. 11 Group.

Seldom has so rich an opportunity been wasted by lack of fore-thought and planning. The Germans were certainly not short of aircraft or aircrews—that night they sent another large raid of nearly 200 aircraft against London, and Southampton, Portland, and Cardiff were also attacked. But the opportunity for the really damaging blow that Göring expected his forces to deliver had been missed at noon, and would never recur.

At eight o’clock in the evening, when Churchill, exhausted by the day’s drama, woke from a nap, he rang for his principal private secretary, John Martin, who brought him the latest news. “This had gone wrong here; that had been delayed there; an unsatisfactory answer had been received from so-and-so; there had been bad sinkings in the Atlantic. ‘However,’ said Martin, as he finished this account, ‘all is redeemed by the air. We have shot down one hundred eighty-three for a loss of under forty.’”
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In fact the Germans had lost only sixty aircraft—in the chaos of battle the claims of pilots (and antiaircraft gunners on the ground) tended to overlap. Still, the
Luftwaffe
had made its maximum effort, and had lost sixty aircraft to twenty-six British fighters destroyed and thirteen pilots killed. The
Daily Telegraph
’s subhead on Monday, September 16, got the facts right: “Massed Day Attack on London Smashed.”
¹⁵

More important still—more important than anything else—on the next day, September 17, Hitler sent a signal postponing Operation Sea Lion “indefinitely.” The continuing heavy losses of German aircraft and the evident survival of Fighter Command, meant that the precondition of the German navy for the invasion of England—control of the air—could not be met, and with the autumn weather approaching it was useless to keep up the pretense.

Very soon, the great fleet of barges would be dispersed back to their ports, canals, and rivers, and the Führer’s attention would be drawn east toward the Soviet Union. The worst of the Blitz was still to come, the night fighters’ problem had still not been solved, and the British Army still patrolled the beaches of southern England just in case Hitler changed his mind; but Dowding’s strategy had worked. The invasion would never come, Fighter Command had never lost control of the air for even a single moment, and “the Few” had won one of the four most crucial victories in British history—the Armada, Trafalgar, Waterloo, and the Battle of Britain.

Perhaps without even realizing it, in mid-September 1940 Hitler lost the war, defeated by the efforts of perhaps 1,000 young men. Unable to invade and conquer Britain, he would turn against the Soviet Union, sacrificing the German army, and thereby prolonging his war until, at last, the Americans were dragged into it by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, pitting Germany against three of the most powerful industrial countries in the world.

All this was to come, and nobody, not even Churchill, could foretell it in the autumn of 1940, when Britain still stood alone. But Dowding and “his chicks” had prevailed, and it is perfectly fitting that September 15 should be celebrated every year as “Battle of Britain Day.”

N
apoleon’s comment that no moment in war is more dangerous than that of victory was perfectly illustrated by the events that followed September 15. First of all, on the British side there was no immediate recognition that a great victory had been won—the
Luftwaffe
kept on bombing, though increasingly it did so at night, thus inevitably drawing attention to the weakness of Dowding’s night fighters. The worst of the Blitz would begin in the autumn, with night after night of sustained bombing that would eventually cost the lives of more than 50,000 British civilians. As the days grew shorter, however, and the autumn storms began to lash the seas in the Channel, it began to dawn on most people that invasion was no longer an immediate prospect, if indeed it was still a prospect at all. To those in the know, the fact that the barges and tugs so painstakingly assembled in the Channel ports for Operation Sea Lion were being dispersed back to where they had come from was a certain sign that Hitler had changed his mind, if he had ever been serious about invading. As far as the public and the armed forces were concerned, it was thought more prudent not to dismiss the threat of an invasion, for fear that complacency would replace alertness, so the Home Guard and most of the British Army in the United Kingdom continued to go through the motions of patrolling the beaches and preparing for invasion long after the threat had ceased to exist.

In the air the glamour of the fighter pilots was rapidly eclipsed by that of night fighter aces such as “Cat’s Eyes” John Cunningham, and by the need to place greater emphasis on Bomber Command, as it took the first steps toward paying back the enemy in kind. Soon the bomber crews got the lion’s share of the publicity, leaving the fighter pilots with an ever diminishing role. (Despite contemporary retroactive angst in the English-speaking world about the “strategic” bombing of Germany in World War II, much of it centered on the firebombing of Hamburg in 1943 and the destruction of Dresden in 1945, it would be difficult to overstate the enthusiasm of the British public for giving the Germans a taste of their own medicine after the Blitz began in earnest in the autumn of 1940 and the winter of 1941.) Fighter Command took to making “sweeps” over occupied France, bringing the
Luftwaffe
fighter squadrons up to fight in strength—a strategy that was as costly for the British as it was for the Germans, if not more so.

A long grim period in the war began for the British after September 15, obscuring to some degree the magnitude (and permanence) of their victory. At sea, losses of shipping to the ubiquitous U-boats (which benefited now from the fact that French ports on the Atlantic were in German hands) soared. Initial successes against the Italians in North Africa would soon be followed by calamitous and even shameful defeats in Greece and Crete and by the arrival in Libya of the first elements of General Erwin Rommel’s
Deutsche Afrika Korps.
At home, the British became accustomed to the dreary rigors of rationing (one egg a month, and only a few ounces of doubtful meat), the blackout, and the bombing. Clothing was rationed; electric heaters glowed a dull red because of the reduced wattage; coal and coke were rationed; the whole nation darned, mended, patched, did without, and shivered. The British had faced Hitler down and given him his first military defeat, but until June 1941, when he attacked the Soviet Union, they stood alone, facing an occupied continent and a determined enemy. Quite apart from the feeling of many people in Britain (outside the extreme left) that Stalin and communism were not much better than Hitler and Nazism, the Russians did not at first seem like promising allies. The Soviet Union rapidly lost its entire air force, all of western Russia and the Ukraine, and millions of troops as the German armies advanced toward Moscow. At the same time, it made imperious demands in terms of aid and supplies that the British could not possibly provide, given the precariousness of their own situation and the perils of sending shipping to the Soviet Union through seas dominated by German U-boats and aircraft from Norway. Even to the optimists, there was still no sign that the United States would ever enter the war, despite the flow of Lend-Lease supplies across the Atlantic to an increasingly impoverished Britain, which had long since exhausted its dollar reserves and its credit to buy arms.

Precisely because the world around them looked so grim in the winter of 1940 and the spring of 1941, with no end to the war in sight, and with diminishing resources forcing people whose belts were already pulled tight to tighten them some more, Britons were already looking back at the warm summer of 1940 as a moment of triumph, when the “fighter boys” in their Spitfires and Hurricanes had gained a glorious victory in the clear blue sky above Kent. The Battle of Britain was already becoming a patriotic myth before it was even over. No time was required to turn it into a legend, or to transform the pilots into airborne knights of the Round Table, reminders of the days when the British public had thought of itself as heroic, rather than merely alone and beleaguered.

In the remembered glow of those summer days, much of the pain and bitterness of the Battle of Britain was eventually suppressed in favor of a more glamorous picture. That picture did not necessarily include the young WAAFs in the operations rooms listening to the screams of pilots trapped in the cockpits of flaming airplanes plunging to the ground. Nor did it include the faces of the “guinea pigs,” so called in RAF slang not just because they were the subjects of experimental burn surgery, but also because someone whose lips, nose, and ears had been burned off had the smooth, featureless face of a guinea pig—until the surgeons began a long, excruciatingly painful series of operations to graft on some semblance of features. (Even less could be done about hands that were burned to shriveled claws.)
*
The picture also left out the rows of dead WAAFs in improvised mortuaries on the badly bombed airfields of No. 11 Group; the pilots who died at sea, bobbing in their inflated Mae Wests in sight of the white cliffs of Dover as hypothermia overcame them; and the aircraftmen of the ground crews who died of shrapnel wounds or machine-gun fire while rearming “their” aircraft during a German low-level bombing attack rather than take shelter. In much the same way, the discharged legless or armless sailors begging on the docks of Portsmouth or Plymouth after the Armada or the Battle of Trafalgar were soon expunged from the patriotic myth—it has always been so.

The Battle of Britain rapidly developed its own mythology, with the result that in many people’s minds the Spitfires, the Hurricanes, and radar appeared spontaneously in 1940, rather than as a result of decisions made by the two principal appeasers of prewar British political history, Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain. But without their determination to provide Britain with a modern, credible fighter defense, and without the immense amounts of public money needed to build the aircraft and the factories that would produce them (and the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine) in quantity, Britain would have been overwhelmed after Dunkirk. Whatever their other shortcomings as prime ministers, Baldwin and Chamberlain were responsible for the creation of Dowding’s Fighter Command—often against the advice of (and despite dire warnings from) the Air Ministry, where the cult of the bomber as the only reliable deterrent against attack remained unshaken until events in 1940 suddenly, unexpectedly, and briefly made the fighter the all-important weapon on which Britain’s survival depended.

There is also a tendency today toward retroactive complacency: historians look at the numbers of aircraft the British were producing, compare them with production in the German aircraft industry, and conclude that the outcome was never in doubt—that the margin was never as slim as people thought at the time. But this, too, is an illusion. Certainly, the output of the German aircraft industry in 1940 ought to have been higher—neither Hitler nor Göring had expected or prepared for a long war with Great Britain—and, like the British, the Germans produced too many aircraft that were inappropriate and ineffective for the kind of air war they found themselves in.
*
Nevertheless, time and time again the
Luftwaffe
came very close to crippling Fighter Command. Had the Germans been able to follow August 18 with another couple of days of attack on the airfields of No. 11 Group on the same scale and at the same level of intensity, the story might have ended quite differently. True, the Germans would have stood a better chance of winning if Göring had not canceled the four-engine bomber program in 1937, and if a rush program had been instituted in 1939 to enable the Bf 109 to carry an external jettisonable fuel tank (this was a problem shared by the Spitfire and the Hurricane). However, the
Luftwaffe
was defeated not because of its technical shortcomings but because of poor intelligence work, a fatal tendency to bomb the wrong targets, and the severe underestimation of the importance to Fighter Command of the radar stations and the interlocking series of operations rooms to which the radar stations fed information. Had the Germans known which building at Biggin Hill contained the Sector operations room and destroyed it, they might have come very much closer to paralyzing No. 11 Group, at least for a time. But fortunately, they had no idea—the real culprits of the Germans’ failure, if there were culprits, were General Martini, the commander of the
Luftwaffe
signals force; and Colonel Schmidt, whose intelligence reports on Fighter Command were hopelessly flawed.

Of course the most important culprit was Göring, whose self-indulgence, short attention span, arrogance, overconfidence, and failure to institute (or respect) a disciplined and well-organized chain of command, rather than ruling the
Luftwaffe
by a combination of cronyism and a calculated policy of divide and conquer, doomed the air attack against Britain from the start. Had Göring been willing to delegate the air war against Britain to a single commander, and back him up—Kesselring would have been an obvious choice for the role—the Germans might have succeeded. But giving that kind of authority to anyone other than himself would have gone against Göring’s instinct for self-preservation, and against his inflated pride and his self-image as Germany’s first soldier and airman. There was simply no place in the
Luftwaffe
for a man with the untrammeled authority that Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur “Bomber” Harris would have over Bomber Command from 1942 on, or that Dowding had as Commander-in-Chief, Fighter Command, during the Battle of Britain. Still less, of course, was there any possibility of putting one determined man in charge of every aspect of Operation Sea Lion, the army, the
Luftwaffe
, and the navy, and giving him full authority to get on with it—a German equivalent of Eisenhower in 1944. The only person who could play this role, to the extent that it existed, was Hitler himself. But quite apart from his lack of interest in naval matters and his delegation of the air war to Göring, his ability to command Sea Lion was destroyed by his never altogether banished hope that in the end it wouldn’t be necessary, that the mere threat of an invasion might be enough to bring the British to their senses and make them recognize that they had been defeated.

Perhaps for no one did the Battle of Britain have a more unexpected end than for Dowding himself. As the battle continued throughout the rest of September, and the German aircraft ranged farther north over London, instead of concentrating their attacks against No. 11 Group’s airfields south of the capital, Leigh-Mallory’s No. 12 Group was drawn increasingly into the fighting, rather than being used merely when Park called for fighter protection over his Sector airfields. A consequence of this change in the balance of British forces was that Douglas Bader’s “big wing” began to play a larger role in the battle, despite Park’s doubts about its wisdom and his preferences for “squadron strength” attacks, which had in any case hitherto been accepted dogma for fighter operations. Bader did not hide his anger at Park’s reluctance to use his big wing as he saw fit, and one of his pilots, who happened to be a member of Parliament, passed this growing dispute about Fighter Command tactics on to the Undersecretary of State for Air and, more disturbingly, to the prime minister. The fat was now in the fire, and with a politician’s natural sense of self-preservation when faced with a sharp difference of opinion between senior officers of any service in wartime, Churchill urged the Chief of the Air Staff to arrange for a meeting of the interested parties and discuss “Major Day Tactics in the Fighter Force.” Since Churchill was more than capable of intervening directly in service matters when he wanted to, he was clearly throwing a hot potato back to the air force. That there was no urgency to the matter in his mind is proved by the fact that it did not take place until October 17, more than a month after the greatest and most successful day of the battle.

Much has been made of this meeting by those who see it as a trap carefully set and baited by Air Marshal Sholto Douglas and Air Vice-Marshal Leigh-Mallory to catch Air Chief Marshal Dowding and Air Vice-Marshal Park; and there is no doubt, even in supposedly objective accounts, that it reflects one element in a very determined campaign on the part of Dowding’s many enemies in the Air Ministry to get rid of him. Dowding’s supporters—and there is no lack of them decades after the fact—tend to portray him as an innocent victim of backstairs intrigue and jealousy, but he had not reached the rank of Air Chief Marshal and Commander-in-Chief, Fighter Command, without some natural political instincts of his own, and a large part of his career had been spent amid the intrigues and cabals of the Air Ministry. He was, in fact, a skilled infighter himself, when it came to the Air Ministry and the Cabinet; and if he had a lot of enemies, it has to be said that he had made many of them himself, by his brusque manner, his impatience with those who disagreed with him, and his aloof, distant, eccentric personality.