The Many not the Few
The Stolen History of the Battle of Britain
Richard North
Copyright © 2012 by Richard North
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Christopher Booker
Introduction
1 Battle lines
2 Let battle begin
3 War of the people
4 War and peace
5 Closing the door
6 War drums
7 Eagle Attack
8 Redefining the war
9 Countdown to the Blitz
10 Start of the Blitz
11 Rebellion
12 Consequences
13 The widening war
14 The battle won?
15 To the victor the spoils
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Websites and Archives
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
Winston Churchill, Their Finest Hour. 20 August 1940
The searchlights are in position, the guns are ready, the people’s army of volunteers is ready – they are the ones who are really fighting this war …
Quentin Reynolds, London can take it. 16 October 1940
Acknowledgements
How this book came to be written is as much part of this story as the story itself. Born in North London just a few years after the end of the war, I was brought up with the Battle of Britain. As a boy, I built my quota of Airfix Spitfires and Hurricanes, Me 109 fighters, Stuka dive bombers and, when it finally came available, the fabulous model of the twin-engined Heinkel 111 bomber. With my school friends, no group of boys could have more avidly discussed the specifications and the merits of the different aircraft, or studied more carefully the tactics and the events of 1940.
London, even in my childhood, was still pockmarked with bomb sites, which we spent endless time exploring. Neighbours, the parents of our friends and our relatives all had their own stories, to which we boys listened, wide-eyed. When old enough, we joined the air cadets and my very first flying experience, in a dual control Chipmunk, virtually duplicated the path one of the combat flights of fighter ace Douglas Bader during the war.
With a flying scholarship under my belt and a private flying licence gained shortly after my eighteenth birthday, I found myself living and working on a former fighter station in Essex, a satellite airfield which had housed Hurricanes during the battle. In the bright summer mornings, standing amid the wartime hangers, it took little effort to imagine the sounds of Merlins and aircraft rising to meet the enemy. That and much, much more had made the Battle of Britain as much part of my life as it possibly could be, short of actually living through it.
Decades later, on the seventieth anniversary, when tributes were flowing for the diminishing band of men directly involved in the events, I decided to offer my own personal homage to “the few”. I chose to do this by means of an internet diary, or blog. This had been done before, but I reasoned that if my own skills could make the battle a little more accessible to a wider audience, it would be worth doing again.
With that as my objective, 70 years to the very day after the battle had started, I published the first entry. Then presenting a daily narrative on every single one of the 114 days of the battle, my sole intention was to record a summary of events. However, as I added more and more detail, I found increasing difficulty in keeping to the conventional narrative. Long before the end, I had concluded that it did not hang together.
Curiosity now aroused, I began to read more widely and then research more thoroughly. With a distance of more than 40 years between my first flight and now, what flying skills I had ever possessed had long since been replaced by an entirely new skill-set, including a PhD as a formal qualification in research, all supporting my day job as a political researcher. With a new eye, and access to material which had previously only been obtainable with difficulty, if at all, I set to work.
What made the book possible though was the way the research environment has changed. First, much of the basic labour has been done, so that one can rely on such authorities as Francis K. Mason for their detailed analyses of the air battle, and on and the likes of Rear Admiral Ansel for his evaluation of the prospects for the invasion of England – to name but two of over a hundred key writers. But what has really changed is the advent of the internet. Far more material is available, far quicker, and at considerably less cost than it ever has been. Furthermore, the net has been enriched by new material that would never otherwise have seen the light of day.
Add to this the ability now to obtain books from around the world, even rare, out-of-print copies, at astonishing speed and low cost, and it is possible to achieve far more in less time than traditional researchers, with large support teams, could ever do. Running my own online forum also allowed me to test theories, and air information, with members from all over the world adding comments and sending more material. This made for a more balanced and complete work than I imagined possible, and I thank them all for it.
That said, as with my previous book on the British occupation of Iraq, very many people helped with the making of this book. The technology may have vastly improved the process but it also makes writing a more lonely occupation. As before, therefore, I must single out my long-suffering and patient wife Mary who provided so much support during the long hours of parturition. Again, my colleague Christopher Booker helped with encouragement and advice, and especially with the fearsome issue of structure, and my publisher Robin Baird-Smith kept me on the rails. I thank them both and also Jim Greenhalf, who has been a very special friend.
Special thanks also go to Peter Troy, for his interest and encouragement, and his comments on early drafts, which helped shape the narrative. To the editor of the website Think Defence who freely provided me with a huge amount of material, I also owe many thanks, as well as John-Paul Mc Kenna, who was extraordinarily helpful in getting research material to me. And even in this electronic age, real human beings have given me real and valuable assistance. I must thank Belinda Brown of the New Zealand High Commission, the hugely effective researchers at the Fleet Air Arm Museum at Yeovil, Nick Baldwin, Archivist at the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children and Christine Wagg of the Peabody Trust. I am also indebted to Andreas Winkel, editor of the website storm boot kommando.de, who supplied me with some original photographs of the German invasion fleet.
Reflecting how much the research environment has changed though, recognition must go to the hundreds or even thousands of anonymous – or, at least, unknown to me – people, from the researchers and administrators of the National Archives, to private website designers and owners who have put information and photographs in the public domain for all comers to use. That I should have made so much use of it is rather appropriate in a book that celebrates the ach
ievements of the people.
Despite all that, this is not a revisionist history. I would assert that we are currently living through that – a history that was changed after the event, for reasons I explore. This is an attempt to revert to the original – a reversionist history, if you like. It returns to a more faithful narrative which better describes events which still shape our destinies.
As importantly, in seeking to discover how and why the distortions occurred, I come to the startling conclusion that they were largely deliberate, a so far successful attempt to steal our history. That is a story on its own, and one which has important implications for us all. He who steals our history, steals our identity. If we are to learn from history, it must be the right history, the true account, not a counterfeit put in place to conceal a theft.
Bradford
West Yorkshire
10 July 2011
Foreword
By Christopher Booker
Only rarely is it given to a book to show one of the most famous episodes in history in such a dramatically new light that we can never see it in the same way again. Such is the achievement of this remarkable new account of the Battle of Britain by Dr Richard North.
For 70 years we have lived with a picture of the historic events in 1940 which has become one of the most enduring and familiar myths of our time. If a single image could sum up that picture it is of the gallant pilots of those Spitfires and Hurricanes criss-crossing the skies above Kent and Sussex, so successfully defying the aerial armadas being hurled against them that this did more than anything else to avert a threatened invasion.
The myth tells us that, when Britain stood alone after the fall of France, Hitler’s mind immediately turned to the military conquest of England, a precondition of which would be to win command of the air. Hence his launching in mid-August of a full-scale assault on the airfields of southern England. With the RAF’s resources allegedly stretched almost to breaking point, and the invasion barges gathering in ports across the Channel, Hitler then made what is painted as a fundamental strategic blunder, when on 7 September he switched his bomber fleets from the airfields to launch a full-scale offensive on London.
Barely a week later came what has come to be regarded as the highpoint of the battle, on 15 September, “Battle of Britain Day”. The newspapers bannered across their front pages that the RAF had shot down no fewer than “185 German aircraft”. Although the assault on London continued, by October the outcome of the battle was assured. Invasion had been called off. Britain and civilization were saved. In Churchill’s immortal words, more often quoted than any others of the time, “never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few”.
Such is the essence of the “myth”, congealed over the decades in countless books, films, newspaper articles and television documentaries. But such is the picture which North’s new version dismantles, reassembles and extends in so many respects that it turns much of that mythical version upside down.
Above all, by a tour de force of original research, North is able to set the events of those months in a vastly wider perspective. Instead of focusing just on the heroic role of Fighter Command, he steps back to show us very much more of what was going on at the time, including much that has previously been obscured, downplayed or completely overlooked. The Battle of Britain, it turns out, was an altogether larger and more complex web of events than it has too often been portrayed to be. And, as so often in history, the three-dimensional reality turns out to be much more interesting than the two-dimensional simplicities of the myth.
For a start, North confirms that there was never any practical possibility of an invasion of England, as Hitler soon knew. His real game, to an extent which has never been properly recognized, was not to conquer Britain but to neutralize her into withdrawing from the war, No fewer than five times between July and October 1940, he secretly put forward peace proposals which would allow Britain to remain an independent nation, with most of her worldwide empire intact – so long as she ceased to be at war with Germany.
To this end, Hitler rested his hopes on destroying Britain’s will to continue fighting, by offering a resolution of the conflict which the battle-weary British people would find it hard to resist. If necessary, they should force Churchill to resign, in favour of a new government which would represent their wish to come to some peaceful accommodation with him, Hitler’s purpose was to free himself from the distraction of Britain, so that he could concentrate on what was already his real aim, an invasion of the Bolshevik empire to the east.
Immediately after the fall of France, the German High Command had analysed the need to subdue Britain’s resistance under three headings. The first was to be a major blockade by air and sea, designed to bring her economy to a halt by destroying her ability to feed her people and to keep her key industries functioning, thus depriving her of the means to defend herself. The second strategy would be an aerial assault on her cities intended to break the morale of the British people, to the point where they would be willing to accept Hitler’s offer of peace. Only in third place, as an addendum to the others, was the possibility of mounting a physical invasion.
It was this grand plan which essentially shaped the drama which was to follow. The Battle of Britain proper began, not with the aerial offensive launched on 13 August, “Eagle Day”, but a month earlier, with a concerted attempt in July to cut off her economic lifelines and her maritime supplies. This centred partly on a relentless campaign to sink the small ships which brought down the east coast so much of what London and southern England needed to survive, such as coal to keep power stations running and the lights on. But it also involved raids on many of Britain’s key ports, such as Dover, Southampton, Bristol, Swansea, Liverpool, Hull, even Falmouth.
One reason why the scale of these July attacks has never been fully appreciated – as was to remain true of much else that followed – was the very strict censorship, which prevented much of the havoc they were wreaking from being reported. All newspaper readers or BBC listeners were allowed to know of a devastating attack on Bristol, for instance, was a brief report that that there had been “a raid on a town in the west of England”. As North discovered, much of what was going on all over Britain in 1940 remained virtually unrecorded for decades. Only the internet and the painstaking efforts put into compiling local historical websites and archives has made it possible for much of this to be put together.
The second phase of the battle was the assault in August on Britain’s air power. Again this was targeted not just at the airfields – the RAF survived these attacks much better than is often allowed – but at aircraft factories across the kingdom, from Southampton, Luton, Bristol, Birmingham and Coventry to northern cities such as Leeds and Manchester. Particularly when these raids took place at night, there was inevitably much collateral damage from bombs which missed their intended targets, and it was at this time that, for the inhabitants of many British cities, what would be remembered as “the Blitz” began.
Only in September, when the third phase of the battle began with the launching of the blitz on London, were the British people allowed to know something of the horror of the aerial offensive which had already caused havoc in other cities. Initially most of the destruction was centred around London’s East End and what was then the largest port in the world. For the first time, the assault of the Luftwaffe was deliberately aimed at civilian targets and at destroying the British people’s morale and social cohesion. This leads to one of the most fascinating episodes in North’s narrative.
Never fully reconstructed before has been the chilling story of how hundreds of thousands of East Enders were desperate to find refuge from the mass-bombing, from which they were hopelessly ill-protected by the perfunctory surface shelters provided by government policy and local councils. Above all Londoners wanted to shelter safely underground in tube stations. But initially the authorities, led by Churchill’s Cabinet, were adamant that armed guards must be placed on station e
ntrances to keep the public out.
Only after 50 East Londoners, led by a Communist Phil Piratin, marched “up West”, demanding to join the customers of one of London’s most luxurious hotels in a shelter beneath the Savoy, did the debate over the inadequacies of London’s shelter provision come to a head. So strong by now was the anger of East Enders, who felt abandoned by the authorities (only the tireless efforts of the Salvation Army and other voluntary organizations made it possible for many blitz victims to find food and shelter), that the government finally gave way. The policy reversal which opened up the underground to provide bomb shelters was to provide some of the most haunting images of the war.
The significance of this, however, was that it reflected Hitler’s wish to divide British society in such a way that the poorer classes might rise up to demand peace at almost any price. In this respect he certainly blundered in eventually allowing his bombers also to strike at the richer West End of London, most notably in the bombing of Buckingham Palace, since this did much to show the British that all classes were now in this fight together,
But as North describes, the potential division Hitler hoped to promote was most vividly expressed in a running conflict between Churchill, who continued to portray “his” Battle of Britain as centred on the heroic exploits of Fighter Command, and J. B. Priestley who, in his hugely popular weekly radio broadcasts, was quick to recognize that the real front-line protagonists in the battle were now “the people”. Like the US broadcaster Quentin Reynolds, he spoke for all those who nightly suffered the effects of the bombing, and all those who were fighting heroically alongside them to keep society functioning, from firemen, civil defence and ambulance workers to the crews of the ships which were keeping London and Britain supplied with the necessities of life.
So fixated was Churchill on the crucial part in saving Britain he saw having been played by “the few” that, when the invasion fear finally subsided in October, he was quite happy to proclaim the Battle of Britain as having ended in victory. In fact, the struggle had been much more level-pegging than the government propaganda machine and the media liked to pretend (the true German losses on 15 September, for instance, had been not 185 as claimed but only 56). By the end of October the Luftwaffe’s total losses had been 1,680 aircraft, the RAF’s 1,642 – so that, in that respect, the result had been not so much a victory as a score draw.
Many Not the Few: The Stolen History of the Battle of Britain Page 1
