Many Not the Few: The Stolen History of the Battle of Britain

by Richard North

  Faced with Schniewind’s insistence on the narrow front, Halder declared that, “I utterly reject the Navy’s proposal; from the point of view of the Army, I regard their proposal as complete suicide. I might just as well put the troops that have landed straight through a sausage machine”. Schniewind retorted that the broad front was not only suicidal, but “a sacrifice of troops on their way to land”. There was no possibility of reconciliation. The issue would have to be decided by Hitler.8

  The media in Britain were covering the invasion story in their own way. A down-page item in the Express reported that German Army leave had been stopped and that “Hitler is hourly intensifying his invasion campaign of nerves against Britain”. The report retailed a quote from Luftwaffe General Sanders, who threatened “complete destruction of London docks and Birmingham”. He added:

  I cannot tell you when the attack will come or how, but I can say it will not come in the form in which it is anticipated in England. The German Air Force is ready to strike now. It has already made all preparations; planes have been overhauled and pilots rested. Mr Churchill was quite right when he said that in our attacks on England we have up to date only been taking England’s measure. We have not started to cut the cloth. The attacks will be directed against docks and industrial centres.

  At a press conference the previous day, Ribbentrop, the foreign minister, had declared that “England will be forced to accept peace terms this year”. In Spain, said the Express correspondent on the Franco–Spanish frontier, it was firmly believed that, with all communications between occupied and unoccupied France severed, the German invasion of Britain was imminent. All roads and railways in northern France were strictly reserved for German troops. It was thought the Germans would make a double attack, one from western France directed against south-west England and Ireland, and the other from northern France, directed against the Kentish and Essex coasts.

  Yet in the skies over Britain, the day was widely regarded as “quiet”. Fighter Command lost five aircraft, two others bringing total RAF losses to seven. The Luftwaffe lost five.

  In terms of action, a convoy off Cromer was attacked, probably FS 44 – six vessels on the run that stretched from Methil, the sheltered anchorage in Largo Bay in the Forth Estuary, all the way to Southend. This one was due on 8 August. From there, the vessels would either join another convoy or make their way independently to the port of London or another destination close by. Sometimes the convoys started on the Tyne, as this one did. Most did so from September 1939 up to the end of August 1940. From then, the starting point had been Largo Bay, watched over by the RAF as it became a prime target for the Luftwaffe. Altogether, the FS series ran until May 1945, comprising 1,778 convoys which passed through 18,448 shipping movements, carrying well over 20 million tons of cargo. The route was protected by defensive minefields but was vulnerable to attacks by U-boat, E-boat, aircraft and mines.9

  The convoy system was a vital link in the chain between the coalfields of the north-east and the south. Even without enemy action, there would have been problems. Through the brutally cold winter of 1939–40, there had been a desperate crisis. Snow and freezing conditions in January and February had brought the rail system to a halt and coal distribution had virtually ceased. Emergency stocks had been depleted and some areas ran out of coal completely.

  The winter had been the coldest since 1895 and the January the coldest since 1838. The Thames had frozen in the upper reaches, ice interfered with shipping in the estuary, and even the sea froze in Morecambe Bay. The lowest temperature was 10 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit), recorded at Rhayader, Radnorshire, on 21 January. More insurance claims for cars with engines split by frost were recorded in January than in the whole of any one winter. Trains took a week to get from London to Glasgow, the passengers sleeping at wayside stations unable even to reach a road, which in any case they would have found blocked.

  Factory workers in East London were unable to go home for two days and stayed in the factory hostel. Snowdrifts 16 ft deep were reported in outer London areas. This weather, which began before Christmas, lasted until March. It included Britain’s worst ice storm, which was hailed as a thaw and proved to be a frost. The rain came down and as it fell into the lower atmosphere it froze. Nearly the whole country was covered with ice for two days, and transport was stopped.

  For almost three weeks traffic in the Humber had been suspended by ice. A ship specially strengthened for ice-breaking failed to force a passage out of Goole, and an attempt to break up the ice with an empty collier of 1,500 tons resulted only in her riding up on the ice and remaining there.10

  Now, the transportation stresses were intensifying. The inland system, and especially the rail network, was not coping. And London needed coal, 30,000 tons every week just to feed the electricity power stations, to keep the trains on the move – most of them coal-fired – and for much of the heat for domestic cooking and hot water, as well as for making the town gas. The south of England, in total, required 275,000 tons a month to be delivered by sea.

  Len Deighton, in his book, was caustic about what he termed the “official stupidity” of sending domestic cargoes through dangerous coastal waters. He argued that they should have been sent by rail, as they were later.11 But it was not that simple. The fall of France had seriously disrupted traditional patterns of trade. Much of the ocean-going trade had been diverted to the west coast to keep it away from the Luftwaffe. This required a major re-orientation of rail traffic. While there were plenty of locomotives and trucks, the loading and unloading facilities did not exist on the scale required, in the places they were now needed. Marshalling yards were inadequate; there were bottlenecks throughout the system, especially at junctions on lines where there had been significant routing changes. Storage depots were in the wrong places and local distribution was not fully (or at all in many cases) integrated with the rail system.

  War production was also imposing additional loads on transport, as were the joint requirements of civilian evacuation from major cities, and troop movements. Operation Pied Piper, in the first week of the war had relocated three million people – nearly a quarter of the population of England – creating massive disruption. With the Phony War, where the expected bombing had not occurred, many had drifted back, only for there to be a second, more measured evacuation as the bombs began to fall. This had imposed further burdens on the rail system. Both mobilization and evacuation meant that there were more people away from home, creating more demand for long-distance transport as people returned home to visit friends and relatives. The population had become far more mobile than it ever had been. This created additional competition for track space – even more with petrol rationing and restrictions on road transport.

  To make matters worse, the rail system was in private hands. Routes were regionally delimited and rolling-stock inventories were owned by regional companies. There was no provision for pooling stock, apportioning it nationally according to need and then tracking and accounting for the new patterns of usage, so that stock could be returned to where it was most needed. There simply was not the unified management – nor even the statistical information – which would permit central planning and control of what had to become a national rail system for it to function effectively.

  On top of that, there were the effects of the blackout – especially on marshalling yards and goods depots, which needed high intensity illumination to work efficiently in the hours of darkness. Air-raid warnings which forced workers to take cover, and then actual bombing damage, all had significant effects on goods movements – which were set to increase. Thus, while there was – in theory – sufficient rail capacity to cope with extra traffic generated by closing down the coastal shipping trade, the system was not up to the task. It would never catch up. By the time changes had been made, the rail infrastructure had deteriorated, rolling stock had worn out and the whole system could only be kept running by offering a vastly poorer service to passengers, itself creating huge problem
s and enormous aggravation.

  Furthermore, if there was stupidity, it was not necessarily confined to officials. Pre-war, the Ministry of Transport to a certain extent foresaw that there would be difficulties “in placing a sudden demand on the railways for greatly increased traffic in unfamiliar channels”. It was the railway companies which proved to be the obstacle, displaying unwarranted optimism about their ability to cope, based on flawed planning assumptions, not the least of which being that passenger traffic could be drastically cut.

  In the meantime, to keep London and the southern towns supplied, there was no alternative but to use the colliers, plying from the coalfields of the north. Had they not sailed, London would have gone dangerously short of coal – even more so than it actually did. And coal-fired steam pumps pushed water through the mains which fed the fire hydrants. Without coal, the story of the Blitz could have been very different indeed.12

  Thus, with their escorts – many of them armed trawlers – these small ships traversed the dangerous waters of the east coast and the Channel. Their crews did so uncomplainingly – badly paid, with no pensions, no holiday or sick pay or even injury compensation. If their ships were sunk from under them, their pay ended the moment the water lapped over their boots. They faced appalling dangers and suffered a far greater number of casualties than did “the few” who were to capture the nation’s imagination.13 Their largely unrecognized heroism gave the planners a breathing space, time to resolve some of the problems of adjustment, the like of which had never before been experienced and for which the country was singularly ill-prepared.

  But, if the heroism of the “Coal Scuttle brigade” as it came to be called was unrecognized, fighting yet another unrecognized aspect of the war was J. B. Priestley. To his campaign, a reference was made in William Hickey’s column in the Express. Sixteen editors, war correspondents and columnists had dined with Duff Cooper, the meeting chaired by Priestley. He had been particularly interested in discussing the government’s definition of “peace aims”, constantly bringing the talk back to the “new Europe” that we must be supposed to be fighting for. He and others urged that the government should define the sort of new world order they wanted. He spoke of the need to counter the Nazi claim that they were fighting for a new order, “we merely for the status quo”.

  Priestley said he spoke for the thoughtful younger generation, in the Forces and out, who were asking the question, troubled by the government’s apparent lack of a programme and adherence to old ways. He built up a glowing picture of the alert, politically educated young British public, absorbed in world affairs. Hickey demurred. Priestley, whom he described as “an earnest Liberal”, was taking an unrealistically optimistic view. “There are, thank heaven”, Hickey continued, thousands of these “young intelligents” (chiefly in the working classes) but they are still in a small minority. Priestley “was probably making the amateur’s mistake of thinking those who write letters to him were representative”. The real man-in-the-street rarely wrote letters; more rarely still intelligent or “progressive” ones.

  DAY 30 – THURSDAY 8 AUGUST 1940

  The shooting war erupted – the sea and air together to make for the biggest fight yet. So many aircraft were involved, and so vicious was the fighting, that some regard 8 August as the true beginning of the Battle of Britain or, variously, the start of the second phase. Even then, the main action was against shipping, specifically Convoy CW9, codenamed “Peewit”, routed from Southend to the Yarmouth Roads off the Isle of Wight.

  The convoy was the first attempt to run the Straits after it had been closed by the Luftwaffe. Briefing the convoy skippers, an unnamed Royal Navy Reserve (RNR) commander told them that keeping the route open was a matter of “prestige”. “We don’t give a damn about your coal … we’ll send you empty if we have to”, he was reported to have said. And so, with twenty-five merchant ships and nine escorts, the convoy had weighed anchor at 7 a.m. on the morning of August 7.14

  Some reports have it that the convoy was picked up by radar, but there was no need for high technology. The convoy could be seen by shore observers sailing through the Straits in daylight. The Germans then only had to wait for darkness and lie in wait further down the Channel, listening for the approach of the ships. That is what they did. That night, four E-boats lay in the water, engines throttled back, rocking in the swell. At two in the morning, the quiet was broken only by the thumping rhythm of gliding ships and the wash and suck of water. Then they struck. There was the snarl of high-powered diesels kicking into life, the ghastly green glow of a star shell punched into the sky by a destroyer escort, and the night ripped apart by the slam of gunfire, escorts and convoy blazing away with everything they had.15

  The coaster Holme Force and her 1,000-ton cargo of coke was the first to go down, torpedoed off Newhaven. The Fife Coast followed, ten to fifteen miles west of Beachy Head. Eleven lives were lost. The steamer Ouse was sunk in the confusion. She collided with the steamer Rye while avoiding a torpedo from one of the E-boats. Twenty-three survivors were rescued from her. Steamers John M, ten miles south of The Needles, and Polly M, fifteen miles from Cape Wrath, were damaged.

  Daylight brought the Stukas, in the first of three major attacks of the day. SS Coquetdale was the first casualty. The Empire Crusader followed, sunk fifteen miles west of St Catherine’s Point, with the loss of her master, two crew and two naval gunners. The Dutch steamer Ajax was sunk fifteen miles west of St Catherine’s Point, with the loss of four crewmen. Three other Dutch steamers, Veenenburg, Omlandia and Surte were damaged, as were British steamers Scheldt and Balhama. The Norwegian Tres was damaged so badly she later sank in St Helen’s Bay. Two anti-submarine yachts and four anti-submarine trawlers were also damaged. HMS Borealis, serving as a barrage balloon vessel, was sunk 4.5 miles from St Catherine’s Lighthouse.

  Against all that, Fighter Command lost twenty-one aircraft, claiming in total the destruction of sixty-six, as against twenty-one Luftwaffe aircraft actually destroyed – although many more were damaged. Two RAF bombers lost put the Luftwaffe ahead, with twenty-three British losses to twenty-one German. More dangerously, eighteen Fighter Command airmen were lost – including three from a Blenheim F1. Fifteen were lost at sea. One, Flight Lieutenant “Henry” Hall, crashed off Dover. His friend and fellow pilot, Johnnie Kent, later observed that these early combats had been “the most deadly of all”. Many a good fighter pilot lost would have been invaluable in the days that followed.

  Fighting over England, Kent observed, one would come down on land where medical attention, if required, could rapidly be obtained. Over the sea it was different. “The chances of being picked up during a convoy attack were very remote and this may well have happened to Henry as it did to so many others”, he wrote. Hall had commanded a flight in No. 257 Sqn but had previously been a test pilot at Farnborough. He was exactly the sort of experienced pilot the British could ill-afford to lose.16

  Despite all this, and solely on the basis of the grossly inflated tally that actually concealed a small net loss and a disastrous loss of experienced pilots, Churchill was moved to direct a congratulatory message to be sent by the War Cabinet to the Secretary of State for Air and the Chief of the Air Staff. Such was the power of statistics in willing hands.17

  No similar message was sent to the Admiralty, or even to the Shipping Minister congratulating the merchantmen who had taken such risks. Instead, the Navy received a sharp memorandum from the Prime Minister to Admiral Pound. “Since we are using the convoys as decoys,” he wrote, “surely they should creep in along the shore a good deal more than they do.” Churchill also complained that there were too many convoys running. There had been four working at the same time. Only one should be run every four or five days, he said. No thought was given to the need to move goods.18

  By the end of the evening, Jock Colville was thinking about greater events. He believed “personally” that the invasion would not be delayed much longer: Germany was probably gathering herse
lf for a formidable blow. However, he confided that he had been comforted by the views of an “eminent German”, whom he did not name. This person had opined that Germany’s position was “splendid but hopeless”.19

  DAY 31 – FRIDAY 9 AUGUST 1940

  No doubt with huge relief, the Ministry of Information announced the newer, bigger and better RAF victories, the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express both recording fifty-three victories for the loss of sixteen RAF fighters. Not everyone was convinced. George Orwell was one of the more prominent sceptics and there were enough of them to invoke a rebuke from Ernest Bevin via the Mirror. “If we let cynicism and bitterness get into the hearts of the people we shall (blank, blank) lose the war”, he complained. Asking what could best cheer the people, the paper suggested: “News of a victory”. Defensive talk, it averred, makes for cynicism. And what does not make for cynicism? The paper’s answer was: “This sort of thing – we shot down 53 enemy aircraft yesterday”.

  The media was certainly entering into the spirit of things, treating their readers to a diet of excited reports from towns “somewhere on the South-east coast”, where Spitfires “roared”, while cannon and the machine guns provided “an almost continuous chorus”. Typical of the genre was copy from George Fyfe in the Daily Telegraph. He had written:

  The battle scene changed swiftly from one part of the sky to another in a highly exciting game of hide-and-seek. Pilots who had lost their adversaries in the mist would suddenly re-establish contact and in wonderful displays of aerobatics begin blazing away at one another with all their guns.

  Later in the same piece, he wrote of a Messerschmitt which had “raced away” from the scene, followed by two Spitfires, which “streaked through the sky in thrilling pursuit”. But this was not an action game for the entertainment of the watchers. The “highly exciting game of hide-and-seek” cost No. 145 Sqn five pilots in three actions that day, although it in turn claimed an inflated seventeen enemy aircraft destroyed. This had Keith Park rushing to the squadron to congratulate the survivors on “their magnificent efforts”. Archie Sinclair sent a telegram of congratulations to CO, Squadron Leader John Peel. But the squadron was falling apart. After taking three more casualties, it was withdrawn from the line on 14 August and sent to Drem, in Scotland.20