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

by Richard North

  Reflecting on the battle, Galland in his autobiography referred to the third phase fought between 8 August and 7 September. In this action the bombers returned to the task allocated to them by Douhet: the enemy air force must be wiped out while still grounded. But Douhet, he said, envisaged for this task waves and waves of bombers, darkening the sky with their multitudes. He would have been gravely disappointed to see the realization of his strategic dream as it was put into practice over England at the time.31

  The commander with the most immediate responsibility for frustrating Göring’s ambitions was Keith Park. His meeting was in the austere surrounds of Hillingdon House. The contrast could not be more extreme. At the very centre of events, fighting the battle day-on-day, Park was the self-contained professional. “Survival is everything”, he told his controllers. The battle would be won if Fighter Command could stay in being until the autumn, when it would be too late for the Germans to invade. But he was worried about the number of pilots being lost over the sea in hot pursuit of retreating aircraft. Pilots were to be vectored to large enemy formations over land or within gliding distance of the coast – except for shipping and convoy protection in the Thames Estuary.32

  One crucial issue emerging at this time was that fighter losses could no longer be made good from production. The combined weekly output of single-engined types was a little over a hundred. The RAF was eating into its reserves. A potential pilot shortage, though, was a bigger problem. With over 200 pilots lost from the start of the battle, replacements had numbered about 60. These newcomers, “though of equal spirit, as yet possessed only a tithe of the fighting skill of their predecessors”. Volunteers from Lysander and Battle Squadrons, from Allied Forces, and those about to embark on the final stages of bomber and coastal training, were rushed through specially shortened fighter courses.

  There was also the strain on those who survived: the long hours at dispersal, the constant flying at high altitudes (two or three sorties a day was normal, six or seven not uncommon), the repeated combats, the parachute descents, the forced landings. The tiredness of those who had been most actively engaged was a factor which could be neglected no more than the casualties.

  General Sir Hugh Elles of the Ministry of Home Security seemed unconcerned with these details. He had spent some of his valuable time responding to the concerns of the citizens and burghers of Swansea about air raids, drafting a carefully phrased letter to Hugh Dowding, as the person in charge of the air defences. He referred to the importance of the docks in Swansea and “the great refinery of Llandarcy” close by. He also asked for the installation of more barrage balloons on South Wales, “more for psychological reasons than anything else”. In a dusty response, Dowding was to tell Elles: “I have no balloons for psychological use and am having to refuse physiological claims”.33

  That very afternoon in South Wales, three Ju 88s sped low-level across the coast. Roaring up the Milford Sound, they lobbed their bombs into an oil depot. This was not Llandarcy. Its turn was to come. This was the Pembroke Docks complex, the largest Admiralty fuel storage site in Britain. Two tanks received direct hits and eight of the fifteen on the site exploded and burst into a flaming inferno.

  In the immediate locality, there was chaos. Shrieking mothers, some hysterical, were frantically looking for children. From a pig farm close to the depot, terrified pigs fled squealing down the road. Firemen, soon on the scene, found jet black smoke churning across the carriageway in such dense clouds it was impossible to see. The blaze was creating a deafening roaring noise. Fire fighters had to “shield their faces from the scorching heat”.

  The conflagration became the largest “single-seat” fire the UK has ever known – even to this day. In the three weeks before it was finally extinguished, it consumed 33 million gallons of fuel oil, during which time 650 firemen were engaged. On 22 August, 5 firemen from Cardiff were killed in an explosion while fighting the fire. Twenty-eight were injured. Of those who were about to become “the few”, there had been so sign. The depot had been completely undefended.34

  8.

  Redefining the war

  In the last war millions of men fought by hurling enormous masses of steel at one another. “Men and shells” was the cry, and prodigious slaughter was the consequence. In this war nothing of this kind has yet appeared. It is a conflict of strategy, of organisation, of technical apparatus, of science, mechanics, and morale.

  Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 20 August 19401

  What started off as a “war of peoples” was now to be redefined by Churchill as the war of the “few”, a war fought by a technocratic élite, to whom the many owed “so much”. The idea of setting out “war aims” was then rejected by the Prime Minister. His emphasis was on breaking the Nazi tyranny. Concealed by the censor’s crayon, however, the war was being redefined in other ways, while events were leading inexorably to the Blitz.

  DAY 42 – TUESDAY 20 AUGUST 1940

  Despite the bad weather, Heinkels bombed Liverpool. At least 30 tracks were reported over Lincolnshire and Nottingham and a number of RAF bomber airfields were attacked as they lit flarepaths for returning aircraft. Sheffield, Nottingham, Hull, Derby and Leicester were raided by small numbers of bombers, causing 112 casualties.

  Seven Fairey Battles of No. 12 Sqn had also been out, attacking invasion shipping in Boulogne. Had they each delivered their 1,500lb bomb load, this would still have been a light raid. As it was, because of the haze, the glare of the German searchlights and the heavy anti-aircraft fire, four aircraft failed to find suitable targets. One returned with engine trouble and another with a bomb-rack snag. Yet another was shot down, the crew taken prisoner. Despite this, readers of the morning’s Express were regaled with the squadron’s exploits. Astute readers might have wondered why it was still making attacks. A raid the previous Saturday had “virtually completed the destruction of the commercial port”. Naval and air bases had been left in flames.

  It was Churchill’s big day in the Commons. But in a remarkable contrast with the extravagant ceremony attendant on Hitler’s speaking engagements, he had to wait his turn in an unadorned debating chamber. There were oral questions. Sir William Davison asked why there was still a great shortage of coal in many provincial towns. The Mines Secretary, David Grenfell, wearily answered that, in view of the heavy demand for coal stocking, some delays were inevitable.2 The crisis of the previous winter was still casting its shadow.

  When he stood up to speak, Churchill ruminated on the nature of the war. But no longer was it his “war of peoples” of 14 July. After his visits to Fighter Command HQ, having been immersed in the technology, the planning and the statistics, it had become “a conflict of strategy, of organisation, of technical apparatus, of science, mechanics”, and only then of morale. He talked about the “great air battle” in progress, telling the House that it was too soon “to attempt to assign limits either to its scale or to its duration”. The Prime Minister also asserted that, in France, British fighter aircraft had been inflicting a loss of “two or three to one” on the Germans. At Dunkirk, this had been about three or four to one. In this current battle a larger ratio was expected, and that expectation “has certainly come true”. It must also be remembered, he said:

  that all the enemy machines and pilots which are shot down over our island, or over the seas which surround it, are either destroyed or captured; whereas a considerable proportion of our machines, and also of our pilots, are saved, and soon again in many cases come into action.

  These two last assertions illustrated the fragility of the Prime Minister’s grasp of events. His exchange ratios were based on inflated kill figures, ignoring the Bomber and Coastal Command losses, and aircraft destroyed on the ground. But the figures for losses, from the start of the battle to the end of this day, adding two RAF and four Luftwaffe losses for the day, gave a total of 602 British aircraft lost, with the German figure standing at 585. As to pilots being “saved”, only the previous day Park had expressed h
is concern at the number of pilots being lost. Dowding was later to write:

  It might also be assumed that all German crews who were in aircraft brought down during the Battle were permanently lost to the Luftwaffe because the fighting took place on our side of the Channel. Such an assumption would not be literally true, because the Germans succeeded in rescuing a proportion of their crews from the sea by means of rescue boats, floats and aircraft.3

  Churchill was considerably less knowledgeable about some technical aspects of the campaign than one might imagine. Lord Halifax, in his dealings with the Prime Minister often described him as talking “rot”.

  Nevertheless, Churchill was extremely well informed about aircraft recovery, which he described as a “vast and admirable system of salvage”. He was referring to the Civilian Repair Organization (CRO), set up by his friend Lord Beaverbrook. This was indeed a superb system, which could take aircraft normally considered beyond repair and ensure their “speediest return” to the fighting line. In July 1940, 40 per cent of aircraft reaching fighter squadrons had come from this source.4 And it was such considerations that brought Churchill to the best-remembered part of his speech, when he said:

  The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the world war by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

  Crucially, Churchill did not refer here to Fighter Command, or even pilots. He spoke of “British airmen”. Only then did he declare: “All hearts go out to the fighter pilots, whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day”. But, he added:

  we must never forget that all the time, night after night, month after month, our bomber squadrons travel far into Germany, find their targets in the darkness by the highest navigational skill, aim their attacks, often under the heaviest fire, often with serious loss, with deliberate careful discrimination, and inflict shattering blows upon the whole of the technical and war-making structure of the Nazi power. On no part of the Royal Air Force does the weight of the war fall more heavily than on the daylight bombers who will play an invaluable part in the case of invasion and whose unflinching zeal it has been necessary in the meanwhile on numerous occasions to restrain.

  Not in any way could Churchill’s “few” be taken to be an exclusive celebration of fighter pilots. The passage gave far more credit to the bombing effort. It afforded one “of the most certain, if not the shortest of all the roads to victory”. Nor was this the speech of a prime minister expecting imminent invasion, leading a nation fighting for its life, its very survival apparently hanging on the slender thread of a few squadrons of Spitfires and Hurricanes.

  Thus, time and again the actions, the demeanour, do not match the words. And behind the scenes, R. A. Butler, under-secretary at the Foreign Office, was briefing newspaperman Cecil King, telling him that the invasion was “hooey”. There had never been, he said, sufficient concentrations of troops in northern France. Hitler’s troops were going east. They were going to attack Russia.5

  The war, of course, had not stopped for Churchill’s speech. A bomber formation was intercepted over the Thames Estuary and a spirited fight developed late in the day when Polish fliers from the newly commissioned No. 302 Sqn shot down a Ju 88 off the Yorkshire coast at Withernsea. The evening saw a raid on Newton Abbot. This small Devon town just north of the naval base of Plymouth was regarded by the Germans as an important strategic railway junction. Three aircraft bombed the station and the streets surrounding it. Then they strafed the area and attacked a Plymouth train. Severe damage was caused to the station with fifteen locomotives, fifty-two coaches and twenty-two goods wagons damaged. Fifteen people were killed and sixty were seriously injured. Chased by two Hurricanes, the attacking aircraft fled, flying so low that they had to climb to clear the river bridge as they made their escape.6

  The day saw two Fighter Command aircraft lost, and eight Luftwaffe losses, including a seaplane lost in a storm and a Condor which went missing during a sortie to Northern Ireland.

  DAY 43 – WEDNESDAY 21 AUGUST 1940

  The newspapers gave Churchill’s speech prominent coverage, but the Daily Mirror homed in on his admission that he had been asked for a better definition of Britain’s war aims. He had told the Commons that while the battle raged and the war was still perhaps in its earlier stage, he did not think it wise, “to embark upon elaborate speculations about the future shape which should be given to Europe or the new securities which must be arranged to spare mankind the miseries of a third World War”.

  The ground, said Churchill, was not new. It had been frequently traversed and explored, and many ideas were held about it in common by all good men, and all free men. “But before we can undertake the task of rebuilding we have not only to be convinced ourselves, but we have to convince all other countries that the Nazi tyranny is going to be finally broken.” To Priestley, and for that matter Duff Cooper, this was a snub. But there was something else. Having shared with Priestley the “war of peoples” concept, Churchill had turned his back on it and redefined the war. It had become, after all, a war of princes, of technocratic élites.

  In an implied rebuke to the Prime Minister, though, “George” Strube in the Express political cartoon depicted his trademark “little man” holding a large bunch of flowers, labelled “bouquet”. Surrounded by a circle of eleven men, each in different guises – from airman to anti-aircraft gunner and ARP warden – he was puzzling who to give it to. And well he might. Each man was pointing his neighbour. So much for “the few” – here was a graphic depiction of the many.

  Churchill had other things on his mind by now, having been made aware of growing US scepticism about the scale of the RAF victories. Writing to Archie Sinclair, he told him, “The important thing is to bring the German aircraft down and win the battle”. American correspondents and the American public “will find out soon enough when the German air attack is plainly shown to be repulsed”. Separately, he wrote to General Ismay, commenting that “The prospects of invasion are rapidly receding”.7

  Air activity, hampered by poor weather, was relatively light. And the Luftwaffe was undergoing a reorganization, transfering Me 109s from Cherbourg to the Pas de Calais where their short range could be better exploited. Göring visited the headquarters of the Second Air Fleet for the first time. While he was there, a convoy running the Straits was shelled by the newly installed heavy guns at Cap Gris Nez. Sixteen aircraft then attacked the convoy. No losses or damage were recorded, although the attrition of the merchant fleet continued elsewhere. The British steamer Letty was lost en route to Ireland, from an “unknown agent”. In a raid on Southampton Dock, the hulk Kendal was sunk, together with a hopper barge. The net layer Kylemore was sunk by German bombing off Harwich, the steamer Alacrity was damaged at Falmouth and the trawler Wolseley off the Pembrokeshire coast.

  On the domestic front, Home Intelligence found that the Prime Minister’s speech had been extremely well received. In London, where morale was said to be “excellent”, it was thought to be “completely right”, particularly “his reference to the RAF”. It “epitomizes the feeling of the country”, one respondent had said. Confidence had greatly increased since the beginning of the war.

  And that war went on. Ju 88s machine-gunned firemen battling the fire at Pembroke Docks, now in its third day. At RAF St Eval, the sector station for Cornwall, three intruders dropped bombs and incendiaries, and then machine-gunned dispersed aircraft. Five Junkers Ju 88s then bombed the Radio Direction Finding station on St Mary’s, Isles of Scilly. On the east coast, a formation of Dorniers was spotted. Intercepting aircraft claimed several kills. The former Butlin’s holiday camp at Skegness, requisitioned by the Royal Navy, was bombed. There were injuries and a new recruit was killed. The mood was lightened, however
, when German radio claimed that HMS Royal Arthur, the official name for the camp, had been sunk with great loss of life.8

  In 599 sorties, Fighter Command lost four aircraft, three destroyed on the ground at St Eval. A Hampden lost on operations brought the RAF total losses to five, against the Luftwaffe loss of thirteen bombers.

  DAY 44 – THURSDAY 22 AUGUST 1940

  Air Secretary Archibald Sinclair made the pages of the Daily Mirror with an explanation of how enemy air losses were computed “so that public confidence in the British announcements may be maintained”. Having so done, he declared that “It could be asserted with confidence that the reports of our pilots tended to err on the side of understatement. They were on their honour”.

  The Daily Express carried a large advert for War Bonds, with a pull-quote from the Prime Minister: “Never in the field of human conflict … “. Said the copy: “You can back our airmen by buying … “.

  Paul Mallon, a widely syndicated Washington columnist, found his way into several US newspapers with yet more rumours of Nazi peace offers. To the latest were attached “surprisingly moderate” terms, he wrote: Churchill was to be replaced by Beaverbrook, and the UK would join in an economic alliance with Germany, against Russia and Japan.9

  The Luftwaffe attacked more convoys in the Straits of Dover. Bombs were again augmented by the shore batteries. When they failed to hit any ships, they shelled the town. This would be the start of a four-year bombardment which recorded 2,226 shells landing within the town boundaries. Many more fell in the surrounding countryside, the harbour waters and the Straits. Essentially a front-line town, the civilian population dropped from 40,500 in early 1939 to an estimated 12,000.

  Dover was not alone in its torment. During the day, there were more raids on RAF Manston, this coastal station being attacked so frequently that it was in the process of being abandoned. That night, Aberdeen, sites in Yorkshire, Hampshire, South Wales and Bristol were hit. Filton airfield was also bombed, as raiders targeted the Bristol Aircraft Company works. And despite Sinclair’s defence of the scoring system, the British claimed seven enemy aircraft downed, for the loss of two of their own. The actual figures were four – against nine RAF aircraft lost. Ironically, on this one day, the Germans did not exaggerate. They claimed seven RAF aircraft for the loss of six of theirs.10