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

by Richard North

  There were also reports of RAF attacks on Calais, seen from Dover Harbour. Starting about ten the previous night, German searchlights had been probing the sky. Parachute flares were dropped and orange-coloured “flaming onions” soared into the sky. The thump of bombs was heard across the stretch of twenty miles of sea – a rare occurrence. Bombing appeared exceptionally heavy.

  Tiny by comparison was a report in the Yorkshire Post, retailing the views of H. B. Lees-Smith, the MP for the West Yorkshire mill town of Keighley. Speaking in his constituency, he suggested that the last possible day for an invasion was the equinox on 21 September. If Hitler did not beat us by physical invasion in the next month, said Lees-Smith, he would try to defeat us by his blockade, by sinking our merchant ships.

  German Army chief von Brauchitsch was now relying on the Naval Staff’s understanding that the invasion would only be mounted “if an especially favourable initial situation offers sure prospects of success”. On this basis the Navy had agreed to keep fifty transports at Le Havre to transfer to England the four divisions based there. Twenty-five of these ships would sail directly to Brighton Bay behind motorboats in the assault wave, while the rest would go with the main crossing. Their landing zones would be allocated according to the prevailing situation. Halder was far from satisfied. The plan had “no chance of success this year”. This day, therefore, von Brauchitsch had insisted on seeing Hitler personally.28

  Air action over Britain started with the appearance of reconnaissance aircraft in the No. 11 Group area, followed by a series of raids, one of which targeted Folkestone, killing three and injuring several others. The depleted No. 264 Sqn lost three more of its Defiants after being savaged by two Me 109s – although not before claiming a number of Do 17s downed. Fighter Command overall suffered twenty-two losses. Bomber and Coastal Command lost six. A former Dutch Fokker seaplane was also downed, bringing total RAF losses to twenty-nine. The Luftwaffe lost thirty-eight machines, including two He 115s destroyed on the ground by RAF bombers.

  Come the night, 200 Luftwaffe bombers were abroad, with raids on Bournemouth, Plymouth and Coventry. Birmingham had another visit, and flights were made over London, triggering air-raid warnings. Bombs were dropped in the Hendon and Edgware districts. Bombing in and around London was becoming almost routine. The first major raid in the centre had been put down to a navigational error. The Luftwaffe seemed to be making a lot of those errors, given that it also had radio beams to guide its bombers.

  DAY 49 – TUESDAY 27 AUGUST 1940

  The Battle of Britain was long past the preliminary stage, said the semi-official Berlin paper, Dienst aus Deutschland, characterizing all that had happened so far as “preliminaries”. “Now begins the planned destruction of industrial plants essential to war”, it said.

  The British newspapers reported on the prolonged overnight “raid” on London, with six hours between the first warning and the “all clear”. It was small beer compared with what was to come, but enough to excite the headline writers. After the hectic fighting of the day before, Fighter Command reported less business. The new Göring doctrine was taking effect. Less than fifty intruders were detected and only four bombing incidents were recorded during the daylight hours. One of those, described as “a bad air-raid”, was in Plymouth. It killed twelve inmates and staff of Ford House, an old people’s home. The Great Western Railway tender, the Sir John Hawkins, was damaged. On the day, Fighter Command lost four aircraft, Bomber Command three and the Luftwaffe five.

  Overnight, the Luftwaffe was on the rampage again. Bombs were dropped on Gravesend, Calshot, Portsmouth, Southampton, the Isle of Wight, Tonbridge, Tiptree and Leighton Buzzard. In the north-east, bombing was reported at twenty different locations. There were five fatalities at Eston and three at West Hartlepool. Since June, that town had been under repeated attack. As with so many provincial towns, night after night the warning sirens had sounded. The town suffered air raids from June 1940 until March 1943, and seventy men, women and children were killed during this time. The period between July and October 1940 was the worst. During these months there were a total of 147 warnings, often several a night, lasting for hours.29

  Dockers at Grimsby and Immingham, very much in the front line, decided on their own response. They went on a two-day strike, demanding “risk money”, plus extra for working in the black-out, and for the arduous nature of their work.

  For the hard-pressed public, the shift to night bombing became the main topic of conversation and concern. The disturbance and uncertainty was causing serious problems for a population under stress. But also causing considerable concern, according to Home Intelligence, were the erratic signals given by the air-raid warning sirens. They seemed to bear no relation to the level of threat. Bombs were just as likely to drop after the “all clear” as during the warning period. Increasingly, the public was losing confidence in the system.

  Ordinary people might have been even more concerned if they had been aware of the lack of harmony and focus in the higher reaches of the RAF. The Fighter Command brass hats were addressing their real enemies – each other. Keith Park was trying to sort out the behaviour of Air Officer Commanding (AOC) No. 12 Group, Leigh-Mallory, and his promotion of the “big wing” concept. This issue has been rehearsed endlessly, but the spat must be seen against a background of a nation supposedly on the brink of an invasion, fighting for its survival. Throughout the campaign, its senior leaders seemed to be devoting most of their energies to plotting against each other, while Dowding sat in his garret in Stanmore, apparently ignorant of the proceedings, or so he later claimed – himself the subject of greater plots.30

  In Germany, the tension was between the Army and Navy. The long-running dispute over the width of the Sealion landing front was finally coming to a head. Despite von Brauchitsch’s direct approach to him the previous day, Hitler had decided that the Army had to face the realities of Germany’s limited naval power. Under the signature of Keitel, once more, Hitler ordered that, “Naval operations will be adapted to fit in with the given facts in relation to the available tonnage and cover for embarkation and crossing”.31 This was the final word. It was to be a neither a narrow front, nor a broad front, but an ugly compromise. It gave up Ramsgate at the eastern extreme and Lyme Bay at the other, but still leaving a front of eighty miles, far wider than the Navy thought safe. The Army General Staff had no choice but to accept this decision. But the attitude to the operation changed. It was now considered to be only the coup de grace, its object to land troops after the battle had already been won.32

  DAY 50 – WEDNESDAY 28 AUGUST 1940

  The lead editorial of the Yorkshire Post this day noted that the Germans were turning from day raids to night raids. To its rhetorical “why?”, it answered: “One prime reason and a very encouraging reason for us is the failure of their big daylight offensive a fortnight ago”. And the result got front-page treatment in the Daily Mirror, with the banner headline: “Nazis over London, 21 towns”. This was coverage of the night of raids, and graphic testament to the way the Luftwaffe was progressively converting to a night bombing force.

  In a separate item, the Mirror reported that “for the first time in the history of any nation, ordinary working people – Britons – are recognised by the State as standing in the front line of the war”. That story announced official compensation arrangements – the lack of which had been a highly contentious issue in the First World War bombing raids. No one needed any reminding of their status, though. A large photograph showed a wrecked Anderson shelter and a 30ft deep bomb crater, in a “household garden near London”. The occupants had survived, their survival being given considerable prominence in the press, adding to a growing body of reports detailing positive experiences with Anderson shelters.33

  The Guardian returned to the matter of “peace aims and war aims”. It noted that the demand for “a definite and detailed statement” united the pessimists who suspected that a British Government would make a bad peace, and the
optimists who expected it to make a good one. The paper observed that the Nazis had their own scheme for a new order in Europe. Therefore, it was not enough “to answer Hitler by saying that we want to restore a Europe of free peoples”. The paper wanted “ideas for the co-operation of those free peoples in an economic order” that would “save Europe from the calamities that followed that last war and ruined the last attempt to unify Europe by means of the League of Nations”.

  Italian Foreign Minister, Galeazzo Ciano, met Hitler at the Berchtesgaden, and recorded an explanation that the failure to attack Britain was “due to bad weather”. He would need at least two weeks of good weather to overcome British naval superiority. Ciano came away with the impression that there had been a definite postponement of the assault. Nevertheless, he wrote, “Hitler seems resolved to go to the limit because, he tells me, he has rejected an attempt at mediation made by the King of Sweden”.34

  In the shooting war, there were only so many variations on a theme the Luftwaffe could offer. At first sight, the day looked to be a repeat of earlier efforts when, about 8.30 a.m., aircraft started to assemble over Cap Gris Nez. This was the classic pattern, with which RAF radar operators were very familiar.

  It soon became clear, however, that the Germans knew their movements were being tracked. They were now practising a studied deception programme, assembling aircraft en masse and only splitting them up into different raids once they were past the radar and closer to their targets. The radar, in any case, could still only give limited information on formation sizes, heights and composition, so controllers were vitally dependent on the network of observer stations to give more detail. But with several raids going over together, this confused the reporting system, markedly degraded the value of the radar and made more difficult the task of vectoring the right number of fighters to the right places at the right times.35

  So it was in this case. The bomber element of this force was two groups of Dorniers. They were escorted by fighters, the total force amounting to 100-plus aircraft. Crossing the Channel, one section – led by twenty Dorniers – headed for Eastchurch. That left twenty-plus Dorniers to fly on to Rochford, home of Short Bros, and the manufacturing site for the new, four-engined Stirling bomber. Four RAF squadrons put up to block the raid were unable to penetrate the defensive screen. They lost eight aircraft and six pilots trying. Four aircraft were from the ill-fated No. 264 Sqn flying Defiants, which were shot down by a gruppe of Me 109s as they went into the attack. Only eight aircraft returned to their home base at Hornchurch and only three of those were serviceable.

  Thus did Eastchurch suffer yet another attack, losing two Battles destroyed on the ground. The German bombers were nevertheless deterred by spirited flak. Airfields were now benefiting from a new policy implemented by General Pile, concentrating anti-aircraft resources on them. The Germans did no lasting damage and the station remained operational, albeit restricted to daylight flying. The second raid, headed for Rochford, again met with stiff fighter opposition. Elements of thirteen squadrons attempted to head it off. As before, the fighters failed to penetrate the defensive screen and the station took the hit – but suffered only minor damage.

  Churchill, meanwhile, was on the coast, seeing for himself the state of defences. While he was thus engaged, a third attack developed. This one comprised a large fighter sweep over Kent and the estuary at 25,000 ft. It was precisely the formation Park wanted his own pilots to avoid but they attempted to take it on, losing nine aircraft in the process. On the day, Fighter Command lost eighteen aircraft in all, with others bringing losses up to twenty-one. For those, the Luftwaffe traded twenty-eight. Fifteen were Me 109s.

  Come the night, came the bombers. Avonmouth Docks were bombed, with high explosives falling on the Shell Mex can factory. HE and incendiaries fell near the plant belonging to the National Smelting Company. Bombs were dropped on the factory of Messrs S. Smith and Sons at Cricklewood. A new type of incendiary bomb was reported to have been dropped at Ulceby. A thirty-minute raid on Coventry around ten in the evening caused considerable damage to thirty-one houses and minor damage to other shops and houses. Water and gas services were affected.

  The sirens sounded in Altrincham, in Cheshire, at 10.39 p.m. Forty-one high explosive bombs and one incendiary fell, one bomb hitting a petrol storage tank at O’Briens Oil works next to the canal. Two tanks each containing 25,000 gallons of fuel, were set on fire. Houses and other buildings were hit. Churchdown in Gloucestershire was bombed just before midnight, when an important water main was damaged, seriously affecting Gloucester city and a nearby RAF station.36

  At two in the morning, several bombs were dropped on Liverpool, when some houses were demolished. Damage was caused to electricity and water mains. Fires were started but were soon brought under control. The main Liverpool–Exeter railway line was damaged, making it necessary to suspend traffic. As to London, in what was described as the “most prolonged attack of the war”, over 1,000 incendiaries and some high explosives were dropped on areas in the city, with aircraft circling for seven hours. Many fires and explosions were reported.

  DAY 51 – THURSDAY 29 AUGUST 1940

  A secret memorandum from the Naval Staff reached the War Cabinet this day, with a covering note from the First Lord of the Admiralty, Labour Co-operative MP Albert Victor Alexander – a political appointee, his title not to be confused with the First Sea Lord, Albert Admiral Pound. AV, as he had been known since childhood, had been First Lord for two years in the 1929 Labour Government. A critic of appeasement and a supporter of Churchill as war leader, his reward had been another chance at First Lord. Despite that, he had been kept out of the Prime Minister’s inner circle and excluded from the War Room. Now, though, he was sounding the alarm, forwarding to his Cabinet colleagues a paper entitled: “Merchant shipping casualties”, written by the Naval Staff. In introducing the paper, AV was blunt: “A most serious situation has arisen,” he wrote:

  [t]he enemy is concentrating a heavy attack on trade with submarines and aircraft, and in addition there has been a small but steady loss due to raiders. The latter may increase as, owing to the large number of troop movements requiring escort, we are unable to release cruisers and armed merchant cruisers to hunt raiders.

  In the eight weeks up to 25 August, 143 ships had been lost, amounting to 564,000 tons. A number of ships had been damaged. The losses sustained during the most recent six days had been extremely serious – 15 ships totalling 92,000 tons sunk and 12 ships totalling 42,000 tons damaged. AV surmised that Hitler might be making this attack on shipping his main offensive, instead of an invasion. The Staff made numerous recommendations, including strengthening Coastal Command patrols.37

  Even as AV was raising the alarm, though, on the other side of the Channel Keitel was instructing the Admiral in charge of naval forces in France to make arrangements to convoy the vessels needed for Sealion to their assembly points at their launch harbours. The Admiral was also to provide the “necessary protection” through mined waters.

  As the barges and transports started their laborious passages, observers reading the British media might have been forgiven for thinking that they were reading the chronicles of the “Battle of London and the Home Counties” – or the “Battle of London” as Churchill was to call it. Coventry had yet to be permitted its walk-on part. Most provincial raids, under the baleful grip of the censor, got little press coverage. Even the still blazing fire in Pembroke Docks got short shrift, despite the smoke towering over 1,000 ft in the air, visible for 100 miles. And this night was a reminder that the Germans were attacking the whole of Britain.

  The Midlands and points north were raided by a force of about 150 bombers. The raid was the heaviest yet in Britain, with widespread damage caused in Liverpool’s dockland and city. More than 470 casualties were reported. Other bombers, at one or two staffel strength, raided Birmingham, Bristol, Coventry, Manchester and Sheffield.

  Losses on the day amounted to nine Fighter Command aircraft,
and three RAF bombers. The Luftwaffe lost seventeen. Following the course of the battle from the most notable current texts, one also has to do a double-take, wondering whether the same war was being reported. The preferred narrative is that the battle at this time was dominated by the Luftwaffe attacks on the RAF, a desperate bid to break the power of Fighter Command in order to meet the Führer’s timetable for the invasion of England. In fact, RAF airfields were only occasional targets and represented only a fraction of the effort expended. In those terms, they could not be defined as the schwerpunkt, the main point of attack.

  At the time, even the New York Times was reporting the intensifying night-time bombing campaign. The British public was only too conscious of it. Home Intelligence was made fully aware of the change, reporting with detectable relief that there was “no noticeable decline in morale although in London particularly there is some depression mainly brought by lack of sleep”. There was some “nervousness” in the south, about stories of attacks on Birmingham, Coventry and Portsmouth. But morale was highest in the areas which had been most heavily bombed.

  If the invasion was just over two weeks away, there was no sense of it in the British media. The man in charge of Britain’s land defences, General Alan Brooke, also seemed unconcerned. He had just spent a day in north Scotland, watching Army exercises and was to go to the furthest, western reaches of Wales the next day.38 These were not the actions of a man expecting jackboots on the Brighton shingle. More problematical was the growing shipping crisis, unseen and unreported by the media, but potentially more deadly than the entire air war. And, as the days grew shorter, the civilian population was increasingly exposed to the terrors of night bombing. It is impossible to characterize this period merely as a joust between Fighter Command and the Luftwaffe.