Many Not the Few: The Stolen History of the Battle of Britain
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Herbert Morrison, since taking over as Home Secretary and Minister of Home Security, had been labouring long and hard. And despite his initial support for the original pre-war policy, expressed in his maiden speech as minister on 8 October, he was now ready with something which John Anderson had refused to deliver – a deep shelter policy. At the daily War Cabinet meeting, he revealed the details.76 What had changed, he said, was that prolonged night raiding had led certain sections of the public to seek shelter, irrespective of warnings, towards nightfall and to stay there until morning. The “accessibility” arguments against deep shelters which had hitherto prevailed were no longer valid.
While it was impossible to apply any policy for deep shelters evenly over the vulnerable areas of the country, Morrison – in what amounted to a complete volte-face – felt that it would not be right, on this account, to dismiss the possibility of providing deep shelters in certain area. He accordingly suggested that work should be put in hand for providing additional shelter by tunnelling. In London this construction would be linked with the Tube system.
This was too early for the newspapers to report, but many published details of an equally important issue – shipping losses. The week ending 20–21 October had been the blackest since the evacuation from Dunkirk, with a cumulative total of British, Allied and neutral ships lost at 198,939 tons.
DAY 114 – THURSDAY 31 OCTOBER 1940
For once the night was quiet as well. The “raiders passed” siren sounded at the earliest time since September. People in shelters looked at each other “almost in disbelief”. But, warned the Daily Mirror, in a front-page headline the next morning: “Don’t think air war is over”.
Morrison, having informed his colleagues of the new shelter policy, now planned to announce it in a ministerial broadcast on the BBC. He circulated the draft script to the War Cabinet.77 The first section read:
We are seeing more and more clearly that the Battle of Britain is only a part of the world war. And within the Battle of Britain conflict between the German Air Force and the civilian population is itself only a part. But what a vitally important part it is! How the whole fortune of war turns upon it! We all feel a glow of pride in the work of our Civil Defence army.
A year ago could we have foreseen the performance they have put up? There they are – bank clerks, shopkeepers, stockbrokers, civil servants, craftsmen, labourers – peaceable, steady folk. The world is electrified to see them stand up as they have done to the rain of fire and death that has poured upon them night after night – stand up to it, and do their job, and never fail their neighbours or their duty. And our police – they have lived up to and surpassed their finest traditions.
Morrison, the Labour politician, was speaking to “the ordinary citizens of the country”. A solid promise of victory lay in the fact that for months they had stood up to the attack, kept their nerve, and were ready for more. They had won the first round – won it hands down. “Well done, magnificently done, men, women and children of Britain!” he said.
For the fliers, on this one day, it had been the quietest day for four months – although it was not to last. A few bombs were dropped over East Anglia and Scotland but neither side lost any aircraft in combat. On the month, Fighter Command had lost 190 aircraft. Total RAF losses for the month stood at 318, compared with 306 lost by the Luftwaffe. On the last day of Dowding’s battle, Fighter Command losses stood at 1,009 since 10 July. Total RAF losses came to 1,643 and Luftwaffe losses stood at 1,686. Different sources offer slightly different figures, but most agree that the two side’s totals came within 50 of each other. In numerical terms, the two sides were effectively at parity. It was a score draw.
And the next day, the bombers came just the same. Out at sea, the torpedoes were running, the mines were primed and the Condors hauled their deadly bombs. John Anderson, meanwhile, laboured to bring coal to London. And, at a meeting of the Defence Committee, Churchill finally agreed that the danger of an invasion was “relatively remote”. The dispositions and state of readiness of British forces would be adjusted to match what was judged to be a diminished threat throughout the winter.78 Admiral Forbes was to get some of his escorts back. Like Dowding, and Park, though, he was not to keep his job. On 2 December, he was relieved of his command.79
14.
The battle won?
The Battle of Britain was the aerial conflict between British and German air forces in the skies over the United Kingdom in the summer and autumn of 1940. It was one of the most important moments in Britain’s twentieth century history and a decisive turning point of the Second World War. Royal Air Force Fighter Command defeated the Luftwaffe’s attempt to gain air supremacy over southern England and saved Britain from German invasion and conquest.
Imperial War Museum website
In June 1940, the fall of France had merited a major speech to the people of the country. Churchill told the nation: “What General Weygand called the ‘Battle of France’ is over. I expect that the battle of Britain is about to begin”. There was no such speech on 31 October 1940, when that battle was supposed to be over. But then, the battle wasn’t over. It had not even been properly defined and at this stage did not even merit a capital “B” to signify a specific event. The next day, it continued, just as before.
To come was the bombing of Coventry on 15 November and the Sheffield Blitz of 12–15 December. Then German aircraft dropped somewhere in the region of 450 high explosives bombs, land mines and incendiaries. During those nights 668 civilians and 25 servicemen were killed. A further 1,586 people were injured and over 40,000 more were made homeless. A total of 3,000 homes were demolished, another 3,000 were badly damaged. No less than 72,000 properties suffered some damage. Manchester was badly hit on the nights of 22–23 and 23–24 December 1940, killing an estimated 684 people and injuring 2,364.
There was the fire-bombing of London on 29 December 1940, which produced the epic photograph of St Paul’s, wreathed in smoke and flames. There was the Clydebank Blitz of 13–14 March 1941, two devastating raids on the shipbuilding town. It suffered the worst destruction and civilian loss of life in all of Scotland. Five hundred and twenty-eight people died, 617 people were seriously injured, and hundreds more were wounded by blast debris. Out of approximately 12,000 houses, only seven remained undamaged – with 4,000 completely destroyed and 4,500 severely damaged. Over 35,000 people were made homeless.
But it did not stop there. Bristol, Liverpool, Swansea and Birmingham, all suffered, with Belfast also being savaged. The misery seemed endless, culminating in the so-called “Moonlight Blitz” on London on 10 May, when the debating chamber of the House of Commons was destroyed and Big Ben was damaged. Any one of the hundreds of thousand people, crouching in their shelters as hell erupted, would be justified in asking why, if the RAF had won the battle back in September, the Germans were still bombing. The answer, as the Daily Mirror so presciently warned on 1 November, was that the air war was not over.
The very fact that it was continuing supports the assertion that a three-part battle was involved – the parts we identified earlier as the blockade, the invasion and the attack on morale (the Blitz). As to who won the battle, the specific groups competing for the accolade of victor include the three RAF Commands, Fighter, Bomber and Coastal. Then there is the Royal Navy – and also the merchant marine; and the various civilian organizations such as the police, Civil Defence, the National Fire Service and of course the people, as individuals and as communities and groups, formal and informal.
It should be fairly self-evident already from an exploration of our narrative that the people played a very significant part in the battle, but it is still useful to carry out a more structured assessment of where the credit for the ultimate victory should lie. Thus, we look at each of the three main parts of the conflict in turn.
THE BLOCKADE
The essence of this battle was set out in Führer Directive No. 9. From our narrative, it is evident that many of the bombing raids in t
he early stages of the Battle of Britain, classed as Kanalkampf by the Germans, were primarily attacks on shipping, and therefore, implementing this directive. While formations were often protected from RAF interference, there is no evidence that the attacks were specifically intended to bring RAF fighters into the fray. And despite the dismissive attitude of Churchill and others to the coastal convoys, the shortage of coal in the winter of 1940–1, arising from distribution problems, attests to their damaging effect. The Germans perhaps had a better idea of the vulnerabilities of the British supply system than did Churchill.
There is a tendency, incidentally, to characterize this part of the conflict as the Battle of the Atlantic, and primarily as a U-boat war, the main developments taking place in 1941 and 1942. But the blockade was always more than a U-boat war, and by no means confined to the Atlantic. The east coast convoys, running the minefields and “E-boat alley” were part of that war. The bombing of the ports – from Dover, to Southampton, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Falmouth, through to Bristol, Swansea, Pembroke, Birkenhead, Liverpool, Belfast, Clydesbank, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Newcastle, Sunderland, Hull, Great Yarmouth and, of course, the Port of London – plus all the points in between – were also part of this war. And this war alone nearly vanquished Britain.
Here though, there is a definitional problem. When on the receiving end of a bombing raid, it is sometimes difficult to divine the intent. A raid on a convoy or port may be a genuine attempt to destroy the ships and goods, but it may also be a “come-on” to attract defensive fighters, the real objective being to engage and defeat the enemy air force. According to the Dowding dogma, if it is the former, then it is not part of the Battle of Britain.
There is nothing, by the way, to stop both objectives being pursued, simultaneously. There can be no real doubt, however, that the German air assault on our shipping, ports and infrastructure was a serious and hard-fought part of the war, separate from the attacks on the RAF. But this was never going to secure a rapid victory – blockades do not work that way. Nevertheless, success of the air effort and the wider blockade could eventually have induced the British Government to capitulate; just as in February 1942 the blockade of Singapore forced its surrender.
One can quite understand the temptation to over-simplify the battle, though. It is much easier to retain nice neat divisions, keeping – say – the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the Battle of the Atlantic in separate, watertight compartments. The real world, however, does not recognize such divisions. For instance, as much as it was an attack on the physical survival of the nation – aimed at starving out the population and reducing their capacity to wage war – the blockade was an attack on morale. The shortage of food, the reduction in variety, the absence of luxury goods, the grinding tedium of queues, the need to make do and mend and the never-ending government nagging – which began seriously to irritate almost everyone – all had their effect.
What is so very difficult to convey is how interrelated everything was, and how so many things had knock-on effects. Thus, as the Germans swept across northern Europe and then occupied the Channel ports, we see that much of our shipping was rerouted to ports in the west. This meant that goods had to be moved internally to their final destinations – largely by rail – putting stress on the railway network. With increased passenger traffic and the movement of war materials, that made it more difficult to move coal. Together with the bad weather, this led to real shortages. The failure properly to defend the coastal convoys exacerbated this situation so that, by the end of the Dowding’s day battle, Anderson had to be drafted in to deal with the crisis.
Now we are outside the time framework of Dowding’s battle, but the coal crisis developed during the brutal winter of 1940–1. By then, on top of the damage to the rail network, the Blitz caused huge damage to the Port of London and required a further transfer of capacity to the west coast ports, with further stress on the railways. Coastal shipping, and even canals were pressed into service, but the system never really recovered. As coal backed up all the way to the pitheads this affected production, as there was no room to store mined coal at the pits. Further stresses led, by the early spring of 1942, to serious coal shortages. In a fraught labour situation, interference in production – which led to cutbacks and miners being laid off – was one of the factors that precipitated a wave of strikes. That required action by the government to bring the coal industry under tighter control. In turn, this added to the growing dissatisfaction with the management of the war, leading to Churchill calling for a vote of confidence in January 1942. All of these events, directly and indirectly, resulted from enemy action, initiated during Dowding’s day battle.
At this point, the submarine war can be factored in – and the long-range air-strikes (as well as the activity of the surface raiders). What is remarkable was how quickly and severely losses here started to bite. The arithmetic offered by Minister of Shipping, Ronald Cross on 30 October 1940, attested to this.1 Imports in the first year of the war had been 43½ million tons, but September 1940 imports had been “disappointingly low”, at three million tons. Given the shipping losses already experienced, expected imports for the second year of the war had fallen to 42 million tons, and 34 million for the third year. But, at the then current rate of shipping loss, they were expected to drop to 32 million tons, as against the 34 million imported in the last full year of the First World War, when the population to be supplied had been 6.5 per cent less.
These figures made no allowance for increased demands for shipping for military purposes in the Middle East and elsewhere, made worse by the closure of the Mediterranean. Thus, what Ronald Cross was saying was that, had the then current loss rate continued, shipping capacity was set to fall below survival level. In the third year of the war, Britain could no longer have fed the population and supported then current military campaigns. But for the intervention of the USA, and her shipping, this was a battle the British could have lost.
Now let us overlay the strategic position. When the Luftwaffe departed from Britain in May 1941, some elements taking part in the invasion of the Balkans, Greece and then Crete, it was very far from being a defeated force. It was not the losses inflicted by the British which caused it to withdraw from the battle. The determining factor was the invasion in the East.2 Progressively, as it redeployed to the Soviet border, it comprised a powerful and effective fleet which contributed significantly to the early victories against the Soviet forces.
It will be recalled that Hitler – and his generals – expected a quick and easy victory in Russia, with the fighting finished well before the winter of 1941–2. They were not alone in these expectations. In Britain, policymakers fully expected Stalin’s defeat within three to six weeks, with minimal losses. But Hitler had also suggested that crushing the Soviet Union could strengthen Japan, the increased threat from which would force the USA to look to the Pacific, and keep it out of a European war. That was not wild assumption. Despite constant pressure from Churchill – who expected Roosevelt to declare war on Germany in January 1941 after his presidential inauguration – the USA did not enter the war of its own volition. Only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 did the Germans declare war on the USA. In that sense, Churchill failed to achieve his own strategic objective.
That notwithstanding, imagine that Germany, successful in Russia, had stayed the Japanese hand. With America not yet in the war, imagine also that the Luftwaffe had returned to France in force, any time from autumn in 1941 through to the spring of 1942, confronting a UK seriously weakened by the U-boat blockade. Churchill’s Government would by then have also been embroiled in the Far East, and would have yet to have given the country a single military victory. With no prospect of the USA entering the war, how long would Britain have held out?
On that basis, in the spring of 1941, when the German attacks finally petered out, the air assault was on hold. In theory, it could have restarted, with the same murderous intensity of 1940–1, at any time from the winte
r of 1941 to the spring of 1942.
But then, if Britain had not been forced to capitulate under the renewed weight of the Blitz, the blockade might have finished her. That issue was not settled until the USA joined the war, putting her shipbuilding resources into the pot, replacing the losses sustained in the battle. An arguable case can then be made that, in the first instance, Britain’s saviour was not her armed forces (or even her own people) but the Soviet Union, and then the USA. However, neither of these countries could have had any effect if Britain had already been defeated before either had entered the war. To that extent, the blockade was not decisive – it could only have been had the Soviet Union been defeated and had the USA kept out of the European war.
Once again, though, this is not the complete story. There is clearly a relationship between the threat posed by Hitler’s invasion, and the effect of the blockade. Essentially, as long as there was a credible invasion threat – and for some time after it had ceased to be credible – Churchill held back a large number of warships in domestic ports, ready to intercept an invasion fleet. This greatly weakened the convoy defences, evident from Churchill’s own complaint of 4 August about the shipping losses on the North-Western Approaches. In this context, it has to be said that the British did not lose the “supplies war” so early in the conflict only because the Germans did not have the physical capability to win it.
It might also be said that Churchill was curiously reluctant to allow relief to be brought to the beleaguered convoys. This was evident on 29 August, when the First Lord, AV Alexander and the Naval Staff, made representations for the release of escorts. Perhaps it was premature at that point, with German invasion barges then being shipped down the Channel. As an aside, though, in accordance with AV’s other request, Coastal Command could certainly have been strengthened. Instead, the most modern aircraft – with the full approval and active encouragement of Churchill – were used to bomb Germany. Shipping patrols had to make do, in the main, with semi-obsolescent and dangerously inadequate Avro Ansons and Lockheed Hudsons, both short-range aircraft based on civilian designs, with limited weapons-carrying capabilities.