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

by Richard North

  This brings us to the crucial date of 28 September, when Churchill had good intelligence to suggest that the invasion had ceased to be a credible threat. At that time, Admiral Forbes had pleaded for the release of escorts, as he had been doing for months. Yet, despite Shipping Minister Cross adding his weight to the representations on 30 September, the Food Minister on 3 October and the First Lord of the Admiralty again on the same day, all making the same points, Churchill refused to act. According to War Cabinet records, he appeared to have done so on 4 October, but without then having taken any action for nearly two weeks, on 15 October he resiled from his promise to release warships, on the basis of what were said to be “intelligence reports” which said that the threat of invasion was not over. In fact, Churchill was not relying on intelligence but “operational considerations” from the Chiefs of Staff.

  Interestingly, the official Royal Navy historian, Captain S. W. Roskill, writing in 1954, did not refer to these Cabinet exchanges – then still secret. But he did recall a discussion between Forbes and Churchill on the last day of October when, prior to the Defence Committee decision to scale down the invasion precautions, the Admiral had been asked for his views on the possibility of the invasion fleet being launched.

  According to Roskill, only when Forbes had assured the Prime Minister that an invasion was “not a practical operation of war” did he at last relent and allow the return of warships to their normal functions. He could have done so six weeks earlier, and certainly by the end of September, before suffering the highest shipping loss rate of the war. But on 8 October, in parliament, Churchill was still ramping up the invasion threat, on grounds that lacked any credibility whatsoever, and still telling his Cabinet colleagues on 15 October that there was a credible risk.

  Churchill was later to assert that he was more concerned about the shipping crisis than he ever was about the invasion threat, but in his history he was strangely silent about his reasons for refusing to give convoy protection more priority. Instead, there is a gap in his narrative of almost exactly four months from his 4 August communication to the First Sea Lord on the threat to shipping and the next one he chose to cite, dated 3 December. He did not mention the multiple representations made by ministers to the War Cabinet about the diversion of escorts, or the build-up of the intelligence picture which suggested that the invasion threat had diminished a great deal earlier than he had acknowledged at the time. Nor, incidentally, does he explain his absence of support for more and better patrol aircraft for Coastal Command.

  Throughout the period, Churchill thus concentrated military resources on countering the invasion. Whatever he might have said in private, or actually believed, this was what he presented as the greater threat. If we now step back from the neglected supplies war, and look at this threat, we see how this came to define the traditional narrative, not least with the assistance of Winston Churchill himself.

  THE INVASION

  The formal claim of the invasion being at the heart of the Battle of Britain is set out in an Air Ministry pamphlet called The Battle of Britain, published in March 1941. This, by common accord, defined the battle as we now know it, and in the following terms:

  What the Luftwaffe failed to do was to destroy the fighter squadrons of the Royal Air Force … This failure meant defeat – defeat of the German Air Force itself, defeat of a carefully designed strategic plan, defeat of that which Hitler most longed for – the invasion of this Island. 3

  A distilled version of this appears on the Imperial War Museum website, reproduced at the beginning of this chapter. However, this, and the many variations, only stand up if Hitler cancelled (or postponed) Sealion as the necessary and direct consequence of the Luftwaffe failing to gain air superiority. Turning this round, it must be asserted that, had the Luftwaffe defeated RAF Fighter Command in the September of 1940, the invasion would have gone ahead, and would then have been successful.

  The very obvious problem with this scenario is that in the face of interference from the Royal Navy’s thousand ships, even with British aircraft cleared from the skies of southern England, there would have been the difficulties of landing troops on open beaches, unloading sufficient equipment and then – especially – keeping the troops supplied.

  What has been less well explored, however, are the practicalities of beach landings, using barges rather than specially designed landing craft. Only a few, small-scale practice runs with the available equipment were carried out, but the rare photographs illustrate better than any words that these were not assault craft. As illustrated by Schenk and Ansel, the ramps were not of the hinged, drop-down type seen on modern assault craft, but heavy, cumbersome affairs needing up to fifteen minutes and a crew of twenty to slide them into position, even under optimum conditions. They were craft that could not have been unloaded except with extreme difficulty under fire, and then not at all rapidly.

  Then, as the intention was to land on the ebb tide, each barge would be stranded for most of one tidal cycle. The difficulty of manoeuvring these barges into position, and then leaving them stranded for around eight hours, did not auger well for a successful landing. And that was without taking into account the weather. When the Allies invaded Normandy in 1944, they took with them over 1,000 converted Thames barges – all of them self-propelled, but none of them used for assaulting defended beaches. During the storm of 21 June, an estimated two-thirds of them were lost or damaged.4 In practice, the German barges proved surprisingly capable of weathering rough seas, but the real problem was beaching and unloading them. That problem was unsolvable with the resources available.5

  Separately, though, having gone through the sequence of events in the German camp, what so very clearly emerges is the conflict between the Army and the Navy about the nature of the landing. The Army required a broad front landing and the Navy could only deliver on a narrow front. Both believed that each other’s plans were suicidal. Neither was prepared to compromise. When Hitler on 27 August decided that naval operations must be adapted “to fit in with the given facts”, a compromise was imposed on the both Services. But, as far as the Army was concerned, Sealion had ceased to be a credible military operation. It could no longer be an opposed landing. At a stroke, it had become a transportation exercise, its purpose to deliver troops after the battle had already been won – the winning of which was left to Göring and his air fleets.

  Here, an intriguing point arises. Had the Germans won the air battle, how would they have known? As long as there had been some RAF fighters to take to the skies, and a small number of German aircraft had been shot down each day, the clerks and statisticians could do the rest. The RAF only had to win on paper – as indeed it did on many days, when it had lost more aircraft than it had shot down – leaving the newspapers and the BBC to announce the victories. That these were paper rather than real victories made absolutely no difference – which was just as well. In strictly numerical terms – taking into account all aircraft losses including those of Bomber and Coastal Commands – the battle was inconclusive, neither won nor lost.

  What also has to be restated here is that any invasion fleet’s journey would have been at night. Aircraft could not then have interfered to any great effect, leaving the German vessels invulnerable to the RAF but also Royal Navy vessels immune from Luftwaffe activity. If one recalls the enormous damage done to the Peewit convoy on 8 August by a handful of E-boats, then it is not difficult to imagine the great slaughter that the Navy could have wrought with a much larger fleet. We are thus confronted with the unavoidable conclusion that gaining air superiority might have been a necessary condition for an invasion, but it was not sufficient. The Royal Navy had to be neutralized in order to render the night safe for the invasion fleet. The Germans did not achieve that. They did not even attempt it.

  Nevertheless, in thousands of narratives, it is a given that an invasion was stymied by the RAF. A few, and only a very few, explore the practicalities. One of the first was Duncan Grinnell-Milne’s 1958 book, Sil
ent Victory. He concluded that with the equipment the Germans had available, it was not feasible. But Churchill got there first. When writing his history of the period, he had been through the invasion of Normandy. He knew in detail the huge scale of the enterprise, its hazards and pitfalls and thus made his own comparison between the situations in 1940 and 1944, writing:

  Apart from mastery of the air and command of the sea, we had as large (if not so well equipped) an army, fresh and ardent, as that which Germany assembled in Normandy four years later to oppose our return to the Continent. In that case, although we landed a million men in the first month, with vast apparatus, and with every other condition favourable, the battle was long and severe, and nearly three months were required to enlarge the area originally seized and break out into the open field.

  He remarked that there had been some talk in parliament of the “invasion scare” after the danger had passed away. Yet this is precisely the term he himself had been using, when he noted: “Certainly those who knew most were the least scared”. After the event, he did not hesitate to make the obvious inference: the Germans had not been equipped to succeed in an opposed landing. Others agreed. Military academic Murray Williamson, in his book, entitled, Strategy for Defeat, wrote:

  In retrospect, the task facing the Germans in the summer of 1940 was beyond their capabilities. Even disregarding the gaps in inter-service cooperation – a must in any combined operations – the force structure, training, and doctrine of the three services were not capable of solving the problem of invading the British Isles.6

  This is effectively confirmed by Vice Admiral Kurt Assmann, formerly a member of the German Navy operations staff and subsequently a naval historian. He expressed his views in 1947, in a then confidential evaluation of the part played by the German Navy in Sealion, a treatise on which we rely extensively in this book. His view of the cancellation (or postponement) is particularly relevant. He noted that, when the time came for a decision, “not one of the responsible authorities was ready to speak decisively against the operation, although all recognised the inherently serious objections; but all were privately relieved when the failure of air supremacy afforded a good reason for outwardly justifying the abandonment of the operation”. Given the favourable air situation, there seemed no need to embark on this “extreme measure” involving such great risks.

  Thus we see the shift to a reliance on the air war, its pivotal role confirmed by Karl Klee, who produced the translation of so many of the documents on which we rely. He stated that the “basic motivating factor” for the air offensive was the effort “to bring about a decision of the war though strategic warfare alone”.

  Another authoritative and convincing assessment came from General Günther Blumentritt, the Operations Officer of Army Group A, under General Gerd von Rundstedt, the man who was going to lead the Sealion operation. Interviewed after the war by Captain Basil Liddell Hart, the well-known writer on military affairs, Blumentritt noted Hitler’s “strangely dilatory attitude” over the invasion plans. “He showed little interest,” Blumentritt said, “and made no effort to speed up the preparations.” That was utterly different from his usual behaviour. “Before the invasion of Poland, of France, and later of Russia, he repeatedly spurred them [the planners] on. But on this occasion he sat back.”7

  In a far more detailed article, written exclusively for the Irish defence journal, An Cosantóir, Blumentritt then gave a damning evaluation of the operation.8 Hitler’s frequent pronouncements “that he wished and intended to reach agreement with England” led the planners – himself included – not to regard the operation very seriously. Further, no decision Hitler ever made could be considered final. In 1939, the Polish invasion had been suddenly halted after the reconnaissance forces had actually reached the frontier, while the “alert” orders for the invasion of France and the Low Countries had been rescinded no less than eleven times.

  Von Rundstedt had taken the invasion no more seriously than had Blumentritt and, in either late July or August, had been in Berlin, when he had been told by Hitler that he did not intend to carry out Sealion. Taking the cue from his superior, Blumentritt’s view was that the operation was a bluff. Orders were given and practical preparations were undertaken because “a bluff can only succeed when everything is done as if the operation were meant seriously and when all staffs and units believe implicitly in its execution”.

  Blumentritt was by no means alone. Heinz Guderian, the general commanding the spearhead Panzer Group in the invasion of France, spent August in Berlin, to where he had transferred his headquarters, enjoying a period of “leisure and relaxation”. Of Sealion, he had to say:

  Even from the very beginning this operation was never taken very seriously. In my opinion the lack of a sufficiently strong air force and of adequate shipping – not to mention the escape of the British Expeditionary Force from Dunkirk – made it a completely hopeless undertaking.9

  Against that, Macksey in 1980 argued that an invasion could have been successful, but he had the assault starting on 13 July when the British Army was weak. Yet, for the Germans to prevail, he had to give to them capabilities and equipment which simply did not exist in the July. For instance, his fictional invasion force relied on – among many other things – the Siebel ferry to transport the guns. Yet volume production of the craft did not begin until September 1940. By late September, only twenty-five had been completed.10

  In 1974, a wargame was played at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. It presumed that the Luftwaffe had not yet won air supremacy and used previously unpublished Admiralty weather records for September 1940. Even without air supremacy, the Germans were able to establish a beachhead in England using a minefield screen in the English Channel to protect the initial landings from the Royal Navy. However, after a few days, the Royal Navy was able to cut off supplies from the German beachhead, isolating the invaders and forcing their surrender.11 Joining the list of naysayers, Robinson, in 2005, then convincingly dismissed the idea of a successful landing. Two, more recent authors, Hewitt in 2008 and Cumming in 2010, on the basis of careful study of the relative strengths of the opposing forces, also conclude that the Royal Navy would have blocked any invasion attempt.

  From the totality of the evidence, the inevitable conclusion must be that the Germans – and especially the Navy – realized that the enormous practical difficulties involved in mounting an invasion made it an unrealistic proposition. The only way that Sealion can be made to succeed is either by distorting the evidence, or by ignoring it altogether. Thus, while Campion attempts to adjudicate on the issue, he does so by considering only a fraction of the evidence before coming down on the side of the myth.12 The facts, however, clearly support the idea that Sealion may have started off as a genuine exercise, but once the practical difficulties had been understood, any enthusiasm evaporated. It became an elaborate bluff, kept going first to pressurize the British Government, and then to divert attention from the impending invasion of the Soviet Union.

  If, therefore, the RAF cannot claim credit for preventing an invasion, the question must be posed as to what Fighter Command actually achieved. The best answer is that it survived, although even that achievement was not quite as portrayed in the traditional narrative. Despite being under great stress, it never appears to have been under serious threat. Yet it is here that the myth is at its strongest. Less than a month after the Luftwaffe attack on RAF facilities had started in earnest with Eagle Day on 13 August, it is held that No. 11 Group was on the point of collapse.

  Remarkably, though, no sign of that crisis is apparent in contemporary accounts of the battle. The crisis narrative does not seem to emerge until after the war – starting around 15 September 1945, on the fifth anniversary of the great battle with the Luftwaffe. Then, the media makes the running rather than official sources. Only then does the supposedly abrupt shift on 7 September from airfield attacks to the bombing of London become the error “which saved British Fighter Command and England”
.13 Not until 1961, in Wood with Dempster, was the bombing of London presented as easing the “agonising strain” on No. 11 Group. And it took until 2009 for Max Hastings to pronounce that the Germans had made “a decisive strategic error”.

  The crisis then reached a peak in the same year when Patrick Bishop has Dowding beginning to consider withdrawing the remainder of his “battered forces” to northern England. The British Army is “tensing for action, in the belief that command of the air was about to be lost and invasion was imminent”. No one told General Alan Brooke. At the time, on 15 September 1940, he wrote in his diary of his concerns, but added to the entry after the war.

  It should not be construed that I considered our position to be a helpless one in the case of invasion”, he wrote. “We should certainly have a desperate struggle and the future might well have hung in the balance, but I certainly felt that given a fair share of the fortunes of war we should certainly succeed in finally defending these shores.

  Brooke, however, was only the general charged with the defence of Britain.

  As to the existential crisis in Fighter Command, many post-war authors have it that it was of the same order as the crisis of May 1940 when Churchill was proposing to send further Hurricane squadrons to the aid of a collapsing France. The interesting thing then is that Dowding sought an audience with the Prime Minister and followed up with a letter, telling him unequivocally that he could no longer defend the country. Thus, the issue was placed very firmly on the record. The Prime Minister was left in absolutely no doubt that the situation had reached a crisis level.