The attack on Fighter Command airfields has always been regarded as the hub of the Battle of Britain. Between 12 August and 6 September there were 53 main attacks on airfields, but only 32 of these were directed at fighter stations. All but two of these attacks were made against 11 Group airfields. There were additional small raids on a wide range of lesser targets; the German Air Force calculated that there had been approximately 1,000 altogether, against industrial installations, air force supplies and communications. There were six main raids against the radar stations on the south coast, most of them on 12 August; they were not attacked repeatedly, and hardly at all towards the end of the second phase of the battle.12 According to those attack reports that gave details of casualties, some 85 personnel were killed, at least seven of them civilians. The single largest loss of life occurred at Biggin Hill on 30 August, when 39 were killed and 25 injured in an accurate low-level bomb attack. The number of aircraft destroyed on the ground was remarkably small, and declined quickly once serious efforts were made to disperse and camouflage aircraft. Air patrols were instituted to protect refuelling squadrons from a sudden surprise attack. In total, 56 aircraft were destroyed on the ground, 42 of them in the first week of the attack, but only seven in the whole of September.13
The airfields that suffered severely were the group most easily reached from France. These included the forward fields at Manston, Lympne and Hawkinge near the Kent and Sussex coasts, all of which were temporarily shut down following a number of attacks. Of these Manston was the most heavily attacked, and was rendered unserviceable on six days and five nights between 14 August and 12 September. Nevertheless, desperate efforts were made to keep airfields operational. After the first attack on Manston on 12 August, 350 men were brought in to carry out repairs and the station was operational again the following day. Aircraft were kept flying after subsequent raids until five raids in one day on 24 August left a number of unexploded bombs. This impeded full recovery for only two days.14
The attack on Lympne on 13 August was particularly heavy, with 400 bombs falling on the landing ground alone. Repairs were slow because construction workers had been sent to Manston to help with the attacks of the previous day. The Air Ministry sent 100 of its own building workers to help, and 150 men were found from firms in the surrounding district. When Lympne was attacked once more, on 17 August, the local men were so upset that they left, with only a small landing strip yet clear. They were induced back only to be hit by a third raid on 30 August. This time five local workers were killed when a bomb hit a slit trench; work was once more delayed. Park took the opportunity of this unfortunate history to press the Air Ministry to supply at least one bulldozer and one excavator at each aerodrome, and to allocate repair parties of 150 men from a central pool of government workers.
German Air Intelligence suggested at the end of August that at least eight airfields had been knocked out entirely and the rest of the system severely depleted. The truth was quite different. Fighter Command adapted itself quickly to the new phase of attack. Park was able to move aircraft to aerodromes further inland and to prepared satellite fields. The inland circle of airfields was then protected by the aircraft of 10 and 12 Groups, while 11 Group fighters fought the raiding aircraft. New tactics were issued to the squadrons on 19 August to cope with the airfield campaign. Fighters were told to engage the enemy over land and not risk combat over the sea, where clusters of enemy fighters waited to escort the bombers back to safety and to destroy any unwary pursuers. Pilots were encouraged to attack bombers first and avoid combat with enemy fighters, while at first notice of incoming aircraft, stations were ordered to send up a squadron to patrol below cloud cover over the airfield to minimize risk of a surprise attack. Once airborne, Spitfires were encouraged to engage enemy fighters, while Hurricanes hunted down German bombers, which may help to explain their different loss rates.15
The communications web held together well under the strain of attack. Sector operations rooms were out of commission on only three occasions, though the supplementary emergency operations rooms, constructed above ground some distance from each sector station, proved inadequate as replacements. They were too cramped to house all the necessary personnel and the paraphernalia of plot tables and radio equipment; they lacked sufficient telephone landlines to operate as an integral part of the system. Radar stations emerged with remarkably little damage. The attack on Dunkirk RDF (in north Kent) destroyed two huts but inflicted no serious damage on the transmitter. The Dover station suffered slight damage to the aerial towers. At Rye, on the Sussex coast, all the huts were destroyed on the morning of 12 August, but the transmitting and receiving blocks were unscathed and operations restarted by noon. At Ventnor on the Isle of Wight all buildings were destroyed in two attacks on 12 and 16 August.16
If German commanders had realized sooner the role that radar played in the system, attacks might have been pressed more persistently. But because it was assumed that Fighter Command fought a decentralized battle, with squadrons tied to the radio range of their individual stations, attacks on radar were not given a high priority. They were, in any case, difficult targets to destroy completely, even more so once the Junkers Ju 87B dive-bombers were withdrawn from battle on 18 August to avoid further high losses and conserve them for the invasion. German commanders were also lulled into a false sense of security by the reports of heavy losses inflicted on the RAF in the second half of August. At the end of the month, German Air Intelligence estimated that the RAF had lost 50 per cent of its fighter force since 8 August, against a loss of only 12 per cent of the German fighter force: 791 British aircraft against 169 German. In early September, Goering was informed that Fighter Command had been reduced at one stage to a mere 100 serviceable fighters after the attacks on airfields.17
The real picture was remarkably different. On 23 August, Fighter Command actually had an operational strength of 672, with 228 Spitfires and Hurricanes ready in storage depots; on 1 September there were 701 operational aircraft and on 6 September the figure was 738, with 256 in stores ready for immediate despatch.18 The losses suffered were understandably higher in late August, but the RAF daily casualty records show cumulative losses of only 444 between 6 August and 2 September, 410 of them Spitfires and Hurricanes.19 German records of fighter losses show at least 443 for the slightly shorter period from 8 August to 31 August, with total aircraft losses during the same period standing at a little under 900.20 Both sides made extravagant claims about the losses inflicted on the other, largely because of double counting by pilots who could not tell clearly in the aerial mêlée who had shot an aircraft down. Yet by an odd statistical coincidence, fighter losses on the two sides were almost exactly the same in August. An evident gap opened up between the German commanders’ perception of the battle and the reality facing German pilots as they engaged daily against a numerous and deadly enemy.
The assault on Fighter Command posed greater problems with the British supply of pilots. During August the casualty rate rose to 22 per cent of pilot strength, a higher rate of loss than could be made good from the Operational Training Units, which by August were turning out 320 pilots a month. A system of reinforcement was developed which gave 11 Group access to the pilots in other fighter groups. So-called ‘A’ squadrons were kept at full strength (20 trained pilots) and all assigned to Park’s group; ‘B’ squadrons were kept at near full strength and assigned to other key group sectors; ‘C’ squadrons were set up in 12 and 13 Groups, composed of only five or six trained pilots, whose job it was to prepare the intake of operational trainees for combat in the south-east.21 The rotation system allowed some respite to the hard-pressed front-line pilots, though it did throw into the heart of the battle less experienced crew, whose survival rates and kill ratios were lower.
These men were Churchill’s ‘few’. In a speech to Parliament on 20 August he repeated a sentence that he had been heard to mutter to himself a few days earlier as he returned by car from Park’s headquarters at Uxbridge: ‘
Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’ For all its subsequent reputation, the speech had, according to one of Churchill’s private secretaries, ‘less oratory than usual’. For much of the time ‘the speech seemed to drag’ in front of an audience made languid in the heat of an unaccustomed August sitting.22 Churchill devoted only a small part of his speech to the air battle, which focused on problems in the African war against Italy; nor did he single out Britain’s fighter pilots for praise. Fighter Command got six lines, but Bomber Command got twenty-one: ‘On no part of the Royal Air Force,’ Churchill continued, ‘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…’23
On the Fighter Command stations Churchill’s remark was soon turned into a joke about mess bills. The journalists who dared the trip to these southern airfields were rewarded with scenes that have remained etched in the popular memory of the battle. ‘You knew,’ wrote Virginia Cowles, looking back a year later, ‘the fate of civilization was being decided fifteen thousand feet above your head in a world of sun, wind and sky.’ Aircraft could be seen ‘falling earthwards, a mass of flames, leaving as their last testament a smudge of black against the sky’. The pilots appeared like overgrown children, ‘little boys with blonde hair and pink cheeks, who looked as though they ought to be in school’.24 German crewmen evoked the same sentiments. When the MP Harold Nicolson saw two German Air Force prisoners at Tonbridge Station guarded by three soldiers with fixed bayonets, he thought them ‘tiny little boys’. The other passengers treated them with a shy respect.25
The toll on the men who flew the aircraft was severe. The persistent, daily combat was physically draining and nerve-racking. Captured German prisoners at the end of August were said to show signs of ‘nervous strain and cracking morale’, and ‘nervous exhaustion’. In his memoirs the German fighter commander Adolf Galland described the gradual demoralization of the German fighter force from the strain on minds and limbs compounded with the lack of any clear sign of operational success.26 They at least did not suffer the indignity of being machine-gunned as they parachuted to earth. British fighter pilots were regarded as combatants as they floated down because they could be back in a cockpit within hours; German pilots could only become prisoners-of-war. Dowding in his ‘Despatch’ deplored the practice, but confirmed that it accorded, in his view, with the laws of war.27
The strain on Fighter Command crew was evident to their commanders. In August, Dowding ordered a period of twenty-four hours’ rest for each pilot every week (which explained at least in part the gap between numbers available and the numbers actually flying that so enraged Churchill). In 11 Group efforts were made to repair the damage suffered by men swept round on a carousel of noise, danger and fear. Pilots were sent away to distant billets to get a night of uninterrupted sleep. More games and physical exercises were introduced. The Treasury, after much argument, finally agreed that the cost of electric lighting for airfield squash courts would be met from the public purse on the grounds, robustly argued by the Air Ministry, that a good game of squash produced a better pilot. Less energetic games were denied the public subsidy, and pilots had to pay for the lights in billiard halls out of their own pockets. Park thoughtfully arranged for airfields to be visited by string bands ‘in order to remove some of the drabness of the present war’.28
By the beginning of September the toll was telling on both sides. Park reported to Dowding that, between 28 August and 5 September, the cumulative impact of the pounding received by airfields had had ‘a serious effect on the fighting efficiency of the fighter squadrons’, which could be met only by improvisation. Yet the RAF withstood the assault far better than any other air force attacked by German aircraft. The system of reinforcement was not ideal, but it provided an adequate pool of reserves, while the supply of aircraft was maintained steadily. The three airfields temporarily put out of commission had not been intended to stand in the defensive front line. They were used for the battle in France, but their proximity to the coast made them less satisfactory as defensive stations. Dowding had under his command a network of stations and satellite fields which would have kept a substantial force in contact with the attacking formations even had the forward airfields been put permanently out of action. Only a carefully directed scheme of sabotage could have disrupted the network of communications, which was limited as much by technical snags and human error as it was by the work of the enemy. Dowding commented on Park’s report by pointing out that his Group had survived 40 attacks on 13 airfields, and had briefly lost the use of only three.29 The loss rate of men and machines was as high in September when the attacks on airfields were abandoned.
At the height of this dour campaign of attrition came an intervention from Hitler which is always said to have saved Fighter Command and turned the battle. In a speech on 4 September Hitler announced that the German Air Force was to switch the main weight of attack on to British cities. London was singled out as the chief target and from 7 September, when the first mass daylight raid was launched on the capital, the German effort was concentrated on bombing the city by day and night. The respite afforded Fighter Command, so it is argued, allowed it to revive and to inflict insupportable losses on the German air fleets. The reason usually given for the sharp change in air strategy is the attack on Berlin by Bomber Command on the night of 25/26 August. Hitler was said to be so incensed by violation of the German capital that he suspended the attack on the RAF in order to unleash annihilating retaliatory blows against London; vengeance attacks made little strategic sense, and German strategy thereafter was doomed to failure.
The issues that led to the third phase of the battle were more complex than this. The central problem for Hitler and the military leadership was still to find a way to bring Britain quickly to the point where invasion could be carried out with a reasonable prospect of success. Barring invasion, there remained the hope that air attacks would prove so unendurable that the British government would at last bow to public pressure and accept the peace refused earlier in the summer. The disappointing results of the early wave of attacks in mid-August had already prompted Hitler to take stock. ‘The collapse of England in the year 1940,’ he told staff at his headquarters on 20 August, ‘is under present circumstances no longer to be reckoned on.’30 Nevertheless he did not cancel Sealion, nor rein back the air assault, in the hope that the situation might suddenly improve. Instead the air force moved on to the next stage of the campaign planned in July.
By late August the German Air Force commanders assumed from the intelligence they were fed that Fighter Command was a spent force. Their instructions were now to bring the rest of the country progressively under attack, starting with industrial, military and transport targets in and around major urban centres in preparation for the invasion. Heavy bomb attacks on Bristol, Liverpool, Birmingham and other Midland cities at night preceded the attacks on London. On 2 September Goering ordered the systematic destruction of selected targets in London in line with the wider aim to reduce military capability and the will to resist. On 5 September Hitler directed the air fleets to begin a general campaign against urban targets and enemy morale, including London. With this directive, according to a lecture given in Berlin later in the war, ‘economic war from the air could be embarked upon with full fury, and the morale of the civilian population subjected at the same time to a heavy strain’.31 The decision to launch attacks on London rested with Hitler, but all the preparation was in place long before. When Hitler did authorize the attack to begin, it was not a simple case of matching terror with terror, even though the first instructions to the air fleets described the operation as ‘Vengeance attacks’. Hitler insisted that only war-essential targets should be attacked, and rejected the idea of inducing ‘mass panic’ through deliberate attacks on civilian areas.32 The raids on Berlin may have affected the timing of the decision, but even this is doubtful. At most they allowed German leaders what Goeb
bels described as an ‘alibi’: British airmen were presented in German propaganda as military terrorists, while German operations were presented as a legitimate attack on targets broadly defined as essential for war.33
Such a distinction is still sometimes drawn sixty years later. It is an entirely false one. The two air forces operated under almost identical instructions to hit military and economic targets whenever conditions allowed. Neither air force was permitted to mount terror attacks for the sake of pure terror. The British War Cabinet issued a directive to Bomber Command early in June 1940 instructing bomber crews over Germany to attack only when a target was clearly identified, and to seek out an alternative target in case the first was obscured. If no contact was made with the target, aircraft were expected to bring their bombs back. On moonless nights aircraft could attack ‘identifiable targets in the centres of industrial activity’. With an eye to publicity (or perhaps a future war crimes trial?), the authors of the directive observed that the new requirements ‘will show up quite well on the record if ever the time comes when belligerents have to produce their instructions to bombers’.34 German airmen were also told to bomb only when they had good visual contact with the target, and to bring their bombs back if they did not. Lecture notes found on a German POW revealed detailed instructions to avoid residential districts (unless jettisoning bombs!). German airmen were told that ‘on moonless nights’ London could be attacked because it offered ‘a large target area’ in which something of value might be hit.35
The problem both air forces faced was the impossibility of attacking single military targets with existing air technology without spreading destruction over a wide circle around them. This explains why both sides believed that the other was conducting a terror campaign against civilian morale. By mid-September Park was telling Dowding that the Germans had abandoned ‘all pretence of attacking military objectives’ in favour of ‘“browning” the huge London target’.36 Goebbels invited foreign newsmen on grisly tours of bombed schools, churches and hospitals. But even he could see that journalists would not be taken in entirely by counterclaims that German aeroplanes only attacked military targets, and was even prepared to admit that it was ‘impossible to avoid civilian damage’.37 In an age long before smart weapons, accuracy to within a mile at night could be considered aerial sharp-shooting. Bombers were under constant threat of attack by fighters; they were shot at by anti-aircraft guns and trapped in cones of searchlight beams; they flew in poor daytime weather, they flew in the dark. What would now be described by the cynical euphemism ‘collateral damage’ was unavoidable, and German aircraft began to inflict civilian casualties from the moment they attacked the British mainland in June.
The Battle of Britain Page 6
