The Battle of Britain

by Richard Overy

  There was little evidence of widespread hatred of the enemy, however understandable it might have been. Violence erupted briefly against Italian premises in London in June when Italy entered the war (one Italian grocery, the Spaghetti House, hastily changed its name to British Food Shop).61 Home Intelligence found that public calls for bombing reprisals were directed against Italy as much as Germany. There was surprisingly slender evidence of sustained Germanophobia. The call for reprisals died down in October, but was more marked in areas where there had been no bombing. The Ministry of Information observed in November that populations that had not experienced raids ‘seem more prone to exaggeration and self-pity than others who have been badly bombed’. In one opinion poll carried out in the north-east, only 58 per cent favoured bombing reprisals against Germany. Earlier in the summer the Ministry had begun an orchestrated campaign to ‘stir up the people’s more primitive instincts’. Some uncertainty prevailed about how to do this, and the propagandists were left with the unhelpful conclusion that it was ‘merely sufficient to impress the people that they were in fact angry’. The campaign was quietly dropped.62

  The transfer to night bombing in September altered the nature of the aerial battlefield once again. Fighter Command was responsible for the night-fighter force, made up predominantly of Blenheims and Beaufighters, but in the absence of adequate aerial radar to find bombers in the dark, contact with night raiders was largely accidental. At night the anti-aircraft defences were the main line of defence. When concentrated attacks began on London, guns were brought in from other parts of Britain to provide a more satisfactory barrage. Anti-aircraft batteries claimed 337 aircraft destroyed from July to September, but of those only 104 were at night, when it was estimated that a barrage used up to ten times as many shells per aircraft as visual firing.63 The reality was that aircraft were very difficult to shoot down at night from the air or from the ground until the advent of new detection equipment. German air fleets found that half their casualties from October onwards were caused by accidents resulting from poor weather conditions and ice.

  By day the bomber force gradually disappeared. It was substituted by large formations of fighters, a small group converted to a fighter-bomber role with the addition of one 250 kg bomb, and an escort of between 200 and 300 combat fighters. The shift had two purposes. First, fighter bombers could keep up the pressure on the urban population by regular small-scale attacks which strained already jangled nerves; second, the fighter sweeps were intended to engage Fighter Command in a steady war of attrition to try to complete the process of wearing down the fighter force begun in July. The strategy made sense only in the light of the persistent misrepresentations of Fighter Command strength by German Air Intelligence, which continued to assert that the enemy was down to its last 200–300 aircraft and that British aircraft production was falling sharply under the hail of bombs. In October, 253 of the nuisance raids were mounted; in November, 235.64 Aircraft flew at altitudes well above 20,000 feet, where the Me 109 was at an advantage thanks to its two-stage engine supercharger. At such heights the slow ascent from RAF airfields to meet the enemy proved a grave handicap and loss ratios began to favour the attacker.

  Fighter Command switched tactics once more. Standing patrols of high-flying Spitfires were used to reconnoitre incoming fighter sweeps. On sighting the enemy, other fighter squadrons patrolling at lower altitudes flew up to battle stations. Air fighting at high altitude brought new difficulties. British aircraft did not have pressurized cabins and the hood was prone to leak at altitude, inducing terrible cramps for the unfortunate pilot. Fighting at high altitude was more physically draining, particularly for RAF squadron commanders whose average age was almost thirty. Losses in October totalled 146 Hurricanes and Spitfires; German air fleets lost 365 aircraft, of which a high proportion were bombers subject to increasingly hazardous flying in the late autumn nights.65 Nevertheless the loss of pilots in Fighter Command was down to only 10 per cent of the force in October, and in November losses of both aircraft and pilots fell to a new low point as the daylight air battle died away as falteringly and inconclusively as it had started.

  From October the German leadership placed its faith in the political impact of bombing for want of any other form of direct pressure on Britain. Some airmen favoured a short and brutal campaign of terror against British cities and food supplies to bring a swift capitulation, along the lines first outlined by the Italian General Giulio Douhet in his classic study of air power published in 1921, Command of the Air. The ‘England-Committee’ of Ribbentrop’s foreign office also strongly favoured a short terror campaign to drive the inhabitants of the East End of London across what they called the ‘social fault line’ into the West End, where London’s well-to-do would be frightened into making peace from fear of social revolution.66

  Though the German Air Force never formally adopted terror bombing, the tactics of widely scattered attacks, the use of a special incendiary squadron to start fires for other bombers to follow, the relaxation of rules of engagement over London on moonless nights, the deliberate decision to target the enemy psychologically by attacking intermittently round the clock (and for as long as possible at night), the use of aerial mines and the targeting of administrative areas of the capital, all reveal the gradual abandonment of any pretence that civilians and civilian morale would not become targets. The death of more than 40,000 people during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz may not have been deliberate policy, but must surely stretch the idea of ‘collateral damage’ beyond the limits of meaning. In Berlin Goebbels gloated in his diary almost daily throughout the last months of 1940 over the horrors of air warfare. ‘When will Churchill capitulate?’ he asked in November. On 5 December he noted the frightful reports from Southampton: ‘The city is one single ruin… and so it must go on until England is on her knees, begging for peace.’ On 11 December Goebbels heard Hitler address the Party bosses: ‘the war is militarily as good as won… England is isolated. Will bit by bit be driven to the ground.’67

  A VICTORY OF SORTS

  I think we have managed to avoid losing this war. But when I think how on earth we are going to win it, my imagination quails.

  HAROLD NICOLSON, DIARY, 8 NOVEMBER 19401

  We shall win, but we don’t deserve it; at least we do deserve it because of our virtues, but not because of our intelligence.

  WINSTON CHURCHILL, 10 AUGUST 19402

  Britain was not driven into the ground in 1940 and Germany did not win the war. These statements are commonplace enough. The difficulty is to decide what, if anything, connects them, for the Battle of Britain did not seriously weaken Germany and her allies, nor did it much reduce the scale of the threat facing Britain (and the Commonwealth) in 1940/41 until German and Japanese aggression brought the Soviet Union and the United States into the conflict. The issues in 1940 cannot be reduced to a simple dividing line between victory and defeat.

  In the first place the threat from the German Air Force was just one of the problems Britain faced in the autumn and winter of 1940. The war against Italy in north and east Africa was a major contest, whose outcome was just as critical for the long-term survival of Britain’s global imperial position. In August Italian armies invaded Somaliland, and in September crossed into Egypt. The large Italian Navy forced Britain to fight a major naval campaign in the Mediterranean at a time when ships were desperately needed for defence against invasion and to protect the vital trade routes across the Atlantic on which Britain’s long-term survival depended. This war against Italy exposed how fragile Britain’s position was in 1940, fighting two European great powers, her navy under constant submarine threat, the economy in crisis, a predatory Japan in eastern Asia, waiting for Britain’s star to fall like France before her. In the end only a small portion of the war effort of Britain and the Commonwealth was exerted against the German Air Force in the autumn war in the air.

  The German threat itself was only partly reduced as a result of the air battles. In late Nov
ember 1940 a pessimistic Churchill was reportedly still anxious that Germany ‘will strive by every means to smash us before the Spring’.3 The one thing that the Battle of Britain could not prevent was the bombing. Even during the daylight clashes between July and September, a high proportion of bombers reached and bombed their targets. German air fleets could not bomb at will, and they sustained what proved to be debilitating loss rates by day, but there was no effective way of preventing bombing, even when the navigational beams were finally jammed by British counter-measures in November. The factors that undermined the effectiveness of the bombing campaign both by day and by night were self-inflicted: bomb attacks were carried out with small bomb-loads, with relatively small numbers of aircraft, and over a widely scattered number of targets. Many of these targets were of secondary importance; no target system, whether airfields, communications, ports or industry, was attacked repeatedly, systematically or accurately. When British Air Intelligence analysed the German bombing effort in late September 1940, they found the results ‘remarkably small in proportion to the considerable effort expended’. In the absence of any observably consistent bombing strategy, the British concluded that the German Air Force bombed ‘with the primary object of lowering morale’, which it failed to do in any significant sense.4

  The onset of the bombing war in September 1940, the ‘Blitz’ as it soon became known, revived anxieties about a sudden overwhelming strike from the sky to force surrender on a stunned people. When Harold Nicolson visited the Master of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge in January 1941, he was warned that the public had no idea ‘how gigantic the German knock-out blow will be when it comes’.5 Gas warfare was a persistent fear. In November the Labour Leader Clement Attlee was given responsibility to get Britain’s stock of poison gas up to the level of 2,000 tons agreed before the war, in case the Germans used gas as a final resort. Churchill became more anxious as time passed that desperation might push the enemy to resort to chemical weapons. In February 1941 a cypher message arrived from Budapest, courtesy of the American legation, warning not only that the invasion of Britain was scheduled for March, but also that German scientists had perfected ‘a new soporific gas’ whose effects would last for thirty-six hours whilst German forces stormed ashore. To Churchill’s immediate inquiry about Britain’s gas capability, the Air Staff replied that the RAF could attack the German population with gas bombs for only four or five days, but if gas was mixed in with high-explosive bombs the campaign might last for two or three weeks.6

  That same month came further intelligence from Switzerland that Germany had retained a secret force of 10,000 aircraft to hit Britain with one massive aerial blow at a critical moment. Churchill now asked the Air Staff to tell him what kind of aerial ‘banquet’ the RAF could lay on in retaliation. Though the RAF was rightly sceptical about any secret air force, they relayed to Churchill the cheerless statistical conclusion that Germany could probably send across some 14,000 aircraft, while the RAF could scrape together only 6,514, including 2,000 trainers and 3,000 reserves.7

  The edginess evident among British political circles reflected the widespread belief that invasion had only been postponed in September 1940 by the exertions of Fighter Command, not cancelled. In the spring of 1941 the Ministry of Information renewed the circulation of pamphlets about invasion in an effort to challenge popular complacency; Fighter Command was issued with new operational instructions early in March for the fight over the invasion beaches. Information from Europe was ambiguous, partly because Hitler had ordered a campaign of deception to mask the operational preparations to attack the Soviet Union by apparently maintaining the pressure on Britain; and partly because Hitler did not entirely exclude the possibility of invasion if Britain became sufficiently weakened or demoralized. In discussion with the German Navy commander in January, he suggested that the aerial and naval blockade of British imports might lead to victory as early as July or August 1941, or create the conditions necessary to permit successful invasion and occupation, or, finally, produce the coveted ‘negotiated’ peace.8

  It is evident that Hitler’s view of the British problem did not alter a great deal between the summer of 1940 and the spring of 1941. The air battles of August and September 1940 were regarded from the German side as just one part of a campaign that lasted almost a year to find ways of bringing sufficient pressure on Britain to get her to give up. The campaign included a political offensive to persuade Spain and Italy to collaborate in destroying Britain’s precarious military position in the Mediterranean and North Africa (an effort that stumbled on Franco’s refusal to join the war, and Mussolini’s decision, kept secret from Hitler, to move into the Balkans instead by invading Greece in October 1940). The naval war, which grew into what became known as the Battle of the Atlantic, developed as a blockade strategy largely independent of the invasion operation, and one that pushed the British war effort to its limit long after the Battle of Britain. Invasion itself was always just one option, and one for which Hitler himself had deep reservations.

  It is open to debate whether the air battle of the autumn of 1940 was the decisive factor affecting the German decision whether or not to invade. There were other reasons for delaying. It is often forgotten that there stood more than an air force between Hitler and conquest of Britain. The German Navy was heavily outnumbered by the Royal Navy, even one stretched taut by the demands of other theatres. The German Navy as a result always remained half-hearted about the whole operation, and made its views felt throughout the weeks of preparation. The British army may not have been a match for the German army in the field, but it represented a considerable threat to a landing attempt. The German army leadership undertook what preparations they could, but they were faced with an operation for which there was simply no precedent in German military history, and one for which preparation was at best improvised. General Günther von Blumentritt, an army staff officer assigned to Operation Sealion, later described the preparations carried out in 1940 as woefully inadequate: ‘It must not be forgotten that we Germans are a continental people,’ he wrote. ‘We knew far too little of England. We knew literally nothing of amphibious operations. At the time we were preparing Sealion plans, accounts of the campaigns of Caesar, Britanicus and William the Conqueror were being read…’9 Above all, the German leadership recognized, as the western Allies were to realize in the invasion of Normandy, four years later, that defeat would be a political and military catastrophe. ‘It is imperative,’ wrote General Alfred Jodl, Hitler’s Chief of Operations, in August 1940, ‘that no matter what might happen the operation dare not fail.’10

  There need be no doubt that under the right circumstances Hitler was serious about invading Britain in 1940. There remained, none the less, a genuine ambivalence in his attitude to the British problem. He understood how difficult the practical questions were and was keen to avoid ‘risky experiments’ and ‘high losses’. He confessed to an audience of Party bosses that he was ‘shy of the water’, which may explain why he listened so closely to what Raeder and the navy had to say in 1940.11 He wanted invasion to be foolproof, ‘absolutely assured’. He kept the door open to a political settlement: ‘Even today the Fuehrer is still ready to negotiate peace with Britain,’ ran the minutes of a Führer conference in January 1941.12 Hitler’s view of Britain is well known: a curious blend of envy and admiration, of contempt for her current state of decadence and respect for a famous history. In his memoirs Adolf Galland recalled a conversation with Hitler when he came to Berlin from the air battle in September 1940 to collect Germany’s highest military award, the oak leaves to the Knight’s Cross. Alone with Hitler, Galland told him the unalloyed truth about how tough air combat against Britain had proved to be. Instead of the diatribe of contradiction he had expected, Hitler explained his respect for the Anglo-Saxon peoples, his regret at the life-and-death struggle between the two states – the ‘world-historical tragedy’ that now promised only total destruction where there might have been fruitful collaboratio
n.13

  It is evident that not a lot was needed to deter Hitler from the idea of invading Britain. Fighter Command tipped the scales. The failure to destroy the Royal Air Force ruled out the possibility of a cheap, quick end to the war in the west and kept alive an armed anti-Axis presence in Europe. The full significance of this outcome was not realized on the British side as the air battle shifted to its new and more deadly phase from September 1940. But when Dowding forwarded to the Air Ministry in mid-November a report on the previous two months of air fighting compiled by Air Vice-Marshal Park, he began at last to develop some sense of what his force had now achieved:

  … the point to remember is that the losses sustained by the enemy were so great that heavy day attacks by bombers were brought to a standstill and that the Command did, in fact, win a notable victory; since, if the attacks had not been brought to a standstill, the invasion would have been facilitated and the war might well have been lost.14

  It is this achievement that came to be described as the Battle of Britain.

  Victory in this narrow but important sense has been explained in many ways. German airmen were at a disadvantage attacking over enemy territory with very limited fighter range. Fighter Command was able to draw on the resources of the other nine-tenths of the British Isles outside the range of the Me 109. Even if the forward airfields had been lost permanently, British fighter forces could still have been deployed from bases further inland, though they might then have taken a lower toll of the enemy bomber force. The German fighter force became tied to the bomber stream as the battle drew on, limiting its radius of action and manoeuvrability without affording the bombers real security from attack on the way out or the way back. All the time Fighter Command was improving the means to identify and engage the enemy through radar and signals intelligence.