Scramble: A Narrative History of the Battle of Britain

by Norman Gelb

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  American First Committee

  STATEMENT OF PRINCIPLES

  1. The United States must build an impregnable defense for America.

  2. No foreign power, nor group of powers, can successfully attack a prepared America.

  3. American democracy can be preserved only by keeping out of the European war.

  4. ‘Aid short of war’ weakens national defense at home and threatens to involve America in war abroad.

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  Century Group, Committee to Defend America

  If Germany wins control of the North Atlantic, the period prior to the completion of our own two-ocean navy will be a period of acute danger for us. During that period, the United States could be invaded from the Atlantic. In order to remove the risk of invasion, the government should take all possible steps to prevent German control of the North Atlantic. The most certain preventative — until our two-ocean navy is built — is the continued existence of the British Fleet. And the fate of the British Fleet will be settled by the battle for the control of the North Atlantic which is about to begin on the shores of England, Scotland and Ireland.

  Despite his pro-British sympathies, Roosevelt was strictly bound by congressional restrictions not to diminish America’s own defensive capabilities by distributing arms to foreigners. But he did manage to find a half-million rifles which could reasonably be considered ‘surplus to American requirements’ and to let the British cart them off. These were of First World War vintage, but had never been used and had been stored in grease. They were greatly welcomed by Churchill, who was finally able to distribute a fair number of usable weapons to the Home Guard. An American Committee for the Defense of British Homes managed to put together a few cases of shotguns, hunting rifles and other small arms to send to the British, but that was little more than a gesture. Of far greater significance, Roosevelt managed during the course of the Battle of Britain to push a Lend-Lease Agreement through Congress. Fifty old but usable American destroyers were transferred to the British to beef up the

  Royal Navy, in return for leases on military bases in British colonies in the West Indies and Newfoundland. It was easy enough to dismiss the protests of isolationists by pointing out that American control of extra bases in the Western Hemisphere enhanced rather than diminished the security of the United States in a troubled world. Besides, a corps of highly professional, London-based American newspaper and radio correspondents daily fed vivid accounts to the American people of the heroic efforts of the hard-pressed British to thwart Nazi attempts to subjugate them and of the daring exploits of the outnumbered RAF fighter pilots. It aroused widespread admiration on the other side of the Atlantic.

  THE BATTLE IS JOINED

  Short of pilots, short of planes and solemnly pondering the baptism of battle it had just endured, Fighter Command could at least take satisfaction from the realization that everyone now acknowledged the crucial, central role it had to play in the defence of Britain. But though it had begun rebuilding its operational strength during the post-Dunkirk lull in June and early July, there was no real break in the conflict. There was no recurrence of the ‘phoney war’, no suggestion that the worst was over. While licking and treating their earlier wounds, RAF fighter squadrons continued to tangle with the enemy in furious, spasmodic encounters.

  After Dunkirk, they were dispatched to cover smaller scale evacuations of units of British forces driven back helter-skelter to other points along the French Channel coast. At the same time, the Germans, trying out their newly acquired bases in westernmost Europe, began sending planes on reconnaissance missions over the Channel and over parts of Britain. Fighters were sent aloft to intercept them and to intercept German aircraft on sporadic bombing raids against British targets, sometimes in response to British bomber raids on German-occupied Europe.

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  BRITAIN IS BOMBED

  Waves of German Planes Attempt Retaliation for RAF Raids

  Air Alarm in Berlin

  By James MacDonald

  Special cable to the New York Times

  London, Saturday 22 June — German bombs thundered over parts of this country early today as the Nazi air force retaliated for new British aerial attacks on targets in many points in Germany, France and the Netherlands. Names of counties where warning sirens went off and anti-aircraft guns blazed were withheld when the raids began at about midnight. But the area affected was large, embracing east and south coast points and even western England ... In some communities, the alarm lasted four hours or more and the people, huddled in shelters, heard terrific explosions ... Bitter aerial fights between raiders and defending planes occurred after a network of searchlights enmeshed the Germans in their beams.

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  Gunner Fred Taylor

  I worked the searchlights on the Romney Marsh just off the coast. We were very primitive in those days, listening for incoming planes with great big earphones — square, six-foot-long, box-shaped things, stretching out to a point. By closing your eyes and listening, you could get an idea of the position of the plane. The position was relayed by the listeners to the men who directed the searchlights. We always had to be twelve degrees in front of the plane because of the sound lag. And, with luck, there was the plane. At the time, there was no ack-ack down where we were. We lit up the incoming planes for our fighters to see. During the daytime, we manned machine-guns in case there was an enemy attack. One day, I was reporting by telephone to a relay point on a plane I saw coming in, heading for the town of Rye. When it was over Rye, I reported I could see one, two, three flat things falling from the plane. I always imagined that if they were bombs, they would be falling point downward. But these were falling flat. The man at the other end of the line asked, ‘Are they bombs?’ I said, ‘1 don’t think so. But hold on a minute. They’ve turned and now they’re falling point downward.’ Then I heard the whumph, whumph, whumph, and I told him, ‘They were bombs all right.’

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  New York Times

  London, 25 June — The authorities obviously have done much to coordinate defense measures. Thus, instead of one suburban siren following another — and some confusedly and belatedly wailing the alarm while others were sounding the all clear — all seemed to blast out today’s warning together. Early commuters to London found only one aftermath of the three hours upset in the city. There were no morning papers and those travelling in the first trains sat idly gazing at advertisements they had perhaps never previously noticed.

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  Pilot Officer Donald Stones

  One day towards the end of June, we were told to stand by for an investiture by King George on the parade ground at Biggin Hill.

  That was the day Flight Lieutenant Jimmy Davis and Sergeant McQueen were shot down. Jimmy Davis was an American who had been commissioned in the RAF before the war. He was a first class pilot and a great chap. In the afternoon, Sergeant Cartwright, Sergeant Whitby and myself received our decorations from the King. Jimmy, having been killed, wasn’t there to receive his. The King asked about the remaining Distinguished Flying Cross on the table. He was told what had happened to Jimmy. He seemed quite moved.

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  Mollie Panter-Downes

  London War Notes, 28 June

  Rural areas have had far more alarms and actual bombings than the cities, and it’s ironical that many people who fled to country retreats when war broke out have been in the thick of it, as they wouldn’t have been if they’d stayed put in peaceful Chelsea or Hampstead. The German raiders have turned up in all sorts of places where they weren’t expected. A boys’ school which migrated from a danger area on the east coast to a supposedly quiet spot in the southwest came in for quite a spectacular raid the night the boys arrived — to the delight of the pupils and the consternation of the staff.

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  Leonard Marsland Gander, Radio Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph

  Diary, 10 July

  I have been exploring the possibilities of turning the gar
age ... into an air-raid shelter. Elmer, the builder, says however that there will be difficulty in getting timber to support the roof. There is also the question of what I shall do with the car and the feeling that the passage downstairs is probably just as good anyway.

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  Daily Express, 10 July

  For an hour early yesterday morning, the people of a southwest coast town sat in their air-raid shelters. They listened to the anti-aircraft guns. Some heard the engines of the German planes. They heard the roar of the British fighters overhead. Then they heard a series of terrific bomb explosions and they pictured their town in ruins. As the all clear sounded, the townsfolk came out to see what damage had been done. Those near the seashore stopped amazed — then they ran home as though the Germans had returned. Back they came with baskets, tin baths, buckets, prams and barrows. They waded into the sea and filled up with fish killed or stunned by the explosion of bombs in the water. They pulled them in in the hundreds — flat fish and fat fish, big fish and small, cod and whiting ... The Germans did not damage the town, but when they dropped all their bombs in the sea and fled, they provided enough fish to supply the town’s breakfast, dinner and tea.

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  War Cabinet Minutes, 11 July

  War Cabinet had before them a memorandum by the Minister of Information [Alfred Duff Cooper] urging recommendation of the decision reached by the War Cabinet on 3 July that reports of casualties caused by German air raids should in the future be stated in general terms and should not give details of the precise number killed and injured. In favour of the publication of the exact number, it was urged that the withholding of publication of facts known to a large number of people in this country created doubt and disquiet.

  The Minister of Information and the Minister of Home Security [Sir John Anderson] said that evidence in this sense was accumulating in reports from the regions. Public opinion in this country could be relied upon to accept bad news, provided they knew that they were being given the full facts. On the other hand, it was argued that the Home Front was now the frontline trench, and that there was no more reason to publish the detailed casualties inflicted on civilians each day than there would have been to publish daily casualties inflicted in particular sectors of the battle front in Flanders. The day-to-day publication of the numbers of civilians killed must have a depressing effect on public opinion here, and must have some value to the enemy.

  The Prime Minister suggested that, if it was necessary to publish information as to total civilian casualties sustained, this could be done periodically.

  For the Fighter Command pilots who had tangled with the Luftwaffe over France, Belgium and Holland, the battle had commenced in earnest weeks earlier. But as a distinctive, critical episode in the Second World War, the Battle of Britain is reckoned to have begun on 10 July 1940. The fixing of that date might be considered arbitrary. During the ten days prior to the ‘opening’ of the battle, no less than twenty-eight British fighter planes were destroyed and eighteen pilots killed. One squadron had been so relentlessly engaged during that period and earlier that it had to be sent north to recuperate (where two of its most experienced pilots immediately crashed in a simple training exercise). Another squadron was down to only eight operational aircraft and others were below strength as well.

  But 10 July, as Dowding later noted in his report to the Secretary of State for Air, was the day the Germans employed ‘the first really big formations — seventy aircraft — intended primarily to bring our fighter defences to battle on a large scale’. It was a harbinger of things to come. Before the Battle of Britain was brought to a close, such formations, and very much larger ones, regularly darkened the skies over England.

  The Battle was divided into phases. During the first phase, which lasted until 12 August, the Germans concentrated most of their attacks on convoys steaming through the Channel and on English coastal targets. Their bombers were sent out with strong formations of fighter escorts. The primary object was to exhaust Fighter Command by luring its fighters, which were obliged to defend British targets from bombing raids, into combat within comfortable reach of the new German airbases in occupied Europe. They would be overwhelmed by the numbers of the enemy and Britain’s capacity to resist would be crippled even before the main Luftwaffe onslaught was launched.

  In terms of gains and losses, the opening day of this first phase of the battle was a good day for the British. The Germans managed to sink a small ship in a convoy, but they lost sixteen aircraft (shot down or damaged) to six lost by the RAF. British pilots returning to their bases were elated by their performance and the performance of their aircraft. But the events of the day contained a frightening message for Fighter Command. When all reports were in, it was realized that, in notching up its impressive score, RAF fighters had flown more than 600 sorties by the end of the day — an extravagant outlay in view of Fighter Command’s strained circumstances.

  In the days that followed, this pace was for the most part sustained, and while the British retained a convincing lead in the kill-loss ratio, most of the German aircraft they shot down were bombers which, aside from their bombing assignments, were decoys for Luftwaffe fighters hovering above them, waiting to swoop down; on the other hand, virtually all the British aircraft destroyed or damaged came, as the Germans intended, from Dowding’s precious stock of Spitfires and Hurricanes. Furthermore, most of the British pilots killed during this period were experienced flyers, many of whom had been blooded over France and during the Dunkirk episode. They would be impossible to replace at short notice. And many who survived had been flying two or three sorties a day, practically every day, had been kept on readiness when not aloft, and were close to exhaustion. At that rate, questions could be asked about whether Fighter Command would be in any condition to beat off the expected Luftwaffe assault on inland targets.

  While assessing the grim prospects, Dowding, still carefully husbanding his reserves, was pressed to shift fighters to bases closer to the coast, the better to be able to meet the German attacks quickly. Such a move presented problems. For one thing, the Germans regularly sent out several attacking formations. Though they were usually picked up by radar as they formed up over France, it was rarely possible to predict which would head for targets deserving priority defensive attention from the limited numbers of forward aircraft. Aside from that, being based so close to the incoming attackers, the British fighters did not have time to climb to altitudes above the enemy and were often sitting ducks for Messerschmitt 109s zooming down on them from above and out of the sun. BEWARE THE HUN IN THE SUN became a maxim for British fighter pilots, but not one they were always able to observe.

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  ENGLAND FIGHTS OFF BIGGEST AIR ATTACK

  By Frank Kelley, New York Herald Tribune

  London, 11 July — Day-long sallies by waves of German bombers against coastal objectives in England, Wales and Scotland reached a grand climax yesterday in the greatest and fiercest air battle in ten and a half months of war when seventy-five Nazi bombers, escorted by forty-five or more fighters, roared across the English Channel in two formations and showered bombs on a strongly defended convoy bringing vital food and other supplies to these besieged islands.

  For more than an hour, the Germans came over. They churned up the Channel with scores of bombs which touched off thundering echoes along the chalk cliffs of England, dodged a fierce barrage of anti-aircraft fire from merchant ships and warships and whirled about the sky with dozens of Spitfires and Hurricanes on their tails.

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  Pilot Officer Steve Stephen

  For me, the period up to the end of July was the most intense, the most vicious part of the Battle of Britain. The Germans were dive bombing harbours, dive bombing installations, bombing convoys. And large numbers of German fighters came in, trying to shoot us out of the sky. They kept coming over. They were at us all day long. You felt the pressure. We fought back. They had to be stopped, but by 1 August, we had only about eight of the pilots le
ft from the ones we had had earlier.

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  Flight Lieutenant Frank Howell

  Letter home

  Bags of excitement here — almost too much. The other day, Red Section was sent up to 18,000 over Portland. It was a mucky day, and we had to go up through two layers of cloud. Control gave us a bearing to fly on and said that we ought to meet a Jerry, possibly two, which were in the vicinity. He had hardly finished speaking when out of the cloud loomed a Ju 88. Whoopee! I told numbers two and three to look out for enemy fighters while I made an almost head on attack at it. I don’t think he liked that one little bit because he turned over and went split arse for the sea, releasing four large bombs, and doing over 350 mph. I got in another attack and got his port motor. I was going to do a third when I saw the other chaps screaming down at him. So I let them have a go, being a generous chap! Just then I smelt a nasty smell! An ’orrid smell! I looked at the dials and things and saw that the coolant temperature was right off the clock — about 180°C, and the oil temperature was at 95 ° and going up. The bugger had shot me in the radiator! White fumes began pouring back into the cockpit, so I thought that was not really good enough. The poor old motor began to seize up. I called up Bandy and said, ‘Hello Bandy Control, Red One calling — I am going to bale out four miles off Poole!’ The silly C at the end, of course, couldn’t hear me and asked me to repeat. Bah. Still, I still had 5,000 feet so I told him again and wished him a very good afternoon, and stepped smartly from the aircraft.

  I read something somewhere about pulling a ripcord so had a grope, found same, pulled same, and sat up with a jerk but with no damage to the important parts.

  Everything was lovely — quiet as a church, a lovely day, a spot of sun, three ships two miles away who would be bound to see me! Found myself holding the handle so flung it away — chucked my helmet away but kept the goggles! Undid my shoes, blew up my Mae West, and leaned back and admired the scenery. The water quite suddenly came very close — a swish and then I began my final swim of the season. I set out with a lusty crawl for Bournemouth, thinking I might shoot a hell of a line staggering up the beach with beauteous barmaids dashing down the beach with bottles of brandy. Instead, the current was taking me out to sea, and I was unceremoniously hauled on board a twelve-foot motorboat. Still, the navy pushed out a boat and the half tumbler of whisky went down with a rush!