Churchill’s speech to the House of Commons on 18 June 1940 has been so often quoted that it sometimes receives only the nod due to glorious rhetoric. But its closing words repay attention, because they defined for the rest of the war the democracies’ vision of their purpose:
What General Weygand called the battle of France is over. I expect that the battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our empire. The whole might and fury of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us, therefore, brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’
It is striking to contrast the prime minister’s appeal to ‘brace ourselves to our duties’ with the strident demands of Germany’s warlord, in similar circumstances in 1944–45, for ‘fanatical resistance’. Grace, dignity, wit, humanity and resolution characterised the leadership of Britain’s prime minister; only the last of these could be attributed to Hitler. In the summer of 1940, Churchill faced an enormous challenge, to convince his own people and the world that continued resistance was credible. Sergeant L.D. Pexton, thirty-four years old, was a prisoner in Germany when he wrote on 19 July: ‘Heard today that Hitler had broadcast some peace terms and that Churchill had told him what to do with them … Hope they do patch up some sort of terms as everyone here wants it, and to get home.’ Pexton’s view was obviously influenced by experiencing defeat in France, and thereafter finding himself at the mercy of the victorious Nazis. But in Britain, too, there were those – especially among the commercial classes and the ruling caste, best informed about the nation’s weakness – who continued to fear the worst. It was Churchill’s epic personal achievement to rally them in support of the simple purpose of repelling invasion.
The latter months of 1940 were decisive in determining the course of the war. The Nazis, stunned by the scale of their triumphs, allowed themselves to suffer a loss of momentum. By launching an air assault on Britain, Hitler adopted the worst possible strategic compromise: as master of the Continent, he believed a modest further display of force would suffice to precipitate its surrender. Yet if, instead, he had left Churchill’s people to stew on their island, the prime minister would have faced great difficulties in sustaining national morale and a charade of strategic purpose. A small German contingent dispatched to support the Italian attack on Egypt that autumn would probably have sufficed to expel Britain from the Middle East; Malta could easily have been taken. Such humiliations would have dealt heavy blows to the credibility of Churchill’s policy of fighting on.
As it was, however, the Luftwaffe’s clumsy offensive posed the one challenge which Britain was well placed to repel. The British Army and people were not obliged to confront the Wehrmacht on their beaches and in their fields – a clash that would probably have ended ignominiously for the defenders. The prime minister merely required their acquiescence, while the country was defended by a few hundred RAF pilots and – more importantly though less conspicuously – by the formidable might of the Royal Navy’s ships at sea. The prime minister’s exalting leadership secured public support for his defiance of the logic of Hitlerian triumph, even when cities began to burn and civilians to die.
The prospect of an imminent invasion was less plausible than Britain’s chiefs of staff supposed and Churchill publicly asserted, because the Germans lacked amphibious shipping and escorts to convoy an army across the Channel in the face of an immensely powerful British fleet. Hitler’s heart was never in it. But intelligence about his means and intentions was fragmentary: decryption of enemy cipher traffic at Bletchley Park* lacked anything like the comprehensive coverage achieved later in the war. Much German activity, or absence of it, on the Continent was shrouded from London’s knowledge. British service chiefs, traumatised by the disaster in France, attributed almost mystical powers to the Wehrmacht.
Privately, Churchill was always sceptical about the invasion threat, but he emphasised it in his rhetoric and strategy-making throughout 1940–41, as a means of promoting purposeful activity among both his people and the armed forces. He judged, surely rightly, that inertia and an understanding of their own impotence would be fatal to the spirit necessary to sustain morale, and to his hopes of inducing the United States to enter the conflict. There must be no return to phoney war: since defence against prospective invasion was the utmost the home army could encompass, he projected this as its principal task for many months after it became plain that the danger had passed.
Following the fall of France, the prime minister’s ruthlessness was first displayed against his recent allies. One morning in July 1940, armed Royal Navy parties boarded French warships in British harbours to demand their surrender. At Devonport, officers of the submarine Surcouf resisted, starting a gun battle in the control room during which one French and three British sailors were killed. Three-quarters of French servicemen in Britain, including most of those rescued from Dunkirk, insisted on repatriation, a choice in which the British indulged them. French alienation increased after a British ultimatum to their battle squadron at Mers-el-Kébir was rejected on 3 July. Churchill was determined that Pétain’s fleet should not support a German invasion of Britain. Admiral Marcel-Bruno Gensoul refused either to renew the war alongside the Royal Navy, or to accept neutrality under British guard. Admiral Somerville thereupon sank or shelled into wreckage three of Gensoul’s ships, killing 1,300 sailors. Churchill feared the assault might cause the Pétain regime actively to ally itself with the Nazis, though this did not dissuade him from giving the fire order. Vichy did not become a formal belligerent, and a few remote African colonies ‘rallied’ to Brigadier-General Charles de Gaulle’s ‘Free France’ in London. But French forces vigorously resisted every British encroachment on their territories until the end of 1942.
It seems mistaken to suppose that the policies of Pétain, and the widespread support they commanded, represented mere fallout from French defeat. The Vichy government welcomed the opportunity to impose what Michael Burleigh has called ‘a regressive moral, political and social agenda in which authority and duty would trump liberty and rights’. Pathological hatred and fear of the left – and of Jews – caused almost all of aristocratic, commercial and bourgeois France to back Pétain until German oppression became intolerable and Allied victory plainly inevitable.
The Luftwaffe air assault on Britain which began in July 1940 offered Churchill’s people their best opportunity to engage the Germans on favourable terms. The only class of ground or aerial weapons system in which the British had near parity with their enemies in quality and quantity was the single-seat interceptor fighter. The RAF’s Hurricanes and Spitfires were handicapped by clumsy tactical doctrine and .303 machine-gun armament with inadequate destructive power, but squadrons were controlled by the most sophisticated radar, ground-observer and voice-radio network in the world, created by an inspired group of civil servants, scientists and airmen. If the equipment and performance of Britain’s army remained unsatisfactory throughout the war, Churchill’s nation far surpassed Germany in the application of science and technology: mobilisation of the best civilian brains, and their integration into the war effort at the highest levels, was an outstanding British success story. The RAF had developed a remarkable system of defence, while their opponents had no credible system of attack.
The Luftwaffe’s commanders suffered from a confusion of objectives which persisted throughout the summer. Gen. Albert Kesselring opposed the assault on Britain, preferring instead to
seize Gibraltar and gain dominance of the Mediterranean; Hitler initially vetoed bombing of British cities, while Goering rejected attacks on southern ports, which would be needed for the Wehrmacht’s landings. The Luftwaffe sought to gain dominance of the air space over south-east England by destroying Fighter Command, and embarked on an incoherent campaign to achieve this by sending bombers to attack airfields and installations, escorted by fighters which were expected to shoot down RAF planes as easily as they had done in France. Intelligence, a chronic weakness of the Third Reich, was woeful: the Germans had no understanding of Fighter Command’s detection and control network. They themselves had developed radar – Dezimator-Telegraphie, as they called it, or DeTe for short – before the British, and their sets were technically more advanced. But they failed to link them to an effective ground–air direction system, and never imagined that Fighter Command might have done so. Throughout the war, institutionalised hubris dogged the Nazi leadership, which was repeatedly wrong-footed by Allied technological initiatives; if Germans had not built a given weapon or device, they were reluctant to credit their enemies with the wit to do so.
Colonel ‘Beppo’ Schmid, head of Luftwaffe intelligence, was a charlatan who told his chiefs what they wished to hear. Goering had neither a strategic reserve of aircraft, nor manufacturing resources to create one. The Germans conducted the Battle of Britain with stunning incompetence, founded upon arrogance and ignorance. If the RAF made its share of mistakes, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding and his most important subordinate, Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park, the New Zealander commanding 11 Group, displayed a steadiness of judgement amounting to brilliance, entirely absent across the Channel. The Germans began their campaign with two assets: a modest superiority of aircraft numbers and a corps of experienced combat veterans. They failed to concentrate these, however, against the vital targets – radar receivers, fighter stations and supporting installations.
The Battle of Britain opened with July skirmishes over the Channel, as the Germans attacked coastal convoys and the RAF responded. Hitting a precision target from the air was difficult. A dive-bomber pilot attacking a 750-foot ship from astern, for instance, had only a 1.5-second margin of error in pressing his bomb release, which from abeam fell to a quarter of a second; it was a tribute to the skills of German Stuka pilots that they inflicted severe losses on British convoys. But the Ju87s flew even more slowly than the RAF’s Battle bombers, which had been destroyed wholesale in France, and it was now the turn of the British to exploit enemy vulnerability: Stukas suffered slaughter wherever Fighter Command encountered them, and eventually had to be withdrawn from the battle.
Spitfire pilot Geoff Wellum described the racing sensations of air combat:
All at once, crossfire, heavy and pretty close at that. Bloody front gunner. My target, concentrate, the target. Looking at him through the sight, getting larger much too quickly, concentrate, hold him steady, that’s it, hold it … be still my heart, be still. Sight on, still on, steady … fire NOW! I press the gun button and all hell is let loose; my guns make a noise like tearing calico … I get the fleet impression of hits and explosions of the glass nose of my Dornier and of Brian’s Spitfire breaking away, its oil-streaked belly visible for a fraction of a second. Keep firing, Geoff, hold it. For Christ’s sake break off or you’ll hit him; too close, this. I stop firing, stick hard over. I even hear his engines as he flashes by inches overhead. Bloody hell, this is dangerous!
In mêlées in the sky, it was often remarkable how few aircraft either side destroyed. Over a Channel convoy on 25 July, for instance, scores of British and German planes exchanged fire, but only two Spitfires were shot down, and one Messerschmitt Bf109. RAF pilots had received scarcely any training in air fighting, an art the Germans mastered over Spain and Poland, and the defenders were now obliged to learn by experience. Early in the battle, it became apparent that the overwhelming majority of ‘kills’ were achieved by a handful of each side’s best men: the top 3.5 per cent of Fighter Command’s pilots made 30 per cent of all claims for aircraft shot down, and the Luftwaffe’s aces accounted for an even higher proportion of ‘kills’. Exceptional eyesight, marksmanship and nerve to get close were the decisive factors.
The RAF strongly discouraged the cult of the ‘ace’, and of personal scores, but the Luftwaffe energetically promoted it. Such stars as Adolf Galland, Helmut Wick and Werner Molders were said by resentful comrades to suffer from ‘Halsweh’ – the ‘sore throat’ on which they were eager to hang the coveted ribbon of a Knight’s Cross – as all three did when their score of ‘kills’ mounted. Galland, a supremely effective air fighter but also a selfish and brutal one, had no patience with weaklings in his command. One day on the radio net a frightened German voice wailed, ‘Spitfire on my tail!’ and then again a few moments later, ‘Spitfire still behind me! What should I do?’ Galland snarled, ‘Aussteigen, Sie Bettnasser!’ – ‘Bail out, you bed-wetter!’
Air combat, unlike any other form of warfare, engaged exclusively very young men, who alone had the reflexes for duels at closing speeds up to 600mph; by thirty, they were past it. Commanders, confined to headquarters, issued orders. But outcomes hinged upon the prowess of pilots just in or just out of their teens. Almost everything they said and did in the air and on the ground reflected their extreme youth; on 17 August Lieutenant Hans-Otto Lessing, a Bf109 pilot, wrote exultantly to his parents, describing his unit’s hundredth alleged ‘victory’ like a schoolboy reporting the success of his football team: ‘We are in the Geschwader of Major Molders, the most successful … During the last few days the British have been getting weaker, though individuals continue to fight well … The Hurricanes are tired old “puffers” … I am having the time of my life. I would not swap places with a king. Peacetime is going to be very boring after this!’ One of the despised ‘puffers’ killed him the following afternoon.
The RAF’s Paddy Barthrop said afterwards: ‘It was just beer, women and Spitfires, a bunch of little John Waynes running about the place. When you were nineteen, you couldn’t give a monkey’s.’ British pilots partied relentlessly at night, youth overcoming exhaustion. Pete Brothers said, ‘We used to booze dreadfully.’ One day when his squadron was stood down in bad weather, the airmen adjourned to the bar, only to find themselves scrambled when the sky cleared. ‘I shall never forget taking off and thinking, “That button … turn it that way … switch on gunsights …” We were all absolutely tanked. Mind you, when we saw black crosses, you were instantly sober.’
They cherished their aircraft as magic carpets into the sky. Bob Stanford-Tuck said: ‘Some men fall in love with yachts or some women, strangely enough, or motor cars, but I think every Spitfire pilot fell in love with it as soon as he sat in that nice tight cosy office with everything to hand.’ Similarly, Bob Doe on his first sight of his new plane: ‘Our hearts leapt! We walked round it, sat in it, and stroked it. It was so beautiful I think we all fell a bit in love with it.’ Fighter Command’s British pilots fought alongside contingents of New Zealanders, Canadians, Czechs, South Africans and a handful of Americans. The 146 Poles who participated in the Battle of Britain formed the largest foreign element, 5 per cent of overall RAF pilot strength. Their combat reputation was superb, rooted in experience and reckless courage. ‘When you seen [sic] the swastika or black cross on the aircraft,’ said one of them, Bolesław Drobiski, ‘your heart beat much quicker, and you decided that you must get him or you get shot yourself. It’s a feeling of absolute … vengeance.’ This was not bombast. When Poles later attacked Germany, they chalked messages on their bombs – ‘This is for Warsaw’, ‘This is for Lwów’ – and meant it.
Popular adulation was heaped on the aerial defenders of Britain, expressed everywhere airmen met civilians – as they often did, in evenings after fighting in the sky above towns and villages. The applause of ordinary people meant much to the pilots amid their exhaustion and losses. ‘There was tremendous kindness,’ said one young man afterwards. ‘It was a lovely fe
eling. I’ve never felt that Britain was like that again.’ Soldiers muttered jealously about the RAF’s ‘Brylcreem boys’; the Wehrmacht had a similar phrase of its own for the Luftwaffe – ‘Schlipssoldaten’, ‘neck-tie soldiers’. For the rest of the war, fliers of all nations retained a glamour denied those who fought on the ground.
Fighter Command was acutely sensitive to the loss of its experienced pilots: ten Hurricane aces – men who had shot down five or more enemy planes – were lost between 8 and 19 August, then a further twelve between 20 August and 6 September. Novice replacements were killed at more than five times this rate; casualties were especially high in squadrons that continued to use the rigid formations RAF official doctrine prescribed for ‘Fighting Area Attacks’. Units fared better whose commanding officers promoted flexibility and initiative. Pilots who flew steady courses died; those who stayed alive dodged and weaved constantly, to render themselves elusive targets. Three-quarters of downed British fighters fell to Bf109s, rather than to bomber gunners or twin-engined Bf110s. Surprise was all: four out of five victims never saw their attackers; many were hit from behind, while themselves attacking a plane ahead.
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