But while new production figures were impressive, so too were those of repaired aircraft. Repair and salvage of aircraft had been outsourced from the RAF and was run by the Civilian Repair Organization (CRO), headed by Lord Nuffield and managed by Morris Motors. Needless to say, Nuffield went as soon as the Ministry of Aircraft Production took over. The principle of the system was a good one, with a chain of Civilian Repair Units, which were major repair workshops, but also depots at airfields, training schools and other warehouses.
Beaverbrook took the existing set-up but quickly made a number of changes. Before, aircraft damage had been categorized: 1, repairable by squadron; 2, repairable by contractor or at depot; or 3, recommended for parts salvage. Beaverbrook now re-categorized damage as 4, 5 or 6. Category 4 applied to aircraft that could be repaired within thirty-six hours. Category 5 was given to those aircraft safe to fly lightly, and which became known as ‘fly-in’ repairs; if a category 5 aircraft was repairable within twenty-four hours, for example, then the pilot could wait and fly it back. Finally, there was category 6, applied to any aircraft which would take longer than thirty-six hours to repair and which needed to be moved by road. Responsibility for transporting damaged aircraft to depots and CRUs was left to No. 50 Maintenance Unit.
All members of the CRO and Maintenance Units were as indoctrinated with the need for long hours and speed of response as those working in aircraft production. And, once again, Beaverbrook did not care whose feet he trod on in order to achieve results. He took over all aircraft storage units, normally carefully controlled by the Air Ministry, and his agents scurried around putting MAP padlocks on all the hangar doors. He even decided which aircraft would go where, a decision reached in consultation with Dowding and his commanders, such as Park. The Air Ministry was bypassed entirely. The effect was electric. In addition to nearly 300 new aircraft a week, in the last two weeks of June more than 250 were repaired and sent back to squadrons. In just a few weeks, the production of new aircraft had risen by 62 per cent, new engines by 33 per cent, repaired aircraft by a staggering 186 per cent, and repaired engines by 159 per cent. It was an astonishing turn-around.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Archibald Sinclair, Air Chief Marshal Newall and others at the Air Ministry did not take well to this whirlwind brand of unilateral decision-making, particularly on a number of matters such as stores and allocation where they believed they were better qualified for the job. But if Beaverbrook felt he was not getting the cooperation he required, then he simply threatened to resign, as he did on 30 June. ‘I cannot get information which I require about supplies or equipment,’ he wrote to the Prime Minister, putting on record what he had undoubtedly told him face to face. ‘I cannot get permission to carry out operations essential to strengthening our reserves to the uttermost in readiness for the day of invasion … The breach which has thus been made between the Air Ministry and myself cannot be healed, although I have made many efforts.’ Of course, Churchill refused to accept his resignation. The Air Ministry was told to be more co-operative. Beaverbrook had won even greater autonomy. ‘Beaverbrook was an unpleasant bastard,’ said Alex Henshaw, one of the principal Spitfire test pilots. ‘But he was the right man in the right place at the right time.’
Funnily enough, Hitler would have approved of Beaverbrook. Going behind the backs of those on the same side, getting on the nerves of colleagues and displaying single-minded ruthlessness was the kind of attitude he liked to see from the Nazi leadership. And, in fact, Beaverbrook’s short-termism, where future projects and reserves were put to one side in the interests of resolving the immediate crisis, was precisely the mindset Hitler had adopted in his preparation for war in the west. The big difference was that, unlike the RAF, the Luftwaffe had no Beaverbrook in charge of aircraft production.
It was true that Germany was suffering economically and from a shortage of raw materials during the winter and spring of 1939, but thanks to Hitler’s go-for-broke orders the Luftwaffe was not struggling from a shortage of aluminium or other key components. Her aircraft factories were well-established and had, by 1940, considerable experience of producing large numbers of aircraft, unlike the RAF. Admittedly, there had been bottlenecks on the German railways which had held things up, but operating to all intents and purposes on a peacetime footing there should have been no excuse for the slow rate of production.
With Milch sidelined from the entire procurement and production process, it was left to Udet to whip the industry into an urgent, highly efficient organization that was operating to maximum capabilities. This, however, simply did not happen. Udet did not have Beaverbrook’s drive, experience and understanding of how big business could operate. Individual manufacturers were largely left to their own devices, and although Udet regularly visited Heinkel, Junkers and others, he never seemed to check too closely on what they were actually doing.
He had also been hit hard by the continual delays to the Ju 88, but with an offensive against the west looming had, in the spring of 1940, urged Heinkel to speed up development of the four-engine He 177 heavy bomber. Production was now to be rushed, without adequate testing, so that by the spring Heinkel’s factories were due to be producing 120 He 177s per month. Late in March, Udet visited Ernst Heinkel. The strain was showing; Udet was smoking continuously and seemed restless and edgy. ‘I hope there won’t be any trouble with the He 177,’ he told Heinkel. ‘The Ju 88 has caused enough difficulty for my taste. The He 177 has got to get into operation. We don’t have any other large bomber that we can use against England. The He 177 has got to fly! It must!’
His anxieties seemed to leave him the moment victory was assured in France. Depression was replaced by euphoria. The war was over, and none of his plans over which he had worried so much mattered any longer. As a result, he was easily persuaded by Heinrich Koppenberg, the Director-General of Junkers, to downgrade the He 177 and make the Ju 88 the principal German bomber instead. ‘All this planning,’ Udet told Göring, following the fall of France, ‘is garbage.’
Udet’s lack of grip and urgency and the inability of the rest of the Luftwaffe High Command to do anything about it meant that aircraft production was now way below that of Britain. In June, 220 new fighters were built and 344 bombers. In July, those figures would fall even lower. Repair figures were worse. Just over a thousand Me 109s and just fifty-nine Ju 88s would be repaired and back in the air during the whole of 1940.
The Luftwaffe still had vastly superior numbers of aircraft compared to the RAF, but its might was not looking anything like as impressive as it had on 9 May. It had lost around a third of its operational strength since then and a fifth of its establishment strength. Its transport fleet had also not recovered from the mauling it had suffered on that opening day of the campaign – and neither would it when monthly production figures of the Ju 52 stood at just twenty-four in May. This was significant because without Ju 52s there could be no large parachute drops over England, and moving groundcrews and other personnel took much longer when carried out by road. And unlike Fighter Command, Luftflotten 2 and 3 had remained fully engaged in the battle right up until the end in France, which had cut down on the opportunities for rest and rebuilding. Siegfried Bethke, who had returned to 2/JG 2 in the middle of June, had been glad to get back to flying duties but the endless frenetic action and moving of airfields had taken its toll. ‘We’re all very fatigué!’ he wrote in his diary as he waited on readiness in his 109. ‘I am also about to fall asleep in my plane.’
On the first day of June, Dowding had had just 331 Spitfires and Hurricanes, but by the last day of the month had 587 ready and serviceable, with plenty more on their way. It still wasn’t enough, but it was a vast improvement; the odds were getting better. More of a concern was the shortage of experienced pilots. There were, admittedly, well over double the number of pilots available for the number of aircraft, but Dowding was worried that the rate at which new pilots were being trained was slower than he had planned. This was largely due to the terrible w
inter, which had severely hampered the amount of flying training that could be done. Worse was the loss of nearly 300 pilots in France – pilots who had considerably more flying experience than the new boys now coming through.
Still, most of the fifty-five fighter squadrons had been able to build up their strength and make good earlier losses. Now back up at Leconfield in Yorkshire, 616 Squadron had returned to the old routine of readiness and convoy patrols along the north-east coast. Cocky Dundas felt no anti-climax, however. Rather, he was filled with a renewed sense of purpose in the knowledge that the Germans would launch their offensive at any moment. However, while 616 had not suffered too many losses over Dunkirk, in other squadrons the atmosphere now seemed very different. Tony Bartley and Allan Wright had been posted to Pembrey, in South Wales, where, with a new CO, 92 Squadron was resting and rebuilding after its baptism over Dunkirk. ‘We were really glad to get our rest,’ Tony wrote to his father. ‘Some of us couldn’t eat or sleep much after Dunkirk.’ David Crook had noticed that quite a change had come over 609 Squadron. He finally rejoined them on 29 June, although unlike 92 Squadron, they were still at Northolt, in the front line of 11 Group. There was also a new CO as well as a number of new faces. ‘The old easy-going outlook on life had vanished,’ noted David, ‘and everybody now seemed to realize that war was not the fairly pleasant affair that it had always seemed hitherto.’
Meanwhile, Pete Brothers and 32 Squadron were still based at Biggin Hill in 11 Group and on front-line duties, although those were little more than occasional combat sorties. One day, he and the squadron escorted Blenheim bombers over France and on another occasion some photo reconnaissance Blenheims, but in between there had been a chance to practise and to operate at a slightly less hectic pace. In Pete’s case, it meant a chance to see his wife, who was still living in their little bungalow in Westerham, a few miles from Biggin.
Bee Beamont and the rest of 87 Squadron had been sent north, out of the fray, to Church Fenton near York. It took a while for the squadron to congregate again after the chaos of France. There were new faces and also new Hurricanes – the squadron had to be almost entirely re-equipped with new aircraft, but within a week they were operational once more. Bee found it took a little while to get accustomed to life on a normal RAF station having been abroad for eight months, and also to a calmer pace of life, but eased his way back by heading off with one of his squadron mates, Jimmy Dunn, in an old Avro Tutor biplane looking for possible invasion landing fields. Billy Drake was also back in England, although not with 1 Squadron. Although recovered from his wounds, he had been posted to 6 Operational Training Unit at Sutton Bridge as an instructor. It was Billy’s job to make sure the pilots now coming through training were fit to be sent to operational squadrons. Most were Volunteer Reserves or overseas pilots. To begin with, he would take them up in a Harvard or Miles Master two-seater trainer, and when satisfied that they could handle themselves, would send them up in a Hurricane, following in his own. They would practise formation flying and then Billy would try and teach them rudimentary dog-fighting. His combat experience was invaluable.
Yet while it was the fighter aircraft that were to shoot down enemy aircraft, there were other weapons in Dowding’s armoury – weapons that he hoped would greatly improve the efficiency, and chances, of his pilots. Now dotted along the British coast was a series of twenty-one high metal masts, as much as 360 feet tall like giant Meccano. Also standing sentinel looking out to sea were thirty shorter, more squat stations. These together were Britain’s RDF, or radar, chain, a key component in Dowding’s early warning system.
The genesis of such a system had begun six years earlier, in 1934, when Harold Wimperis, Director of Scientific Research at Dowding’s then department in the Air Ministry, had set up a committee under the well-known physicist Henry Tizard, with the idea that it should investigate the possibilities offered by science to assist air defence. Wimperis immediately consulted Robert Watson-Watt, a Scottish scientist who had for many years been studying high-frequency radio and atmospheric research. Wimperis had asked Watson-Watt first about the possibility of developing a ‘death ray’. This Watson-Watt thought unlikely, but he did have ideas about how radio wave reflections might be used to detect, rather than destroy, aircraft.
Watson-Watt put forward his theories on ‘Detection and Location of Aircraft by Radio Methods’ to the Tizard Committee. In essence, he argued that an aircraft meeting a short-wave radio pulse would act as a kind of radiator, and reflect the signal, which, if powerful enough, could be picked up. The time lag, measured in microseconds, between the emission and reception of this reflected signal could be shown on a cathode ray tube as a blip of light on a fluorescent screen. Thus once a suitable time base was established, the distance of the aircraft from the radio base could, in theory, be worked out. The Tizard Committee was impressed and asked Dowding for approval to spend development money. Dowding replied that if it could convince him of its possibilities, he would arrange for the necessary funding.
On a cold, wintry day in Northamptonshire in February 1935, Watson-Watt carried out the first of his experiments. A BBC short-wave radio transmitter, some six miles away in Daventry, provided a continuous radio beam. The pilot of an RAF Heyford aircraft from Farnborough was told to fly along a railway line to a point twenty miles away and then back again, keeping close to the line provided by the beam. He made three runs, and although on the first he did not fly close enough to the beam, from the second and third there were clear echoes from the bouncing-back of the transmission.
Dowding was delighted by the results and immediately authorized the necessary development money. ‘We now have an embryo,’ Wimperis wrote to Dowding a week after the experiment, ‘a new and potent means of detecting the approach of hostile aircraft, one which will be independent of mist, cloud, fog or nightfall.’
An experimental station was hastily established at Orfordness on the Suffolk coast. Within six months, Watson-Watt’s Radio Direction Finding – or RDF, as he called it in an effort to dupe the enemy – was detecting aircraft at forty miles. It was, however, impossible with one radio mast to assess the bearing of any incoming aircraft. Only with two or more could a picture of the position of a plane at any given moment be achieved. Simple geometry then made it possible to track any oncoming aerial traffic with an accuracy that improved significantly with experience and as the system was extended.
Initially five radar stations were ordered to be built. Watson-Watt and his team moved to Bawdsey, south of Orfordness, in early 1936, by which time aircraft were being detected as far as sixty-two miles away. All of the five stations suffered various time-consuming snags; it did not seem possible to achieve anything with the kind of urgency Dowding required. A radar training school was set up at Bawdsey in early 1937, and the actual RDF station there opened in May that year. In July, Dover Chain Home – or CH – station opened, followed by Canewdon in August in time for Dowding’s Fighter Command air exercises that same month. Despite inevitable errors, the results were encouraging. Aircraft were now being detected at up to a hundred miles away, and immediately afterwards the Air Ministry authorized the establishment of a twenty-station chain around Britain’s coast.
Chain Home, however, had its limitations. It was rudimentary in many ways, as Watson-Watt and his team were well aware. Transmitter antennae floodlit the airspace directly in front of them with pulses of radio energy. If these pulses hit an object – such as an aircraft – they would rebound and be sent back, rather like an echo. These pulses were high-frequency beams of a broad wavelength of 10–13.5 metres, which required large antennae capable of enough power to achieve the floodlight effect. Thus, CH stations required four 360-foot masts, 180 feet apart, with antenna wires strung between them for transmitting the pulses, and then four different antennae of 240-foot masts for receiving the echo-like reflections. This made them pretty big and very obvious to any German who cared to look at them through his binoculars on the other side of the Channel
. Furthermore, because the antennae were static, rather than rotational, they could only transmit – and receive – on the section of the coast directly in front of them. Nor did it work over land. They could detect what was coming towards them over the sea, but once the raiders had passed, they could offer nothing more.
A further limitation was that aircraft could fly under the masts completely undetected. This, however, was resolved by the addition of a second string of radar stations, known as Chain Home Low, which then proved to have another benefit, namely a more accurate measure of the size of an enemy raid. While the RAF had been developing Chain Home, the Admiralty Research Laboratory had also been carrying out research for its own needs and had developed coastal defence and gun-laying radars known as CD, which could measure ships’ ranges accurate to about twenty yards using a rotating antenna. These were much lower frequency and sent out on a shorter wavelength of just 1.5 metres. These were copied and developed for the RAF and became Chain Home Low (CHL). Much smaller, they were effectively a searchlight of rays rather than a floodlight, and could be manually rotated by an operator using cranks. A similarly hand-rotated receiver would then pick up the echoes. The CHL programme was only implemented in the autumn of 1939, and that thirty stations had been built and were operating by June the following year was largely down to frantic compulsory purchasing of land and a lot of red tape being cut; aircraft production was not the only area where bureaucracy could be overcome when minds were focused. Britain’s radar chain was rudimentary and lacked finesse but it was the best that could be achieved within the time that had been available. But it worked: approaching aircraft could be detected up to 120 miles away. More than that, its rudimentary nature had worked in Britain’s favour too.
The Battle of Britain Page 40
