The Battle of Britain

by James Holland

  And what about Japan and the Middle East? Churchill had assured the Australian and New Zealand governments that should they be attacked by Japan he would abandon the Mediterranean and send the Fleet to help them as quickly as possible. Cool logic suggested the Middle East should be abandoned anyway; the Suez Canal was now unreachable since the Italian entry into the war, while nearly all Britain’s oil no longer came through Persia and the Middle East, but from the USA. But cool logic had suggested Britain sue for peace at the end of May, and logic had not been right then and, as far as Churchill was concerned, was not right now with regard to the Middle East. It would mean abandoning Iraq, Egypt, Palestine, Malta and Gibraltar. Fighting the Italians in the Mediterranean and in Africa at least offered Britain a chance to successfully fight back. The Italians were not the highly motivated, well-equipped force that the Germans were. Nonetheless, it was causing him much anxiety. He had not been impressed with General Wavell, the C-in-C Middle East, during a visit to London. Like most British generals, he lacked the kind of optimistic and offensively minded vision of the Prime Minister. And there were other considerations. ‘The P.M. is very much on edge,’ noted Jock Colville on Eagle Day, ‘concerned with the quickest method of sending reinforcements to the Near East before the expected attack on Egypt.’ There were two problems. The first was the severe shortage of war materiel and sending overseas arms and equipment that was still desperately needed in Britain, a gamble Churchill was prepared to take and to overrule all objections from his Chiefs of Staff to do so. In fact, no fewer than 150 precious tanks were sent to the Middle East, while a daring plan to fly in Hurricanes from an aircraft carrier from the western Mediterranean was also put into effect. The second problem was time. Getting men and materiel all the way round South Africa, or from India and the Dominions, was very time-consuming. Britain had to pray the Italians would not attack too soon.

  For a young man like Jock Colville, just twenty-five years old, his proximity to Churchill and Britain’s leaders at this momentous time was eye-opening to put it mildly. He was almost daily finding himself dining with Churchill, Beaverbrook, Eden, Ismay or the CIGS, General Dill, and other Chiefs of Staff. On the second weekend in August, he was at Chequers, the PM’s country residence, and found a letter from Admiral Nelson in one of the rooms, written shortly after the Battle of the Nile in August 1798. ‘My Lord,’ Nelson had written to the First Lord of the Admiralty, ‘was I to die at this moment, want of frigates would be found stamped on my heart.’ Jock now suggested Churchill send this to Roosevelt. The Prime Minister smiled and assured him that they were now certainly going to get the destroyers from America. ‘But it is curious,’ noted Jock, ‘how history repeats itself even in small details.’

  Churchill had, by this time, already heard that Roosevelt and his Cabinet had agreed to the legislation for the sale of fifty or sixty old destroyers. What now had to be agreed was a quid pro quo that would be acceptable to Congress and the British. On the morning of 14 August, Ambassador Joe Kennedy, through gritted teeth, presented Churchill with Roosevelt’s offer. Britain had to agree to send the Fleet to other parts of the Empire should British waters become untenable, and, second, to grant ninety-nine-year leases to establish US naval and air bases in the West Indies, Bahamas, Bermuda and Newfoundland. As ever, Churchill offered Kennedy a ‘highball’ on his arrival at Number 10. As ever, Kennedy declined. ‘This war will go on till then unless Hitler is beaten,’ Churchill told him on reading the terms about the ninety-nine-year lease. ‘I think the more we get together with you people, the better it will be for the world.’ Subject to approval – which would happen – the deal was, at long last, on. A week earlier, the US Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, had called for a massive build-up of arms; on the 11th, America accepted an order from Britain for 4,000 tanks. These would not be ready for another year, but one of Churchill’s greatest attributes was his vision, and an ability to see a way through and beyond the current crisis, something many of his colleagues – Harold Nicolson included – did not share. British investment in the US arms industry was a powerful weapon. As Churchill was well aware, once American industry was producing thousands of tanks, planes, ships, vehicles and ordnance – and making herself rich as a result – her own road to war would seem ever more likely.

  Despite anxieties in the Middle and Far East and elsewhere, Britain’s current head-to-head with Nazi Germany remained very much Churchill’s prime concern. He had told Jock Colville that there was only one aim: to destroy Hitler. Just as Hitler had singled out Churchill as the architect of British stubbornness, so the Prime Minister saw the Führer, rather than the German nation, as the cause of the current war and strife. ‘Let those who say they do not know what they are fighting for,’ he told Jock, ‘stop fighting and they will see.’

  On Eagle Day, it was the pilot shortage not the massed German raids that was particularly bothering him, just as it was Dowding. Training had already been snipped and trimmed back, Elementary Flying Training reduced to seven weeks from eight in summer and ten in winter, and the later intermediate and advanced stages of training also cut by a week. Specialization would now begin at an earlier stage and more pilots were accepted initially to allow for losses through ‘wastage’. The really critical bit was the reduction of the OTUs from a month to a fortnight. This was the last stage of training, where pilots became operational on Spitfires or Hurricanes. Two weeks was no time to prepare raw and inexperienced pilots for battle. Nonetheless, the cuts were to have a dramatic effect on the numbers of pilots coming through, if not the quality, with a projected increase from 1,632 pilots in June to 2,108 in September.

  However, there were other experienced pilots waiting in the wings, not only those transferred from the navy, but also those of other nationalities. There were, for example, forty Free French officers and NCOs at OTUs on 10 August, and 114 Czech, 443 Polish and 28 Belgian pilots already enlisted into the RAF Volunteer Reserve. Amongst these not inconsiderable numbers was Jan Zumbach.

  Jan and his fellows had been kept at the detention centre in Blackpool for three long weeks, but eventually they were declared fit to fly. The first few were sent to existing British squadrons, but then eventually the Air Ministry decided to form two new Polish squadrons at Northolt. Jan was among those posted to what had been designated 303 Squadron by the RAF and Kociuszko Squadron by the Poles.

  They arrived at Northolt on 2 August, yet despite its being a Polish squadron, 303 was still to have a British squadron leader and flight commanders, although these were paired with Polish counterparts. The new CO was Tom Neil’s old flight commander at 249, Boozy Kellett, while also watching over the Poles was the Northolt station commander, Group Captain Stanley Vincent, a veteran of the Great War and a man not to be pushed around by impatient, truculent Polish pilots. ‘I’m not having people crashing around the sky,’ he warned them, ‘until they understand what they’re told to do.’ So before Jan and his fellows were let off the leash, they were sent back to school. Every morning, they were put on a bus at Northolt and taken ten miles to Uxbridge to learn the basic vocabulary that would be used in flight. They had to be able to count, use the clock-face system of giving bearings, and understand the RAF code words such as ‘angels’, ‘bandits’ and ‘pancake’.

  After proving themselves in Magisters, they were finally introduced to the cockpit of the Hurricane, but before they were allowed to take to the air, Jan and the other Poles all had to get their heads round a quite different layout to what they had been used to. ‘Everything here was back to front,’ said Jan. ‘In Poland and France, when you wanted to open the throttle, you pulled; here, you pushed. We had to reverse all our reflexes.’ And that was not all. Now it was miles rather than kilometres, feet rather than metres, and gallons not litres. ‘The units of pressure were even more eccentric,’ added Jan. ‘The British certainly had their own ways of doing things.’

  All this was learned on the ground, the pilots cycling on out-sized tricycles fitted with radio,
compass and an airspeed indicator. Needless to say, they found the indignity of these exercises deeply humiliating. ‘The British were wasting so much of our time with their childish exercises,’ noted Jan, ‘when all of us had already won our wings.’ They got their own back by partying hard at night and gaining a deserved reputation for unruliness. Jan didn’t care. He just wanted to get in the air and shoot down Germans. Yet however undignified and however frustrating these seemingly puerile lessons were, they were essential all the same. The Dowding System depended on every man and woman knowing their role, and that included the pilots. Although the Kociuszko Squadron pilots were, by the middle of August, champing at the bit, they would soon get their chance, and then all painstaking ground training would quickly prove its worth.

  Pete Brothers was convinced God was on their side. ‘It’s just one of those things,’ he says. ‘God was there and he was looking after us.’ After almost non-stop action since the middle of May, countless tussles and near misses, Pete had good personal reasons to think so. Those believers in the Luftwaffe must also have sometimes wondered whether, or at least suspected that, the British had some untold influence on the weather. First the millpond Channel during the Dunkirk evacuation and now an almost unceasingly cloudy and wet summer. It was poor weather that had disrupted plans for Adlertag, and it was poor weather once again that scuppered any persistent heavy operations the next day. There was still activity, however. Successive large raids hit the south-east after midday, and amongst the raiders Walter Rubensdörffer’s Erpro 210 hit Manston yet again, destroying two hangars, while above fighters tussled. Dolfo Galland added to his mounting score, shooting down another Hurricane – in fact, it had been a good day for all of JG 26, who claimed eleven downed aircraft. No less important, only one of the Stukas they had been escorting had been shot down.

  Elsewhere, small groups of raiders pressed inland. Amongst their targets was Middle Wallop, hit far more successfully by one Junkers 88 than by two entire Gruppen of Stukas the day before. The pilots of 609 Squadron had been lunching in the mess for a change when the air raid warning sounded. Dashing out, they sped down the edge of the grass field to the square bungalow that acted as dispersal, grabbed their parachutes and flying helmets and dashed to their Spitfires. One section had already been up patrolling, but David Crook and several others now sat strapped into their planes waiting to be ordered off. Soon after, he heard the unmistakable unsynchronized thrum of German bombers above the clouds. Immediately signalling to his groundcrew to stand by, he then watched as a lone Ju 88 broke out of the cloud to the north of the aerodrome, turned slightly then dived at high speed. David watched four bombs dropped from around 1,500 feet. A moment later there was an earth-shaking boom followed by immense clouds of mushrooming smoke and dust.

  David and the others took off immediately, but Sergeant Alan Feary, already up in the air, swooped down and attacked the Junkers as the German came out of his dive. Hit at close range, the aircraft crashed in flames soon after. ‘I flew over to the crash and have never seen any aeroplane more thoroughly wrecked,’ wrote David, ‘it was an awful mess.’ Later, both he and John Dundas chased after several Heinkels, David damaging two and John finishing off one of them. When the crash was subsequently investigated, two senior Luftwaffe officers were found dead on board. John hoped to get the silver wings and swastika from the tunic of one of the dead colonels. ‘If so,’ he asked Margaret Rawlings, ‘would you like it?’

  From their headquarters near the battle front, the Luftflotten and Fliegercorps commanders were tearing their hair out in frustration. That evening the forecast once again looked bad for the following day, and although elaborate plans had been drawn up, it seemed these would have to be postponed once again. Then orders had arrived for them to go to Carinhall the following morning for another conference with the Reichsmarschall.

  Climbing through the early-morning haze, Kesselring, Sperrle and their air corps commanders had flown towards Berlin. It was true that the Reichsmarschall still maintained his other political offices of state and thus proximity to Berlin could be more than justified. Yet it was by no means necessary since most of his enterprises and operations were running themselves. Rather, most of his time was now being spent art-collecting and indulging other pastimes. Many of his directives to his commanders had so far been quite sensible, but if he were to play a large part in the battle he needed to be near the front, as he had been during the western campaign, not hamming it up at Carinhall. It was a costly waste of time dragging all his commanders to the forests north-east of Berlin every time he wanted to talk to them, but it was a trick of Hitler’s that he liked to ape; it suited his periodic bouts of indolence and reinforced his sense of power.

  Although Luftwaffe claims remained wildly optimistic, there could be no denying it was not making the headway it had planned, and that the Stukas and Göring’s beloved Zerstörers, in which he had placed so much faith, were getting a pasting. He decided there should be new tactics. From now on, each Stuka Gruppe would be escorted by an entire fighter Geschwader, with one Gruppe remaining with the Stukas and diving with them, the second flying overhead, and the third protecting the whole attack from above. What he was forgetting was that Me 109s and Me 110s could not dive with Stukas, because they were not dive-bombers and did not have air brakes. If they kept up, they would plough on into the ground. Göring also now insisted the Stukas should also be escorted on the way back. He berated his commanders as well for using the Me 110s as regular fighters. ‘I have repeatedly given orders that twin-engine fighters are only to be employed where the range of other fighters is inadequate,’ he scolded, ‘or where it is for the purpose of assisting our single-engine aircraft to break-off combat.’ He was now talking contradictory nonsense. Me 110s could not be used to support single-engine fighters if they were only allowed to be flown on long-range sorties. The real problem was that the Zerstörers were simply not manoeuvrable enough for fighter operations against Spitfires and Hurricanes. They were more suited to long-range, low-level ground attack; Walter Rubensdörffer’s team were proving how effective they could be, given the right role.

  Göring next underlined the priorities for targets. Until further notice, he told them, all operations were to be directed exclusively against the enemy air force, including targets in the aircraft industry. Shipping was only to be attacked when the opportunity was ‘especially propitious’. Night attacks, he told them, were to continue, but were essentially to be nuisance raids, albeit also directed against air force targets. In fact, this was what the Luftwaffe was already doing, as outlined in his previous directive. Then there was the issue of the British aircraft DeTe chain. ‘It is doubtful whether there is any point in continuing the attacks on DeTe sites,’ he added as one of his final thoughts, ‘in view of the fact that not one of those attacked has so far been put out of action.’ This was an extraordinary decision. Clearly, Martini had been completely hoodwinked by the dummy pulses being sent out from Ventnor, which was still out of service. So far, just a handful of the RDF stations had been attacked. Yet determined and repeated attacks on these sites could and should have caused the kind of damage that had been suffered at Ventnor, which would have created a massive handicap for the British fighters. By abandoning attacks on them, Göring was giving Fighter Command an astonishing boost.

  The Reichsmarschall had pulled all his senior commanders away from the battle front to tell them to use more fighters when escorting Stukas, to use the Zerstörers more sparingly, to stop attacking British RDF stations, and to carry on hitting the same targets they were already attacking. Why this could not have been put on a one- or two-page memo is not clear, but while they were sitting in his great hall, surrounded by antlers, great masterpieces and other trophies of war, Britain and the English Channel were basking in glorious sunshine.

  It was therefore fortunate for the Luftwaffe that one staff officer had been prepared to put his neck on the line and order the planned operations for that day to go ahead.r />
  Earlier that morning, Oberst Paul Deichmann, Chief of Staff at II Fliegerkorps, had wandered out of their farmhouse headquarters at Bonningues, near Calais, and realized that the early-morning cloud was, in fact, just haze, and that behind it breathed an almost perfect summer’s day, and not a ridge of low pressure. The weathermen had got it badly wrong. By mid-morning, the haze had evaporated revealing nothing but blue skies up above and glorious sunshine. Of the wind, there was barely a breath.

  It was certainly too good a day to waste. Aware that most of the bomber crews would be fuelled up and almost ready to go, Deichmann decided to issue his orders. Stukas were to attack Hawkinge and Lympne. Dorniers were to give Eastchurch another pasting while another Gruppe attacked Rochester. Erpro 210 could attack Martlesham Heath. Having had his orders acknowledged, Deichmann headed to the Holy Mountain, Luftflotte 2’s HQ at Cap Blanc Nez.

  It was ironic, when considering the thrusting, up-front approach to command adopted by Guderian, Rommel et al. during the western campaign, that Kesselring should have chosen to have his HQ in a dank, deep underground bunker of the type favoured by defeated French commanders. Presumably, fear of British bombs had driven him to use such a base, but while Kesselring was undoubtedly safe down there, he did miss things, such as the sun emerging through the morning haze.