by John Kelly
On July 5, eight months before his sixtieth birthday and nine days before his retirement, Air Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding received a letter from the Air Ministry requesting him to defer his retirement until October. Archibald Sinclair, the Air Minister, was not happy about the extension. Dowding was a difficult subordinate, but Sinclair had no choice. Fighter Command was built around the Dowding System, and the only person who knew how to operate the system was “Stuffy” Dowding. An elderly Victorian gentleman with an enthusiasm for communicating with the dead, Dowding hardly seemed an avatar of the future; yet the Dowding System—a combination of radar, radio monitoring, intelligence transcripts, and operation-room tracking—amounted to a first edition of the modern command and control system. With it, Fighter Command could respond earlier and more accurately to German attacks. Hitler’s dithering about an invasion also worked to Fighter Command’s advantage by providing time to replace the almost five hundred Hurricanes and Spitfires lost in the French campaign. On July 10, the first day of the Battle of Britain on the British calendar, Dowding had 664 operational aircraft, most of them modern Spitfires and Hurricanes. The Germans had 760 Me 109s and 220 Me 110s, twin-engine heavy fighters. The odds against the British were not as formidable as these numbers suggest, however. Big and ungainly, the Me 110’s lack of maneuverability made it an easy target; and while the Me 109 was superior to every British fighter, its pilots would be facing an enemy who often knew when they were coming and what corner of the sky they would come from, an important advantage in a battle where the margin of victory for either side was likely to be inches.
The British people were also prepared for the coming battle. The sharp improvement in the July morale numbers owed something to good leadership, but the uptick also reflected an important change in public perception of the war. The arrival of the Luftwaffe over Britain, the experience of sharing the dangers and hardship of combat, had instilled in ordinary men and women a sense that they were fighting what some were already calling a “People’s War.” The public anger heaped on the Home Office for infringing on civil liberties, on the Ministry of Information for—allegedly—using morale interviews to collect personal data, and on wealthy Britons for sending their children abroad was a manifestation of an empowered public’s view that, as frontline fighters, they were entitled to a voice in how the war was conducted.
Given the invasion rumors and the growing intensity of the air war, it would have been odd if the July morale reports had been uniformly positive. Some people were still avoiding news or conversation about the war, or were engaging in other forms of distancing; and there were still pockets of real despair in the country. A London society doctor reported that more of his wealthy patients were requesting poison capsules. Still, the general picture that emerged from the July data was that of a united nation calmly gathering itself for battle, an impression strengthened by the reaction to Hitler’s July 19 peace offer to Britain. “People laughed and jeered,” Home Intelligence reported.
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From the offices in the American embassy on Grosvenor Square, Ambassador Joseph Kennedy and General Raymond Lee, the military attaché and head of US intelligence in London, had followed Britain’s progress over the summer and had come to different conclusions about its prospects. In early August, the ambassador told a visiting American military delegation that Britain’s “absolutely only chance” of avoiding defeat was to hold on until Roosevelt won a third term and then try to get the United States to “pull them out.” Lee, an affable midwesterner who looked like a movie-star version of an American general—he bore a remarkable resemblance to the modern-day actor Tom Selleck—was more optimistic. Some of the optimism can be put down to the Anglophilia of a Missouri boy dazzled by the sophistication of London, but only a small portion. Lee had witnessed the discipline of the British public under fire; had inspected the beaches of southern England and found them better defended than the London rumor mill had it; had met Brooke and Ismay and been impressed by their resolve and skill; and had stood in the twilight in Victoria Station, piercing air-raid sirens throbbing in his ears, watching Winston Churchill gruffly refuse to put out his cigar or take cover. Yet if anyone had asked Lee, “Why do you think Britain will avoid defeat?” the first thing he would have mentioned was the Dowding System, which he inspected during a visit to Fighter Command on August 7. The warren of passageways below Dowding’s office led to “two great rooms” where Lee was introduced to “two of the most intricate and modern organizations [in] the world. . . . In one room [was] the huge map on which moment by moment the reports of enemy locations [were] plotted and enemy air and sea movement exposed; in another room, an even greater chart where actions [were] followed [second] by second. “The great rooms [were] almost silent,” Lee wrote that night—“only a soft murmur of voices as messages come and go over headsets and . . . operators [move] counters and markers from point to point and others tend electric bulletins and switchboards. The whole establishment watches the slightest movements of both sides day and night. . . . I had no idea the British could evolve and operate so intricate, so scientific, and [so] rapid an organization.”
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Six days after Lee’s visit to Fighter Command came Adler Tag, Eagle Day: August 13, the beginning of the Battle of Britain on the German calendar. In July, the Luftwaffe had concentrated on coastal shipping, making occasional forays inland to strike industrial targets. In August, it had a new mission: knock the sword from the Whale’s hand so the invasion could proceed. On the eve of battle, the leader of the Luftwaffe told his air crews the target was Fighter Command and its supporting infrastructure, airfields, airplane factories, and so forth.
FROM REICHSMARSCHALL GÖRING TO ALL UNITS OF AIRFLEET 2, 3 AND 5. OPERATION EAGLE. WITHIN A SHORT PERIOD YOU WILL WIPE THE BRITISH AIR FORCE FROM THE SKY
HEIL HITLER
It was still dark when the bomber crews at the German air base in Arras began revving up their engines on the morning of August 13. A moment later lights flickered on in the farmhouses abutting the airfield, and cursing, half-dressed French farmers tumbled out into the early morning darkness to soothe their frightened livestock. The area around Arras had seen a lot of fighting in May, and on a clear day the bomber crews flying to England could see the point where a BEF attack had been repulsed on May 24. This morning the marking point—the hulks of a few scorched Cruiser tanks—was shrouded by a two-thousand-foot cloud bank. At first light, the Arras unit and two other bomber groups were circling above the clouds, looking for the fighters that would escort them to their target, Eastchurch, a British air base fifty-eight miles south of London. At a little after 6:00 a.m. a single escort, an Me 110 heavy fighter, emerged out of a cloud, dived several times on the lead bomber, then was swallowed up by the cloud again. Oblivious to the malfunction in his radio, and unaware that the fighter pilot had been signaling him to turn back, Adler Tag had been postponed until the afternon—due to the cloud cover—Oberst Johannes Fink, the flight commander, led his eighty-four Dorniers out over the Channel. As the Thames estuary came into view, the clouds briefly parted and the pencil-shaped shadows of the Dorniers raced across the white-capped sea. The radar stations at Dover, Foreness, and Whitstable picked up the flight, but, uncertain of the bombers’ direction, failed to issue a warning. Just before seven, the Dorniers were approaching Eastchurch when a squadron of Spitfires swept out of the sky and pounced on the bombers at the rear of the formation. The first burst of machine-gun fire made the interior of the Dorniers glow red; short tongues of flame licked their fuselages, followed by plumes of black smoke; the sequence concluded with the piercing drone of a mortally wounded bomber falling into a death spiral, its burning undercarriage silhouetted against the summer sea. It is unclear how many bombers the Spitfires shot down, but British historian Richard Collier says that after the attack “more than fifty Dorniers sped on to their target,” which suggests heavy German losses. Despite the Spitfire strike, continuing confusion at the Chain Home radar sta
tions kept Eastchurch innocent of the menace descending upon it until the last moment. At a little after 7:00 a.m. a young RAF pilot having breakfast in the mess hall looked out the window and shouted, “They’re dropping bombs, they’re dropping bombs on us!” just as the first of a hundred high-explosive bombs fell on the runways. That was the last piece of good fortune Oberst Fink enjoyed on Adler Tag. Flying home, the Dorniers were savaged again by marauding Spitfires and Hurricanes. Five more planes fell from the sky. Thirteen others were badly damaged. It was only a little after eight in the morning.
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“Pile, it’s a miracle.”
Normally, Air Marshal Dowding was the most undemonstrative of men, but on the morning of August 14 he was so excited by the previous day’s events that he did a very un-Dowding-like thing. He began dive-bombing the office wastebasket with his folded spectacles to demonstrate to General Frederick Pile, the Chief of Antiaircraft Command, how his pilots had fallen on the German bombers. The Luftwaffe report on Adler Tag correctly identified the number of sorties German pilots flew on August 13: 1,485, the most thus far in the battle; however, almost every other important statistic in the report was either incorrect or misleading. The RAF had lost fifteen planes on the thirteenth, not eighty-eight as the report claimed (the Germans lost thirty-nine planes on the thirteenth), and, while nine air bases were attacked on Adler Tag, only a few belonged to Fighter Command. Eastchurch and Detling, its sister base, were part of Coastal Command, and Andover, another frontline base, was part of the Army Co-operation Command.
“Morale high in all reports. News of air battles stimulating,” Home Intelligence noted in its morale report for August 14. Dowding’s impromptu attack on his office wastebasket said all that needed to be said about morale in Fighter Command, but, as that uneventful Wednesday passed from morning to afternoon, exhilaration gave way to puzzlement. The Luftwaffe was in the air that day, but not in very large numbers. An Enigma transcript resolved the mystery. Reichsmarschall Göring’s goal was to “wipe” the RAF from the sky in a week, and, to ensure the deadline—August 15, the third day of its air offensive—was met, the Luftwaffe would deploy 2,119 planes against Britain, far more than on Eagle Day; and, to stretch Fighter Command to the breaking point, major attacks would be launched against northern England as well as Kent and the other countries along the southeast coast.
The fifteenth, a sunny Thursday, began peacefully enough. At nine that morning, there were only a few German reconnaissance planes poking about between the Bristol Channel and East Anglia. Then, a little before eleven, radar stations picked up a flight of thirty-plus German planes crossing the Channel. The flight passed the lighthouse in Dungeness on the English side of the Channel coast, sending the soldiers on the beaches below diving for cover; then the Germans swung northeast toward the village of Hawkinge, where Fighter Command had a base. The local men were in the fields taking in the wheat crop when almost two dozen Ju 87 dive-bombers and six Me 109 fighters arrived overhead. The work in the fields stopped and the men looked up. Thirty seconds of the “metallic pang panging of the airfield’s Bofors gun” and the high-pitched scream of the diving Ju 87s was sufficient to satisfy everyone’s curiosity; the fieldhands dropped their implements and fled through rows of unharvested wheat toward “the shelter of a distant elm grove.” One of the older fieldhands pulled his shirt over his head as he ran, as if trying to protect himself from rain, not bombs. The man behind him found the gesture so absurd he was “chok[ing] with laughter” when he reached the elm grove.
An hour after the Hawkinge attack, radar picked up a flight of a hundred German bombers and seventy fighters approaching the Farne Islands, a bleak collection of windswept rocks off the coast of Northern England. This morning Luftflotte 5, a Luftwaffe unit based in Norway, was using the islands as a navigational point. As they came into view, half the flight peeled away and turned south toward the county of Yorkshire, while the other half continued westward toward Tyneside, an industrial center that straddles the northeast counties of Northumberland and Durham. The attacks were a feint designed to pull Fighter Command’s southern squadrons northward, but Luftflotte 5 was picked up by radar while it was still well out to sea. In both Yorkshire and Tyneside, British fighters were waiting when the bombers and their escorts arrived. In the ensuing mêlée, Luftflotte 5 lost 20 percent of its planes and played no further role in the Battle of Britain.
The main German effort of the day was made along the Channel coast. At 2:14 p.m., radar picked up a flight of thirty planes assembling over Calais, and another fifty planes over Saint-Omer. At 2:28 p.m. a hundred planes were identified assembling to the north of Saint-Omer; and at three o’clock, a further eighty planes were tracked crossing the Channel. Shouts of “Many, many bandits” crackled through the radios of the 130 Spitfires and Hurricanes scrambled to meet the onslaught. Below the crowded sky, groups of onlookers gathered to watch the battle. To one man, the “thundering phalanx of planes” overhead “seemed to make an aluminum ceiling of the sky.” To another, the contrails that embroidered the flawless afternoon sky brought to mind an ice-skating rink. As the afternoon progressed, “blazing planes, parachutes, shrapnel, bombs,” and body parts began to rain down on the Channel counties of Kent, Sussex, and Hampshire. Between dogfights, one wealthy Kent family sent their butler out to sweep the lawn. All afternoon the battle swung back and forth. A little after three, a flight of twenty-four German bombers broke through a screen of Spitfires and bombed the Fighter Command base at Martlesham Heath unopposed for five long minutes. The base at Hawkinge, which had been bombed on August 13, was bombed again on the fifteenth, this time so intensely that the antiaircraft crews defending the base developed blood clots in their ears from the pom-pomming of their guns. The Coastal Command base at Eastchurch also received a second visit on the fifteenth. After an attack on Short Brothers, an aircraft works in Kent, just before four, the August sky abruptly emptied and remained so until 5:00 p.m., when radar picked up a flight of two to three hundred German planes approaching Portsmouth and Portland, two important naval centers on the Channel coast.
All day, in twos and threes, fours and fives, and then in sixes and sevens, the British pilots in reserve—the men on thirty minutes’ notice, lounging on the grass, and those on instant notice, sitting in their cockpits—were called into battle. By the time Churchill and Pug Ismay visited Fighter Command’s operations room early in the evening of August 15, every red light but one was lit up on the wall panel that tracked the number of squadrons in the air. Then a report came in that Croydon, a town ten miles to the south of London, was being bombed—and the last red light blinked on. The attack was a mistake; Hitler had banned air strikes in the London area in hopes of encouraging the British to accept a compromise peace. But even if Ismay had known the attack was the result of a navigational error, it would not have eased his anxiety. Every squadron in southern England was now either engaged or out of action. What would happen if the Germans launched an evening attack? The thought of it made Ismay “sick with fear.” Croydon, though, proved to be the last of it. After the attack the sky emptied out again, and one by one the Spitfires and Hurricanes returned to their bases in the August twilight. On the drive back to Chequers, Churchill was unusually quiet. Ismay attempted to start a conversation, but was cut off. “Don’t speak to me—I never have been so moved,” Churchill said. The two men drove on in silence for a few minutes; then Churchill said, more to himself than to Ismay, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
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The generation that lived through the Battle of Britain has largely passed from the scene, but the story of their everyday heroism during the fateful summer of 1940 lives on in the morale reports of Mass Observation and Home Intelligence. August 20 (as the German air attacks escalate): “Morale remains high. There is confidence and cheerfulness.” August 27: “Air raids dominate thought and conversation. Determination has not weakened.” September 9 (two days aft
er the first big German attack on London): “In areas which have been most heavily raided there has been little sign of panic and none of defeatism, but rather of . . . increased ‘determination to see it through.’ ” September 16 (the day after the second German attack on London): “Yesterday’s aerial successes have produced enthusiastic praise for the RAF. . . . Many people anticipate an invasion within the next few days and are very confident that it will be a failure.”
The courage and steadiness of the British public in the face of invasion and daily bombing owed something to their growing ownership of the war, their sense that they were fighting a People’s War. But it also owed a great deal to the leadership of Winston Churchill.
It was Churchill’s unique achievement that, in the midst of mortal danger, he was able to fashion a new national narrative out of the gray, sordid business of modern war—out of the ration cards, the food shortages, the queues, the air-raid drills, and the death notices—and make the plumber and the shopgirl feel like participants in a great historical pageant. There have been many theories about why ordinary people found the Churchillian narrative so compelling. Margery Allingham thought it was because the prime minister “brought you up to his level”; Ernst Kris, a psychoanalyst and student of wartime propaganda, thought it was because Churchill helped the British people understand the crisis they were facing. There is a measure of truth in both theories. But only the British historian Isaiah Berlin has captured the music in Churchill’s achievement:
