With Wings Like Eagles: A History of the Battle of Britain

by Michael Korda

  It was not just aircraft that were mass-produced on a huge scale—Luftwaffe bases sprang up all over Germany, built with a lavish attention to detail and designed in the most ambitious Third Reich style. At a time when most RAF stations had wooden huts for housing, with outside “ablutions” and a cast-iron coke stove for heating, the buildings Göring put up were brick and stone, centrally heated, with comfortable rooms for the airmen, even better accommodations for the officers, and mess halls that were well lit, clean, and comfortable. Officers’ messes had chrome and marble bathroom fittings, big fireplaces, and leather furniture. Instead of looking as if they had been plunked down by a careless hand in the middle of nowhere on god-forsaken heaths and soggy meadows, the bases of the Luftwaffe were handsomely landscaped and set among winding paths and forests of pine trees—at first glance they looked like plush health resorts rather than military bases.* Göring, who stinted himself of nothing, did not stint his airmen either; they were the envy of the other two services.

  Without wishing to make the Luftwaffe sound more attractive than it was—it was, after all, a Nazi organization, with all that that implies—it was by far the least class-conscious of the German services, and offered the best chance of promotion for lower-class and middle-class young men, provided of course that they were Aryan and had joined the Hitler Youth. Just as in the RAF, enthusiasm for sports mattered a lot, and just as in the RAF pilots were not necessarily commissioned. At least half the Luftwaffe pilots, bombardiers, and navigators (and of course all the air gunners, flight engineers, and wireless operators) were “other ranks.” In one significant way Luftwaffe practice differed from that of the RAF—in British aircrews, the pilot was always “captain” of the airplane whatever his rank, in absolute command from the moment the engines started up, even if he was a sergeant and his navigator and bombardier were both officers; but in the German aircrews, the senior officer on board was “captain” of the aircraft, even if he was not the pilot. In another respect, German practice differed from ours—German bombers, like German tanks, were deliberately designed to place the members of the crew as close together as possible, both to raise their confidence and morale and to enable them to help a comrade who was wounded, or take his place when necessary. The advantages of this were obvious, but there were also disadvantages—a single good burst from a fighter could disable the whole crew, and the gunners lacked elbow room to use their machine guns effectively, and did not have isolated power turrets giving them a full field of fire. That said, German and British aircrews were equally well trained and German and British fighter pilots about equally matched.

  German and British fighter pilots were about equally “mounted” too. Like the Hurricane and the Spitfire, the Bf 109, with various updates, would remain in production until the end of the war, and would be continually modified to carry more powerful weapons than it had originally been designed for. Like them too, both the aircraft and the designer achieved celebrity status.

  Willy Messerschmitt, like Reginald Mitchell, was a visionary genius of airplane design, and like Sydney Camm he could turn his hand to anything with wings (his versatility was such that before the end of the war he would be responsible for the design of the world’s largest transport plane, the six-engine Me 323; the world’s first operational jet fighter, the Me 262; and the world’s only operational rocket-propelled fighter, the Me 163). Messerschmitt was unlike Camm and Mitchell, however, in that his fighter did not at once win the confidence and enthusiasm of the air force it was designed for, and from the first it was inextricably mixed up in the politics—or the vicious personal rivalries that passed for politics—of the Third Reich.

  In the early 1920s, Messerschmitt had founded his own aircraft firm in Bavaria, and received a subsidy from the Bavarian state government (as well as clandestine funding from the defense ministry in Berlin).2 His rival was another Bavarian aircraft manufacturer, Bayerische Flugzeugwerke, but in 1927, in the bad economic times and under severe financial pressure, the Bavarian government, unable to subsidize both firms, forced them to merge—a shotgun marriage that pleased nobody.

  Unlike Camm and Mitchell, Messerschmitt was not just a gifted airplane designer; he was a businessman-entrepreneur with large ambitions, who had no desire to simply sit at his drawing board designing airplanes for other people to build and profit from. From the very beginning of the unwelcome merger, he dominated the new company, which got its first windfall in the shape of an order for a small, ultrafast modern monoplane airliner, designed to carry ten passengers. The order came from the new national airline Lufthansa, whose managing director and director of procurement was Erhard Milch. Half Jewish or not (the question was not yet of critical importance in 1927), Milch was, then as later, overbearing, an intriguer, opinionated, and a bad man to have as an enemy. Messerschmitt promptly proceeded to make an enemy of him. The airplane he had designed crashed during its development testing in 1928, and Milch canceled Lufthansa’s order. Messerschmitt quickly produced an improved prototype, and the order was reinstated, but after further delays Milch once more canceled it—the relationship between the two men was already touchy—and demanded the return of Lufthansa’s down payment. Bayerische Flugzeugwerke was unable to return the money, having spent it to produce the two prototypes, and as a result was forced into bankruptcy in 1931. During this disagreeable period dislike between the two men ripened into outright loathing, so it was not good news for Messerschmitt when Hitler came to power in 1933 and Milch emerged as the second most powerful figure after Göring in the German aviation world.

  Like Mitchell, Messerschmitt was a man who always sought simple, elegant solutions to technical problems. He was not as successful in his business dealings, however. Milch had made it very clear that Messerschmitt’s reconstituted company would get orders only to build other companies’ aircraft as a subcontractor, but Messerschmitt went ahead and designed several innovative training and small transport aircraft, which, since it was clear that Milch would never buy them for the Luftwaffe, he proceeded to sell abroad, securing contracts for the trainer from Romania. Milch chose to treat this as something like an act of treason, precipitating a Gestapo investigation—after all, who could predict on which side Romania might be, if it came to war?—which caused another crisis, requiring the intervention of Göring himself to smooth things over.

  A series of misfortunes continued to plague Messerschmitt. He designed a plane to compete in an air speed race, the Challenge du Tourisme Internationale, only to have two of the prototypes crash in succession. Then, changing plans, he turned the Romanian trainer into a high-speed, all-metal tourer, with a flush-riveted, stressed skin of exceptional strength and smoothness. The Bf 108A, as the aircraft came to be known, was full of technical innovations, elegant, fast, and easy to fly. It was admired by everyone who saw it, and looked, in fact, exactly like a scale model of the Bf 109 to come. Enthusiasm for the Bf 108A was in fact so great that it survived despite a crash in which one member of Milch’s own staff was killed while flying the airplane, and even the fact that it was beaten in the 1934 Challenge du Tourisme Internationale by a Polish airplane. It did, however, record the fastest speed reached in the race, and won the praise of experienced pilots like Theo Osterkampf, who had initially been a fierce critic of the aircraft (and who would later go on to become one of the most beloved Luftwaffe commanders in the Battle of Britain—he was known as “Uncle Theo” to his pilots).

  In 1934, when the Reichsluftministerium (RLM), the German air ministry, sent out a request to manufacturers for a single-seat, all-metal monoplane fighter, with retractable undercarriage and a minimum of two machine guns, to be powered by a V-12 liquid-cooled aero engine—essentially similar, except for the number of guns, to British Air Ministry Specification F37/34, which produced the Hurricane and the Spitfire—Milch deliberately excluded Bayerische Flugzeugwerke from the list of firms invited to submit a design. Messerschmitt’s admirers, of whom Göring was one, finally persuaded Milch to relent, but ev
en then the most Milch would do was to offer Bayerische Flugzeugwerke a chance to submit a fighter design at its own expense, as a “developmental project”—that is to say, if the design was accepted, it would be manufactured by another company. Messerschmitt was tempted to give up designing aircraft altogether and take a teaching job instead, but he finally swallowed his pride and sat down to design a fighter, which would have to be so good that it would surpass every other aircraft company’s entry by a clear margin, and which, even then, he knew Milch would probably try to sabotage.

  There are people who work best under life-or-death pressure, and Messerschmitt was apparently one of them. In record time he sketched out a new fighter design, the smallest and lightest aircraft he could build around the proposed new twelve-cylinder engine, all metal, and designed so that it could be mass-produced in sections by relatively unskilled labor (a feature it shared with Dr. Porsche’s Volkswagen, which dated from the same period), with a pair of thin rectangular wings tapering to squared-off wingtips, an enclosed cockpit, two machine guns in the engine nacelle and—a daring novelty—a twenty-millimeter cannon firing through the propeller hub. The Bf 109 benefited from the same innovations as the Bf 108A: a sleek, flush-riveted metal skin; leading and trailing edge slats that would open automatically to increase the aircraft’s maneuverability and lift; and, above all, the thinnest possible wing, supported by a single spar, as revolutionary as Mitchell’s elliptical wing for the Spitfire, but much easier to manufacture.

  The wing was both the curse and the blessing of Messerschmitt’s design. Its perfection was the central feature of the design, but to achieve that narrow, knife-edge thinness required putting everything that would add weight or bulk to it into the fuselage—hence the armament was all placed ahead of the pilot, and the landing gear and its operating mechanism were fixed to the fuselage, only the strut and wheel retracting outward into the wing. The wings themselves would have to bear the weight of the aircraft only when it was actually in the air. This gave the Messerschmitt fighter its characteristic narrow track and pigeon-toed look on the ground, and contributed to the very high accident rate during taxiing that plagued it throughout its long service life (and was, to a lesser degree, a problem with the Spitfire as well). Ironically, power in the prototype was to be provided by an imported Rolls-Royce Kestrel twelve-cylinder engine, the precursor of the PV XII Merlin, since neither the Junkers nor the Daimler-Benz engine intended for the new generation of Luftwaffe fighter had as yet completed its trials.

  The aircraft that emerged caused considerable controversy. Pilots disliked the thin wings and delicate tail structure,* both of which they predicted would break off in violent maneuvers; the hinged cockpit canopy, heavy and shaped like a greenhouse, which opened to the starboard side so that there was no way of sliding it back in flight; and the wing slots, over which the pilot had no control. The plane was startlingly small, too, as if Messerschmitt had carved away every unnecessary square inch of metal. In any event, the general assumption was that this particular horse race was fixed—Milch would never allow Messerschmitt to win it, and that was all right anyway, since most pilots preferred the robust Heinkel (He) 112, which, with its reassuringly thick wings and its superwide track undercarriage, was visibly the better (and sturdier) aircraft.

  Messerschmitt continued to produce modified prototypes, the third one at last giving up the Rolls-Royce engine for the Junkers Jumo engine; and as test followed test, the plane that couldn’t win became the one to beat. Two of the three contenders (from Arado and Focke-Wulf) dropped out, leaving only the He 112 as the competition, and, embarrassingly for Milch, Messerschmitt’s fighter consistently out-classed the Heinkel in every possible way—speed, maneuverability, climbing ability, ceiling, high-speed diving ability. There was simply no comparison.3

  Ernst Udet, Göring’s old war comrade from the Richthofen Squadron in World War I, now promoted to colonel and technical director of the Luftwaffe, and converted into a fervent supporter of Messerschmitt’s fighter, put on a surprise demonstration of it in front of Göring at Rechlin, the Luftwaffe test center. Udet managed to “shoot down” in mock combat not only a flight of bombers, but all the fighters accompanying them. Göring was not much interested in technical details, but as a former fighter pilot himself, he could recognize superior performance when he saw it with his own eyes, and from that moment on the He 112 was a dead duck.* Udet was a brilliant pilot, and in a way his brilliance was his misfortune, since he tended to judge aircraft designs by the seat of his pants, in the air—unlike the patient Dowding, who left that side of things to the test pilots. Another misfortune for Udet was that he was a rival of Milch’s for Göring’s attention. There was bad blood between Udet and Milch, which was made worse by Udet’s fame and glamour. Udet had barnstormed in the early days of German aviation after the war; had flown in numerous German movies about mountains and airplanes, a popular genre in the 1920s, when he had collaborated with Leni Riefenstahl (and, some said, been her lover); and was both a bon vivant (as mentioned earlier) and a brilliant cartoonist, with a gift for mordant caricatures of his fellow senior Luftwaffe officers—a talent which often pricked their vanity. It did not help either that although Udet and Göring had both won the Pour le Mérite, imperial Germany’s highest decoration for bravery, Udet’s score of kills was almost three times the size of Göring’s. Göring’s envy of his old friend was as dangerous as Milch’s enmity, and would cost Udet his life in 1941 when he committed suicide.

  Despite the political and personal quarrels that surrounded the Luftwaffe’s new fighter, it went through its protracted trials with no more than the usual problems of any innovative high-speed design. The Daimler-Benz engine having been selected over the Junkers engine, it was at last introduced into the early production models, and would power the Bf 109 for the next eight years. Messerschmitt had placed a prominent “chin” radiator under the engine nacelle, but like all fighter plane designers, he was obsessed with reducing drag, and eventually was obliged to place a smaller, aerodynamic radiator under each wing—with great reluctance, since it was the first step back from the perfectly “clean” wing he had in mind.* A more serious problem was his inability to make the twenty-millimeter cannon firing through the propeller hub work—the cannon tended to overheat quickly and jam; and when it did work, the recoil tended to create dangerous vibration (Messerschmitt would eventually get all this right in 1941, with the Me 109G).† This left the Bf 109 with only the two fuselage machine guns—not enough firepower, especially in view of the RAF’s decision to ask for an eight-gun fighter. The only solution was to put a machine gun in each wing, eventually to be replaced in time for the Battle of Britain by a twenty-millimeter cannon in each wing. Once again, Messerschmitt’s perfect wing was degraded—the gun added weight to the wing, and required a streamlined raised blister to house the ammunition drum. (Aircraft designers fight a constant battle against increases in drag because of operational requirements—additional weaponry, radio antennae, cooling vents, and worst of all, exterior bomb racks, all of which inevitably add to drag and reduce speed.)

  Messerschmitt had one great advantage over Mitchell and Camm. In late 1936 and early 1937 several of the preproduction Bf 109s were shipped secretly to Spain, to be tested by Luftwaffe pilots of the Condor Legion in combat, in the Spanish Civil War. Valuable lessons were learned—among them the absolute need for the additional two wing machine guns, and a rush program was undertaken to replace them as soon as possible with cannon*—and many modifications were made to correct the kind of flaws that only real combat can reveal. Like the Hurricane and the Spitfire, the Bf 109 progressed from a fixed-pitch wooden propeller to a metal constant-pitch propeller to a three-bladed variable-pitch propeller, changes that progressively increased its performance.

  That said, the Bf 109E, with which the Luftwaffe would fight the Battle of Britain, was a formidable and well-designed weapon, and in some respects better equipped for combat (largely as a result of the Germans’ ex
perience in Spain) than its British equivalents. Dowding had been concerned with preserving the integrity of the fuel tanks in the event of a crash, and as a result did not pay enough attention to the new technology of self-sealing fuel tanks, which might have prevented many of the fires that killed or disfigured his pilots. Nor were RAF fighter aircraft fitted with a rubberized one-man life raft that automatically inflated and bobbed to the surface in case of a crash at sea, with the result that many RAF pilots found themselves dogpaddling in the frigid water of the English Channel in their Mae West life jacket, hoping against hope to be seen and picked up by an RAF launch, instead of sitting in a life raft with a vastly better chance of surviving.

  The fact that the Daimler-Benz engine had fuel injection instead of carburetors was a plus for the Bf 109—Rolls-Royce engineers, with their taste for the tried-and-true, had preferred to stick with carburetors, which, in sudden, violent dives, sometimes starved the Merlin of fuel. Experienced British fighter pilots learned to perform a quick “flick” of the aircraft before diving to fill the float of each carburetor, but it was an unpleasant experience for less proficient pilots when the engine suddenly cut out in the middle of a dogfight.4 On the other hand, Dowding, with his usual dogged persistence, had browbeaten the Air Council and Rolls-Royce into using 100-octane aviation fuel in the Merlin, whereas the Germans stuck to lower-grade eighty-seven-octane aviation fuel. This was a big and risky decision, since there was at the time no refinery in the United Kingdom producing 100-octane fuel. The fuel had to be imported from the United States, making Fighter Command in 1939 and 1940 dependent, among other things, on the Treasury’s supply of dollars, on the prowess of the German U-boat commanders, and above all on the willingness of merchant sailors to man tankers filled with thousands of gallons of high-octane fuel that one torpedo would turn into a white-hot explosion incinerating in a second both ship and crew.* The gain in performance by the decision to use American 100-octane fuel in British fighters to some degree offset the advantage of German fuel injection, but it was another one of those things that only a man as objective, determined, and sure of himself as Dowding could have brought off in the face of a skeptical Air Council and Treasury. As in the Luftwaffe, early combat experience also led to the addition of armor plate behind the pilot’s seat, and many a pilot would owe his life to this plating.5