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

by Michael Korda

  A further problem, which would emerge during the course of the day, was that however sophisticated the plan might be, it was based on poor intelligence. Colonel Josef “Beppo” Schmidt, the Luftwaffe’s chief of intelligence, seems to have been better at telling his boss what he wanted to hear than at providing useful targeting information. The purpose, after all, was to deliver a knockout blow to Fighter Command. There was no deliberate intention here of bombing civilian targets, or of sowing terror among civilians, so the situation was unlike the bombing of Warsaw and Rotterdam, or the “Blitz” against major British cities later that autumn, or for that matter the massive “area bombing” of major German cities by RAF Bomber Command from 1942 to the end of the war—and the Germans’ targets were carefully calculated with the objective in mind.

  Given that objective, it is all the more surprising that the plan called for so many widespread attacks on targets that were unlikely to hurt Fighter Command. It was not as if the British had made any serious attempt to hide or keep secret the location of Fighter Command’s airfields, still less the factories in which the fighters were built, or Fighter Command Headquarters, or the vital radar towers, some of which were clearly visible in good weather from across the Channel with binoculars. Much of the information the Germans required was easily available before the war in guidebooks; in the British government’s excellent, detailed Ordnance Survey maps, which could be bought at any bookstore; in news stories; or even from the local telephone directory. Had the German air attaché in London cared to spend his holidays before the war driving around southern England with a few Ordnance Survey maps in the glove compartment of his car, and a Shell Motorist’s Guide and a pair of binoculars appropriate for bird-watching on the seat beside him he could easily have picked out most of the vital targets of Fighter Command—it did not require the services of a master spy, nor did the Germans have one in Britain. (One of the Japanese military attachés provided Tokyo with a more accurate view of Fighter Command’s strength by taking up golf and playing regularly at golf courses close to RAF fighter airfields.) It would be symptomatic of the whole day that although 120 Ju 88 bombers of Lehrgeschwader, or LG, 1 (the Lehrgeschwader were elite “demonstration” units formed around a nucleus of experienced instructors) spent nearly an hour bombing Southampton in the afternoon, they merely destroyed the Raleigh Bicycle factory, Pickford’s furniture storage warehouse, and a refrigerated meat storage depot, leaving untouched the Vickers-Supermarine factory in which Spitfires were produced. (A second, larger “shadow” factory had been completed at Castle Bromwich, near Birmingham, but production difficulties caused largely by the fact that it was under the control of the imperious Lord Nuffield, the automobile manufacturer, who was at odds with Lord Beaverbrook, meant that the Southampton factory was still the primary producer of the aircraft in 1940.)* There was nothing at all secret about the Spitfire factory at Woolston—it was large, easy to find, marked clearly on city maps, and listed in the Southampton telephone directory—and at least in theory one would have thought LG 1 worth sacrificing if necessary to destroy it.

  Colonel Fink—whose aircraft had bombed a Coastal Command rather than a Fighter Command airfield, another result of faulty intelligence from Beppo Schmidt’s staff—had not been alone in failing to receive the recall message. Kampfgeschwader 54 attacked the RAF airfields at Odiham and Farnborough, neither of which was a Fighter Command airfield; and a substantial force of Bf 110 twin-engine fighters that had flown out to support the KG 54 bombers failed to find them in the clouds, made a landfall just west of the seaside resort town of Bournemouth about fifty miles away from KG 54 as the crow flies, and got bounced by British fighters for their pains. By mid-morning those Germans who had failed to receive (or ignored) the recall were back at their bases, having accomplished nothing of value and complaining bitterly—Fink the most loudly of all—about the absence of fighter support and the fact that whatever radio device the British were using to detect German aircraft, it was still working all too well, despite claims that the whole system had been put out of action the day before. Fink had lost five bombers, and had many more damaged; KG 54 had lost four aircraft; and the Bf 110s of Zerstörergeschwader (ZG) 2 had lost one fighter. Despite the iffy weather and poor visibility of the morning, Air Marshal Park’s RAF fighter squadrons had apparently experienced no difficulty at all in finding the German raiders—a fact that struck Fink and many others (but apparently not Beppo Schmidt) as deeply disturbing and worthy of further investigation. (It is notable that although Fink was upset by KG 2’s losses, they were in fact substantially below 5 percent, which RAF Bomber Command deemed an “acceptable” rate of loss for operations.)

  Clearly, Fink, like many in the Luftwaffe, assumed that the raids on the 12th had severely damaged Fighter Command’s power to resist, and was startled by the number of British fighters that nevertheless appeared, and the apparent ease with which they found him. As it happened, Fink also had the bad luck to be attacked by Flight Lieutenant Adolph “Sailor” Malan of No. 74 Squadron, a burly South African who would prove to be one of the most determined, successful, and intelligent RAF aces of the Battle of Britain. (Malan was the author of “Ten of My Rules for Air Fighting,” which was printed as a poster for display at fighter airfield dispersal huts. The first rule was “Wait until you see the whites of his eyes!”*) Fink had also been attacked by one of the only two Hurricanes in Fighter Command armed with twenty-millimeter cannon instead of machine guns, flown by Flight Lieutenant Roddick Lee Smith of No. 151 Squadron. Smith was a convert to cannon. Despite the fact that the heavier guns and their bulky ammunition drums reduced the Hurricane’s speed and maneuverability, he believed that they “packed a much greater punch and at a longer range,” and managed to demonstrate it convincingly.

  The morning, however chaotic, should have been a warning to the Germans that Fighter Command had not been seriously inconvenienced by the ambitious operations of the previous day, and should also have given them a clue that Dowding’s elaborate, carefully thought out system of radar and centralized fighter control was the key to the battle. German signals intelligence reported that all the radar stations were back in service—the British were sending out a dummy signal to conceal the fact that the Ventnor station on the Isle of Wight was still under repair—but this news does not seem to have interested anyone in the Luftwaffe high command, perhaps because Field Marshal Kesselring now had an angry Reichsmarschall Göring (and Göring’s sumptuous private train, Asia) on his hands at his headquarters, as well as an even angrier Fink to deal with.

  Kesselring managed to shake off Göring and his entourage long enough to fly to Arras and calm Fink down, and by noon the weather had improved, as promised. The sky cleared, the sun came out, and it was decided to proceed with Adler Tag late in the afternoon as if nothing had happened.

  If numbers alone could do the trick, the Luftwaffe had certainly amassed an impressive force—a combined force of 197 Ju 87s and Ju 88s would attack the Southampton area, with heavy fighter protection, while farther east large numbers of Ju 87s, escorted by fighters, would cross the Channel between Calais and Boulogne to attack the Short aircraft factory at Rochester, in Kent, and the airfield at RAF Detling, near Maidstone. Once again, however, German intelligence seems to have been misinformed. Although the Germans missed the Vickers-Supermarine factory in Southampton, the Short aircraft factory in Rochester took a pasting (the RAF slang of the day for receiving a heavy attack), but it manufactured bombers, not fighters; nor did Fighter Command use RAF Detling, which was yet another Coastal Command airfield. The airfield at RAF Andover was also attacked in error—the Stuka dive-bombers mistook it for the more important Fighter Command airfield at Middle Wallop. More damage was done to a nearby golf course than to the runway, but the officers’ mess was destroyed by a direct hit. A late-night attack by a small number of He 111s on the Nuffield Aero Works, near Birmingham, did “considerable” damage—and ought to have caused somebody in the RAF to ask how the Lu
ftwaffe could achieve such accuracy at night—but the damage was nothing that couldn’t be quickly put right. In the words of the RAF report for the day, “Enemy aircraft activity over this country has been on a scale far in excess of anything hitherto carried out,” but at the end of the day the amount of damage actually inflicted was neither crucial nor impressive. All told, twelve RAF personnel were killed, and twenty-three civilians. The Germans lost thirty-eight aircraft; the British lost thirteen fighters, plus ten bombers destroyed on the ground. Only three British fighter pilots were killed in action.*

  It is a measure of the wild overestimates on both sides of the battle that RAF pilots claimed seventy-eight German aircraft “destroyed,” thirty-three “probable,” and at least forty-nine “damaged” for the day. Even more wildly exaggerated claims of RAF aircraft shot down were made by the Germans, and announced triumphantly over Radio Berlin, preceded by the boastful Luftwaffe marching song Bomben auf England.

  Both sides suffered from the same problem—in the heat of battle, at high speeds, and flying into and out of cloud cover, British and German fighter pilots and the gunners on German bombers frequently claimed the same “kill” several times over, or counted a plane as “destroyed” when it was merely damaged, or “damaged” when in fact it was still capable of flying home. In fact one German gunner whose aircraft was badly hit, with both engines trailing smoke, took to his parachute only to see, as he descended, the smoke stop and the bomber, together with the rest of his crew, fly on and disappear into a cloud, leaving him to spend the rest of the war as a POW. Excessive and overoptimistic claims on both sides were an inescapable feature of the battle, despite the stringent standards—stricter on the German side than the British—used by intelligence officers (and deeply resented by the fighter pilots) to validate a pilot’s claim to a kill, and this would remain so until the universal introduction of the “ciné gun,” a small movie camera in the wing of a fighter that filmed the target whenever the guns were fired. Also, on both sides, it was easier to know how many planes your own side had lost than to estimate the number of the enemy that had been shot down—you only had to count the empty places at the dinner table in the mess, or the number of ground crews standing around mournfully on the tarmac waiting in vain for their aircraft to return.

  Despite Fink, Göring and his commanders were jubilant. If Beppo Schmidt’s estimate that RAF Fighter Command had no more than 300 or 400 fighters left at most was correct, then they had, by their own count, destroyed between one-third and one-fourth of Fighter Command’s remaining strength in two days of combat, while rendering a major fighter factory kaput and putting out of action several of Fighter Command’s airfields. (In fact, Fighter Command actually had 647 serviceable aircraft at the end of the day.1) All the flight commanders commented on the relatively small number of British fighters they encountered. However effective the Hurricanes and Spitfires might be—and nobody denied their effectiveness—the actual number engaged seemed comparatively modest. From the German point of view, this suggested once again that Dowding’s resources were slender after his losses in France and over Dunkirk. The attack on the 12th against the radar sites was less successful than had been hoped, to be sure, but nobody doubted that these sites would eventually be dealt with by dive-bombers, and in the meantime, a few more days like the 12th and the 13th would no doubt see Fighter Command reduced to its last reserves. It was just a question of continuing to push hard, and of course good weather. Colonel General Halder, the forbiddingly skeptical and competent chief of the army general staff in Berlin, was informed that eight RAF bases were “virtually destroyed,” and that “the ratio of German to British aircraft losses was one to three for all types, one to five for fighters.” This was tantamount to putting the army on notice that the first condition for Operation Sea Lion might be fulfilled by the Luftwaffe at any moment—news which Halder, who was not an enthusiast for the invasion of England, can hardly have welcomed, if he believed it.

  Of course, from the viewpoint of Bentley Priory, where Dowding left his office from time to time to watch the progress of the air battles on the big board, with his usual glacial calm, the Germans’ jubilation, of which he was in any case unaware, was unfounded. He was not pleased by the loss of thirteen fighters and three pilots, and he was distressed by the damage to the Ventnor radar station, which seemed to indicate that if the Germans tried hard enough (and concentrated on one or two neighboring stations) they could blast a “hole” in Fighter Command’s radar coverage for long enough to get a substantial number of raids through without warning. But he had been gratified by the extraordinary courage of the WAAFs at Ventnor, who had gone on working while bombs exploded all around them, eliciting from Dowding a rare personal signal to express his “satisfaction and pride in the behavior of the WAAF in the face of enemy attack.” The steady nerves of young women in uniform while being dive-bombed were not the only thing that satisfied him. Park had fed his fighter squadrons into the battle one or two at a time, just as he had been ordered, attacking in squadron strength again and again, drawing blood every time, but never giving the enemy an opportunity to guess what Fighter Command’s real strength was. More important still, what we would now call the interface between the radar stations, group operations rooms, the filter room at Fighter Command headquarters, and the individual squadrons in the air had been seamless.

  The next day seemed something of an anticlimax. The weather was “Mainly cloudy with bright patches and cloud in the Channel,” which in principle was good for the attackers but posed problems for the defenders. The Germans came on and off throughout the day, in small raids spread out all over the southern part of Britain, with no plan that was clearly discernible to the British, although eleven RAF aerodromes were bombed, none of them all that seriously, except for RAF Sealand, where the sergeants’ mess was blown up. Railway lines were bombed, apparently at random, but these were quickly and easily repaired; and four RAF personnel and twelve civilians were killed on the ground. Fighter Command lost eight aircraft and had four pilots killed; the Germans lost nineteen aircraft, and the commander of KG 55, Colonel Stoeckl, was killed in action. A disproportionate amount of the German losses on the 14th, as on the preceding days, consisted of Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers. However effective they were—and in the hands of a good pilot with steady nerves the Stuka could deliver a 500-pound bomb with amazing accuracy—they were so slow as to make them sitting ducks for British fighters. This was doubly so because a Stuka pilot needed to extend the aircraft’s dive brakes to slow it down as he dived steeply (almost vertically) toward his target, and lost further speed when he climbed sharply after releasing his bomb. Already, the question was being raised whether it was worth using the four Stukageschwader of Air Fleets 2 and 3 over England, though they represented a substantial part of the strength of Luftflotte 3.

  Although a concentrated attack on the radar stations might have paid dividends, the Germans’ effort for the day was largely wasted in “penny packets” (a favorite phrase of General Montgomery), consisting of small raids spread out over many airfields, none of which was seriously damaged. In addition, eight barrage balloons were shot down and the Goodwin Light Vessel was sunk—hardly major targets from Fighter Command’s point of view, or challenging ones for the Germans to hit. There was only minimal raiding on the night of the 14th—the RAF described it as “very slight enemy activity”—but one He 111 bomber was shot down by antiaircraft fire near Sealand, perhaps a welcome revenge for the destruction of the sergeants’ mess.

  The German attacks of the 14th, then, as opposed to those of the two preceding days, were relatively limited, but not from any lack of resolve on the part of the Luftwaffe. The perfect weather Göring had been waiting for was predicted for the 15th, and intense preparations were being made throughout all three Luftflotten for an attack that would finally deliver the coup de grâce to Fighter Command.

  Throughout the battle so far, the Germans had demonstrated a considerable sense of tactics, se
nding out flights of Bf 109 fighters in strength across the Channel to lure British fighters away from the German bomber formations. This plan had not been successful, largely because it was exactly what Dowding expected the Germans to do, and because Park kept a tight control over the squadrons in No. 11 Group. What was intended for the 15th was something similar, but on a much larger scale. It would, in fact, be the biggest battle in the short history to date of air warfare.

  What the Germans had in mind was a vast aerial equivalent of the pincer movement beloved of the German general staff, using, for the first time, the full strength of all three of the Luftflotten simultaneously, including General Stumpff’s Luftflotte 5, which was based in Denmark and Norway. The idea was for Luftflotte 5 to attack targets in northern Britain, while the two larger air fleets in France, the Netherlands, and Belgium made an all-out assault on Fighter Command’s airfields in the south, thus preventing No. 13 and No. 12 Groups from reinforcing No. 11 Group. There were flaws in this strategy, however, some of which the Germans could hardly be expected to perceive.

  Contrary to what was supposed in Berlin, No. 12 Group had not so far been supporting No. 11 Group (No. 13 Group was too far north to do so effectively) to any significant degree; in fact, there was already bad blood between Air Vice-Marshal Park and Air Vice-Marshal Leigh-Mallory on that subject. Park, who had always disliked Leigh-Mallory, felt that the latter had been slow and unwilling to respond to calls for support from No. 11 Group—that Leigh-Mallory was, in effect, deliberately ignoring Dowding’s orders, given at Fighter Command before the battle at the meeting on July 3. He also felt that when No. 12 Group fighters did manage to come to his aid, they ignored the instructions of No. 11 Group’s ground controllers and wandered around in the air over Kent, getting in the way and confusing the controllers. In his own quiet way, Park fumed at Leigh-Mallory’s lack of support, while Leigh-Mallory was nothing like as anxious to send his squadrons into No. 11 Group’s area as the Germans supposed him to be.