*This was perhaps balanced out in Stanley Baldwin’s character by his mother, who was a successful author of fiction about rural life and a book of ghost stories.
*Curiously, Baldwin—like his predecessor, Ramsay MacDonald, and his successor, Neville Chamberlain, the other two major apostles of appeasement—allowed Churchill to have access to British intelligence estimates about German air strength and to information about the RAF’s strength, perhaps on Lyndon B. Johnson’s theory that it was “better to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.” If so, the theory didn’t work. It was not just the accuracy of the numbers that Churchill protested, but the interpretation of them, and the failure to react to them by increasing British air strength dramatically.
*Like the Bristol Blenheim, the German bombers He 111 and the Do 17 (called the “flying pencil” because its fuselage was so narrow) were originally designed and built as fast civilian passenger aircraft—in their case because Germany was forbidden to build military aircraft under the terms of the Versailles peace treaty. All these aircraft became slower when converted into bombers, since they then were heavier and sprouted drag-producing gun turrets, radio antennas, bomb aimer positions, etc. Only the Ju 88 was designed from scratch as a fast bomber, and not coincidentally it proved the best and most adaptable of all. It gained a new lease on life in 1942 as a very effective radar-equipped night fighter.
*The British Lee-Enfield. 303 rifle of World War II had a slightly longer barrel than the Lee-Enfield rifle of World War I (and a different, less effective bayonet). The Mauser 98 K of the German army was merely a slighter shorter version of the World War I Mauser rifle. In both armies the pistols, hand grenades, and helmets were identical to those of the earlier war, as were the British Army’s machine guns.
*In the 1930 s “Biggles” was the pilot hero of a hugely successful series of what we would now call young adult novels; he was young, daring, and preternaturally brave.
*Starting in 1941, as the Germans came under increasingly heavy attack from Bomber Command, they instituted a very similar system of nationwide, integrated air defense, linking radar, fighters, night fighters, antiaircraft guns, searchlights, police, fire police, municipal authorities, and the Nazi Party’s public assistance organizations under a single command. More ambitious (and authoritarian) than the British system, it was amazingly efficient. There is an excellent description of it in Len Deighton’s novel Bomber.
*The first versions of the Hurricane and the Spitfire to reach service did not yet have this, and squadron commanders were obliged to buy up the local supply of car rearview mirrors from garages and have the mechanics fit them above the windscreen.
*This last problem was eventually solved just before the Battle of Britain by installing in all British aircraft a small wireless transmitter called “identification, friend or foe” (IFF). It sent out a constant coded signal identifying the aircraft to the radar operators as one of ours.
*Offcially La Coupe d’Aviation Maritime Jacques Schneider.
*Gloster Gladiators were still in service at the beginning of the war, and were not only robust but surprisingly effective. At one point in 1940 the air defense of Malta was reduced to three apparently unconquerable Gladiators nicknamed Faith, Hope, and Charity.
*One measure of Reginald Mitchell’s fame in the United Kingdom is that he was voted “the greatest Midlander of all time,” in a poll conducted for BBC Midlands Today in 2003. Mitchell received 25 percent of the votes cast; William Shakespeare came in second, with 17 percent.
*“All the business of war…is to endeavor to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I called ‘guessing what was at the other side of the hill.’”
*Even in 1952, when the author served in the Royal Air Force in Germany, we were awed by our quarters at a former Luftwaffe base near Hamburg, which not only had indoor baths and showers but featured a mysterious-looking porcelain basin set in the wall which was too small, too high up, and too elaborately decorated to be a urinal, and which turned out to be a flushing vomitorium for those who had drunk too much beer.
*Messerschmitt strengthened the horizontal stabilizers with external struts, which were criticized by British and American airmen as either cautious or old-fashioned, but in fact Sydney Camm also used two struts to support the horizontal stablizers of his Hurricane prototype. They were removed only because, in Camm’s absence during a brief hospitalization, one of his staff decided they weren’t needed and had them taken off. Camm was livid when he returned, but since the tailplane seemed just as strong without them, he eventually came around to the idea himself.
*In order to give the impression that the Luftwaffe had two fighters, not just one, development of the He 112 continued, and prototypes of what came to be called the He 113 were later shown off at frequent intervals, disguised with varying paint schemes and fake squadron identification markings. As a result, several British pilots claimed to have shot one down in the Battle of Britain, although in fact the He 113 never saw combat.
*Mitchell was afflicted with the same problem. He had originally designed the Spitfire with a retractable radiator that would be lowered only as needed during takeoff, climbing, and landing, but the Merlin engine produced far too much heat for that, and he was eventually obliged, with much reluctance, to put a coolant radiator under the starboard wing and an oil radiator under the port wing, spoiling the smooth airflow below his perfect elliptical wing.
†By then Messerschmitt’s name was considered a propaganda asset, and his aircraft began to be named after him (Me), instead of after the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke (Bf).
*The RAF was also experimenting with twenty-millimeter cannon. It was obvious that the greater weight of the shell, and the fact that the shell was explosive, would make bringing down an all-metal aircraft easier than it was with rifle-caliber bullets, but the trade-off was that most of the cannon suitable for installation in an aircraft had a fairly low velocity and a slow rate of fire. The twenty-millimeter cartridge was certainly a killer, but in the two seconds a fighter pilot had in which to hold an enemy aircraft in his sight and “kill” it, only an expert could achieve enough “hits” with slow-firing cannon to do the job. At least one RAF squadron given cannon-equipped fighters in 1940 demanded to have its older, machine-gun-equipped fighters returned to it.
*The merchant seamen tanker crews are among the many unsung heroes of the Battle of Britain, as are the young women of the WAAF who continued to call in radar fixes to Fighter Command HQ from wooden huts aboveground at the radar sites while under direct attack from German dive-bombers.
*The traditional English foxhunter’s cry on seeing a fox. The German fighter pilots too used old hunting cries.
*The two MG FF (Oerlikon) cannon in the wings of the Bf 109 E (each with sixty rounds) fired on an “open bolt,” as opposed to a closed bolt—that is, the breech opened as they fired, like that of a submachine gun. This made them lighter (they also had a short barrel, to save weight) by eliminating a complex and heavy breech-locking mechanism, but also substantially reduced the muzzle velocity (submachine guns are designed this way so that they don’t overheat). Consequently, in 1940 the Bf 109 E’s wing guns, though they packed a deadly punch, operated at a very low rate of fire and with insufficient muzzle velocity.
*In order to prevent moisture (rain or fog) from entering through the open gun ports in the wing and freezing on the gun breeches as the plane took off and climbed rapidly into colder air, Dowding had the ground crews cover the gun ports with “sticky tape,” very much like what is now called duct tape. That used by the RAF was bright red, hence the bright red square patches on the leading edge of the wings of British fighters. The first bullet simply cut a hole in the tape. Armorers usually left taping over the gun ports to the last, after they had cleaned and reloaded the guns, so the intact red patches were a sign that the fighter was ready for action again.
*Oddly enough for a seafaring nation like Britain, th
e Luftwaffe was better organized and equipped for picking their pilots up from “the drink.” German aircraft had self-inflating life rafts, and their airmen were provided with a bag of bright lime-green dye attached to their life vests to mark their position in the water and help the rescue seaplanes spot them.
†The canopy of the Bf 109 had been made even heavier and more coffin-like by the addition of a piece of armor plate attached to it behind the pilot’s head, which also restricted the pilot’s ability to see what was behind him.
*“Angels one five,” means 15,000 feet.
*Some 338, 000 troops, more than two-thirds of them British, were brought off the beaches of Dunkirk.
*One exception occurred when General Charles de Gaulle, newly promoted to command the French Fourth Armored Division near Laon, on May 28, 1940, carried out a bold, sustained, and successful counterattack against much larger German forces, demonstrating what might have been done had the French used their own armored forces aggressively. The success was unusual enough that he was shortly afterward made undersecretary of state for national defense by Paul Reynaud.
*It is instructive, of course, to read French accounts of these events for balance, particularly the memoirs of De Gaulle and Reynaud.
†In Command of History, by David Reynolds, Allen Lane/Penguin, London, 2004.
*Indeed the whole French plan of attack was named le Plan D, after the Dyle River, though French officers often joked that the name stood for le plan Débrouillard, best translated as “trying to sort out a hopeless mess,” as in débrouillez-vous, “sort it out yourself.”
*In fact, at this point in the war, Bomber Command had neither the equipment nor the expertise to do much serious damage to the German war effort; and prior to May 10, 1940, it had in any case been more or less restricted to dropping bundles of propaganda leaflets over Germany, since the French government feared reprisals by the Luftwaffe if Germany was bombed, and the British government was equally determined not to provoke Hitler. When the RAF suggested bombing ammunition dumps in the Black Forest the then Secretary of State of State for Air, Sir Kingsley Wood, remarked indignantly, “Are you aware that is private property? Why, you will be asking me to bomb Essen next!” (Essen was the home of the Krupp steel works.)
*It was the right and patriotic decision—Wilhemina’s fellow sovereign Leopold III would be widely criticized, and forced to abdicate after the war, for remaining in Belgium under German occupation, together with his mistress Lillian Baels, later the princess de Réthy. Among the other sovereigns who fled to London to keep their freedom of action were the kings of Norway, Yugoslavia, and Greece; among the other governments in exile in London were those of Poland, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, and France (in the shape of Charles De Gaulle’s Free France).
†President Roosevelt had initiated what Churchill called this “intimate, private” correspondence in September 1939, when Churchill was still First Lord of the Admiralty in Chamberlain’s War Cabinet. The letters between them fill three very substantial volumes—Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, edited by Warren F. Kimball, Princeton University Press, 1984.
*The equivalent in the United States would have been a full (or four-star) general.
*These are the words used by General Ismay in his Memoirs.
†A mixed force of about 100 twin-engine RAF bombers attacked the Ruhr on the night of May 15–16; sixteen were unable to locate their target, and the remainder inflicted little serious damage.
*The author was evacuated to Canada (in the early autumn of 1940 ) at the age of seven, as were his friends the distinguished historians Sir Alistair Horne and Sir Martin Gilbert. Churchill deplored this vast upheaval of children, which was a relict of the Baldwin/Chamberlain era, when it was believed that major urban areas would be destroyed overnight by bombers. He finally managed to put a stop to the evacuations after the City of Benares, carrying hundreds of evacuees, was torpedoed by a German U-boat hundreds of miles from shore.
*Kennedy’s dislike of the British was deeply reciprocated by them. He made no secret of his belief that they were beaten, or of his lack of confidence in the RAF. His fear of being bombed made him leave London every night he could, prompting one Foreign Office wit, according to the historian Andrew Roberts, to remark, “I thought my daffodils were yellow until I met Joe Kennedy.”
*Throughout this book I have tried to use the actual number of aircraft shot down on both sides, as confirmed in German and British postwar records. Very few of Fighter Command’s aircraft were then equipped with a “ciné camera” to record “kills” during the Battle of Britain, and in the confusion of an air fight many pilots naturally claimed the same plane. The Germans also exaggerated the number of British aircraft they shot down. In both countries confusion was abetted by propaganda.
*The author met Lord Beaverbrook several times—he was a friend of Alexander Korda’s, and like Korda he enjoyed spending time on the Côte d’Azur, where he had a luxurious villa. Brendan Bracken (later the Viscount Bracken, PC) was another family friend, and also a self-appointed adviser and godfather figure to the author as a young person. Both Beaverbrook and Bracken were larger-than-life personalities, brash, acerbic, witty, tough-minded, and self-confident, whose only allegiance, apart from self-interest, was to Churchill.
*The Air Transport Auxiliary was formed in 1940 and included 166 women pilots, who delivered everything from Spitfires to bombers.
*The German parachute attack on Crete in 1941 was a success, but also a classic Pyrrhic victory—losses were so high that henceforth the German parachutists fought as an elite light infantry division. The American parachute landing in Sicily in 1943 was disastrous, and the full-scale attack on Arnhem in the autumn of 1944 by British parachute forces was a heroic and bloody defeat, brilliantly described in the book and the film A Bridge Too Far.
*Although about two-thirds of Dowding’s fighters were Hurricanes during the Battle of Britain, the glamour of the Spitfire was such that German aircrews invariably claimed to have been shot down by Spitfeuren even when the fighters in question were Hurricanes.
*A few of the Canadians were, in fact, Americans who had crossed the border and joined the RCAF to get in the war, to the consternation of U.S. ambassador Joseph Kennedy in the UK, who was anxious to keep American citizens from joining the RAF.
*The official numbers of aircraft in both air forces were separated into three distinct categories—“establishment,” meaning the number of aircraft a unit was supposed to have, on paper; “strength,” meaning the number of aircraft it actually had on a given date; and “serviceability,” meaning the number of aircraft in full repair and ready for operational service on a given date. These numbers are frequently mixed up, carelessly, by historians, as if they meant the same thing, but it is only the last category that matters. Aircraft being serviced or repaired, or standing idle because a part is missing, do not fly on operations. Thus, to take an example at random, on August 10, the three German Luftflotten assigned to attack Britain were supposed to have 1,011 Bf 109 s, but in fact had 934, of which 805 were serviceable.
*Under German racial laws, those of “mixed” blood, i.e., Mischlinge of the first degree, with one or two Jewish grandparents, were on the one hand obligated to serve in the armed forces, but on the other could not rise above the rank of sergeant or serve in such elite units as aircrew or submarine crews. They were also constantly threatened by the Gestapo’s determination to treat the Mischlinge as if they were full Jews, which the German army resisted, not out of an interest in racial justice, needless to say, but because such a policy would reduce its manpower pool.
*For the day-by-day details of the Battle of Britain, I have relied on two principal sources: The Royal Air Force Battle of Britain Campaign Diary, which is very accurate about weather, British fighter losses, and RAF and civilian casualties, as well as the exact damage inflicted by Luftwaffe raids, but is not necessarily accurate about German losses; and The Narrow Margin, by Derek Wood an
d Derek Dempster, Pen and Sword Military Classics, Barnsley, U.K., 1961, which is almost equally detailed and gives revised, accurate numbers for German losses, based on an analysis of postwar German records.
*“Bounce” was RAF slang for a surprise attack. You bounced or got bounced by the enemy. The origin is social-sexual—an overenthusiastic, or unexpected and unwelcome, sudden embrace, as in “She got bounced in the taxi on the way home.”
With Wings Like Eagles: A History of the Battle of Britain Page 32
