Chapter Fourteen
‘We Will All Be Here Soon’
German pilots were mapping out the nation. During that summer, they frequently did so on the nights when the moon was full and bright. The blackout below gave civilians a certain level of security, a protective cloak; but, using the glittering threads of rivers, the silver lines of railway steel, the enemy pilots were able to explore the darkened land below. They were seeking out the places towards which intelligence had pointed them: the manufacturing plants, specifically the plane factories, such as the great works at Filton, near Bristol. There was a chilly insolence about such missions, and something curiously as invasive as invasion itself. Naturally, the British were flying equivalent missions over Germany and its conquered territories. Nonetheless, the German sorties carried an extra charge of unease because there was still an essential mystery involved: what were they planning? And the invasion: when? And what form would it take? There was no one in Britain, however, who didn’t think that the Nazis would soon be landing.
Brief respite came for Dowding and the squadrons throughout the southeast just beyond the midpoint of August 1940. For a few days, the Germans scaled down operations to a series of scattered incursions. This is not to underplay the devastation caused by the raids: an oil storage depot in south Wales turned into a choking inferno which blazed for over a week; a swooping raid in Skegness targeted a naval training establishment and blew away a number of buildings, including 900 huts. But the vast formations of bombers and fighters were, for a brief few days, largely absent from the skies over Britain. In part, the Luftwaffe was regrouping, giving the squadrons based in France a chance to effect repairs and allowing the pilots a brief window of rest. Even throughout those days, though, the people of Britain were never allowed to forget that while they slept, there were killers flying high above them, with bombs poised to drop.
Sporadic nocturnal attacks in the Midlands targeted factories; in the West Country, the bombers homed in on Filton and dropped sixteen tons of bombs, putting part of the works out of action temporarily. And Londoners received a premonition of what was coming to them; Germans explored and targeted the industrial northeast of the city, from Walthamstow to Enfield, site of the vast ordnance works. In the event, factories sustained little damage; instead it was residential properties that suffered. Night-time defence was not a strong element in the work of Fighter Command, though it was not for want of trying. Radar could do so much; but in the velvet darkness, there was little the Observer Corps could have done to help without the vast arcing searchlights, and the very poor visibility made matters impractically difficult for the pilots. The leaders and pilots of Fighter Command nevertheless carried on as though they vastly outnumbered the enemy.
In the lives of fighter pilots, despite their nerve-tautening sorties, there were moments of curious serenity; fragments of time that appeared to stand apart from the frenzied flow. After one messy dogfight above the Channel, towards the end of the day, Geoffrey Wellum, piloting his Spitfire high above the clouds, knew he had to get back to base. But something had chimed in his soul. He wrote:
The sun is now below the horizon and the whole world in which I find myself is one of purple mistiness. Nothing appears to be alive. I am alone in a strange, still environment. No movement at all. My aeroplane is stationary … This is a type of peace and tranquillity that, to my mind, is utterly beautiful. It is a shame having to think about the ground and having to get back on it. If only I could go on flying like this forever.
Yet he was also sharply aware of the incongruity: ‘A short time ago, I probably killed a man. I was excited and elated, totally taken up with the chase and the kill on a “him or me” basis, and now this terrific sense of peace. What a strange life we pilots lead.’1
Another curiosity of those comparatively still days was the way that the German press, at the behest of Dr Goebbels, stepped up reports of a Britain that was held in a desperate stranglehold. ‘Conclusive phase of the war begun’ and ‘Great Britain in thumbscrews’ were two of the headlines to appear during this brief Luftwaffe interregnum. Berlin newspapers also suggested that the blockade of the island was complete, and that this was a satisfying fate for a nation that had inflicted starvation on German women and children with a similar ‘totalitarian blockade’ throughout the First World War. ‘The peril to which England has threatened to expose Europe now turns against the island itself,’ declared one newspaper. ‘England is from this day cut off from the world.’
But the British had other concerns. Indeed, on the same day, the Ministry of Home Security was moved to issue a nationwide plea: could members of the public please stop sightseeing the sites of bombing raids? Not merely the day after, but actually while the raid was in progress. ‘It should be realised,’ stated the stern communiqué, ‘that not only do persons congregating in crowds offer a target to enemy raiders, but that the work of rescue and firefighting may be gravely delayed.’
Air Chief Marshal Dowding kept a semblance of stability throughout this period at Bentley Priory by sticking to a disciplined routine. But was such a thing possible for his deputy Air Vice Marshal Park at Uxbridge? Having command of 11 Group – with its pre-dawn alerts followed by air battles that would run on until past sunset – imposed both terrific physical strain and mental strain, as did the fight to remain free of doubts about his strategy when so many of his superiors were starting to question his wisdom. Park nevertheless stood his ground. On one later occasion, he said of the events of late August 1940:
Owing to the very short warning received of enemy raids approaching England, or the south of England, it would have been quite impossible to intercept enemy formations with big wings before they bombed their targets such as the aerodromes and aircraft factories. At the very best, big wing formations from No. 11 Group, if we had used them, would have intercepted a few of the German raids after they had unloaded their bombs on vital targets, and were able to take evasive action by diving away in retreat under cover of their own fighter formations or escorts. The German escorting fighters, having the advantage of height and being freed from the need to escort their bombers, would have decimated our fighter squadrons.2
On top of this, Park knew better than anyone precisely how overstretched his 11 Group fighter squadrons were. In a later interview, he recalled that ‘I was a very worried man because I was short of pilots – I was never worried about the supply of aircraft.’ The reason for this shortfall was quite simple in Park’s view: incompetence and ‘bad planning’ in the Air Ministry. He remembered that when he was later sent to the ministry’s training department, he discovered that no one there had ever quite realised the pressing urgency of the pilot shortage. By contrast, the rate of aircraft production was one of the few aspects of life at that time that gave him solace. The reason? ‘Every night at midnight,’ Park recalled, he would get a personal call from Lord Beaverbrook, ‘asking for the score sheet’.3 Park would tell him of losses and damage; Beaverbrook passed the figures on to the aircraft production factories.
In August 1940, even during the brief lull, Park was never tempted to underestimate his enemies – wherever they might have been. The Germans were the same as they had been in the last war in the most crucial respects: they were ‘very good natural warriors,’ he said, ‘good fighters in the air.’ If they had one fatal weakness, it was that they were ‘slow to adapt themselves when set plans were thrown out, either by the weather, or by the enemy suddenly launching surprise action’.
Park, by contrast, had been almost absurdly adaptable, stretching his resources to their thinnest by setting up shadow airfields – emergency bases that could be deployed in the event that the main squadron aerodromes were targeted. He ensured that the shadow bases were properly equipped with all the telecommunications and radios that they needed. ‘This wasn’t a little game,’ said Park. ‘We weren’t in a position to test out theories.’ Indeed, he went further, asserting that if he had followed Bader’s theories about formations,
‘I would have lost the Battle of Britain.’ It was all about the continued existence of ‘London and the Empire’.4
And at the time, he knew what was coming. The Luftwaffe had first targeted the shipping and the convoys and the supply lines; then they had tried to make inroads into aircraft production. Next it was going to be an intensified German effort to destroy aerodromes and aircraft and hangars and communications – anything to put Fighter Command out of action. Then the way would be open for the German landings to begin, from the air and from the sea. In other words, Park knew that if 11 Group messed this up, they ‘might well have lost the war for the Allies’.
On the morning of 24 August 1940, German forces launched a bombing raid on Great Yarmouth in Norfolk. This could not disguise the steady build-up of forces facing across the Channel towards the country’s south coast. There were skirmishes and feints; British fighter squadrons in the air were trying to patrol the vulnerable airfields. But there were a great many airfields, and few fighters. The anti-aircraft gunners at Dover were initially effective against the incoming Germans, but a second raid proved more difficult to anticipate and see off. At lunchtime, the Germans targeted Manston in Kent and caused some damage, though not perhaps as much as they might have hoped. But the day was yet young. In mid-afternoon, about thirty Ju 88s, with their faithful fighter escorts, made their way relentlessly towards London.
They were engaged by 501 Squadron, but as a savage dogfight between fighter planes began, the bombers bulldozed through. Along the Thames estuary; banking to the left; and then, a few miles short of the great docks, banking right – they were making for the Hornchurch base, not far from the vast industrial works of Dagenham. Extraordinarily – and thanks to local anti-aircraft guns – out of 100 bombs dropped on the base, only six landed within its perimeter. The surrounding country consisted of reedy lakes, meadows and marshes. The German bombers turned to make their escape. Defiants and their crews, stationed at Hornchurch, set off in pursuit; according to the official history, the Defiants eventually managed to overtake the bombers, and the rear gunners had the rare and bloodthirsty satisfaction of firing directly into their opponents’ cockpits.
But the enemy was not quite finished for the day. It had another large 11 Group station in its sights. Again, there were decoy formations up in the air; the squadrons were being pulled in all directions. But a droning mass of bombers materialised offshore from Shoeburyness in Essex, twisted inland just a little further north, and dived determinedly on the base of North Weald.
On this occasion, they were slightly more effective; although they made little impact on the landing grounds, they destroyed the station’s generator house and living areas. It was at this point that Air Vice Marshal Park decided that it was time to take on the limitations of the otherwise excellent radar system. Although, as he recalled in an interview, the system ‘could give you the position of the approaching craft’, and swift calculations by the WAAFs in the Operations Room would give a good idea of its speed, what it still couldn’t do was give an accurate figure of height: ‘If you had a reading of 10,000 feet [3,048 metres], then you had plus or minus 2,000 ft [610 metres].’ The answer, he thought, was for the pilots to break radio silence upon spotting enemy formations. Radio silence gave pilots the advantage of surprise, enabling them to individually track, follow and attack the enemy from behind or from out of the sun. Breaking radio silence to report back to their squadron bases would alert the enemy to their own positions – but Park calculated that it was better for base, and for 11 Group HQ at Uxbridge, to be furnished with the height and the strength of the incoming bombers as soon as the patrolling fighters had spotted them.
At the start of this new and much deadlier phase of German attack, there were more sinister foretastes of what was coming to London and other cities. One night, Observer Corps volunteers watched a single plane making its way up the Thames towards the capital; it then circled the entire city, almost at leisure. On those muggy nights, a couple of other enemy planes got through too: railway bridges in east and north London were hit, a railway line was put out of action and hundreds of people in Bethnal Green had to be evacuated from their tenements when bombs fell close. And always a sense of the enemy sizing up the territory, stalking around and around, fraying the nerves of those below.
The response was, however, more multidimensional. The weekend’s bombing saw the stepping up of ‘Spitfire funds’, the aim of which was simply to raise money to buy new fighters. Down in south London, for instance, the ‘Lambeth Walk Spitfire Fund’ injected a note of black comedy. ‘Already large boxes are being made free of charge by our local undertaker, Mr Harry Smith, for money to be dropped in by passers-by,’ said a local spokesman. Did any of that community have any inkling of what would be coming to their own district in the black months of the winter? Similarly, the East End districts of East Ham, West Ham, Barking and Wanstead opened their own funds. Their proximity to the vast docks made their own vulnerability more obvious. The fund-raising may have provided at least a small psychological boost.
As Air Vice Marshal Park and Air Chief Marshal Dowding contemplated the evolving tactics of the Luftwaffe, a surprising voice weighed in with words both of admonition for friend and foe and encouragement for the RAF. ‘This is what comes of declaring war first and preparing for it afterwards,’ George Bernard Shaw told the Manchester Guardian. ‘The Germans have been preparing for the war for six years and their planes are out of date; ours are still being made, and they are newer and faster than theirs … Meanwhile, we must say what we are fighting for … People are getting impatient, for no-one knows what our aims are.’
That seemed not quite to be the case; for elsewhere, on 26 August 1940, RAF Bomber Command targeted Berlin, struggling through thick weather across the continent to try and hit armaments factories. There were also raids on the docks at Bremen, and swooping attacks on airfields in Belgium and northern France. It was hardly as if Britain was simply sitting back and taking it. The intensity of attack and counter-attack was to greatly increase.
Intelligence reports gathered from a variety of sources throughout August 1940 seemed to find signs of imminent Nazi attack oddly lacking. There was little indication of a build-up of armaments in Belgium or northern France; less movement of vessels around the northern French ports than might be expected. Yet this in itself may have been a feint. Moreover, why would the Nazis assemble craft that could easily be bombed long before they were needed? This indeed would appear to have been the case when, just a couple of weeks later, Britain found itself once more on official invasion alert (that is, an incursion was expected within three days) with the appearance of around 700 self-propelled barges in and around the port of Le Havre.
Before this, the Spitfire and Hurricane pilots were still heavily outnumbered but continued to counter-attack with extraordinary ferocity. This frequently involved pilots attacking German bombers not from above or from the side, but head-on, a tactic that must have seemed to Luftwaffe pilots verging on the suicidal. The aim of the British was to break up the bombing formations before their escorting fighters could intervene and take the fight elsewhere. Partly it was to do with the improved armour on the German planes; only by flying directly at them could a pilot be reasonably sure that his bullets would meet their mark. There was also evidence that the German pilots were utterly spooked by the tactic and dispersed quickly, as well they might. From their point of view, the British pilots must have looked terrifyingly insane. It is said that Dowding had not previously given his approval for this sort of action; the idea was that Spitfires should take on the fighters while Hurricanes engaged the bombers. With so few pilots, however, and with the battles unfolding at such speed, the tiny squadrons improvised and the terrifying direct assault was the result. By the end of August, the technique had complete official approval.
But the German bombers were now coming further inland, more frequently, crossing the country to find a range of targets from the Liverpool docks to large f
actories on the outskirts of Birmingham. There were Luftwaffe aircraft flying over Newcastle; Pilot Officer Robert Jones recalled the day in mid-August when his patrolling squadron, running low on fuel, had begun to wonder if the warnings from control had been a ‘wild goose chase’, when he was suddenly confronted with the terrifying sight of an enormous flight of bombers and fighters – the ‘biggest I had seen since the Hendon Air Shows’ – which, without even thinking of tactics or techniques, they had to take on instantly. Further down south, meanwhile, in 12 Group, Douglas Bader was increasingly furious about the way that he and his own pilots had appeared to be sidelined at this crucial moment. ‘Day after day,’ wrote his eager biographer, ‘while the fights raged, Bader alternately sulked and stormed in the dispersal hut at Coltishall … Ops ignored them. He kept railing at the stupidity of keeping them on the ground while outnumbered squadrons had to engage a massed enemy.’5
It is hard not to sympathise with Bader’s passion: a warrior being denied the one fight towards which he had striven his whole life. Added to this was his own huge experience and charisma; the men in his squadron were inspired. They were not alone: so was his 12 Group commander, Leigh-Mallory. The Fighter Control Officers association now suggests that Bader and his commander had failed quite to take on board the full impact of radar, or the intricate thread of speedy communications woven by Dowding and how it broadly enabled him to deploy fighters to the right places at the right time, as opposed to simply relying on pilots’ sense. Those who opposed Dowding were not necessarily to know that some dogfights, rather than being conducted by pilots sticking to principled formations, were ending up as frenzied free-for-alls. Bader’s voice was to grow more resonant yet, and he and Leigh-Mallory were to be instrumental in causing Dowding some distress. Even Air Vice Marshal Park started to incline a little towards their point of view: that it might be better to send up more fighters to see off the larger German formations.
The Secret Life of Fighter Command Page 19
