Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain

So confident was Hitler that the game was over, and Britain had lost it, that he disbanded 15 divisions and put 25 divisions back to peacetime footing. But the British were gamblers too. They wanted double or nothing.

By the middle of July, Hitler issued Directive No. 16. ‘Since England, in spite of her hopeless military situation, shows no signs of being ready to come to a compromise, I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England, and, if necessary, to carry it out.’ Many historians have italicised the final half-dozen words of that sentence, claiming that it shows he was never in earnest. A more powerful indication of the unreality of Directive No. 16 is its timetable: all preparations were to be ready by the middle of August.

The Directive was so secret that it was sent only to the Commanders in Chief. But Göring passed it on to his Air Fleet commanders, and did so by radio. To put such a important message on the air was an unnecessary risk but the Germans had great confidence in their coding machines. At all levels of command, the Luftwaffe used the Enigma coding machine, at this time changing keys two or three times each day. The Enigma was a small battery-powered machine not unlike a portable typewriter. Rotors changed the cipher, and the receiving machine lit up each letter. This was then written down by one of the code clerks.

When war began the British staged a big cloak-and-dagger operation to get their hands on an Enigma machine. This was hardly the intelligence triumph that recent claimants suggest, as the company making them had had virtually identical Enigmas on sale to all comers since 1923. Having left things rather late, British intelligence were now fiddling with their machine desperately trying to decode intercepted German messages. It was very much a hit-or-miss affair. (In spite of all the nonsense written about it, very few vital messages of this period were decoded, and it wasn’t until the ‘Colossus’ computer began its work in 1943 that there was a regular flow of information.) When reading about Enigma it must be remembered that armies and air fleets received orders by landline teleprinter. Radio communication was not reliable enough for the very long and very complex orders required in modern war. And the Germans – whose monitoring service was excellent – were well aware of the danger to security that radio presented. Only rarely, as with this foolish risk taken with Directive No. 16, did the Enigma intelligence pay such a dividend. It gave the British the German code word ‘Sea-lion’ and was a shot in the arm for the code-breakers. Some claim that this decoded message prompted Churchill to make his ‘fight on the beaches’ speech.

FIGURE 4 (#litres_trial_promo). Seelöwe (Sea-lion)

The German navy submitted an invasion plan that would have created a narrow sea-lane, protected on each side by minefields. This plan was compatible with the very small naval force still available after the Norwegian campaign. On the other hand it would call for concentration areas in the Pas de Calais that would become targets that even RAF Bomber Command would be able to hit.

The German army envisaged landings all along the south coast. They wanted the speed and convenience of using the great ports and harbours of northern Europe, from Rotterdam and Antwerp to Le Havre and Cherbourg. This was particularly important to the armoured and motorised divisions.

When the German naval Commander in Chief received Hitler’s Directive No. 16, his response was immediate. The Admirals were agreed that no date could be determined until the Luftwaffe had air supremacy over the Channel, but they produced a draft plan and on 28 July the army looked closely at it. The navy planners proposed a beach-head near Dover. By using the narrowest section of the Channel they could lay minefields to protect the invasion fleet corridor. Submarines would be assigned to the Channel, in spite of the difficulties these shallow waters presented to submarines, and more to guard the North Sea flank. It was estimated that the navy would require ten days to put the first assault ashore. The army was horrified.

For the attack westwards through France in May, the German army command’s objectives had proved ridiculously modest, in the light of its panzer General’s achievements. Now the army was determined to show more ambition. It told the navy that it wanted landings all along England’s south coast, from Folkestone to Brighton, with a separate crossing from Cherbourg. The army would need tanks and wheeled vehicles which meant all the car ferries must be employed, together with the other cross-Channel tourist facilities. The first wave must be ashore within three days. The primary objectives were massive areas of southern England almost as far as London. And, in case you are still taking all this seriously, the first wave was to consist of 260,000 men, 30,000 vehicles and 60,000 horses! Having looked at the navy’s proposal, Walther von Brauchitsch, the army’s Commander in Chief, and his Chief of the General Staff, Franz Halder, stated unequivocally, ‘We cannot carry through our part of the operation on the basis of the resources furnished by the navy.’

On 31 July Hitler summoned his army and navy chiefs to the Berghof, his chalet in the Bavarian Alps near Berchtesgaden. Grossadmiral Erich Raeder explained the navy’s position first. Preparations were going as fast as possible. The navy was scouring occupied Europe for suitable barges, but the work of modifying them for military use and getting them to the Channel ports could not be completed before 15 September. In view of the army’s demand for a wider front for the landing, and with the prospect of autumn storms, it might be better to plan for an invasion in May 1941, said Raeder.

Hitler did not get angry at this suggestion but he pointed out that the British army would be better able to deal with an invasion by the following year, and suggested that the weather in May would be little better than that in September.

Having put the navy’s point of view, Raeder left the conference. Hitler continued to discuss ‘Sea-lion’ with his army commanders. At one point he went so far as to say that he doubted whether it was ‘technically feasible’. However no such doubts intruded into the Directive of the following day. It was signed by Feldmarschall Keitel and came from the OKW, the High Command of the combined armed forces which Hitler personally controlled. Preparations were to continue, and all would be ready by 15 September. Meanwhile the Luftwaffe would begin a large-scale offensive and, according to the effects of the air raids, Hitler would make a final decision about the invasion at the end of August.

The most significant aspect of all this top-level discussion was the absence of Luftwaffe chiefs. At the Berghof meeting, where the ball was passed to Göring’s Air Fleets, there had been not even one representative of the Luftwaffe.

And so Göring’s so-called Eagle Attack (Adlerangriff) was born in the same bungling, buck-passing muddle that had left Guderian at Sedan without objectives, and then halted him while the men in Berlin thought about it. It was the same mess of contradictory orders that had stopped the German armour at Dunkirk. The top brass of the Wehrmacht were learning that it was safer to equivocate.‘Sea-lion was contemplated,’ said the jokers afterwards, ‘but never planned.’

There was no proper training for the highly specialised amphibious assault and no staff officers with enough experience to plan one. But, having passed the immediate problems to Göring, the army engaged in a series of energetic invasion rehearsals, and propaganda units filmed them for release to cinemas on the actual day. Even more diligently, the German navy searched the rivers and canals of Europe, and crammed the northern ports with barges from all over Europe. Countless men with saws and welding torches fitted each with crude ramps for sea-sick horses under fire. The barges were to be towed across the Channel in pairs, by tugs, at a speed of five knots. The lines of barges were expected to be at least twelve miles long. When they neared England, the plan said the barges were to be sailed into lines from which one unpowered barge would be lashed to a powered barge. Together they would assault the beaches.

Not even the initial assault boats (Sturmboote) were armoured. They were tiny vessels, some held only six infantrymen plus two crew. They were designed for river crossings and modified so that they could be launched from minesweepers that would take them as close as possible to the British coast. And the barge crews included Dutchmen, Belgians and Frenchmen with no vested interest in the operation’s success.

Even if one is generous enough to equate the modified German barges with what were later called LCTs (Landing Craft, Tanks), the Germans still had nothing to compare with the two vessels that the Allied armies were later to find indispensable for seaborne invasion. First, the LST (Landing Ship, Tank) that could survive a heavy sea, and yet had shallow enough draught to put tanks directly on to a beach. Secondly, the DUKW, which was a two-and-a-half-ton truck, with a hull and propeller fitted to it. Groups of them brought supplies from supply ship to beach very quickly, so releasing the ship for another trip.

Churchill did not take the threat of invasion seriously. On 10 July he told the War Cabinet to disregard Sea-lion. ‘… it would be a most hazardous and suicidal operation,’ he said. It is in the light of this that one must see Churchill’s boldness in sending tanks to Egypt in the summer of 1940. It also explains why he backed up Beaverbrook, the new Minister of Aircraft Production, when he poached personnel and commandeered property that built more fighters but caused delays and shortages in other war industries.

At this stage of the war, any German invasion – seaborne or airborne – would have been cut to pieces. British experiments with setting the sea ablaze were fearsome, and Bomber Command were secretly training their squadrons in the use of poison gas. A cover story about spraying beaches to destroy vermin had been prepared for release should the Germans object to this form of warfare. RAF Medical Officers assigned to the poison gas units were being fortified with copious draughts of ‘captured’ champagne.

All this has encouraged some to suggest that there was no real danger of invasion in 1940, and conclude that Fighter Command did not fight a decisive battle. This is a specious argument. Had the Luftwaffe eliminated Fighter Command, its bombers could have knocked out all the other dangers one by one. Given the sort of command of the air that the Luftwaffe had achieved in Poland in only three days, German bombers, guided by radio beams, could have destroyed everything from Whitehall to the units of the Home Fleet. There would have been no insurmountable problem for invasion fleets and airborne units if the air was entirely German.

The Douhet Theories

Like many high-ranking airmen, and manufacturers of bombing aircraft, Göring subscribed to the theories of General Giulio Douhet, an Italian who believed that armies and navies were best employed as defensive forces while bomber fleets conquered the enemy. Just before he died in 1930, General Douhet wrote a futuristic story called ‘The War of 19 –’. Often quoted but seldom read, Douhet’s words had such profound effects upon the German and the RAF High Commands that they are worth examining. Written in the documentary manner of H. G. Wells, Douhet’s story described how an ‘Independent German Air Force’ fought great aerial battles against the Belgian and French air units. ‘There was no doubt that the enemy’s purpose was to make the mobilisation and concentration of the Allied armies as difficult as possible,’ said Douhet’s imaginative fiction. The Allies replied with ‘night-bombing brigades’ that attacked German cities with explosives, incendiaries and poison gas.

Douhet’s fiction continues with the Independent German Air Force dropping leaflets telling the citizens of Namur, Soissons, Châlons and Troyes that their cities are to be obliterated, and that Paris and Brussels will go the same way unless they sue for peace. The tale ends when those towns are obliterated, and the governments do sue for peace. It was the pressure that civilians under air bombardment would put upon their own government that formed the basis of Douhet’s theories. At the end of his story he writes:

Impressed by the terrible effects of the bombings and the sight of the enemy planes flying freely and unopposed in their own sky, though they cursed the barbarous methods of the enemy, they could not help feeling bitter against their own aeronautical authorities who had not taken enough protective measures against such an eventuality.

Douhet believed that any nation devoting a large part of its air force to air defence, was risking conquest by a nation that spent everything on bombing fleets. Totally disregarding all the advantages that the defence enjoys in any form of warfare, Douhet smoothly concluded that ‘No one can command his own sky if he does not command his adversary’s sky.’

The German Army Air Service’s tactics in the First World War had already proved that this was nonsense, but Douhet provided abundant quotes for ambitious bomber theorists. Such men, in Germany, France, Britain and the USA, had long since decided that in war the importance of an air force (and its commanders) would be judged by the amount of damage done to the enemy, not by skill in defence. Douhet was important because he reinforced illusions about the effectiveness of the bomber and reduced still further the influence of the fighter pilots.

Although he had been a fighter pilot, Hermann Göring found Douhet’s ideas easy to accept. He was not sympathetic to the complex technical devices which had converted air warfare from armed barnstorming to crude science. Like many of his contemporaries, he found it convenient to stick to von Richthofen’s simplistic dictum that shooting down enemy planes was ‘the only important thing’ and that ‘everything else is nonsense’. And Göring’s Luftwaffe was dedicated to the offensive, designed for close co-operation with the invading German armies. It lacked long-range bombers, but – argued its leaders – what did that matter if the invasions were so successful that you could leap-frog forward with your medium-range machines from each new lot of captured airfields. It seemed to make sense.

By 1940, some were already claiming that Göring had proved Douhet right. The capitulation of Poland and the Netherlands had followed quickly after the bombing of Warsaw and Rotterdam respectively. Even sceptics were beginning to believe that this was cause and effect. Certainly it seemed to provide Göring with a trump card. If his overall programme of air attacks against military targets in southern England failed, he had only to switch his whole attack to London itself and the British government would seek terms. Douhet said so, and history proved it.

Unfortunately for Göring there were, in Britain, some young flyers who had never read Douhet, and an elderly disbeliever named Dowding.

* (#ulink_22e45eaa-6459-5a01-ad64-a35c1f30aa38) The world’s first passenger-carrying airline service was operated by Zeppelin airships before the First World War.

* (#ulink_15cd965b-ad6f-5940-adab-6ae4691bf217) The Messerschmitt 109 and 110 designs were started when the company was named Bayerische Flugzeugwerke and thus were abbreviated Bf 109 and Bf 110. In July 1938 the company became Messerschmitt AG, so that the abbreviations for the later designs were Me 210, Me 410, Me 163, etc.

PART TWO (#ulink_595a31b6-cede-5fd9-ba10-8b7410db68b4)

‘A difficult man, a self-opinionated man, a most determined man, and a man who knew, more than anybody, about all aspects of aerial warfare.’

– GEN. SIR FREDERICK PILE, GCB, DSO, MC (General Officer Commander in Chief Anti-Aircraft Command, 1939–45), of Dowding

It is difficult to imagine a man less like Hermann Göring than was Hugh Dowding. In 1914, already 32 years old, Dowding qualified as a pilot. His father heard about it and forbade him to fly because it was too dangerous. Hugh Dowding obeyed his father.

Both his parents came from the sort of upper-middle-class families that supplied senior men to the Church, India and the armed forces. His father, a kind and conscientious man, had founded a successful preparatory school in Scotland. There were four children, three boys and a girl.

As the eldest child of the school’s head-master, Hugh Dowding was expected to set an example of duty, manners, patriotism and industry. Like his father, he went to Winchester, a public school reputed to produce inscrutable intellectuals. Dowding’s subsequent career did little to change the Wykehamist reputation.

At Winchester he found that joining the Army Class was a way to avoid Greek verbs. Later Dowding said that he went into the army rather than learn Greek, but in 1899 – when he entered the Royal Military Academy – Queen Victoria’s scarlet-coated soldiers were just about to fight the Boers in South Africa. The British, after many years of widespread contempt for men and matters military, were undergoing a bout of hysterical jingoism.

In response to the crisis, the army shortened its Royal Military Academy course to one year. Dowding’s family could not have afforded the private income that their son would have needed in a smart regiment. Instead Hugh Dowding went to Woolwich but failed to get the exam results necessary for a commission in the Royal Engineers. He had to be content with gunnery. Second Lieutenant Dowding, of the Garrison Artillery, graduated but never fought the Boers. Instead he served in Gibraltar, Ceylon, Hong Kong, and with the Mountain Artillery in India.

By the time he returned to England the world had fundamentally changed: the Wright brothers had built their flying machine, and a Frenchman, Louis Blériot, had flown the Channel. The idea of learning how to fly attracted Dowding, in the same way that polo and skiing did. By getting up in the early hours he was able to have flying tuition at Brooklands before arriving at the Camberley Staff College each morning. The Royal Flying Corps had been formed the previous year, and anyone who could fly and was accepted by it could get the cost of his flying tuition refunded. Dowding persuaded the flying school to teach him on credit until he got the refund. It was on this ‘fly now, pay later’ arrangement that Dowding was able to afford his Royal Aero Club certificate. The school assigned a mechanic to be his instructor and he got his ‘ticket’ after a total of one hour and forty minutes in the air.

After a further three months’ instruction at the Central Flying School, Upavon, Dowding received his wings. Until then he had considered flying as a sport, or at best a help to his army career. But his short time with the men of the Royal Flying Corps – still a part of the army – made him think that he would like to stay with them. His father’s veto did no more than delay matters. It was 1914. Within weeks of getting his wings, war with Germany began. Dowding’s qualification as a pilot required him to serve with the RFC.

Dowding went to France. By 1915 he was a squadron commander. Dowding was considerably older than the average wartime pilot – ten years older than von Richthofen, for instance – and, as the RFC expanded and became the RAF, his military background brought him rapid promotion. By the time the war ended, Dowding was a Brigadier-General. Many rungs lower on the promotion ladder were three young squadron commanders. They were all to play vital roles in the Battle of Britain almost a quarter of a century later.

Commanding an army-cooperation squadron, there was Major Leigh-Mallory, who was to continue with this speciality in the peacetime air force. Leigh-Mallory, who later became Dowding’s severest critic, was ten years younger than Dowding. He had taken an honours history degree at Cambridge before becoming a soldier and, in 1916, an airman. Trafford Leigh-Mallory was a thick-set man with heavy jowls and a small, carefully trimmed moustache.

Major K. R. Park, MC and bar, DFC, was an astounding New Zealander who had fought at Gallipoli, been wounded on the Somme, and then, by losing his medical records, transferred to the air force and shot down twenty German aircraft.

Keith Park was a popular and persuasive man. He had quelled a near mutiny in 1918 by assembling the airmen and talking to them on random subjects and in such a monotonous voice for so long that all rebelliousness was destroyed by fatigue.

Thirdly there was Major W. Sholto-Douglas, DSO, MC, a fighter pilot credited with five victories. In another example of post-war Angst, Dowding was instructed by the Air Ministry to court-martial Sholto-Douglas over something that was in no way the young officer’s fault. In spite of a rather delicate situation that obtained between Dowding and the Air Ministry over his own retention in the RAF, Dowding refused to take any action. For this, Sholto-Douglas seemed suitably appreciative.

Dowding was an enigmatic man. His inability to make intimate friends will probably keep him so. It is difficult to reconcile a man who put on his hat before stepping into the next office, with a ski champion who seldom missed a season on the slopes, and eventually became president of the Ski Club of Great Britain. There was Dowding the diligent administrator, and Dowding the impatient technician; Dowding the devout and courteous, and Dowding of whom the Air Ministry was afraid. If Dowding remains an enigma there can be little doubt that that is exactly what he wished.

Already an abstemious and dedicated man, his social life virtually disappeared upon the tragic death of his wife after only two years of marriage. He was left to care for an infant son. Withdrawn and reflective, Dowding now devoted himself entirely to his work. Some mistook this attitude for ambition.

In the early 1930s Dowding was appointed to the Air Council as Member for Supply and Research. One of his first dicta was that wood must no longer be the structural base of combat aircraft. During Dowding’s time in this vital job, the RAF changed from biplane fighters to metal monoplanes. It was not done without strong opposition from the biplane lobby. In 1935 the first Hurricane flew, and the prototype Spitfire came a few months later.

It was on Dowding’s authority that Robert Watson-Watt of the National Physical Laboratories demonstrated the way in which an aircraft could reflect a radio beam (in this case a BBC overseas programme). They watched a pinhead of light on a cathode-ray oscillograph stretch to a tiny green line. It was the crude beginning of Britain’s radar.