All Hell Let Loose: The World at War 1939-1945

The Luftwaffe’s commanders suffered from a confusion of objectives which persisted throughout the summer. Gen. Albert Kesselring opposed the assault on Britain, preferring instead to seize Gibraltar and gain dominance of the Mediterranean; Hitler initially vetoed bombing of British cities, while Goering rejected attacks on southern ports, which would be needed for the Wehrmacht’s landings. The Luftwaffe sought to gain dominance of the air space over south-east England by destroying Fighter Command, and embarked on an incoherent campaign to achieve this by sending bombers to attack airfields and installations, escorted by fighters which were expected to shoot down RAF planes as easily as they had done in France. Intelligence, a chronic weakness of the Third Reich, was woeful: the Germans had no understanding of Fighter Command’s detection and control network. They themselves had developed radar – Dezimator-Telegraphie, as they called it, or DeTe for short – before the British, and their sets were technically more advanced. But they failed to link them to an effective ground–air direction system, and never imagined that Fighter Command might have done so. Throughout the war, institutionalised hubris dogged the Nazi leadership, which was repeatedly wrong-footed by Allied technological initiatives; if Germans had not built a given weapon or device, they were reluctant to credit their enemies with the wit to do so.

Colonel ‘Beppo’ Schmid, head of Luftwaffe intelligence, was a charlatan who told his chiefs what they wished to hear. Goering had neither a strategic reserve of aircraft, nor manufacturing resources to create one. The Germans conducted the Battle of Britain with stunning incompetence, founded upon arrogance and ignorance. If the RAF made its share of mistakes, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding and his most important subordinate, Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park, the New Zealander commanding 11 Group, displayed a steadiness of judgement amounting to brilliance, entirely absent across the Channel. The Germans began their campaign with two assets: a modest superiority of aircraft numbers and a corps of experienced combat veterans. They failed to concentrate these, however, against the vital targets – radar receivers, fighter stations and supporting installations.

The Battle of Britain opened with July skirmishes over the Channel, as the Germans attacked coastal convoys and the RAF responded. Hitting a precision target from the air was difficult. A dive-bomber pilot attacking a 750-foot ship from astern, for instance, had only a 1.5-second margin of error in pressing his bomb release, which from abeam fell to a quarter of a second; it was a tribute to the skills of German Stuka pilots that they inflicted severe losses on British convoys. But the Ju87s flew even more slowly than the RAF’s Battle bombers, which had been destroyed wholesale in France, and it was now the turn of the British to exploit enemy vulnerability: Stukas suffered slaughter wherever Fighter Command encountered them, and eventually had to be withdrawn from the battle.

Spitfire pilot Geoff Wellum described the racing sensations of air combat:

All at once, crossfire, heavy and pretty close at that. Bloody front gunner. My target, concentrate, the target. Looking at him through the sight, getting larger much too quickly, concentrate, hold him steady, that’s it, hold it…be still my heart, be still. Sight on, still on, steady…fire NOW! I press the gun button and all hell is let loose; my guns make a noise like tearing calico…I get the fleet impression of hits and explosions of the glass nose of my Dornier and of Brian’s Spitfire breaking away, its oil-streaked belly visible for a fraction of a second. Keep firing, Geoff, hold it. For Christ’s sake break off or you’ll hit him; too close, this. I stop firing, stick hard over. I even hear his engines as he flashes by inches overhead. Bloody hell, this is dangerous!

In mêlées in the sky, it was often remarkable how few aircraft either side destroyed. Over a Channel convoy on 25 July, for instance, scores of British and German planes exchanged fire, but only two Spitfires were shot down, and one Messerschmitt Bf109. RAF pilots had received scarcely any training in air fighting, an art the Germans mastered over Spain and Poland, and the defenders were now obliged to learn by experience. Early in the battle, it became apparent that the overwhelming majority of ‘kills’ were achieved by a handful of each side’s best men: the top 3.5 per cent of Fighter Command’s pilots made 30 per cent of all claims for aircraft shot down, and the Luftwaffe’s aces accounted for an even higher proportion of ‘kills’. Exceptional eyesight, marksmanship and nerve to get close were the decisive factors.

The RAF strongly discouraged the cult of the ‘ace’, and of personal scores, but the Luftwaffe energetically promoted it. Such stars as Adolf Galland, Helmut Wick and Werner Molders were said by resentful comrades to suffer from ‘Halsweh’ – the ‘sore throat’ on which they were eager to hang the coveted ribbon of a Knight’s Cross – as all three did when their score of ‘kills’ mounted. Galland, a supremely effective air fighter but also a selfish and brutal one, had no patience with weaklings in his command. One day on the radio net a frightened German voice wailed, ‘Spitfire on my tail!’ and then again a few moments later, ‘Spitfire still behind me! What should I do?’ Galland snarled, ‘Aussteigen, Sie Bettnasser!’ – ‘Bail out, you bed-wetter!’

Air combat, unlike any other form of warfare, engaged exclusively very young men, who alone had the reflexes for duels at closing speeds up to 600mph; by thirty, they were past it. Commanders, confined to headquarters, issued orders. But outcomes hinged upon the prowess of pilots just in or just out of their teens. Almost everything they said and did in the air and on the ground reflected their extreme youth; on 17 August Lieutenant Hans-Otto Lessing, a Bf109 pilot, wrote exultantly to his parents, describing his unit’s hundredth alleged ‘victory’ like a schoolboy reporting the success of his football team: ‘We are in the Geschwader of Major Molders, the most successful…During the last few days the British have been getting weaker, though individuals continue to fight well…The Hurricanes are tired old “puffers”…I am having the time of my life. I would not swap places with a king. Peacetime is going to be very boring after this!’ One of the despised ‘puffers’ killed him the following afternoon.

The RAF’s Paddy Barthrop said afterwards: ‘It was just beer, women and Spitfires, a bunch of little John Waynes running about the place. When you were nineteen, you couldn’t give a monkey’s.’ British pilots partied relentlessly at night, youth overcoming exhaustion. Pete Brothers said, ‘We used to booze dreadfully.’ One day when his squadron was stood down in bad weather, the airmen adjourned to the bar, only to find themselves scrambled when the sky cleared. ‘I shall never forget taking off and thinking, “That button…turn it that way…switch on gunsights …” We were all absolutely tanked. Mind you, when we saw black crosses, you were instantly sober.’

They cherished their aircraft as magic carpets into the sky. Bob Stanford-Tuck said: ‘Some men fall in love with yachts or some women, strangely enough, or motor cars, but I think every Spitfire pilot fell in love with it as soon as he sat in that nice tight cosy office with everything to hand.’ Similarly, Bob Doe on his first sight of his new plane: ‘Our hearts leapt! We walked round it, sat in it, and stroked it. It was so beautiful I think we all fell a bit in love with it.’ Fighter Command’s British pilots fought alongside contingents of New Zealanders, Canadians, Czechs, South Africans and a handful of Americans. The 146 Poles who participated in the Battle of Britain formed the largest foreign element, 5 per cent of overall RAF pilot strength. Their combat reputation was superb, rooted in experience and reckless courage. ‘When you seen [sic] the swastika or black cross on the aircraft,’ said one of them, Bolesław Drobi

ski, ‘your heart beat much quicker, and you decided that you must get him or you get shot yourself. It’s a feeling of absolute…vengeance.’ This was not bombast. When Poles later attacked Germany, they chalked messages on their bombs – ‘This is for Warsaw’, ‘This is for Lwów’ – and meant it.

Popular adulation was heaped on the aerial defenders of Britain, expressed everywhere airmen met civilians – as they often did, in evenings after fighting in the sky above towns and villages. The applause of ordinary people meant much to the pilots amid their exhaustion and losses. ‘There was tremendous kindness,’ said one young man afterwards. ‘It was a lovely feeling. I’ve never felt that Britain was like that again.’ Soldiers muttered jealously about the RAF’s ‘Brylcreem boys’; the Wehrmacht had a similar phrase of its own for the Luftwaffe – ‘Schlipssoldaten’, ‘neck-tie soldiers’. For the rest of the war, fliers of all nations retained a glamour denied those who fought on the ground.

Fighter Command was acutely sensitive to the loss of its experienced pilots: ten Hurricane aces – men who had shot down five or more enemy planes – were lost between 8 and 19 August, then a further twelve between 20 August and 6 September. Novice replacements were killed at more than five times this rate; casualties were especially high in squadrons that continued to use the rigid formations RAF official doctrine prescribed for ‘Fighting Area Attacks’. Units fared better whose commanding officers promoted flexibility and initiative. Pilots who flew steady courses died; those who stayed alive dodged and weaved constantly, to render themselves elusive targets. Three-quarters of downed British fighters fell to Bf109s, rather than to bomber gunners or twin-engined Bf110s. Surprise was all: four out of five victims never saw their attackers; many were hit from behind, while themselves attacking a plane ahead.

‘People who stayed in a burning cockpit for ten seconds were overcome by the flames and heat,’ said Sgt. Jack Perkin. ‘Nine seconds and you ended up in Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead in Dr Archie McIndoe’s burns surgery for the rest of the war. If you got out in eight seconds you never flew again, but you went back about twelve times for plastic surgery.’ Hurricane pilot Billy Drake described the experience of being shot down: ‘It was rather like having a motor-car accident. You can’t remember what the hell happened.’ Both sides suffered heavily from non-combat mishaps, born of momentary carelessness or recklessness by tired and often inexperienced young men: between 10 July and 31 October, 463 Hurricanes suffered such damage, sometimes total and fatal. As many as one-third of both Dowding’s and Goering’s overall losses were accidental.

Few pilots who bailed out offshore were recovered: a man in a dinghy looked pathetically small to rescue-launch crews scouring the Channel and North Sea. Ulrich Steinhilper gazed below as he flew back over the Channel from a September mission: ‘Our track across those wild waters became dotted with parachutes, pilots floating in their lifejackets, and greasy oil slicks on the cold water showing where another Me109 had ended its last dive. All along the coast near Boulogne we had seen 109s down in the fields and on the grass, some still standing on their noses.’ Nineteen German aircrew drowned that day, while just two were picked up by floatplanes.

The chivalrous spirit with which the British, at least, began the battle faded fast. David Crook returned from a sortie in which his roommate had been killed, and found it strange to see the man’s possessions just where he had left them, towel hanging on the window. ‘I could not get out of my head the thought of Peter, with whom we had been talking and laughing that day. Now he was lying in the cockpit of his wrecked Spitfire at the bottom of the English Channel.’ That afternoon, the dead pilot’s wife telephoned to arrange his leave, only to hear the flight commander break news of his death. Crook wrote: ‘It all seemed so awful. I was seeing at very close quarters all the distress that casualties cause.’ After Pete Brothers’ squadron was engaged a few times and he had lost friends, he abandoned his earlier notions that they were playing a game between sporting rivals. ‘I then said, “Right, these are a bunch of bastards. I don’t like them any more. I am going to be beastly.”’ Very early in the struggle, pilot Denis Wissler wrote in his diary: ‘Oh God I do wish this war would end.’ But few of the young men who fought for either side in the Battle of Britain stayed alive through the five-year struggle that followed it. To fly was wonderful fun, but a profound and premature seriousness overtook most aerial warriors in the face of the stress and horror that were their lot almost every day they were exposed to operations.

Through August the Luftwaffe progressively increased the intensity of its assaults, attacking Fighter Command airfields – though only briefly radar stations. Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, C-in-C of Fighter Command, began the battle with an average of six hundred aircraft available for action, while the Germans deployed a daily average of around 750 serviceable bombers, 250 dive-bombers, over six hundred single-engined and 150 twin-engined fighters, organised in three air fleets. South-east England was the main battleground, but Dowding was also obliged to defend the north-east and south-west from long-range attacks.

The first concerted bombings of airfields and installations took place on 12 August, when Ventnor radar station on the Isle of Wight was put out of action. The Luftwaffe intended ‘Eagle Day’ on 13 August to be decisive, but in thick weather this degenerated into a series of poorly coordinated attacks. The Germans mounted their heaviest effort two days later on the 15th, dispatching 2,000 sorties over England, losing seventy-five aircraft for thirty-four British, two of those on the ground. Raiders flying from Scandinavian airfields – too remote for single-engined fighters – suffered especially heavy losses, and the day became known to German aircrew as ‘Black Thursday’. The two sides’ combined casualties were even higher three days later on the 18th, when the Luftwaffe lost sixty-nine planes against Fighter Command’s thirty-four in the air and a further twenty-nine on the ground.

Both air forces wildly overestimated the damage they inflicted on each other, but the Germans’ intelligence failure was more serious, because it sustained their delusion that they were winning. Fighter Command’s stations were targeted by forty Luftwaffe raids during August and early September, yet only two – Manston and Lympne on the Kent coast – were put out of action for more than a few hours, and the radar receivers were largely spared from attention. By late August the Luftwaffe believed Fighter Command’s first-line strength had been halved, to three hundred aircraft. In reality, however, Dowding still deployed around twice that number: attrition was working to the advantage of the British. Between 8 and 23 August, the RAF lost 204 aircraft, but during that month 476 new fighters were built, and many more repaired. The Luftwaffe lost 397, of which 181 were fighters, while only 313 Bf109s and Bf110s were produced by German factories. Fighter Command lost 104 pilots killed in the middle fortnight of August, against 623 Luftwaffe aircrew dead or captured.

The RAF’s Bomber Command has received less than due credit for its part in the campaign: between July and September it lost twice as many men as Fighter Command, during attacks on concentrations of invasion barges in the Channel ports, and conducting harassing missions against German airfields. The latter inflicted little damage, but increased the strain on Luftwaffe men desperate for rest. ‘The British are slowly getting on our nerves at night,’ wrote pilot Ulrich Steinhilper. ‘Because of their persistent activity our AA guns are in virtually continuous use and so we can hardly close our eyes.’

Goering now changed tactics, launching a series of relatively small bomber attacks with massive fighter escorts. These were explicitly designed to force the RAF to fight, especially in defence of airfields, and for the German planes to destroy it in the air. Dowding’s losses were indeed high, but Luftwaffe commanders were dismayed to find that each day, Fighter Command’s squadrons still rose to meet their attacks. Increasing tensions developed between 11 Group, whose fighters defended the south-east, and 12 Group beyond, whose planes were supposed meanwhile to protect 11’s airfields from German bombers. In late August and early September, several stations were badly damaged. Why were 12 Group’s fighters absent when this happened? The answer was that some of their squadron commanders, Douglas Bader notable among them, favoured massing aircraft into ‘big wings’ – powerful formations – before engaging the enemy. This took precious time, but in arguments on the ground the ‘big wing’ exponents shouted loudest. They were eventually given their heads, and made grossly inflated claims for their achievements. The outcome was that the reputation of Keith Park, commanding 11 Group, suffered severely from RAF in-fighting that in September became endemic, while 12 Group’s Trafford Leigh-Mallory – more impressive as an intriguer than as an operational commander – gained influence. Posterity is confident that Park was an outstanding airman, who shared with Dowding the laurels for winning the Battle of Britain.

Many of the RAF’s young fliers, knowing the rate of attrition Fighter Command was suffering, accounted themselves dead men, though this did not diminish their commitment. Hurricane pilot George Barclay’s 249 Squadron was posted to one of the most embattled stations, North Weald in Essex, on 1 September. A comrade said bleakly as they packed for the move, ‘I suppose some of us here will never return to Boscombe.’ Barclay himself took a slightly more optimistic view, writing in his diary: ‘I think everyone is quite sure he will survive for at least seven days!’

At the end of August, the Germans made their worst strategic mistake of the campaign: they shifted their objectives from airfields first to London, then to other major cities. Hitler’s air commanders believed this would force Dowding to commit his last reserves, but Britain’s leaders, from Churchill downwards, were vastly relieved. They knew the capital could absorb enormous punishment, while Fighter Command’s installations were vulnerable. The men in the air saw only relentless combat, relentless losses. George Barclay wrote to his sister on 3 September in the breathless, adolescent style characteristic of his tribe: ‘We have been up four times today and twice had terrific battles with hundreds of Messerschmitts. It is all perfectly amazing, quite unlike anything else…One forgets entirely what attitude one’s aeroplane is in, in an effort to keep the sights on the enemy. And all this milling around of hundreds of aeroplanes, mostly with black crosses on, goes on at say 20,000ft with the Thames estuary and surrounding country as far as Clacton displayed like a map below.’

Sandy Johnstone ‘nearly jumped clean out of my cockpit’ on getting his first glimpse of the massed Luftwaffe assault of 7 September. ‘Ahead and above a veritable armada of German aircraft…staffel after staffel as far as the eye could see…I have never seen so many aircraft in the air all at one time. It was awe-inspiring.’ At the outset, German aircrew derived comfort from flying amid a vast formation. ‘Wherever one looks are our aircraft, all around, a marvellous sight,’ wrote Peter Stahl, flying a Junkers Ju88 on one of the September mass raids. But he and his comrades quickly learned that security of mass was illusory, as formations were rent asunder by diving, banking, shooting Hurricanes and Spitfires. By late afternoon of the 7th, a thousand planes were locked in battle over Kent and Essex. George Barclay’s Hurricane was hit and he was obliged to crash-land in a field. The Germans lost forty-one aircraft on 7 September, while Fighter Command lost twenty-three. As in all the battle’s big clashes, the British had the best of the day.

Ulrich Steinhilper, flying a Bf109, was one of many pilots who, between spasms of intense fear and excitement, was struck by the beauty of the spectacle they created: over London one September day, he gloried in ‘the pure azure-blue of the sky, with the sun dimmed by the sinister smoke penetrating to extreme height; this interwoven and cross-hatched by the con trails of fighters locked in their life-and-death struggles. In among this, the burning balloons and the few parachutes in splendid and incongruous isolation.’ The Luftwaffe’s 15 September onslaught was unaccompanied by the usual feints and diversions, so that Fighter Command was in no doubt about the focus of the threat, and could throw everything into meeting it. Squadrons were scrambled to meet the raiders in pairs, intercepting as far forward as Canterbury, while the Duxford ‘big wing’ engaged over east London. That afternoon, the Luftwaffe’s second attack also met strong defending fighter forces; in all, sixty German aircraft were shot down – though the RAF claimed 185. Between 7 and 15 September, the Luftwaffe lost 175 planes, far more than German factories built.

The assault remained incoherent: the attackers had begun by seeking to destroy the RAF’s defensive capability, then, before achieving this, switched to attacking morale and industrial targets. Their relatively light bombers carried loads which hurt the British, but lacked sufficient weight to strike fatal blows against a complex modern industrial society. The RAF did not destroy the Luftwaffe, which was beyond its powers. But its pilots denied the Germans dominance of the Channel and southern England, while imposing unacceptable losses. Fighter Command’s continued existence as a fighting force sufficed to frustrate Goering’s purposes. Throughout the battle, British factories produced single-engined fighters faster than those of Germany, a vital industrial achievement. Fighter Command lost a total of 544 men – about one in five of all British pilots who flew in the battle – while 801 Bomber Command aircrew were killed and a further two hundred taken prisoner; but the Luftwaffe lost a disastrous 2,698 highly skilled airmen.

Churchill’s personal contribution was to convince his people, over the heads of some of their ruling caste, that their struggle was noble, necessary – and now also successful. The Battle of Britain exalted their spirit in a fashion that enabled them to transcend the logic of their continuing strategic weakness. ‘Our airmen have had a gruelling time, but each day that passes the more magnificently they seem to carry on the fight,’ wrote an elderly backbench Tory MP, Cuthbert Headlam, on 20 September. ‘It is odd to see how much we owe to so small a number of young men – here are millions of us doing nothing while the battle is being decided over our heads by a chosen band of warriors drawn from here, there and everywhere…They must be a superb body of men…one would like to know the difference in material strength of our RAF and the Luftwaffe: some day presumably we shall know – and then, more than ever, I expect, we shall salute the gallant men who are now doing such untold service for their country.’

Britain’s people endured the nation’s ordeal with some fortitude. Those who lived outside conurbations were spared from Luftwaffe attack, but fear of invasion was almost universal. If Churchill was committed to fight to the last, he was also brutally realistic about the implications of possible failure and defeat. Brigadier Charles Hudson attended a senior officers’ conference in York in July which was addressed by Anthony Eden as secretary for war. Eden told his audience that he had been instructed by the prime minister to take soundings about the army’s morale. He proposed to ask each general in turn whether, as Hudson recorded, ‘the troops under our command could be counted on to continue the fight in all circumstances…There was almost an audible gasp all round the table.’ Eden intensified the astonishment when he said that ‘a moment might come when the Government would have to make, at short notice, a terrible decision. That point when…it would be definitely unwise to throw in, in a futile attempt to save a hopeless situation, badly armed men against an enemy firmly lodged in England.’ He asked how troops might respond to an order to embark at a northern port for Canada, abandoning their families.

Hudson wrote: ‘In dead silence one after another was asked the question.’ The almost unanimous response was that most regular officers, NCOs and unmarried men would accept such an order. However, among conscripts and married men, ‘the very great majority…would insist either on fighting it out in England…or on [staying behind to take] their chance with their families whatever the consequences might be’. In other words, senior officers of the British Army believed that, in the face of imminent defeat, many of their men would make the same choice as had French soldiers – to give in, rather than accept the uncertainties and miseries of continuing the struggle in exile. Hudson concluded: ‘We left the conference room in a very chastened mood.’ Neither he nor most of his colleagues had contemplated the prospect that fighting on to the end might mean doing so from a foreign country, with Britain vanquished. Churchill accepted such a contingency; but in this, as in much else, Britain’s prime minister was willing to contemplate extremities of sacrifice from which many of his fellow countrymen flinched.

Hitler might have attempted an invasion of Britain if the Luftwaffe had secured control of the airspace over the Channel and southern England. As it was, however, instinctively wary of the sea and of an unnecessary strategic gamble, he took few practical steps to advance German preparations, beyond massing barges in the Channel ports. Churchill exploited the threat more effectively than did the prospective invaders, mobilising every citizen to the common purpose of resisting the enemy if they landed. Signposts and place names were removed from crossroads and stations, beaches wired, over-age and under-age men recruited to local ‘Home Guard’ units and provided with simple weapons. Churchill deliberately and even cynically sustained the spectre of invasion until 1942, fearing that if the British people were allowed to suppose the national crisis had passed, their natural lassitude would reassert itself.

Uncertainty about German intentions persisted through that summer and into autumn. Among the population at large, fear was mingled with a muddled and excited anticipation, all the keener because the prospect of fighting Germans in the fields and villages of England seemed so unreal. One aristocratic housewife injected some of her hoarded stockpile of Canadian maple syrup with rat poison, destined for German occupiers. To the dismay of her family, however, after some weeks she forgot which tins had been treated, and was obliged to deny the delicacy to her disappointed children. Wiltshire farmer Arthur Street caught something of the pantomime element in people’s behaviour, in an account of his own workers’ and neighbours’ conduct on 7 September, when a warning was transmitted to the Home Guard that German landings were imminent:

The Sedgebury Wallop platoon was on the job that night, and marched seventeen bewildered civilians to the local police station because they had forgotten their identity cards. But at 0700 the farmer in Walter Pocock woke up, and he suggested to his shepherd that he might abandon soldiering for shepherding for half an hour. ‘You’ll be wanting to see your sheep, but take your rifle and ammo,’ he advised. ‘The fold’s only ten minutes walk away, and I’ll send for you the moment anything happens.’ ‘I ’low me sheep’ll be all right eet awhile,’ reported Shep. ‘The day’s fold were pitched eesterday, an’ although young Arthur be but fifteen, I’ve a-trained ’im proper. Any road, I bain’t gwaine till the “All Clear” be sounded.’ At about 11 o’clock, when the word came through that the real or imaginary threat of invasion had passed, grumbling was rife. ‘Bain’t ’em reely comin’, sir?’ asked Tom Spicer wistfully. ‘’Fraid not, Spicer,’ replied Walter. ‘Jist wot I thought,’ growled Fred Bunce the blacksmith. ‘There bain’t no dependence to be put in they Germans.’

Those Wiltshire rustics enjoyed a luxury denied to the peoples of continental Europe: they could mock their enemies, because they were spared from the ghastly reality of meeting them: on 17 September Hitler gave the order indefinitely to postpone Operation Sealion, the Wehrmacht’s plan to invade Britain. The British people and the pilots of Fighter Command saw only a slow, gradual shift during October from massed daylight air attacks to night raids. Between 10 July and 31 October, the Germans lost 1,294 aircraft, the British 788. Hitler had abandoned hopes of occupying Britain in 1940, and also of destroying Fighter Command. He committed his air force instead to a protracted assault on Britain’s cities which was intended to break the will of the population. The Luftwaffe chose as primary targets aircraft factories, together with London’s docks and infrastructure. Due to the limitations of German navigation and bomb-aiming, however, in the eyes of the British people the attacks became merely an indiscriminate assault on the civilian population, a campaign of terror.

The ‘blitz’, which the defenders dated from 7 September, was far harder for Fighter Command to repel than daylight attacks, because the RAF had few night fighters and only primitive Air Interception radar. Churchill incited the feeble anti-aircraft gun defences to fire at will to hearten the population, as indeed they did – but with little impact on the raiders. Between September and mid-November, an average of two hundred Luftwaffe aircraft attacked every night save one. In that period, over 13,000 tons of explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on London, Bristol, Birmingham, Portsmouth and other major cities, at a cost to the Luftwaffe of just seventy-five aircraft, most of them victims of accidents.

The blitz imposed on city-dwellers mingled fascination, terror, horror and eventually acceptance of a new normality. A London woman wrote of one raid: ‘The bombs came down in a cluster, close together…Bomb explosions have a mesmeric attraction dating possibly from firework displays of one’s childhood, and I watched the first two explode. Unless it lifts an entire building in the air, the burst of an ordinary high-explosive bomb is not in itself a grand spectacle, as a major fire can be; its upward streaks of yellow or red look as crude and banal as a small boy’s painting of them.’ Muriel Green, a Norfolk village-dweller, wrote with notable sensitivity for a girl of nineteen about her thoughts as she heard German aircraft passing overhead, on their path to some British city, the night after the devastating 14 November attack on Coventry: ‘I wonder what the pilots feel. After all somebody loves them even if they are Nazis, and they are risking their lives and fighting for their country the same as our men that go bombing. Poor Coventry people. How bitter and hopeless they must feel today. How long can it go on? How many years must all live in fear of the unknown horrors that so many of us have not yet experienced?’

The bomber assault, which continued until Hitler began to withdraw aircraft for the invasion of Russia in May 1941, inflicted heavy damage on British city centres and ate deep into the spirits of millions of people who endured many nights huddled in shelters with their families and fears. It cost the attackers, flying from airfields in northern France, only 1.5 per cent aircraft losses per sortie. This was a much lower casualty rate than the RAF later suffered bombing Germany, because the British had further to go. Some 43,000 British civilians were killed and a further 139,000 injured. But throughout the winter of 1940–41 the Luftwaffe lacked a credible strategic plan, together with the aiming accuracy and bombloads necessary to inflict decisive damage on British industry. The young scientific intelligence officer R.V. Jones played a critical role, by identifying the Germans’ radio navigational beams and showing the way to jam them. Production was disrupted by alerts, and some important plants were damaged; tens of thousands of homes were destroyed, along with ancient buildings, churches and other landmarks. But, to a remarkable degree, the population of Britain learned to get on with its business amid air bombardment. ‘Human casualties were quieter than I had expected,’ wrote Barbara Nixon, an actress turned Finsbury air-raid warden.

Only twice did I hear really terrifying screaming, apart from hysteria; one night a [railway] signalman had his legs blown off and while he was still conscious his box burst into flames; it was utterly impossible for anyone to reach him and it seemed an age before his ghastly, paralysing screams subsided. Usually, however, casualties, even those who were badly hurt or trapped, were too stunned to make much noise. Animals, on the other hand, made a dreadful clamour. One of the most unnerving nights of the first three months was when a cattle market was hit, and the beasts bellowed and shrieked for three hours; a locomotive had been overturned at the same time and its steam whistle released. The high-pitched monotonous tone, coupled with the distant roaring of the bullocks, was maddening.

In an age when much local transport was still horse-drawn, some city stables borrowed from country custom and acquired a goat, which horses would follow in an emergency. One night when the premises of a big City of London firm of carters were set ablaze by bombs, two hundred of its horses were led to safety. Yet while Britain’s ‘blitz spirit’ was real enough, so too were the misery and squalor that bombardment imposed. Bernard Kops, a small boy who later became a playwright and novelist, wrote: ‘Some people…recall a poetic dream about the Blitz. They talk about those days as if they were a time of a true communal spirit. Not to me. It was the beginning of an era of utter terror, of fear and horror. I stopped being a child and came face to face with the new reality of the world…Here we were back on the trot, wandering again, involved in a new exodus – the Jews of the East End, who had left their homes, and gone into the exile of the underground.’

A strand of traditional British silliness helped the afflicted: a London vicar once asked a fellow occupant of his basement shelter whether she prayed when she heard a bomb falling. ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘I pray, Oh God! Don’t let it fall here.’ The vicar said, ‘But it’s a bit rough on other people, if your prayer is granted and the thing drops, not on you, but on them.’ The woman replied, ‘I can’t help that. They must say their prayers and push it off further.’ Air-raid shelters in old buildings swarmed with lice and bugs. In the big subterranean shelters of the inner cities, there was ugliness generated by drunken men and women, bitter quarrels and fights, filth inescapable where there were no lavatories.

Most people agreed that the struggle bore hardest upon the elderly and the very young, alike uncomprehending. Barbara Nixon again: ‘Neither had any idea what it was all about; they had never heard of Poland…and Fascism was, at most, a matter of that wicked beast Hitler who was trying to blow us up, or murder us all in our beds.’ Ernie Pyle, the great American correspondent, wrote from London in January 1941: ‘It was the old people who seemed so tragic. Think of yourself at seventy or eighty, full of pain and of the dim memories of a lifetime that has probably all been bleak. And then think of yourself now, travelling at dusk every night to a subway station, wrapping your ragged overcoat about your old shoulders and sitting on a wooden bench with your back against a curved street wall. Sitting there all night, in nodding and fitful sleep. Think of that as your destiny – every night, every night from now on.’

Seventy-one-year-old Londoner Herbert Brush described how a woman friend had been to her doctor ‘as evidently her nerves have gone wrong with the strain of driving a car under war conditions. On her way to Cambridge she came under machine-gun fire from the air and had to hide in a hedge. Then at Norwich there were several bombs dropped in the vicinity during the night. The doctor says she has shell-shock and has made her up a strong tonic and recommended complete rest for a fortnight.’ In a narrow sense, this woman’s response to relatively slight peril was unimpressive; but human beings measure risk and privation within the compass of their personal knowledge. It was meaningless to assert to an English suburban housewife that Poles, Jews, French refugees, and later soldiers on the Eastern Front suffered much worse things than herself. She knew only that what was happening to her was dreadful in comparison with all her previous experience of life. Only a few exulted in it, like thirty-year-old gardener, pacifist and conscientious objector George Springett. In the first weeks of war, he had regularly dosed himself with Sanatogen nerve tonic, but now he no longer felt the need for it: ‘I’ve had really first-class health since the blitz started!’

Among the heroes of the campaign were the men who learned by trial and error to deal with unexploded bombs, of which there were soon a plethora in Britain’s cities. One of the more remarkable was ‘Jack’ Howard, Earl of Suffolk. Early in the war, this maverick boffin, thirty-four in 1940, secured himself a roving commission in the Scientific Directorate of the Ministry of Supply. In that role, one of his more notable feats was to evacuate from Bordeaux after the French surrender £3 million-worth of industrial diamonds retrieved from Amsterdam, a group of France’s most brilliant scientists, and the country’s entire stock of Norwegian heavy water, indispensable for making an atomic bomb. In the autumn of 1940, this self-consciously eccentric figure chose to appoint himself to bomb disposal.

Suffolk formed his own squad, which included his pretty secretary Beryl Morden, and outfitted a van from his own resources. Thereafter, dressed in a stetson hat and flying boots or occasionally a pilot’s helmet, and invariably affecting a nine-inch cigarette holder, he addressed himself to defusing bombs, and especially to exploring German delayed-action devices, which were fitted with increasingly sophisticated anti-tampering devices. His courage and imagination were undisputed, but some BD men deplored his casual indiscipline. On 12 May 1941, at London’s ‘bomb graveyard’ in Erith Marshes, the earl was addressing a ticking Type 17 delay fuse when the bomb exploded, taking with it ‘Wild Jack’ Howard and thirteen other personnel rashly clustered around, including the beautiful Beryl Morden. His death was lamented, but it was widely held that his insouciance had caused the gratuitous loss of his companions. UXB work penalised amateurs.

A different sort of embarrassment was caused by another UXB man, Bob Davies, a pre-war drifter from Cornwall. He had acquired some technical experience during travels around the world, which he parleyed into an emergency commission in the Royal Engineers. Early one morning in September 1940, Davies commanded a squad sent to address a thousand-kilogram bomb which had buried itself deep in the road in front of St Paul’s Cathedral during a raid in the night. The engineers quickly found themselves in difficulties when overcome by gas from a fractured main, which caused them to be briefly hospitalised. Resuming work, they dug all night, until a spark ignited gas from another main, burning three men.

The press got hold of the story – and the threat to the cathedral. The Daily Mail used the opportunity to applaud the courage of the UXB squads: ‘These most gallant – and most matter of fact – men of the RE are many a time running a race with death.’ Deeper and deeper Davies’s men dug, until almost eighty hours after it fell, they reached the bomb, twenty-eight feet into the London clay. A heavy cable was attached, with which a lorry sought to extract the huge menace. This snapped. Only when two lorries took the strain on a second cable did the bomb slowly rise to the surface. It was lashed to a cradle and driven through the streets of London to Hackney Marshes, where it was detonated. The explosion blew a crater a hundred feet wide.

A flood of publicity followed about Davies and his team, who became famous. A headline asserted: ‘A Story that Must Win a Man a VC’. Davies and the sapper who found the bomb and saved St Paul’s were indeed awarded the newly created George Cross, for civil acts of heroism. Only in May 1942 did an unhappy sequel take place: Davies was court-martialled on almost thirty charges involving large-scale and systematic theft throughout his time in charge of his BD squad; he had also exploited his role to extract cash payments from some of those whose premises he saved from bombs, as well as passing dud cheques. More embarrassments followed: it emerged that the St Paul’s bomb did not, as claimed by the media, contain a delay fuse, so it was much less dangerous than had been alleged; and Davies did not himself drive it out to Hackney. The officer served two years’ imprisonment, being released in 1944. The perils of UXB work were indisputable, and the Cornishman undoubtedly did brave and useful work. But a lesson of his story was that scoundrels as well as heroes played their parts in the blitz, and some people were a tangle of both.

Hitler’s air assault on Britain ranks second only to the invasion of Russia among his great blunders of the war. After June 1940 many of Churchill’s people, especially in high places, recognised their country’s inability to challenge Nazi mastery of the Continent. If they had merely been left to contemplate British impotence, political agitation for a negotiation with Germany might well have been renewed, and gained support from the old appeasers still holding high government office. The unfulfilled threat of air attack, on an annihilatory scale widely anticipated and feared in 1939, could have influenced British policy more strongly than the reality of an inconclusive one.

The prime principle of employing force in pursuit of national objectives is to ensure that it is effective. The Germans failed to achieve this against Britain in 1940–41, a first earnest of one of the great truths of the conflict: while the Wehrmacht often fought its battles brilliantly, the Nazis made war with startling ineptitude. The Luftwaffe, instead of terrorising Churchill’s people into bowing to Hitler’s will, merely roused them to acquiesce in defiance.

Posterity sees the period between July 1940 and the spring of 1941 overwhelmingly in terms of Britain’s air battle against the Luftwaffe, yet that engaged only a small proportion of Germany’s military resources. For the remainder of Hitler’s warriors, and almost the entire army, this became a curious time of idleness comparable with the earlier Phoney War. To be sure, there were conquered nations to be secured, fruits of victory to enjoy – above all those from France. In Berlin, ‘The first effects of the war were not the traditional ones of decay and scarcity,’ wrote American correspondent Howard Smith, ‘but a sudden leap upwards in visible prosperity. Berlin charwomen and housemaids, whose legs had never been caressed by silk, began wearing stockings from the boulevard Haussmann as an everyday thing – “from my Hans at the front”. Little street-corner taverns began displaying rows of Armagnac, Martell and Courvoisier.’

German war industry, still performing relatively sluggishly, needed time to produce tanks, planes and ammunition to replace those expended in the Continental campaigns. The army spent the winter conducting a vast expansion programme – between May 1940 and June 1941 it grew from 5.7 million to 7.3 million men, from 143 divisions to 180. Beyond brandy and stockings, there was important industrial booty to be garnered from the conquered territories, especially railway wagons. Nazi occupation precipitated a drastic decline in economic activity which persisted across most of Europe until the liberation, though French armaments factories made a useful contribution to the German war effort.