A Summer Bright and Terrible (30 page)

Hit them with everything, he thought. Break
their spirits, break their backs, throw everything in, hold nothing back. He
gathered his forces together on the twelfth and thirteenth, and then on the fourteenth,
the weather deteriorated. He sent out a few raids to hit the radar stations in
preparation for a massive assault on the following day. Just in case Dowding
had any fighters left—and just in case their radar worked—he wanted it out of
order. On Sunday, September 15, he would hit them with everything he had. He
would overwhelm them, crush them. His fighters were rested, his bombers loaded
and ready to go. He promised Hitler that the invasion could proceed as planned.

Hitler glowered. Goring had been promising to
destroy the British since before Dunkirk. When he left, Hitler informed his
general staff that he had decided to postpone once again, and for the last
time, his decision on Sea Lion. He would wait until Goring’s supreme effort was
over, and then he would evaluate the situation. He would make a final decision
on September 17. No further postponements would be possible.

As September 15 dawned over England, the
stars disappeared and a bright blue clarity spread over the heavens. The sun
rose strong and hot, burning away the morning mists that tried to cling to the
damp grass of the aerodromes. The British pilots finished their breakfasts and
came wandering out to the flight line. They sat down at card tables to play
pontoon or stretched out in the traditional deck chairs to catch a few rays.
Three days before, they had been harried, exhausted, bleary-eyed. But they were
young and healthy, and with the past few days off, were once again “the gayest
band that ever flew.’’

That is, most of them were. Others were
throwing up their breakfasts behind the operations shacks, while still others
were suffering the “shits” in the latrine. The Poles were glowering at the sky,
trying to force it to unveil the Germans: They wanted nothing but to kill
Germans. The Americans—there were a half dozen of them, one of whom would
survive—were chatting. The French were dreaming of Paris. The Czechs and
Belgians were solemn, waiting.

At ten minutes before eleven o’clock, the radar
station at Rye reported an echo. Twenty-plus forming up ten miles below
Boulogne. Two squadrons of No. 11 Group were ordered to readiness. Quickly,
more plots began to come in. Ten-plus, twenty-plus, thirty-plus. It was going
to be a big day, which was no surprise.

The invasion barges had been piling up along
the French coast, and every night Bomber Command had gone out to sink them, and
every night they reported more and more of them. In addition, the Ultra
decoding experts at Bletchley Park had just intercepted an order setting up a
unit to organize quick turnarounds for supply and troop-carrying aircraft. The
purpose of this was clear: These planes would be carrying paratroopers and
supplies across the Channel and, upon completing the round-trip, would be
quickly reloaded and sent back. Finally, the coming autumnal weather was no
secret on either side of the Channel; everyone in England knew the invasion had
to come soon or not at all.

Today would be the day, Dowding decided. All
summer he had hoarded his fighters, sending them up a few at a time into
overwhelming odds so that he might have another few ready for tomorrow. But
today, with an exquisite sense of timing, he realized there would be no more
tomorrows. He would meet them today with everything he had. He would stake it
all on this last throw of the dice.

As the first radar reports came in, Park
ordered all his squadrons to readiness, but didn’t scramble them. There was
something strange about the radar reports: The blips had always moved quickly
across the Channel toward London, but today they were stationary. Or, rather,
they seemed to be moving in circles, gaining height . . .

Of course. They were doing what Bader did with
his silly Big Wing. Instead of moving into the attack, the first planes were
circling over their bases, building up their formations and climbing together
to altitude. As Park watched, he saw the fighter blips forming over the
bombers. Goring must be worried that they hadn’t been coordinating properly, so
today they were forming up before they started across the water—never realizing
that they were being watched by radar. They were giving Fighter Command what it
needed most: time.

Park ordered the information sent immediately
to 12 Group. For once, Bader might be able to do a bit of good.

The first raid was attacked by twenty Spits of
No. 11 Group as it crossed the coast, and within minutes, four full squadrons
joined them. As London slid up over the horizon, four squadrons of Hurricanes
came diving out of the noonday sun in a wild head-on attack. The bombers tried
to turn away, but now Bader’s Duxford Wing came thundering in; he had put the
extra minutes of warning to good use, and now he brought five whole squadrons
of fresh fighters blasting their way through the escorting Messerschmitts
before they could react, sweeping like a scythe through the bomber formation.

The bomber formation broke apart under that
fire. They dropped their bombs where they were and turned and ran back to
France, harried and hassled by a sky suddenly full of British fighters; they
returned to find the fat Reichsmarschall trembling with rage. How dare they
tell him they couldn’t vanquish the British! He ordered them to refill their
bomb bays, to refill their tanks, and never mind their stomachs. They were
going right back to catch the British on the ground and unprepared.

But Dowding was quite prepared. The Spits and
Hurris were rearmed and refuelled almost before their wheels stopped turning.
The pilots were plied with tea and biscuits, dropping them on the grass when
the calls came through: twenty-plus and thirty-plus, building up all over north-eastern
France. By two o’clock, the Luftwaffe was back again, hundreds of them sweeping
in once more, heading straight for London.

A few Hurricanes met them as they crossed the
coast, but the escorting Me’s beat them off. A squadron of Spitfires joined in,
but were still too few to break through. To the bomber crews, Goring finally
appeared to be right: There were just a few fighters left . . .

And then another squadron of Spits came sailing
around the clouds, and another of Hurris came under them. Squadron after
squadron came flying into the fray as Park followed Dowding’s orders and sent
up everything he had, and the bombers began to fall flaming from the sky.

And then, just as they reached London, Bader’s
Duxford Wing came out of nowhere. The radar stations had seen the enemy early
enough to give sufficient warning, and there was no need to guess at which
target the enemy was heading for. Finally today, his idea worked. The
five-squadron Wing came diving out of the sun, pouring through the escorting
fighters and crashing through the bomber formation, scattering them, burning
them, destroying them. In an instant, the black-crossed sky was fluttering with
black smoke from burning Heinkels and white-parasoled parachutes.

The Messerschmitts were left turning and
twisting in the wind, trying to herd the bombers back together, and failing
that impossible task, the German fighters now realized they had better try to
save themselves as the Spitfires flashed around them. Even No. 10 Group got
into the action as two of its squadrons came diving out of the sun. And the Me’s
whirled around and, at each turn, they saw more fighters, more British roundels
on the wings, more bright red flashes of machine guns. Where were all these
British fighters coming from?

At Bentley Priory, the radar reports showed no
further build-ups over France, and Dowding knew that this was the height of the
battle, this was the climax of the summer. He called Park and Leigh-Mallory:
Send in everything, hold nothing back.

The Messerschmitt and Heinkel crews had been
told there were no more fighters left in Britain, and now six more squadrons of
11 Group dropped onto them from the seemingly infinite sky. The bombers turned
and fled for home. The Messerschmitts tried to protect them but they had been
fighting too many Spitfires for too long, and now in each of their cockpits, a
small red light began to wink. Their fuel was nearly gone, and they still had
fifty miles of England and another twenty miles of cold, wet Channel waters to
cross. One by one, they began to dive away for home, with Spitfires spitting
tracers at their tails and with Hurricanes turning their attention to the
bombers they left behind.

Winston Churchill left 11 Group
headquarters after the afternoon’s battle and returned to Chequers, where he
went directly to bed for his afternoon nap. When he woke, his private secretary
was ready with the day’s news. It was a typical day in the summer of 1940:
problems, troubles, delays, ships sunk, vessels lost, cities bombed. However,
said the private secretary, none of that matters. “All is redeemed by the air.
We have shot down a hundred and eighty-five for a loss of under forty.”

#

INTERCEPTED RADIO MESSAGE (ENCODED)

FROM: Generalfeldmarschall A. Kesselring,
Commanding Officer, Luftflotte 2, Headquarters, Cap Blanc

TO: Reichsmarschall H. Goring,
Headquarters, Okerkommandoluftwaffe

MESSAGE READS: We cannot keep it up. . . .

#

Thirty

The RAF hadn’t shot down 185 airplanes; the
true Luftwaffe loss was 59. It didn’t matter. What did matter was that they had
beaten off the onslaught, and they were still in existence. More than that,
they felt stronger than ever; they smelled the blood of their enemies. They
were victorious!

They awoke the next day, Monday, September 16,
full of confidence. They had their tea, and they waited for the Luftwaffe to come
back. They bloody well dared the Luftwaffe to come back!

The sun rose into another clear blue summer’s
sky, but nothing else rose into that sky. The day’s radar operators were up at
dawn, staring at their screens, seeing nothing. The radar transmitters sent
continuous radio waves across the Channel, and none of them bounced back. At
the German aerodromes, all was quiet. At the British aerodromes, patched now
and in full operation, the Spitfire engines turned over, their full-throated
rumbling caressing the grass. For the rest of their lives, the fighter pilots
would swear there was no sound in the world as lovely as a Spitfire engine.
Today they were lulled to sleep by the sound, they dozed in the sun or chewed
their nails, and some of them vomited whenever the telephone rang, but it was
nothing except a message that the morning tea was late or someone had forgotten
his flying boots.

In France, Goring was holding another
meeting with his senior commanders, a bewildered and beaten group. He asked for
suggestions, but they had none. Galland thought better of asking again for
Spitfires. He had seen enough of them already. Behind every cloud, they all
said, coming out of the sun, climbing from below, south of London, east of
London, everywhere they looked, there was always another squadron of Spitfires
coming at them.

Goring tried to rally them. They had met the
last of the British fighters, he exhorted them. All that was needed was one
more effort. No one answered. He stared at them. They looked away, they looked
at the walls, they looked out the window at the sky. Over Spain, over Poland,
over France, that sky had belonged to them.

It was no longer theirs.

On Tuesday, September 17, the day of Hitler’s
final invasion decision, the British wireless service intercepted two signals
from the German General Staff. They sent the messages to Bletchley Park, where
the staff of decoders got to work on them, using their Enigma machine. The
decoded messages were sent, marked
Ultra, For Your Eyes Only,
to
Churchill.

The first message was to the officer in charge
of the invasion barges that had been piling up along the coast of France and
that had been the target of Bomber Command every night. He was ordered to begin
dispersing them, sending them back upriver to their home ports.

The other message was to the German officer in
Holland who was in charge of the unit responsible for the quick turnarounds to
be organized for the paratroopers and supplies scheduled to be ferried across
the Channel when the invasion began. Today’s message informed him that his
equipment was to be dismantled and that he was to report back to headquarters
for reassignment.

The Battle of Britain was over.

Thirty-one

During the winter of 1940—1941, British
airplane production increased dramatically, so that by the following spring,
when the waters of the Channel had calmed again, Hitler turned away from that
damned little island. His string of easy victories was over. Instead he invaded
Russia, leaving England behind as a massive aircraft carrier from which British
and American bombers began to destroy the German industrial capacity, beginning
finally his long decline.

But the ordeal of the British people was far
from over. Hitler couldn’t gain aerial superiority over the island nation, he
couldn’t invade it, but he could pound and blast it from the air at night, when
the cowl of darkness rendered all things invisible. The Battle of Britain was
over, but the Blitz had just begun.

Throughout the summer of 1940 the Luftwaffe
had been bombing nightly, in what was more than a nuisance but less than
anything meaningful. The bombers came to Coventry and Birmingham, to Liverpool
and Manchester; they came singly, unescorted by fighters, unseen and
invincible. For hours on end, they would drift about above their blacked-out
targets, dropping one bomb here, another there. They couldn’t see where their
bombs would fall, and they didn’t do any significant damage. (That estimate
would be disputed by the families of the several hundred civilians killed that
summer by the German bombs, but England never was in danger of losing the war
because of this night-time harassment.)

Then came September 7, and the Hun hordes were
loosed on London. After the day’s battle the night bombers came over, and the
damage they did was severe. The Thames shone brightly in the dim moonlight,
leading them like a fluorescent arrow to the heart of London. They stole along
in the dark, and when they reached the big bend in the river they dropped their
bombs, turned, and headed home again, and the RAF was helpless to stop them.

The next night they came again, and again on
the following night. On September 15 the Luftwaffe was defeated in the daylight
sky, but the night raids continued. When the daylight bombing came to a halt,
all the bombers were assigned to night duty, and now they came over in force.
London was bombed every single night for fifty-seven consecutive nights, and
when the Luftwaffe developed radio navigation aids Coventry was destroyed and
every other major city was hit hard. The sirens were so ubiquitous that many
people routinely went to sleep under their dining room tables instead of in
their beds. In London they trooped en masse to the tube stations, despite being
warned by the police that it was illegal to bunk down on the platforms
overnight.

Churchill turned angrily to Dowding, demanding
relief, but Dowding had no help to offer. At least, not quite yet. The answer,
he told Churchill, was once again in radar. The scientific wizards were hard at
work designing a portable radar set that could be carried in a new fighter with
a two-man crew. The fighter, the Bristol Beaufighter, was already coming off
the production lines and would be ready for service in a few months. The radar,
named AI for Airborne Interception, was not yet ready but progress was being
made.

“Progress is being made?!” Churchill roared.
Not good enough, not damned good enough by half! Had he no other help to offer?
Dowding shook his head no. There was nothing else. The pilots of the Hurricanes
and Spitfires couldn’t see at night; there was nothing they could do. Churchill
glowered and cursed and with vehemence overrode Dowding’s decision, ordering
that at least one squadron of Hurricanes be detached for night-fighting duties.

To no avail. All that was accomplished was the
death of several Hurricane pilots as they tried to land their high-spirited
charges in the dark. Not a single bomber was brought down by these planes.
Dowding was correct in his helplessness: There was nothing to be done until the
Beaufighters and AI were ready.

Dowding was as aware of the problem and as
impatient as Churchill; he was simply more realistic. Even before the Blitz had
started, a Night Interception Committee—which soon morphed into the Night Air
Defence Committee—had been set up to organize plans for bomber defence, and a
Fighter Interceptor Unit (FIU) was organized to carry out in practice what
ideas the committee came up with. They came up with many ideas, but only one
eventually bore fruit: the concept of an airborne radar set that would enable
the fighters to see in the dark.

The basic concept of radar-controlled night
fighters was quite different from the day fighting scheme, due to the nature of
the beast. By day, the bombers came over in large formations, all too visible,
surrounded by a shield of fighters. Ground-based radar brought the fighters
into visual contact, and then they were on their own. By night, the bombers
slunk in one by one, invisible and alone. To combat them was a totally
different proposition, and one more difficult to implement. The idea was to
have night fighters patrolling a specified area rather than waiting to be
scrambled. When a bomber intruded into his airspace, the pilot would be
directed by ground radar to fly as near to the bomber as could be accomplished,
at which point the fighter’s own radar would take over and guide him in close.
Finally, visual contact would be made, and the bomber would be shot down.

Easy enough to say, but infinitely hard to
accomplish. The problems were many:

1.
      
Producing a radar set small enough to be carried
aloft. Remember, the Chain Home radars used transmitters on towers hundreds of
feet high.

2.
      
Directing the night fighter from the ground in
close to the bomber. Any bomber pilot worth his salt would not be flying
straight and level, but would be squirreling around up there.

3.
      
Operating the airborne radar and flying the
plane so as to get close enough for visual contact.

4.
      
Finally, actually shooting down the bomber.

In the spring of 1940 a young Welshman
named Taffy Bowen had produced a radar set that was sort of workable, and he
prepared to demonstrate it to Dowding. The aircraft he had been working with
was a Fairey Battle, a single-engine two-seater originally designed as a light
bomber (the type that had been demolished in France, now relegated to noncombat
duties). To fit both himself and Stuffy into the backseat, they had to dispense
with parachutes, but they did manage, and the demonstration was a success—as
far as it went. Another Battle flew straight ahead while Bowen, his head under
a black hood along with Dowding, directed their plane to intercept
successfully.

This was progress, but it was a far cry from
having mass-produced sets that worked consistently and were simple enough to be
operated by RAF crew rather than by an expert like Taffy Bowen. The test was
also a far cry from intercepting a bomber that was taking evasive action
instead of toodling along on a prearranged and steady course. When they landed,
Dowding took Bowen aside for a two-hour detailed discussion of the problems
over continuous cups of coffee. He pointed out the problems as he saw them:
Since the night fighter would have to be on standing patrol for many hours at a
time, it would have to be a different sort of fighter than the single-engine
day types, which carried fuel for only an hour or two. Additionally, it was
imperative that visual identification of the bomber be made; for a night
fighter to shoot down a British bomber returning from a mission would be
disastrous for morale. This meant that the pilot’s eyes had to be adapted to
the dark night sky, which in turn meant that he couldn’t be looking into the
comparatively bright radar scope. Putting these together meant that a
twin-engine, two-man aircraft was needed.

Bowen would later write, “This was the first
time I had heard the argument for a two-engined two-man aircraft advanced with
such certainty and with such authority.” The people at the Air Ministry were
always advocating a single-seat, single-engine machine, not really
understanding the difference between shooting down a bomber at night and in the
daytime.

Finally, Dowding pointed out that once the
night fighter opened fire, the bomber would take quick evasive action and would
be lost in the darkness; therefore, the fighter had to have overwhelming
armament, capable of destroying the bomber in the first burst. No such airplane
yet existed, but the Beaufighter would soon be ready with both cannon and
machine guns.

Bowen was impressed: “I had never heard such a
clear and definite analysis of the fundamentals of night fighting.” He was not
as impressed with Professor Lindemann, who also received a demonstration of the
system, but who was “quite worried about a dinner appointment in London that
evening which he did not want to miss . . . and seemed to be in his usual mood
of finding fault with everything and did not have a single positive suggestion
to make. . . . When he got back to London he gave us a poor report. Of all the
distinguished people to whom we demonstrated airborne radar, Lindemann was the
only one who was unimpressed.”

The reason was that Lindemann had his own ideas
and couldn’t bear the thought that anyone else’s might work. After his infrared
scheme he came up with another disaster, code-named “Mutton,” that involved
dropping bombs in front of oncoming bombers, as he explained to Churchill . . .

Thirty-two

Lindemann started off by saying he would
use outmoded bombers, planes the RAF didn’t have any use for, which Churchill
thought was brilliant. These Harrow bombers would carry 150 small bombs, or, as
he called them, aerial mines, weighing just one pound apiece, each of which was
attached to a large parachute by a 2,000-foot piano wire. At the other end of
the wire was another smaller and furled parachute, with the bomb somewhere in
the middle. A squadron of these Harrows would climb up higher than the incoming
bomber formations and would cruise along in front of them. They’d then release
their bombs at 200-foot intervals, and these would float down by the large
parachute in front of the fleet of bombers, providing what was essentially an
aerial minefield six miles long and 2,000 feet high.

When the wing of a bomber hit the wire, the
impact would trigger the unfurling of the smaller parachute. The drag of the
two parachutes might slow the bomber suddenly to below its flying speed, in
which case it would stall and crash. If it kept flying, the bomb would slide
down the wire and, upon hitting the wing, would explode—and Bob’s your uncle,
Lindemann explained.

Churchill loved the idea. Lindemann then
pounced with his simplified mathematical analysis. The bombs would be
accurately laid at 200-foot intervals, and each German bomber has a wingspan of
approximately 30 feet, so one could confidently expect that at least
—at
least
, he emphasized—10 percent of the bombers would be destroyed. The
others, of course, would be panicked; the formation would break up, their bombs
could not be accurately dropped, and in essence the entire night-bombing
campaign would be brought to its knees.

Churchill chortled appreciatively. This is what
he wanted, some new ideas! He turned to Dowding and told him to implement the
concept immediately.

Dowding said no. The idea was ludicrous. First
of all, he said, the whole concept was based on the idea that the German
bombers would be flying in a massive formation, like the day bombers. But night
bombers did not attack like that; it would be impossible to stay in formation
at night, so instead they rambled about individually. Then how could these
aerial mines be laid down accurately in front of them? You’d have to use the
entire squadron of Harrows to attack a single night bomber.

Next, the entire difficulty in combating the
night attacks was that the bombers couldn’t be found at night, and if Dowding’s
fast fighters couldn’t find them, how could the slow Harrow bombers? They
wouldn’t know where to drop their “aerial mines.” Finally, the mines that
missed the bombers would continue to fall to earth as normal bombs: We’d be
bombing England ourselves! The entire idea made no sense at all, Dowding
concluded.

This was not the attitude Churchill wanted to
see in his officers. He reminded Dowding of the tank, which had also been
thought to be unworkable until he, Churchill, had pushed it through. It had won
the war for them. Was he now to face the same stubborn resistance to new ideas?
No, by God! Work on Lindemann’s Tong Aerial Mine was to begin immediately,
code-named “Mutton” for secrecy.

And so it did, and nothing ever came of it. One
squadron eventually became operational in December 1940. They had no success until
March 13, 1941, when bombers attacked Liverpool, Glasgow, and Hull. To avoid
the Harrows’ bombing England themselves, the RAF had decided to use the
technique only over open water, and because of the lack of large German night
bomber formations, single Harrows would attack single bombers—making Lindemann
s original idea of an aerial minefield impossible. On this night, radar was
able to place a Harrow four miles in front of, and several thousand feet above,
one of the bombers a few miles off the coast near Swanage. The Harrow dropped
its mines, which, radar showed, missed the bomber by several miles. But there
were other Germans in the area, and the pilot of the Harrow
thought
he
saw a small explosion, followed by a larger one, and then he felt a concussion.
He interpreted this as the small bomb going off and then the bomber crashing
into the sea, producing the concussion that jarred his airplane.