The Battle of Britain (16 page)

Prior to the Battle of Britain, some dive bombing attacks against British coastal shipping took place in July, but these were no more than a prelude to the main assault. By July 20, Luftflotten 2 and 3 had available 316 Ju 87Bs and Ju 87Rs for the assault on the United Kingdom, 248 of these being immediately serviceable. The bulk of the dive bombers were included in the VIII Fliegerkorps of Generalleutnant Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen with seven Stukagruppen comprising the Stab, I and III/StG.1, the Stab, I and II/StG.2, and the Stab, I, II and III/StG.77. The newly-fomed I/StG.3 was assigned to the IV Fliegerkorps, while II Fliegerkorps embodied II/StG.1 and IV(St)/LG 1.

The first Ju 87 sorties in strength actually took place on August 8, five days before Adler Tag, suffering severe losses despite Bf 109Es providing top cover. On Adler Tag itself, Ju 87s en route for Middle Wallop airfield were bounced by Spitfires of No. 609 Sqn, nine of the dive bombers being promptly despatched. But this was only a foretaste of what was in store for the Stukagruppen. Within six days, 41 Ju 87s had been lost; it was patently obvious this was no replay of the Polish and French campaigns, and the Stuka had been revealed for what it was – an inadequately armed and highly vunerable warplane. To prevent the Stukagruppen from being decimated, the Oberkommando der Luftwaffe had no recourse but to withdraw the Ju 87 from the Cherbourg area to the Pas de Calais where it was to sit out the closing phases of the Battle. The last Stuka sorties in force against British targets took place on August 16, when I and III StG.2 lost nine aircraft in an attack on Tangmere, and on August 18, when StG.77 lost 16 aircraft after attacking Ford and Thorney Island. The shock administered by the combat attrition of the Battle was sufficient to disenchant some of the most ardent of the Ju 87's protagonists within the Luftwaffe.

With the creation of the Third Reich in 1933, elaborate measures were taken to conceal the extent of the rearmament that was taking place in Germany. Later it was to be alleged that the appearance in the mid-'thirties of what were presented as high-speed commercial transports but were, in reality, the prototypes of bombers provided but one glaring example of this subterfuge. In fact, these airliners were not the progenitors of future bombers, their basic designs having been conceived at the outset to fulfil both civil and military roles, commercial transport and bomber versions evolving in parallel.

One of these dimorphic aircraft was the Heinkel He 111, an elegant, well-conceived and efficient design created by the brothers Siegfried and Walter Günter. It was a classic aeroplane coupling exceptional handling characteristics with a performance which, in the early days of its career at least, enabled it to show a clean pair of heels to most contemporary single-seat fighters. Fully representative of the then latest aerodynamic refinements and structural techniques, it was one of the most outstanding aircraft of the mid-'thirties by any standard.

In bomber form, the He 111 temporarily placed Germany in the forefront of development of this category of warplane but, while still a formidable weapon, it had lost some of its potency by the time it was to be committed to the Battle of Britain.

The first bomber prototype, the He 111a, flew on February 24, 1935; a state-of-the-art all-metal stressed-skin monoplane powered by two 690hp BMW VI 6 OZ glycol-cooled 12-cylinder engines and knowing few if any peers on the score of elegance. A commercial airliner prototype, the He 111 V4, garnered considerable publicity on January 10, 1936, when demonstrated to the international press at Berlin-Tempelhof as ‘The fastest aircraft on the world's air routes.'

It was, of course, the potential of the He 111 as a bomber for the future Luftwaffe that was the primary reason for the intense official interest in this aircraft, and construction of a pre-series batch of 10 He 111A-0 bombers had begun at Rostock-Marienehe some months before the commercial He 111 V4 prototype had been demonstrated to the press with such verve by Heinkel's test pilot Gerhard Nitschke. From this point in time, the He 111 was to undergo incremental redesign that was to result in two distinct generations of the Heinkel bomber.

The first generation of which the first production representative was the He 111B, was to achieve a measure of fame as a result of its participation
in the Spanish Civil War, initially with Kampfgruppe 88 of the Legion Kondor and subsequently with the Spanish Nationalist Air Force as well. By the beginning of World War II, however, the He 111-equipped Kampfgeschwader had virtually completed conversion to the second generation bomber which comprised the vast bulk of the equipment of 21 Gruppen and one Staffel with a total strength of 789 aircraft.

The second generation He 111 bomber mated the entirely new wing introduced by the first generation He 111F and J with a completely revised forward fuselage. Whereas the original wing had been of aesthetically attractive and aerodynamically desirable elliptical form, its somewhat complex structure undoubtedly inhibited large-scale production. Thus, early in 1936, Siegfried Günter had begun redesign of the wing, eliminating the elegant ellipses in favour of a straight-tapered planform, a modest reduction in gross wing area resulting in the process. Comparatively small numbers of bombers were completed with the new wing before, in the summer of 1938, an equally radical change was introduced on the assembly lines; this was an entirely new forward fuselage, resulting in what was considered to be the second generation bomber.

Intended to improve both aerodynamics and crew visibility, the new forward fuselage was innovative in that it eliminated the pilot's windscreen that had previously broken the upper fuselage contour in conventional fashion. In place of the stepped windscreen the entire nose section was broadened and deepened, being largely formed by transparent panelling and resulting in forward fuselage contours unbroken by any projection. The pilot was seated to port and all flight and engine instruments were mounted on a panel suspended from the roof. The nose terminated in an Ikaria universal mounting for a 7.9mm MG 15 machine gun.

In order to overcome the problems that would be presented in adverse weather by the surfeit of transparent panels, provision was made for elevating the pilot's seat and controls for landing and taxying, his head projecting through a sliding panel and being protected from the slipstream by a small retractable windscreen. Although the new cockpit glazing was to receive some criticism owing to the mirror effect when the sun was aft of the aircraft, the new forward fuselage was standardised for subsequent production aircraft, these beginning to leave the assembly lines in the winter of 1938–39.

From the outset, the second generation bomber had been planned to take either Daimler-Benz DB 601A or Junkers Jumo 211 engines with equal facility, the bomber being assigned the designation He 111P with the former power plant and He 111H with the latter, priority being given to the DB 601A-engined version owing to the supply situation.

Deliveries of the initial production model, the He 111P-1, began during the early spring of 1939, the first He 111H-1s following some six weeks later. The P-1 gave place to the P-2, which differed solely in the type of radio installed, the H-1 being equipped to a similar standard with deliveries commencing in the same month (May).

One shortcoming of the second generation He 111 was its inflexibility concerning bomb loading arrangements. The bombs were loaded into individual vertical cells, four on each side of a gangway, and this meant that the largest bomb that could be accommodated internally was a 551-pounder (250kg). Perhaps the most surprising fact in view of experience with first generation He 111s over Spain was the lack of any attempt to increase defensive armament which remained three 7.9mm MG 15 machine guns. The crew comprised pilot, navigator/bombardier, radio operator and ventral gunner. The DB 601A-1 engines of the He 111P were each rated at 1,175hp for take-off and the Jumo 211A-1 engines of the He 111H each offered 1,075hp for take-off.

Such was the importance of the Heinkel bomber that the He 111P was built by Heinkel's Rostock-Marienehe and the NDW factories, these being joined by Arado at Warnemünde, while the He 111H was built in parallel by Heinkel's Oranienburg facility, the Junkers plant at Dessau and the new ATG factory at Leipzig. The decision had been taken to standardise on the Jumo 211-engined version as soon as the power plant supply situation permitted, and, in the meantime, sub-types began to proliferate. The He 111P-4 introduced some armour protection for the pilot and dorsal and ventral gunners, and heavier defensive armament, this being raised to six 7.9mm MG 15s. Furthermore, the port bomb bay was blanked off and occupied by a supplementary fuel tank, bomb racks being introduced beneath the blanked-off bay.

Production of the P-series was to be finally phased out early in 1940 with the He 111P-6, this reverting to the standard internal bomb stowage arrangement but having 1,275hp DB 601N engines. The He 111H-2 embodied similar armament changes to those introduced on the P-4, the He 111H-3, which made its début in November 1939, being a dual-role
version, which, adding anti-shipping operations to its repertoire, was fitted with a single forward-firing 20mm MG FF cannon in its ventral gondola. The H-3 sub-type also benefited from installation of Jumo 211D-1 engines each rated at 1,200hp for take-off. These engines were retained by the He 111H-4 which began to come off the lines early in 1940, but were eventually to be supplanted by the Jumo 211F-l offering 1,400hp for take-off.

When World War II commenced, the Luftwaffe inventory of He 111 bombers was fairly evenly divided between P-series and H-series, with 389 of the former and 400 of the latter on strength, all having been taken on charge over a period of less than six months, such was the impetus placed behind the production of the Heinkel bomber. Committed to the Polish Campaign, the He 111 achieved generally favourable results, but attrition was higher than anticipated, a total of 78 bombers being lost. For the onslaught on France and the Low Countries on May 10, 1940, Luftflotten 2 and 3 possessed a total of 1,120 twin-engined bombers of which approximately half were He 111s, but the numerical heyday of the Heinkel bomber was already passing as Kampfgruppen converted to the Junkers Ju 88A. Thus, by Adler Tag, only four Kampfgeschwader remained completely equipped with He 111s, these being KG 26 based in Norway, KG 27 operating from Tours, Dinard and Rennes, KG 53 at Lille-Nord and KG 55 at Chartres, Dreux and Villacoublay.

After initial strikes across the Straits of Dover, the first sorties in force by He 111s took place on August 15 when 72 He 111H-4s of I and III Gruppen of KG 26 flew from Stavanger with the intention of attacking RAF bases at Dishforth, Ulsworth and Linton-upon-Ouse. The bomber force was escorted by Bf 110 fighters of I/ZG 76, but owing to a navigational error none was to find its target. Only 63 of the He 111s actually crossed the coast and eight of these fell victim to RAF fighters. Despite heavy operational attrition, daylight attacks by He 111 formations against targets in the United Kingdom continued for a month.

The provision of stronger escorts of Bf 109E fighters barely alleviated the situation in which the Kampfgruppen found themselves, and, on occasions, when the hard-pressed Jagdgruppen failed to rendezvous with their He 111 charges, the casualties among the bombers were unacceptable. Thus, by mid-September, a change of tactics had become imperative and, from the 16th of that month, the He 111 was to be largely confined to nocturnal sorties.

To become known throughout the aeronautical world by the sobriquet of ‘Flying Pencil' as a result of its immoderately slim side profile, the Dornier Do 17 was, at the time of its début, one of the most elegant and beautiful shapes ever to have taken to the skies. This slimness was seen to be illusory in planform as the near-cylindrical cross section of the fuselage of this aircraft changed rapidly to what can only be described as an inverted triangle to produce an abnormally broad centre fuselage, the section then transforming once more to an ellipse. By the time of the Battle, even the pencil-like side contours had been impaired, for operational experience gained in Spanish skies had dictated fundamental redesign of the forward fuselage of the bomber, and the variant that participated in the fighting over southern England, the Do 17Z, scarcely warranted the popular epithet.

The origins of the Do 17 pre-dated the birth of Germany's Third Reich, stemming from an outline specification drawn up in July 1932 which euphemistically referred to a ‘high-speed passenger transport and mailplane'. From the outset the Do 17 was, in fact, a dedicated medium bomber and reconnaissance aircraft, the pacific roles that, at the time, it was allegedly designed to fulfil being pure fiction. The first prototype, the Do 17c – shortly afterwards to be redesignated Do 17 V1 – was flown on November 23, 1934, this having a single fin-and-rudder tail assembly whereas the second prototype, the Do 17 V2 (formerly Do 17a), was fitted with a twin fin-and-rudder assembly for comparison purposes, this latter flying on May 18, 1935.

The Do 17, like its contemporary, the He 111, took full advantage of state-of-the-art aerodynamic developments and structural concepts, and was a highly advanced design for the early 'thirties. It initiated the German predilection for grouping all crew members in the forward fuselage and it was faster than virtually any single-seat fighter then extant. Preparations for the large-scale production of the Do 17 at Dornier's Manzell, Allmansweiller and Löwenthal factories were in train by early 1936, when plans were also being formulated for additional production by Henschel at Berlin-Schönefeld, Siebel at Halle and by the Hamburger Flugzeugbau.

The initial models were the Do 17E bomber and the Do 17F reconnaissance aircraft, and during the early months of 1937 these began to enter Luftwaffe service, the first examples of the former being committed to operations over Spain with Kampfgruppe 88 of the Legion Kondor in
March of that year. Powered by the BMW VI 7,3 12-cylinder vee engines, the Do 17E and F were, in fact, phased out of production during the course of 1937 after delivery of 536 aircraft, being succeeded on the assembly lines by the Do 17M and P, respectively bomber and reconnaissance aircraft, the former with BMW-Bramo 323D nine-cylinder radial engines of 900hp and the latter with BMW 132N nine-cylinder radials of 865hp.