War Stories III (7 page)

Prevailing in the Battle of Britain and the Blitz that followed required not only dedication and patriotism, but a highly sophisticated air defense network. The RAF “chain home” radars were connected to a system of ground observers and air raid wardens who fed information into an integrated warning and control center headquartered at Uxbridge, just west of London.

The British also organized a remarkably effective civil defense structure to mitigate the effects of the German bombings. The fire brigades, rescue squads, medical personnel, air raid wardens, and explosive ordnance disposal units deployed in Britain's cities often made the difference between living and dying for those on the ground.

Nineteen-year-old Charles Leah wanted to enlist in the army—but with his three older brothers already in the military, his mother pleaded, “I've given up three sons . . . and that's more than any mother should be allowed to suffer.” So instead Leah volunteered to be an air raid warden in his hometown of Coventry, ninety-five miles north of London.

Hitler's deeply flawed decision to shift from bombing the RAF Fighter Command bases to terror bombing of British cities in September of 1940 is the turning point in the Battle of Britain. Though no single document survives to explain his rationale, most historians surmise that it was the consequence of a navigational error.

On the night of 24 August 1940, a ten-plane flight of He-111s, aiming to hit the piers on the lower Thames, overshot their target and dropped their bombs on the center of London, killing scores of civilians. The next night, RAF Bomber Command launched an eighty-plane raid on Berlin—the first against the German capital. Five days later, the Führer lifted his ban on “terror bombing” and urged Goering to “destroy” London.

Within a week of this decision, the Blitz was on—and Hitler was preparing to abandon Sea Lion, his plan for the invasion of England. On 14 September—the day after Mussolini launched the invasion of Egypt from Italian bases in Libya—Hitler postponed Sea Lion and on 12 October, he permanently cancelled the operation. By then, the RAF had recovered sufficiently to inflict horrific losses on the Luftwaffe bomber crews conducting daylight attacks and in November, Goering ordered that all major cross-channel raids would be conducted at night.

In describing the role of the RAF in this bloody contest, Prime Minister Winston Churchill told the House of Commons on 20 August, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

They were few indeed. By the end of September, RAF Fighter Command had lost more than 850 fighters knocking down 600 German bombers. Fewer than 2,500 RAF fighter pilots—among them a handful of Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, Poles, Free French, Czechs, South Africans, and Americans—had handed Hitler his first defeat.

Thanks to their courage, by the winter of 1940–41 Churchill no longer had to worry about a German invasion. Instead he began to focus on how to turn his island nation into a springboard for a joint British-American return to the Continent.

Hitler, thwarted in his hope for a neutral or defeated England, turned his attention to a new adventure: crushing the “Bolshevik menace” by means of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union.

CHAPTER 3

THE EASTERN FRONT 1939–1941

H
itler's 12 October 1940 decision to cancel Operation Sea Lion—the invasion of England—was predicated on the inability of the Luftwaffe to gain air superiority over the British Isles. But even before his conclusion that a cross-channel operation was impossible, the Führer had already begun exploring other options and opportunities. In mid-August he had raised the prospect of taking on the “Bolshevik menace” with his military commanders—suggesting that a campaign against the Soviets would be necessary in order to secure Germany's eastern frontier.

On 2 September he signed a new Tripartite Pact with Italy and Japan—in which they all pledged to aid one another in the event of an attack on any signatory. Eleven days later, Mussolini launched an assault into Egypt from Italian bases in Libya—prompting Hitler to meet with Il Duce on 4 October at the Brenner Pass in the Alps. There, the two fascist dictators concocted a plan for bringing Franco's Spain into the Axis—and seizing all British territories in the Mediterranean from Gibraltar east to Suez.

Hitler took
Amerika,
his specially configured “command train,” for the meeting with the Spanish dictator on 23 October. But Franco was unimpressed—and rejected the idea of allowing the Wehrmacht to transit
Spanish territory in order to attack Gibraltar. Frustrated in his grand design for turning the Mediterranean into an Axis-controlled lake, Hitler returned to Berlin—only to learn that Mussolini, without consulting anyone, had invaded Greece.

 

Hitler launched nearly four million Wehrmacht troops into Russia in Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941.

By the first week of November 1940, Adolf Hitler was on the sidelines of world events for the first time in three years. Mussolini's Italian “Legions” were charging pell-mell across the Egyptian desert toward Suez, and his “Alpine Army” was promising to seize Athens by the middle of the month. The Russians were moving more troops into Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—as they were permitted to do under the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.