With Wings Like Eagles (17 page)

By July 3, the underlying tension between Air Chief Marshal Dowding and Air Vice-Marshal Leigh-Mallory, the commander of No. 12 Group, had become apparent, at a conference about tactics held at Fighter Command Headquarters. Dowding and Leigh-Mallory disagreed about the length of time the Germans would spend attacking Fighter Command’s airfields before an invasion, and Dowding then proceeded to make it clear that he expected his group commanders to keep “a pretty good control” over their squadrons, and to ensure that each squadron received precise orders as to whether to attack the enemy bombers or enemy fighters. He was determined that fighter pilots should not become “obsessed” with the German fighter escort above instead of attacking the bomber force itself, which could be expected to be flying at a lower altitude. In short, Dowding wanted the Group Commanders to prevent “a free-for-all” battle in the sky over England—they were to use their squadrons judiciously, keep an ample number in reserve, support each other, and follow his orders. Since Dowding already knew that Air Vice-Marshal Park would do just that without being told, and since No. 10 Group and No. 13 Group would be on the fringes of the battle, it is hard not to guess that his remarks were aimed at Leigh-Mallory.
⁵

Leigh-Mallory was not Dowding’s only problem air marshal. Dowding had already clashed with the ambitious, hard-thrusting Air Vice-Marshal Sholto Douglas, Assistant Chief of Air Staff in charge of training and the purchase of new equipment at the Air Ministry, on the subject of the Boulton Paul Defiant and on the usefulness of twenty-millimeter cannon instead of .303-caliber machine guns in his fighters, among other things. Douglas was the polar opposite of Dowding, a burly, pugnacious, aggressive former fighter pilot and a member of the numerous Douglas family, which included Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s beloved Bosie, as well as his father, the ninth marquess of Queensberry, who was the popularizer of the famous rules for boxing matches and who brought about Wilde’s ruin.

About the Defiant, Dowding had been proved right, an outcome that won him no friends at the Air Ministry; and on the subject of twenty-millimeter cannon he was not impressed by either of the two types that had so far been tested, or convinced that four cannon would necessarily give better results than eight machine guns. Dowding was all in favor of arming fighter aircraft with cannon in the long run, but first he wanted to make sure they were reliable, and in his opinion this was not yet the case. In the short run, he did not want to disrupt the production of Spitfires and Hurricanes by changing their armament. In the corridors of the Air Ministry, it was easy to portray Dowding’s caution on such subjects as a lack of enthusiasm for new ideas, and attribute this to his age, his stubbornness, and his own crank notions, as well as to the fact that it had been very long since he had flown himself.

It is hard to know if Dowding was aware at this stage of the degree of hostility that already existed between himself and the two men who would be most instrumental in bringing about his downfall (and would benefit most from it), but it would have been out of character for him to have shown any concern or interest, still less to try to patch things up. After all, his enemies already included the Chief of the Air Staff and, in the aftermath of his blunt talk on May 13 about the danger of sending more Hurricanes to France, very likely the prime minister, even if Churchill’s enmity was at an unconscious level. A different kind of Commander-in-Chief might have made a man-to-man effort to win Leigh-Mallory over, or at least to keep him in line (Eisenhower would later do so quite effectively for a time), and to sweet-talk Sholto Douglas, a man with a considerable ego even for an air marshal, who was at once vain, prickly, and well-connected. Dowding had no gift for this kind of thing, however, and no taste for it. It was not in him to flatter, persuade, charm, inspire, or trade gossip with his fellow air marshals, still less to involve himself in their interminable intrigues.

He understood how to win the battle, and that was that—he had been thinking about nothing else since 1936.

Across the Channel, as the
Luftwaffe
moved into the French airfields of Normandy and Brittany and made itself at home, German strategy was still unclear, awaiting Hitler’s decision about the invasion. The navy was beginning to assemble a growing invasion fleet of tugboats, river barges, and sea barges, whose effectiveness has been depreciated by most historians, though it is worth remembering that an even less promising and much more hastily assembled fleet of Channel steamers, motor yachts, lifeboats, Thames River day cruisers, tugs, and fishing vessels had brought more than 250,000 British soldiers off the beaches of Dunkirk and home to England, despite the best efforts of the
Luftwaffe
to stop them. Compared with the “small ships” of the Dunkirk evacuation, the German navy’s fleet of tugs and barges seems quite impressive, especially considering that it was being improvised at high speed and with no advance preparation, since until Dunkirk, the prospect of invading Britain had never come up. The British and the Americans would labor for more than four years to create a fleet for the Normandy invasion, whereas the Germans were attempting to do it in less than three months.

What hampered the Germans was a combination of sloth and wishful thinking at the top. Hitler was still stunned by the magnitude and completeness of his victory over France, and no doubt still expected to receive a call from England any day, from Lord Halifax or Lloyd George, to ask for peace terms; and Göring was enjoying himself in Paris and savoring the endless congratulations and promotions for himself and his favored commanders. Lower down on the totem pole, overburdened staff officers struggled to solve the problems of an improvised invasion and to produce a coherent strategy for victory once the troops were on shore in Britain, but the timetable was still unclear, and there was no single, energetic commander-in-chief—no equivalent of Eisenhower—to pull the three German services together in a single, united effort.

Hitler’s patience came to an end abruptly and unexpectedly on July 3, when a British battle squadron, commanded by Vice-Admiral Sir James Somerville, appeared off the French naval base of Mers el-Kébir, near Oran in French Morocco, and demanded that the French fleet anchored there, commanded by Admiral Gensoul and including two battleships and the two powerful modern battle cruisers
Dunkerque
and
Strasbourg
, sail either to a British port or to a French port in the Caribbean, or that Gensoul should sink his own ships within six hours. Failing this, Somerville reported regretfully, he had orders from His Majesty’s Government “to use whatever force may be necessary to prevent your ships from falling into German or Italian hands.”
⁶
Negotiations continued throughout the day, but Admiral Gensoul finally rejected the British demands. A few minutes later, at five-fifty-three that evening, Admiral Somerville opened fire, crippling the French fleet and killing more than 1,200 French sailors.

French warships in Alexandria, Egypt, as well as Portsmouth and Plymouth, were boarded by British sailors and seized, and a modern French battleship in Dakar was fired on. Announcing this tremendous show of naval force (albeit against a former ally) to the House of Commons, Churchill concluded, with tears in his eyes, “A large proportion of the French Fleet has, therefore, passed into our hands or has been put out of action or otherwise withheld from Germany…. I leave the judgment of our action, with confidence, to Parliament. I leave it to the nation, and I leave it to the United States. I leave it to the world and history…. The action we have already taken should be, in itself, sufficient to dispose once and for all of the lies and rumors…that we have the slightest intention of entering into negotiations in any form and through any channel with the German and Italian Governments. We shall, on the contrary, prosecute the war with the utmost vigor.”
⁷

Here was the long-awaited answer to Hitler’s “peace offer” speech, and, by the way, also to Halifax and Lloyd George. In a highly dramatic way, Churchill had demonstrated both Britain’s sea power and his own resolve to keep on fighting. For the first time as prime minister he received the loud, unstinting applause and cheers of his own party—for while the conservatives had accepted, with whatever reluctance, the inevitability of Churchill as prime minister on May 10, their hearts had until now remained with Neville Chamberlain, who had hitherto received warmer applause from his own side of the House than Churchill had even for some of his greatest and most memorable war speeches. But this time the lion had not only roared, he had struck, and struck hard, and all over the world (particularly in the White House) people took notice at last that whatever had happened to France, Great Britain remained an undefeated imperial power, with a measure of its old ruthlessness and defiance, and that the voice of Britain was not a plea for peace at any price, but the thunder of fifteen-inch naval cannon. Nowhere was this message heard more clearly than in Berlin.

On July 13 Hitler at last signed off on the army’s plan for Operation Sea Lion, setting a target date of August 15 for the invasion and turning the
Luftwaffe
loose to destroy RAF Fighter Command before that date. He was still not fully committed to the invasion: that is, he had mental reservations about whether he should do it or not. But it was no longer theoretical; it was a plump military plan, with fixed dates and elaborate maps, and it was now up to Göring to strike the first blow.

Still not in a hurry, the newly created
Reichsmarschall
(a unique rank placing Göring one step above a field marshal) did not meet with his
Luftflotte
commanders until July 20, at his baroque country estate, Karinhall, where they were left to their own devices to come up with a strategy. By now, the Führer was becoming impatient for action, though at the same time, giving way to the reality of the army’s and navy’s slow preparations for the invasion, he delayed the target date for the invasion to September 15, with the
Luftwaffe
’s grand full-scale air attack to begin on August 5. Even so, he retained firm control over the decision to launch the invasion, which he intimated he would make only after the RAF had been destroyed.

There are two observations to be made about this. The first is that any military undertaking of this size and complexity should not have too many “escape clauses” built into it—an army needs to know that on such and such a date an attack will begin, with no ifs, ands, or buts. The second is that May, June, and July are the months when a cross-Channel invasion has the best chance of succeeding, because of the weather and the long hours of daylight. In 1944, Eisenhower was obliged to postpone the invasion of Normandy from early May to early June, and was prepared to delay it if necessary until July, but he regarded September as dangerously late in the year—the days would be too short; the weather would be chancy; the possibility of major storms would be vastly increased. If Milch (now promoted to field marshal) had been able to persuade Göring to persuade Hitler to launch a hastily improvised invasion immediately after Dunkirk, before the British were organized to resist it and while the weather was most propitious, it might have succeeded. But choosing September 15 as the target date was a landlubber’s decision, and should have been resisted by the German admirals, who knew better.

In short, Hitler still resembled a man in bathing trunks on a beach, dipping his toe into the sea and unable to decide whether to plunge in or not. As for the
Luftwaffe
, pending the full-scale attack, it set about a series of smaller-scale raids on English coastal towns and seaports to test the British air defenses. On July 15, it bombed Yeovil (hardly a worthwhile military target); from the 16th through the 18th it was (shades of things to come) hampered by bad weather; on the 19th it took advantage of some good weather to bomb Dover; and from the 20th through to the end of July it raided shipping, concentrating on the Dover area. During July it shot down 145 British aircraft but lost 270 of its own—not exactly a triumph.
*
At the same time, this was hardly a triumph for Fighter Command, either. By attacking the seacoast of England from across the Channel in small numbers and at a low altitude the Germans were, without realizing the fact, depriving the radar operators of enough time to scramble RAF fighter squadrons. By the time the Germans appeared on the radar screens, it was too late. Things would be very different, Dowding realized, once the Germans began to come in force and attack inland. Dowding’s critics felt he should be getting his fighters scrambled sooner and in larger numbers, so that he could attack the Germans in force and “give them a bloody nose,” but that was exactly what he did
not
want to do. His strategy was to make the Germans think Fighter Command was weaker than it was, to concentrate on their bombers, and to bleed them to death by a constant rate of attrition. He did not want large losses, and he particularly did not want large losses over water.

As it happened, the Germans believed exactly what Dowding wanted them to believe. The relatively low numbers of British fighters they met convinced them that Fighter Command’s strength was small—Göring was informed that the British had left, at most, 300 or 400 fighters—and that, when the time came, a few massive full-scale attacks were all it would take to destroy them. The Germans were also lulled into not thinking seriously about the effect radar and Dowding’s system of centralized control would have over the battle once they attacked farther inland in large numbers—indeed, they seem to have paid hardly any attention to it.

The weather in the first days of August was marked by frequent low clouds, drizzle, and thunderstorms. As a result, Göring, who was waiting for four uninterrupted days of clear weather in which to launch the great attack that was intended to cripple Fighter Command—now grandiosely code-named
Adlerangriff
, “Eagle Attack”—kept putting it off, in anticipation of “a belt of high-pressure from the Azores” that stubbornly failed to appear.
Adler Tag
, “Eagle Day,” had been scheduled for August 5, but haze prevented it—in the event, a small, inconclusive fight between British and German fighters over the Channel resulted in the loss of six German aircraft to one British. August 6 and August 7 passed with little activity, since the German
Luftflotten
were busy preparing for the great attack. On the 8th, a large attack against Channel convoys by Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers guarded by Bf 109s gave further proof, if any was needed, that the Stuka was vulnerable in the presence of British fighters—the Germans lost thirty-one aircraft to nineteen British. (The
Luftwaffe
claimed to have shot down forty-nine British fighters, and the RAF claimed sixty German aircraft downed, causing rejoicing at 10 Downing Street, and showing just how far pilots’ claims exceeded reality on both sides.) Eagle Day was now moved to the 10th, then canceled once again because of bad weather; and the 11th resulted in a large-scale brawl over the Channel, apparently intended to draw large numbers of British fighters over Dover to be “bounced”
*
by Bf 109s while the German bomber force attacked Portland, a tactic that would have worked only if the British hadn’t had radar. The result was a day of bitter fighting, which ended in almost equal losses, thirty-eight German to thirty-two British. The most important event of the day, unbeknownst to the British, was the first sign of the high-pressure weather from the Azores that Göring had been waiting for. Eagle Day was hastily moved to August 13, with a preliminary “softening up” on the 12th, during which the
Luftwaffe
would knock out the forward British fighter airfields on the coast and the radar stations—ironically, the 12th was an important date on the British upper-class sporting calendar, the “glorious twelfth,” the opening of grouse-shooting season.