With Wings Like Eagles (25 page)

At two-fifteen that afternoon the Stukas split into four groups as they passed the Isle of Wight, one bound for Thorney Island, one for Gosport, one for Ford, and one for the radar station at Poling. The natural assumption on the ground, considering the persistent efforts the Germans had made in the past few days to destroy Tangmere, was that it would be once again the target, and given the short distances involved, it is not surprising that the real targets were caught by surprise. Nor is it surprising that the Stuka attacks were more deadly than those of the more conventional bombers at Biggin Hill and Kenley. Stuka pilots were still the elite of the
Luftwaffe
. They did not attack at low levels—instead, they climbed to 13,000 feet, and from that altitude went into a steep dive, of between seventy-five and ninety degrees, aiming directly at their target. The side panel of the pilot’s windscreen was etched with lines that allowed the pilot to check exactly the angle of his dive. Every variable had to be carefully calculated—the aircraft had to bomb directly into the prevailing wind, which of course determined for the pilot the direction of the attack. The speed and the angle of dive had to be held exactly, and a horn sounded automatically in the cockpit to warn the pilot four seconds before it was time to release the bomb load, usually at a height of 400 meters (just over 1,200 feet). This was a method of bombing with pinpoint accuracy that no other air force could match at the time.
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However, one defect was that during the dive the Stuka’s only protection was from the wireless operator–rear gunner seated behind the pilot, who had only one machine gun with which to hold off fighters armed with eight guns. Another defect was that when the pilot pulled out of the dive and climbed away steeply, having released his bombs, his airspeed slowed to the point where he was an easy target for antiaircraft fire from the ground, or for British fighters. Although the Stuka had originally been equipped with an external siren that gave off a banshee wail when the aircraft dived, intended to strike terror into the hearts of those on the ground, by the time of the Battle of Britain these had mostly been removed, as one more object that increased drag and slowed the plane. Besides, the targets were no longer masses of terrified, traumatized refugees or fleeing troops on the roads, as had been the case in Poland and France, but military installations, in which discipline was likely to prevail over fear. At the Poling radar station the WAAF plotters kept on at their work even when they had plotted the enemy aircraft as right above them, and when they could hear the whistle of the descending bombs. (One of them, Corporal Joan Avis Hearn, would win the Military Medal for her courage under fire.) At Ford Naval Air Station, sailors fired back at the Stukas with World War I Lewis guns, and one officer used his revolver; and Wren stewards and cooks helped to rescue and tend to the wounded as bombs went off around them. Of the targets, Ford was hit worst, with twenty-eight killed and eighty-five wounded—it was a scene of “mutilated bodies and wrecked buildings,” over which a dense cloud of burning oil from the flaming fuel tanks hung ominously. Gosport and Thorney Island were the least badly damaged. The radar station at Poling was put out of commission—one of the wooden receiver towers had been damaged. The Stuka force lost sixteen aircraft, and eight of the escorting Bf 109s were destroyed, for a total loss of five British fighters.

The day was still not over. At five-forty-five
Luftflotte
2 attacked again, flying up the Thames estuary, this time to attack Croydon, while Manston was attacked at ground level by fighters. Further raids took place during the night. In the meantime, each side counted its losses. The RAF had lost twenty-seven fighters, with ten pilots killed; the
Luftwaffe
had lost a total of seventy-one aircraft, of which thirty-seven were bombers and eleven were Bf 110s. Forty-four civilians had been killed and 108 wounded. On no other day in the Battle of Britain did German and RAF losses mount so high, or in the case of the
Luftwaffe
ultimately serve so little purpose. It was not so much the number of aircraft that mattered—they could be replaced—but the irreparable loss of so many highly trained bomber crews. Even more important, although the fact was not yet clear to anybody in the
Luftwaffe
high command, at no point had the Germans in any way endangered RAF Fighter Command, or even tempted Dowding to make a tactical mistake. Certainly, the loss of twenty-seven fighters was worrisome, but thanks to Lord Beaverbrook’s efforts they could be replaced overnight; and although Dowding’s concern over the supply of fighter pilots was still intense, the immense effort the two German air fleets made on August 18 had merely put two of his major Sector airfields out of action for a few hours at most, and knocked out one radar station, which could be replaced with a mobile unit until repairs were made. Dowding could look at the day with a certain grim satisfaction. This was exactly how he had planned to fight and win the battle—the Germans were making huge efforts to destroy Fighter Command, at a great cost in life and machines, while Dowding, without ever revealing his real strength, was inflicting more and more casualties on them. Eventually, it would dawn on them that they were battering their heads against a brick wall, but in the meantime, as long as they continued to do so, there would be no invasion.

Unlike most battles, this one was being fought in full view of the public and of war correspondents from all over the neutral world, like a spectator sport on a vast scale, and with the involvement of countless numbers of civilians—as well as firemen, policemen, and the Home Guard, many of whom were more than happy to talk to the press. It was, to be blunt—and although the thought does not ever seem to have crossed Dowding’s mind—great propaganda. The fighter pilots were young, photogenic, clean-cut, cheerful, and enthusiastic. There was no equivalent here to the hundreds of thousands who had died in the mud, barbed wire, futile mass attacks, and gas clouds of World War I. The fighting took place in the air, watched by thousands, sometimes at low altitudes; aircrews on both sides parachuted down onto English fields, villages, golf courses, and gardens; damaged aircraft crashed in bucolic spots or urban streets, or made forced landings in parks and on the lawns of stately country mansions; bombs fell not only on the airfields and radar stations but on the homes of ordinary people, more by accident than by design at this stage of the war, and not in the numbers of the Blitz, when the cities and those who lived in them became the targets of the
Luftwaffe
.

This was not a war people merely read about in the newspapers or heard about on the nine o’clock BBC news—it was fought right overhead, and, interestingly, the effect was to raise British morale, and to capture the attention and admiration of many people in America who in other circumstances might have been indifferent or hostile to what was happening on the other side of the Atlantic. The British Army had been badly beaten in Norway, and had lost again in France, but now, quite unexpectedly, the British found that Dowding’s “chicks,” few and young as they might be, had proven themselves heroes in the eyes of everyone in the world except the Germans. Even the Soviet Union’s spies in the United Kingdom sent accurate, admiring messages back to Moscow, including one from a spy who managed to get into Croydon on August 16 to report on the damage there, and also got very close to Kenley on the 18th, and reported correctly that there was no panic in the surrounding civilian population, and that Kenley’s Hurricanes were back in the air—although whether Stalin saw this, or was informed, is unknown.

During this battle, unlike other great battles in history, life went on as usual close to the fighting, despite the bloodshed in the skies above, bringing to mind W. H. Auden’s lines:

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along….

In Breughel’s
Icarus
, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster…

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky…

 

“A boy falling out of the sky…”
People went on with their lives, picnicking, playing tennis, having lunch outdoors in the glorious (and very un-English) summer weather, while young men four miles above their heads fought and died, or did indeed fall out of the sky. Occasionally they looked up from what they were doing at the maze of contrails in the blue sky, or more rarely, saw an orange flash and a puff of black smoke as an aircraft was hit, and from time to time watched a parachute slowly descend, and wondered whether it was one of theirs or one of ours. No less important a figure than Anthony Eden, the debonair Secretary of State for War, saw a Spitfire and a Messerschmitt flash past at rooftop level as he stepped out of his bath, and later remarked on how strange it was to see the fighting going on in the sky as he and his guests played tennis. Harold Nicolson, the writer and member of Parliament, and his wife, poet and novelist Vita Sackville-West, watched the air fighting high above their heads day after day from their famous garden at Sissinghurst. People grew accustomed to having the war drop in on their lives suddenly and unexpectedly—literally out of the blue—as bombs, pilots, aircrews, empty cartridge cases, flaming fragments of damaged aircraft, and even whole airplanes streaming smoke, flames, or white clouds of glycol, descended on them out of the sky. One RAF pilot who had been shot down and wounded was helped by friendly golfers to a nearby golf club, and parked at the bar in his bloodstained shirt while an ambulance was summoned, only to hear one member say to another, “Who’s that scruffy chap at the bar? I don’t think he’s a member.” The rousing patriotic popular song of the period “There’ll Always Be an England,”
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(played almost as frequently as “The White Cliffs of Dover”), comes to mind when we read about incidents like this. However long England might last—and the issue was still in doubt—there were some things about it and the English that would never change, even at the supreme moment of national crisis: in the ironic words of John Betjeman’s poem,

Think of what our Nation stands for,

Books from Boots’ and country lanes,

Free speech, free passes, class distinctions,

Democracy and proper drains.

 

The England that was being fought over in August 1940 was not yet that of the Beveridge Plan, the nationalization of industries, and the National Health Service that the Labour Party would introduce in 1945, still less that of our own day, when it has become, with whatever reluctance and mental reservations, crisscrossed with six-lane motor highways and part of Europe. It was still, at any rate south of London, in Kent and Sussex, slightly stuffy, dotted with neat suburbs and beyond them deliberately and self-consciously “picturesque” rural villages, then open fields rolling down to the old-fashioned seaside resorts, the shingle beaches and the famous white cliffs. The swashbuckling young airmen, whether German or British, seemed, on landing, to be out of place in their flying kits, warriors from a futuristic and technological world. H. G. Wells had imagined it vividly, but its impact had not yet been felt in this tidy, prosperous corner of Britain, with its narrow roads, its flocks of sheep, its yearly hop picking, and its tidy fields full of horses and ponies. This was the part of England that the Germans proposed—improbably, as many people thought—to invade the moment Göring succeeded in sweeping the skies clear of British fighters.

Perhaps the most important event of the day, therefore, occurred many miles away, and unbeknownst to the British. Given the severe losses of the
Luftwaffe
and the continuing resistance of Fighter Command, Hitler postponed the date for Operation Sea Lion to September 17.

In fact, the events of August 18 led to some further thinking on both sides of the English Channel. On the German side, it was now abundantly clear that whatever promises Göring had made to the Führer, Fighter Command was not going to be eliminated in two weeks. The Germans finally bit the bullet on the subject of the Stuka and the Bf 110, in view of their high rate of loss—Stukas were at last taken out of the order of battle altogether for the time being, and Bf 110s were restricted to combat in areas where they could be protected by Bf 109s, a plan that made no sense at all, since it essentially involved using one fighter to protect another, and limited the use of the big, twin-engine fighter to the short range of the single-seat fighter. Also, the decision was made to concentrate the attacks on Fighter Command airfields and the factories in which the Spitfire and the Hurricane were manufactured, to the exclusion of everything else.

In Britain, Dowding ignored the triumphant headlines in the press regarding German losses—which announced that as many as 165 German and only twenty-seven British aircraft had been shot down, more than twice the actual number of aircraft the Germans lost. Instead, he concerned himself with his dwindling resources. If the Germans continued attacking in the strength they had shown on August 18, and if they concentrated their attacks on the aircraft factories, as he had already guessed they would, Fighter Command might soon be reduced to the point where it could no longer hold its own against them. Despite the admiration that was being showered on his fighter pilots, their actual number was now well below 1,000, and the rate at which new fighter aircraft were being built was leaving him with an increasingly slim reserve of machines. His margin of strength was paper-thin. Dowding could do the numbers better than anyone else, and what they told him was that the rate of attrition was now in danger of working against him faster than against the
Luftwaffe
. In No. 11 Group, which had borne the brunt of the casualties so far, it was decided to move those squadrons in which the casualties exceeded 50 percent “to quieter areas for a rest and a refit,” and to replace them with squadrons from the west and the Midlands. Air Vice-Marshal Park gave his controllers orders not to send fighters out over the sea in pursuit of German reconnaissance aircraft or small numbers of German aircraft, and to avoid sending up large numbers of aircraft against German fighter sweeps. In short, Dowding and Park were pursing (and intensifying) a strategy that was the exact opposite of what Leigh-Mallory was demanding with increasing vehemence (and with Bader as spokesman for the fighter pilots of No. 12 Group), which was to engage the enemy over the Channel with “big wings” of fighters, instead of single squadrons.