With Wings Like Eagles (26 page)

On August 19 the weather took a turn for the worse—“Mainly cloudy, occasional showers in the east,” the RAF report notes—and poor weather continued until August 23, to the great irritation of
Reichsmarschall
Göring. The Germans were not idle for five days, of course. They carried out massive “fighter sweeps,” hoping to provoke No. 11 Group’s fighter squadrons into the air, where they would be outnumbered, and also undertook random bombing, particularly at night. In fact, Göring had ordered an increase in night bombing against industrial targets, since the stretch of bad weather predicted for the next few days made daytime bombing impractical. He sensibly ordered a list to be drawn up of likely targets (a little late, one might think), including aluminum and aircraft engine plants, reserving to himself the decision to bomb targets in London and Liverpool by night.

In this area, at least, the Germans were formidably well prepared, and light-years ahead of the British. As long ago as June, Churchill had been startled by the surprising accuracy of German night bombing, which argued for the existence of a “secret weapon.” Although the Air Ministry was reluctant to admit it, the
Luftwaffe
in fact benefited from an advanced system of radio beams code-named
Knickebein
, enabling bombers to fly a course along a given beam until a crossbeam, aimed at a specific factory or location, told them exactly when to drop their bombs. The most knowledgeable man on the subject turned out to be a twenty-eight-year-old scientist, R. V. Jones, then on the Air Ministry staff. Churchill summoned Jones to 10 Downing Street on June 21 to explain the bad news to him and the War Cabinet. It was, for Churchill, as he would later remark, “one of the blackest moments of the war,” when he realized that the Germans could bomb as accurately by night as by day, knowing as he did that radar-equipped night fighters were still in their infancy—indeed, Fighter Command’s inadequacy in this area was very soon to become a major issue, ostensibly
the
major issue between Dowding and his colleagues.

Dowding took the sensible but pessimistic and unpopular view that only the introduction of radar-equipped, twin-engine night fighters, with a trained radar operator on board as well as a pilot, would enable Fighter Command to intercept German bombers successfully at night, and that until such time as he had enough of them (and the bugs in the airborne interception, or AI, radar equipment were eliminated), the German night raids could not be stopped. Sholto Douglas, his old antagonist in the Air Ministry, wanted him to send up large numbers of Spitfires and Hurricanes at night to intercept the German bombers. This was a tactic which, as Dowding pointed out, was bound to fail—his pilots had no practical way to find an enemy aircraft by night, and since most of them were in any case woefully inexperienced at taking off and landing in the dark, large numbers of fighters and pilots would inevitably be lost in accidents. Originally, both the Hurricane and the Spitfire had been optimistically designated by the Air Ministry as “day and night fighters,” but nobody had taken that seriously—the only modification made to them for night fighting was to rivet a piece of sheet metal above the exhaust stubs on either side of the engine cowling so as to prevent the pilot’s night vision from being blinded by the flames from his own exhaust. Come to that, the only way for a fighter pilot to aim at an enemy bomber at night—if he could find one in the first place—was to search in the darkness for the telltale bluish-red flare of its exhausts.
*

The gloom at the War Cabinet on June 21 about
Knickebein
had been lifted somewhat by Jones’s breezy, youthful optimism; he believed that countermeasures could be developed to “bend” the second beam so that the German bombers would miss their target and drop their bombs over open country. But in August 1940
Knickebein
was still functioning well enough, and in the event, the
Luftwaffe
more than justified Churchill’s apprehension, virtually destroying at least one aircraft factory and hitting the Dunlop tire works in Birmingham with night raids.
⁶
This was pinpoint accuracy with a vengeance, and Fighter Command was virtually powerless to prevent it. The single-engine fighters were unable to find an enemy aircraft in the dark, and the only twin-engine fighter available was a conversion of the now venerable Bristol Blenheim bomber. The night fighter version of the Blenheim was slower than the German bombers it was supposed to hunt, and no more maneuverable—even equipped with the early AI radar set it was not much of a threat.

From August 19 through 23, the
Luftwaffe
demonstrated just what it could do by night using
Knickebein
, striking Portsmouth, Bristol, Liverpool, Hull, Newcastle, Glasgow, and Edinburgh with the loss of only six aircraft on the night of the 19th. On the night of the 20th the Germans managed to put more than 150 aircraft over England, despite very poor weather, and again on the 21st. On the night of the 22nd more than 230 aircraft attacked, rendering the airfield at RAF Manston unserviceable, and hitting the Bristol Aero factory, as well as the somewhat unlikely targets of Harrow and Brighton. On the night of the 23rd there were smaller but still damaging raids over Bristol, Cardiff, and Birmingham. Many of these, of course, inevitably hit civilians rather than military or industrial targets—a typical example, chosen at random, was the bombing of a café in Bridlington, Yorkshire; several people were trapped and four of them were killed. No matter how accurately the
Luftwaffe
bombed by night, bombs were bound to go astray, and in any case, bombers jettisoned their bombs, or dropped bombs at random if they were damaged, lost, or unable to find their target. This was not, as yet, the deliberate, wholesale attack on cities, intended to break civilians’ morale, of the Blitz to come, but it was a big step down the slippery slope toward it.

It is worth keeping this firmly in mind, for most accounts of the Battle of Britain concentrate on the pilots, but no twenty-four-hour period in the official RAF “Campaign Diary” is without its sad little note at the end of each day of “Casualties on Ground,” split into “RAF Ground Personnel” and civilians (the latter referred to, typically, as “Others”). On August 15 civilian casualties were twelve killed, forty-one injured; on August 16, seventy-two killed, 192 injured; on August 17, a day when the RAF described enemy activity as “very light,” ten killed, sixty-six injured; on August 18, forty-four killed, 108 injured. So it goes day by day throughout the Battle of Britain—twenty-three killed, seventy-four injured on the 19th; twenty-three killed, 135 injured on the 20th; four killed, 178 injured on the 21st; three killed, thirty-six injured on the 22nd; thirty-four killed, 107 injured on the 23rd. Even when there was, according to the RAF, “little” or “light” enemy activity, civilians—men, women, and children—died, blown to bits by bombs, or buried under the rubble of their homes, shops, schools, and workplaces, or—on rare occasions—even machine-gunned by a low-flying German plane. Casualties on the ground almost always exceeded those among fighter pilots. To pick a day at random, on August 15 Fighter Command lost thirty-four Hurricanes and Spitfires, with eighteen pilots reported killed or missing, while on the ground twenty-five civilians were killed and 145 injured. This is not to denigrate the fighter pilots—it took extraordinary courage to go up and fight, often several times a day, as well as youth, physical fitness, good reflexes and eyesight, and hundreds of hours of training—but day after day the sad, inglorious little toll of the civilian dead mounted up, a toll of those who died not because they were in combat four miles above the ground but because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, even if it happened to be their own bed.

On August 24, the weather cleared at last, and the Germans’ air offensive resumed at full strength. It would shortly be apparent that their strategy was simple and effective—to bomb the major RAF Fighter Command airfields in the south by day, rendering them unusable; and to bomb specific industrial targets by night, with the aim of bringing the production of components for fighter aircraft to a halt. With this in mind, Göring moved most of the fighter strength of
Luftflotte
3 to the
Luftflotte
2 area, in the Pas-de-Calais, within closer range of England, to give the maximum protection to his bomber force, and ordered frequent sweeps over the Channel to confuse and distract the British.

The 24th was a day of heavy fighting and losses on both sides. Between six in the morning and noon the
Luftwaffe
sent large numbers of aircraft over Kent, some of them feints to draw the British fighters away from a major raid on RAF Manston. The airfield at Manston was bombed so heavily that the RAF was obliged to evacuate it by one in the afternoon—all the buildings were destroyed or ablaze, the runways were made unusable by bomb craters and unexploded bombs, and the telephone and teleprinter lines were cut. “Forward” airfields nearer the coast had been attacked so heavily that many of them were put out of action. Sheer numbers were beginning to tell—the
Luftwaffe
sent more than 500 aircraft over the south of England during the course of the day, putting a huge strain on No. 11 Group’s squadrons. Park was obliged to ask Leigh-Mallory for help, and Leigh-Mallory obliged him with two squadrons; but since these squadrons proved unable to do much to protect Park’s airfields—it would have taken much more than their number to have made a significant difference—the antipathy between Air Officer Commanding No. 11 Group and Air Officer Commanding No. 12 Group was only sharpened. Part of this may have been caused by Leigh-Mallory’s attempt to form a “big wing” from the three squadrons at RAF Duxford, which, just as Dowding and Park had predicted, took so long to form up that the Germans had already left for home by the time it arrived. At every airfield in No. 11 Group, ground personnel worked under constant bombing—ground crews had been ordered to dig slit trenches next to their aircraft so they could take cover when attacked, but many continued to refuel and rearm their aircraft even when being bombed. Throughout No. 11 Group’s area, hangars, mess halls, sick bays, and living quarters were severely damaged or destroyed. The airfields at Hornchurch and North Weald were heavily attacked, and several cities were bombed, mostly by errors of navigation, Ramsgate and Portsmouth among them. The end of the day brought no relief. Practically speaking, the Germans appeared to have settled on a division of labor—
Luftflotte
2, with its reinforced fighter force, would attack by day;
Luftflotte
3 would attack by night. London was heavily bombed for the first time, and in addition Birmingham and Cardiff were hit. The night raid on Birmingham was the most dangerous, since it was aimed at the “shadow” Spitfire factory at Castle Bromwich, but the scattered attacks on London were to have the most serious effect on the battle.

The fighting on August 25 does not appear to reflect great credit on Dowding, and it is certainly true that this might have been the right moment for him to have knocked Park’s and Leigh-Mallory’s heads together. The
Luftwaffe
lost twenty aircraft, and the RAF lost sixteen, with nine pilots killed; civilian casualties on the ground soared to 102 killed and 355 injured, and German aircraft had bombed places as far apart as the Scilly Isles and Aberdeen. Certainly many of Dowding’s pilots seem to have felt that he was a remote figure, and this was true; but Leigh-Mallory also had detractors, most of whom resented the fact that he had never been a fighter pilot himself—among the senior leaders of Fighter Command only Park, who flew everywhere in his own Hurricane to see for himself what was happening, was admired by the pilots. Dowding’s more devoted biographers note that he was preoccupied with the problem of night fighters at this point in the battle, and this too was doubtless true; but the truth is also that Dowding’s focus remained fixed on the essentials of what was taking place. The critical factor remained what it had always been—the weather in the Channel. He understood perfectly, as did Hitler and Churchill (the latter reluctantly), that the calendar, not the number of enemy aircraft shot down, would determine the outcome. Already, Hitler had postponed Operation Sea Lion to mid-September, but he could not hope to carry the invasion off if he waited much longer than that—a fact of which his admirals reminded him constantly. By the end of September the Channel storms would be coming through, bringing with them high seas and bad weather. Early to mid-July would have been the ideal time for the invasion; mid-August was possible; mid-September would be risky; and once October arrived an invasion would be madness. In October, even if the weather allowed the troops to get ashore with their heavy equipment (and they would need to seize the Channel ports in working condition for that, since they had no equivalent of the LSTs Eisenhower would have in 1944), bad weather could cut off any chance of supplying or reinforcing them for days on end.
*

Dowding, therefore, saw his main task as keeping his force in being until the weather and the calendar made the invasion of Britain unlikely or impossible, and by that standard he did not need to win a spectacular victory over the Germans in the air; he merely needed to keep his squadrons flying and attacking the German bombers through the first week of October. He did not anticipate that the German air offensive would end then—it might continue for months, or even years—but there would be no further risk of invasion in 1940.

To those who looked for a visible, clearly defined victory, like that at Waterloo or Trafalgar, this was not easy to accept, but Dowding, if he looked to history at all for examples, was following the example of Elizabeth I, who understood that the defeat of the Armada, while it was undoubtedly a great victory, would not end the war between England and Spain, still less the war between Protestantism and the Catholic Church. It would merely demonstrate for some time to come, perhaps permanently, that Spain was unable to invade England. It had not been complete victory, but it was enough.