With Wings Like Eagles (28 page)

Through the rest of August, the Germans raids continued with increasing force, and the night bombing of certain cities—Portsmouth, because it was a naval base; Liverpool, because it was a vital port for convoys crossing the Atlantic; and Birmingham, because it was the largest industrial city within reasonable range of the German bombers—went from being a dangerous nuisance to becoming a major threat. The day raids continued to be aimed at major targets in No. 11 Group such as Biggin Hill, which was put out of action twice and suffered heavy casualties. The night raids on Birmingham damaged or destroyed various important targets, including the Castle Bromwich Spitfire factory, the Dunlop Rubber Company, “Humber Works, James’ Cycle Works, BSA tools, Nuffield Factory, Daimler Works and Smith’s Stamping Works.” On August 31, Fighter Command suffered its greatest loss for any one day—thirty-nine fighters shot down and fourteen pilots killed, while the Germans lost forty-one aircraft. The RAF’s superiority was being whittled away by huge numbers of attackers, constant waves of attacks, the loss of experienced pilots and sheer numbing exhaustion, particularly in the squadrons of No. 11 Group, whose airfields were continually under attack—on August 30 thirty-nine airmen and airwomen were killed and twenty-six wounded at Biggin Hill alone. Pilots were so tired that one of them landed, then fell forward and slumped over his controls—his ground crew assumed he was dead, but when they ran to his aircraft they discovered he had merely fallen asleep with the engine still running. Others slept curled up in armchairs in full flying kit, and had to be shaken awake to scramble. Ground personnel were numbed by the ceaseless bombing—ground crews refueled and rearmed their aircraft under fire, carrying on with their work even when bombs were exploding nearby; young women dragged unexploded or delayed-action bombs off the runways with tractors, apparently oblivious of the danger; tents were erected to replace destroyed sleeping quarters; mess kitchens were borrowed from the army to prepare food outdoors; airmen and airwomen slept in improvised quarters in nearby houses. Yet somehow the fighter squadrons kept flying, many of them now reduced to no more than a dozen pilots instead of the twenty-six they should normally have had. Improvisation was the order of the day in No. 11 Group, which was in effect under siege.

Air Vice-Marshal Park would later write,

Contrary to general belief and official reports, the enemy’s bombing attacks by day did extensive damage to five of our forward aerodromes and also to six of our seven sector stations. There was a critical period when the damage to sector stations and ground organization was having a serious effect on the fighting efficiency of the squadrons…. The absence of many essential telephone lines, the use of scratch equipment in emergency operations rooms, and the general dislocation of the ground organization, was seriously felt for about a week.
⁸

 

As Park pointed out, the German attacks were now being delivered without any break or pause, giving neither the British fighter squadrons nor the ground organizations on which they depended time to recover. On September 1, in “glorious weather,” at least 450 German aircraft attacked the British airfields again, at last destroying the Sector operations room at Biggin Hill. Two more WAAF NCOs there earned the Military Medal by continuing to work until a bomb blast finally shattered the building and severed the telephone cable; and a team of seven men from the GPO worked in a deep bomb crater under attack for hours to restore telephone service. The operations room was eventually, with heroic efforts, moved to a nearby village shop, but clearly no airfield could survive for long under these conditions or under such heavy bombing raids, which were repeated from September 2 through the 6th, and which were accompanied by heavy and increasingly accurate raids on aircraft factories. On September 1 and 3 RAF and
Luftwaffe
losses of aircraft were equal—an ominous sign.
*

Thus, Fighter Command had approached the breaking point on September 6, and if the
Luftwaffe
had kept up the pressure on the airfields of No. 11 Group and the aircraft factories, history might have taken a different course. Of course we cannot know whether Hitler would have finally launched the invasion, or whether it would then have succeeded; but at last the Germans were in grasping distance of the first precondition for the invasion—the systematic destruction of Fighter Command’s ability to maintain control of the airspace over the Channel, England south of the Thames, and Dover. Indeed Park’s earlier order to his pilots not to pursue German aircraft over the Channel was the first sign that Fighter Command was being obliged by its losses to abandon part of the strategic area it needed to defend—a small step, admittedly, but a step down the slippery slope. British fighters shot down over the Channel were permanently lost, as, very often, was the pilot, whereas when they were shot down over land, there was a good chance that the aircraft could be salvaged, and that the pilot could parachute safely and return to his squadron.

At this precise moment, however, the fatal decision of Hitler at his meeting with Göring in Berlin on August 30 took effect. On September 7, the brunt of the
Luftwaffe
attack was shifted decisively away from Park’s airfields and the aircraft factories toward bombing London and other major cities. Although Dowding and Park had no way of knowing it, the tide of the battle and the conditions under which it was being fought were about to change dramatically. In a more sensible world than that of the Third Reich, the commander in chief of the air force ought to have warned Hitler that taking the pressure off Fighter Command was a fatal mistake, particularly at just the moment when the enormous efforts and sacrifices made by the
Luftwaffe
were about to pay off, but very fortunately for Britain, nothing of the sort happened. Indeed, Göring’s own prestige and vanity were so wounded by the few British bombs that had fallen on Berlin the night of August 25 that he was not only willing but eager to undertake the bombing of London in revenge. Tellingly, Admiral Raeder, although he continued to go through the motions of gathering barges and ships for the invasion, constantly reminded everyone in the supreme command that he needed assurance from the
Luftwaffe
of full control of the air to have any hope of success. This fact was emphasized by RAF Bomber Command, which had succeeded in destroying the Dortmund-Ems ship canal in a daring daylight raid, thus slowing down the delivery of barges to the invasion ports, and forcing the OKW, the high command of the German armed forces, to delay the planned date for launching Operation Sea Lion to September 21, too late in the “invasion season” to count on good weather for the crossing. It was fourteen weeks later in the year than the period Eisenhower would later consider the ideal date for an invasion in the other direction. Had Göring kept on attacking Park’s airfields and the factories that built British fighters for another three weeks with undiminished strength, September 21 might well have become a famous—or infamous—date in history, but it was not to be.

The Germans supposed that Dowding had stripped most of his forces from around the country to reinforce the squadrons south of London and protect the airfields there—indeed, part of the German calculation was that attacking the capital would force Fighter Command to defend it, and thus finally bring the last few remaining British fighters up in large numbers to be overwhelmed by superior German forces. But in fact Dowding’s cautious strategy of holding back a large number of his squadrons to the north and west of No. 11 Group was about to pay off. Dowding had come in for much criticism, behind his back, because he was not using all his forces, but of course his responsibility was to protect the whole country, not just the area south of London, and he had stuck to his guns on this subject despite murmurings against him in the government, and of course from Sholto Douglas, Leigh-Mallory, and his detractors in the Air Ministry. By attacking London in large daylight raids, the
Luftwaffe
would now be exposed not just to No. 11 Group and a portion of No. 10 Group, but to No. 12 Group and No. 13 Group, which were relatively rested and intact. Leigh-Mallory’s fighter pilots would get their chance to attack the enemy in full strength, instead of being used in small numbers (humiliatingly, in their view) merely to protect No. 11 Group’s airfields, and Douglas Bader would have, at long last, his chance to put his “big wing” theory to the test of battle. Moreover, Dowding’s squadrons would be flying from airfields that were no longer under attack. The
Luftwaffe
, contrary to expectations, was about to kick open a hornets’ nest.

On neither side was there any doubt that full-scale air attacks on London would be deadly. Accurate bombing would no longer be of paramount importance—wherever the German bombers dropped their bombs over London, they would kill civilians in significant numbers. At the same time, Fighter Command could not possibly prevent the Germans from dropping bombs—the Greater London area was far too large to prevent the German raiders from getting through somewhere; all Dowding could do over time was to make the effort so costly to the Germans in terms of aircraft and aircrews that they would eventually have to stop, or change tactics. Those who wanted, or expected, a clear-cut moment of victory would be disappointed. The area of death and destruction would simply be shifted from the airfields of southern England and the major industrial cities of importance to the aircraft industry to the world’s largest city.

On September 2
Reichsmarschall
Göring had received the Führer’s permission to begin large-scale day bombing of London (as well as continuing night bombing). He arrived at the Pas-de-Calais on September 7 in his luxurious private train to oversee the initial operation himself, and watch the big formations of both his air fleets’ bombers and their escorting fighters heading toward the white cliffs of Dover in the afternoon and on to London. There were more than 300 bombers and 600 fighters, and the spectacle left most people who saw it speechless; translated into electronic blips and squiggles on a radar screen, it dismayed the RAF radar operators and controllers. This immense raid
*
—the largest so far in the history of air warfare—was far from being a military secret. It was watched by Göring and his staff as it flew overhead, in wave after wave, and was the subject of ecstatic reports on German radio at home as it took place. The radio reports were artfully orchestrated by Dr. Goebbels’s staff, with awe-inspiring music and sound effects. Göring himself announced on the radio to the German people, “I have taken over personal command of the
Luftwaffe
in its war against England.” Some people noted the strange implication that he had not hitherto been in command; others perhaps recalled that he had also promised that Berlin would never be bombed. But the tone of the day in the German media was not only optimistic but triumphalist, even orgiastic, in the tradition of Nazi propaganda. The British radar operators, who were not listening to Radio Berlin, were at first uncertain about what the Germans were planning to attack as they formed up in such large numbers over Calais, and jumped to the conclusion that Kenley and Biggin Hill would once again be the targets, as on previous days.

Fighter Command was, as a result, for once caught flat-footed. Some of the confusion was the result of Park’s instructions to his controllers two days earlier. Although his criticism of Leigh-Mallory was what most of those who read the document noticed first, a second, and more important subject was his dissatisfaction with the way controllers were positioning No. 11 Group’s fighter squadrons. To understand this, it is necessary to keep in mind that radar had originally been an unreliable indicator of height. Radar operators had therefore developed a habit of adding a few thousand feet to their estimate of height because their radar sets generally indicated a height they knew was too low. This technical problem had been largely corrected by August 1940, but many of the operators were still adding on a couple of thousand feet when they communicated their reading of the screen to the controllers. Unfortunately, the fighter pilots themselves usually added on another couple of thousand feet to the figure they were told, partly out of experience and habit and partly because fighter pilots always want to seek the advantage of height when attacking. The higher a pilot is, the better his view of the enemy, and, of course, for a pilot height also equals speed—diving at high speed on the enemy from above and behind was the best guarantee of making a kill and escaping alive. Since it took time for a Spitfire or a Hurricane to climb to a given altitude (about eleven minutes for the former to reach 25,000 feet), for obvious reasons the higher a squadron climbed, the longer it would take to get there. The result was that squadrons were often too late to attack the German bombers on their way in to their target and were attacking
after
the bombs had been dropped. One complaint about Dowding and Park was that however many German aircraft their pilots shot down, they were not doing enough to prevent the Germans from dropping bombs in the first place.

This was related to the second consequence of climbing to a higher altitude than was necessary—the higher British fighters climbed, the more likely they were to meet German fighter escorts, some of which, despite Göring’s order to stick close to the bombers, still flew well above them (which was, of course, the only sensible way to protect them). This had the effect of increasing fighter-to-fighter combat, and of decreasing attacks on the bombers, which usually flew at least 4,000 to 5,000 feet lower. In theory, the Spitfire squadrons should have been taking on the German fighters high up, the Hurricane squadrons should have taken on the bombers lower down, since the Spitfire was faster and could reach a higher altitude than the Hurricane. But in practice this neat division of tasks was not happening, and the pilots were therefore not taking full advantage of each plane’s particular characteristics—against the bombers, the Hurricane was a sturdy and rock solid “gun platform”; but the Spitfire was at its best at higher altitudes, where its speed, maneuverability, and tight turning circle allowed it to fight with the Bf 109 on equal terms, or better.