With Wings Like Eagles (40 page)
Read With Wings Like Eagles Online
Authors: Michael Korda
Tags: #History, #Europe, #England, #Military, #Aviation, #World War II
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*Except for its Empire and Commonwealth, which were very distant and even less well prepared for war than “the mother country.”
*In his speech in the House of Commons on June 18, 1940, on the fall of France, Churchill said, “What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin.”
*The author’s uncle, Sir Alexander Korda, was on the Gestapo’s list. In his case they had his correct business and home address.
*Others remember this as “…when we are lying on the ground choking on our blood,” but either way Churchill’s view of the situation was dramatically different from that of his foreign minister, Lord Halifax.
*Robinson,
Invasion
1940, Carroll and Graf, New York, 2005.
Invasion
1940, Carroll and Graf, New York, 2005.
*Göring exaggerated his powers in this instance. In the end Milch, whose father was Jewish, was obliged to persuade his mother to swear that he was actually the child of an Aryan with whom she had had an extramarital affair.
*The term “radar” was coined later, in the United States, and became universally used. Its birth in the United Kingdom came about in 1935, when the Air Ministry, informed erroneously that the Germans were developing a radio beam “death ray” that could destroy airplanes in midair, asked scientist Robert Watson-Watt to look into the matter. Watson-Watt dismissed the notion of the death ray, but suggested the use of radio beams to locate aircraft. He first tested such beams successfully at Daventry on February 26, 1935. Although Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin has been accused of lacking interest in defense and technology, he was kept fully informed of Watson-Watt’s progress, in which he showed great interest. He understood at once the vital importance of radar, and pushed hard for the development of the “Chain Home” radar network along Britain’s southern coast. It became operational in 1937, and it enabled Fighter Command to detect the number, height, and course of enemy aircraft at ranges of up to 100 miles.
*This was perhaps balanced out in Stanley Baldwin’s character by his mother, who was a successful author of fiction about rural life and a book of ghost stories.
*Curiously, Baldwin—like his predecessor, Ramsay MacDonald, and his successor, Neville Chamberlain, the other two major apostles of appeasement—allowed Churchill to have access to British intelligence estimates about German air strength and to information about the RAF’s strength, perhaps on Lyndon B. Johnson’s theory that it was “better to have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.” If so, the theory didn’t work. It was not just the accuracy of the numbers that Churchill protested, but the interpretation of them, and the failure to react to them by increasing British air strength dramatically.
*Like the Bristol Blenheim, the German bombers He 111 and the Do 17 (called the “flying pencil” because its fuselage was so narrow) were originally designed and built as fast civilian passenger aircraft—in their case because Germany was forbidden to build military aircraft under the terms of the Versailles peace treaty. All these aircraft became slower when converted into bombers, since they then were heavier and sprouted drag-producing gun turrets, radio antennas, bomb aimer positions, etc. Only the Ju 88 was designed from scratch as a fast bomber, and not coincidentally it proved the best and most adaptable of all. It gained a new lease on life in 1942 as a very effective radar-equipped night fighter.
*The British Lee-Enfield. 303 rifle of World War II had a slightly longer barrel than the Lee-Enfield rifle of World War I (and a different, less effective bayonet). The Mauser 98 K of the German army was merely a slighter shorter version of the World War I Mauser rifle. In both armies the pistols, hand grenades, and helmets were identical to those of the earlier war, as were the British Army’s machine guns.
*In the 1930 s “Biggles” was the pilot hero of a hugely successful series of what we would now call young adult novels; he was young, daring, and preternaturally brave.
*Starting in 1941, as the Germans came under increasingly heavy attack from Bomber Command, they instituted a very similar system of nationwide, integrated air defense, linking radar, fighters, night fighters, antiaircraft guns, searchlights, police, fire police, municipal authorities, and the Nazi Party’s public assistance organizations under a single command. More ambitious (and authoritarian) than the British system, it was amazingly efficient. There is an excellent description of it in Len Deighton’s novel
Bomber.
Bomber.
*The first versions of the Hurricane and the Spitfire to reach service did not yet have this, and squadron commanders were obliged to buy up the local supply of car rearview mirrors from garages and have the mechanics fit them above the windscreen.
*This last problem was eventually solved just before the Battle of Britain by installing in all British aircraft a small wireless transmitter called “identification, friend or foe” (IFF). It sent out a constant coded signal identifying the aircraft to the radar operators as one of ours.
*Offcially La Coupe d’Aviation Maritime Jacques Schneider.
*Gloster Gladiators were still in service at the beginning of the war, and were not only robust but surprisingly effective. At one point in 1940 the air defense of Malta was reduced to three apparently unconquerable Gladiators nicknamed Faith, Hope, and Charity.
*One measure of Reginald Mitchell’s fame in the United Kingdom is that he was voted “the greatest Midlander of all time,” in a poll conducted for BBC Midlands Today in 2003. Mitchell received 25 percent of the votes cast; William Shakespeare came in second, with 17 percent.
*“All the business of war…is to endeavor to find out what you don’t know by what you do; that’s what I called ‘guessing what was at the other side of the hill.’”
*Even in 1952, when the author served in the Royal Air Force in Germany, we were awed by our quarters at a former
Luftwaffe
base near Hamburg, which not only had indoor baths and showers but featured a mysterious-looking porcelain basin set in the wall which was too small, too high up, and too elaborately decorated to be a urinal, and which turned out to be a flushing
vomitorium
for those who had drunk too much beer.
Luftwaffe
base near Hamburg, which not only had indoor baths and showers but featured a mysterious-looking porcelain basin set in the wall which was too small, too high up, and too elaborately decorated to be a urinal, and which turned out to be a flushing
vomitorium
for those who had drunk too much beer.
*Messerschmitt strengthened the horizontal stabilizers with external struts, which were criticized by British and American airmen as either cautious or old-fashioned, but in fact Sydney Camm also used two struts to support the horizontal stablizers of his Hurricane prototype. They were removed only because, in Camm’s absence during a brief hospitalization, one of his staff decided they weren’t needed and had them taken off. Camm was livid when he returned, but since the tailplane seemed just as strong without them, he eventually came around to the idea himself.
*In order to give the impression that the
Luftwaffe
had two fighters, not just one, development of the He 112 continued, and prototypes of what came to be called the He 113 were later shown off at frequent intervals, disguised with varying paint schemes and fake squadron identification markings. As a result, several British pilots claimed to have shot one down in the Battle of Britain, although in fact the He 113 never saw combat.
Luftwaffe
had two fighters, not just one, development of the He 112 continued, and prototypes of what came to be called the He 113 were later shown off at frequent intervals, disguised with varying paint schemes and fake squadron identification markings. As a result, several British pilots claimed to have shot one down in the Battle of Britain, although in fact the He 113 never saw combat.
*Mitchell was afflicted with the same problem. He had originally designed the Spitfire with a retractable radiator that would be lowered only as needed during takeoff, climbing, and landing, but the Merlin engine produced far too much heat for that, and he was eventually obliged, with much reluctance, to put a coolant radiator under the starboard wing and an oil radiator under the port wing, spoiling the smooth airflow below his perfect elliptical wing.
†By then Messerschmitt’s name was considered a propaganda asset, and his aircraft began to be named after him (Me), instead of after the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke (Bf).
*The RAF was also experimenting with twenty-millimeter cannon. It was obvious that the greater weight of the shell, and the fact that the shell was explosive, would make bringing down an all-metal aircraft easier than it was with rifle-caliber bullets, but the trade-off was that most of the cannon suitable for installation in an aircraft had a fairly low velocity and a slow rate of fire. The twenty-millimeter cartridge was certainly a killer, but in the two seconds a fighter pilot had in which to hold an enemy aircraft in his sight and “kill” it, only an expert could achieve enough “hits” with slow-firing cannon to do the job. At least one RAF squadron given cannon-equipped fighters in 1940 demanded to have its older, machine-gun-equipped fighters returned to it.
*The merchant seamen tanker crews are among the many unsung heroes of the Battle of Britain, as are the young women of the WAAF who continued to call in radar fixes to Fighter Command HQ from wooden huts aboveground at the radar sites while under direct attack from German dive-bombers.
*The traditional English foxhunter’s cry on seeing a fox. The German fighter pilots too used old hunting cries.
*The two MG FF (Oerlikon) cannon in the wings of the Bf 109 E (each with sixty rounds) fired on an “open bolt,” as opposed to a closed bolt—that is, the breech opened as they fired, like that of a submachine gun. This made them lighter (they also had a short barrel, to save weight) by eliminating a complex and heavy breech-locking mechanism, but also substantially reduced the muzzle velocity (submachine guns are designed this way so that they don’t overheat). Consequently, in 1940 the Bf 109 E’s wing guns, though they packed a deadly punch, operated at a very low rate of fire and with insufficient muzzle velocity.
*In order to prevent moisture (rain or fog) from entering through the open gun ports in the wing and freezing on the gun breeches as the plane took off and climbed rapidly into colder air, Dowding had the ground crews cover the gun ports with “sticky tape,” very much like what is now called duct tape. That used by the RAF was bright red, hence the bright red square patches on the leading edge of the wings of British fighters. The first bullet simply cut a hole in the tape. Armorers usually left taping over the gun ports to the last, after they had cleaned and reloaded the guns, so the intact red patches were a sign that the fighter was ready for action again.
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