With Wings Like Eagles (7 page)

By 1937, production Hurricanes were reaching RAF squadrons in quantity. Camm would always regret not having designed a thinner wing, but no pilot ever complained about that—the Hurricane could absorb enormous punishment and still get you home in one piece; and although it was slower than the Spitfire and had a lower ceiling, its thick wings and the grouping of its guns close together (that roomy wing again!) made it a steadier gun platform. Both aircraft were at least the equal of the Bf 109E in 1939 and 1940, and would remain in production, in updated versions, until 1945. Dowding fussed over the details of both his fighters, as he fussed over the details of everything, finally persuading the Air Ministry, after an epic struggle, to order the manufacturers to put a thick piece of laminated, optically flat, bulletproof glass in front of the pilot in 1939, just in time for the war, and to install hot-air ducting into the wings to keep the breeches of the guns from freezing solid at high altitudes.

With radar in operation, the details of fighter control worked out, and two different types of eight-gun monoplane fighters in service, Dowding had good reason to feel confident that he could meet the enemy on equal terms, if the politicians and the Air Council let him do his job.

A
cross the North Sea, in Germany, the
Luftwaffe
was developing in a very different way, and under a radically different leadership. The contrast between the two air forces was remarkable. The RAF as the junior of the three British services suffered from something of an inferiority complex, which manifested itself in a combination of bravado—an example, later in the war, was Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris’s stubborn belief that RAF Bomber Command could win the war all by itself, if given the resources—and a prickly relationship between officers and “other ranks,” which Len Deighton captured perfectly in
Bomber
, and whose spirit pervades T. E. Lawrence’s famous book on the RAF in the early 1920s,
The Mint
. Because the RAF lacked the ancient regimental traditions and identity that were the backbone of the British Army, and the sense of being shipmates sharing the same risks and dangers that made shipboard discipline in the Royal Navy more tolerable, the gulf between officers and “other ranks” was in some ways wider than in the other services. The fact was that the “other ranks” thought of themselves (and were officially described) as “tradesmen,” unlike soldiers or sailors, and brought with them into the service some of the sullen attitude toward authority of skilled workers and union members in civilian life; while the NCOs in the more specialized trades took on something of the role of union shop stewards in a factory, becoming in effect intermediaries between management and labor. Eight weeks of “square bashing” and polishing his boots were seldom enough to turn a skilled engine mechanic into an obedient soldier-in-blue who accepted the authority of commissioned officers as natural.

A certain respect for pilots (and, to a lesser degree, for aircrew in general) pervaded the RAF, but flying was also a trade. Almost half the pilots in the RAF were NCOs, not officers (in the Battle of Britain 42 percent of the fighter pilots would be sergeants, flight sergeants, or warrant officers), as were many of the navigators, bombardiers, flight engineers, and wireless operators, and all of the air gunners—indeed, it was only the war that put stripes on the sleeves of many of these men, partly because flying duties made their mealtimes erratic and the sergeants’ mess was better suited to flexible mealtimes, and partly because RAF aircrew would be afforded better treatment by the enemy as sergeants if they became prisoners of war.

Traces of old-fashioned class-consciousness pervaded the organization of the RAF, despite the fact that it was the most “modern” and technologically minded of the three services. An example was the so-called Auxiliary squadrons. In order to permit rapid expansion in the event of war, the RAF relied on three separate and distinctly different schemes. The first was the RAF Reserve, consisting of regular officers who had retired from the service, or had completed their term of service (“short-term” commissions were then for four years). The second consisted of the Royal Auxiliary Air Force squadrons, intended to be the equivalent of the army’s “Territorials,” many formed by adventuresome aviation enthusiasts. One of the earliest of such squadrons, No. 601 (County of London) Auxiliary Air Force Squadron, based at RAF Tangmere, had been founded in the bar at White’s Club in 1924 by Lord Edward Grosvenor, a son of the fabulously rich duke of Westminster; its pilots were predominantly wealthy City stockbrokers and wine merchants, and it quickly became known as the “millionaires’ squadron.” The No. 615 (County of Surrey) Auxiliary Air Force Squadron was almost as exclusive, and furthermore had as its Honorary Air Commodore Winston Churchill; and the Oxford University Air Squadron was equally glamorous. Typically, one of No. 601 Squadron’s pilots was W. M. L. “Billy” Fiske, a wealthy and social young American sportsman, who won a gold medal on the U.S. bobsled team at the 1932 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, married the former countess of Warwick, had an international reputation as a skier and golfer, drove a British Racing Green 4.5-liter super-charged Bentley, and on August 16, 1940, became the first American in the Royal Air Force to be killed in combat in World War II.
¹
The Auxiliary squadrons brought to RAF Fighter Command an additional element of dash and high spirits, symbolized by such customs as officers leaving the top button of the tunic open and wearing a brightly patterned silk scarf loosely knotted around the neck, habits of dress that were not always appreciated by RAF Station Commanders, and that soon spread to non-Auxiliary pilots, even to a few sergeant-pilots. The third element, the RAF Voluntary Reserve, was less elitist and less flamboyant, being a more ambitious nationwide training scheme for aircraftmen. At the beginning of the war, members of the Royal Auxiliary Air Force wore a small brass A on the lapels of their tunic, whereas the members of RAF Volunteer Reserve who were commissioned wore a small brass V, but by the end of 1940 these distinctions were no longer encouraged, or widely observed.

Thus, the Royal Air Force, as it formed for war, was a typically British combination of professionals and amateurs, with an equally typical British concern for class differences—certainly a little less stuffy, at least among the pilots and aircrew, than the more elite infantry and cavalry regiments of the British Army, and a lot less sure of its place than the Royal Navy, but still a recognizably British institution.

The enemy it would face was organized along very different lines, and on the surface, at least, seemed more powerful and more “modern.” Forbidden to maintain a military aviation industry under the Treaty of Versailles, Germany had begun systematically evading that restriction early in the 1920s, long before the Nazi Party came to power. General Hans von Seeckt, the austere commander of the
Reichswehr
, was a strong believer in an independent air force; he encouraged the widespread formation of “glider clubs” for German youth; funneled subsidies to the German aircraft industry to design “civil” aircraft that could be adapted or rapidly converted into military ones; made the new German airline, Lufthansa, a clandestine means for teaching young men destined for military aviation to fly; and arranged for those who succeeded to receive advanced training secretly in Soviet Russia. When Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, the foundations had already been laid not only for a modern aviation industry but also for a nationwide scheme for training young people as pilots. All that was necessary was to put a Nazi gloss on what already existed, and pour money secretly into building up-to-date military aircraft. Although Göring’s outsize faults were even then clear enough, nobody could deny his energy, his flair for publicity, or his lack of scruples in achieving his ambitions on the largest possible scale; as Hitler’s air minister (among his many other offices) he worked hard and cut through every bureaucratic difficulty to make Germany a formidable air power overnight. One consequence was that propaganda about Germany’s air power created widespread alarm long before it was in fact a realistic threat; but by 1935, when the existence of the
Luftwaffe
was officially acknowledged by Hitler—Göring was himself the first to display its new uniform, which, despite his bulk, he modeled proudly for his pilots, who were themselves then still dressed in the modest uniform of civilian airline pilots—the infrastructure of a major air force was already complete.

It was, as it would necessarily have been, an air force that satisfied the Führer, who at this stage was more interested in bluff than in war. Hitler remained throughout his life an ex-soldier—airplanes (and warships) did not interest him as intensely as artillery and tanks. About guns and tanks he could never have too much detailed information, and his opinions, though those of a layman, were often perfectly sensible, despite his taste for the outsize and even the gigantic. On the subject of airplanes he seldom interfered, and when he did he was often wrong. Certainly in the 1930s he was willing to leave it all in the hands of Göring. What Hitler wanted was an air force that would overawe and frighten other nations. Bombers interested him more than fighters—he saw no likelihood that Germany would need to be defended from air attacks—and the more bombers, the better. “Strategic” bombing, as it later came to be known, did not much interest him, either. The
Luftwaffe
was primarily intended from the beginning to intimidate Germany’s neighbors, and if intimidation failed, to serve as a major weapon, airborne artillery, for supporting the German army in the event that Hitler’s aims could not be won by diplomacy and threats.

It was not just aircraft that were mass-produced on a huge scale—
Luftwaffe
bases sprang up all over Germany, built with a lavish attention to detail and designed in the most ambitious Third Reich style. At a time when most RAF stations had wooden huts for housing, with outside “ablutions” and a cast-iron coke stove for heating, the buildings Göring put up were brick and stone, centrally heated, with comfortable rooms for the airmen, even better accommodations for the officers, and mess halls that were well lit, clean, and comfortable. Officers’ messes had chrome and marble bathroom fittings, big fireplaces, and leather furniture. Instead of looking as if they had been plunked down by a careless hand in the middle of nowhere on god-forsaken heaths and soggy meadows, the bases of the
Luftwaffe
were handsomely landscaped and set among winding paths and forests of pine trees—at first glance they looked like plush health resorts rather than military bases.
*
Göring, who stinted himself of nothing, did not stint his airmen either; they were the envy of the other two services.

Without wishing to make the
Luftwaffe
sound more attractive than it was—it was, after all, a Nazi organization, with all that that implies—it was by far the least class-conscious of the German services, and offered the best chance of promotion for lower-class and middle-class young men, provided of course that they were Aryan and had joined the Hitler Youth. Just as in the RAF, enthusiasm for sports mattered a lot, and just as in the RAF pilots were not necessarily commissioned. At least half the
Luftwaffe
pilots, bombardiers, and navigators (and of course all the air gunners, flight engineers, and wireless operators) were “other ranks.” In one significant way
Luftwaffe
practice differed from that of the RAF—in British aircrews, the pilot was always “captain” of the airplane whatever his rank, in absolute command from the moment the engines started up, even if he was a sergeant and his navigator and bombardier were both officers; but in the German aircrews, the senior officer on board was “captain” of the aircraft, even if he was not the pilot. In another respect, German practice differed from ours—German bombers, like German tanks, were deliberately designed to place the members of the crew as close together as possible, both to raise their confidence and morale and to enable them to help a comrade who was wounded, or take his place when necessary. The advantages of this were obvious, but there were also disadvantages—a single good burst from a fighter could disable the whole crew, and the gunners lacked elbow room to use their machine guns effectively, and did not have isolated power turrets giving them a full field of fire. That said, German and British aircrews were equally well trained and German and British fighter pilots about equally matched.

German and British fighter pilots were about equally “mounted” too. Like the Hurricane and the Spitfire, the Bf 109, with various updates, would remain in production until the end of the war, and would be continually modified to carry more powerful weapons than it had originally been designed for. Like them too, both the aircraft and the designer achieved celebrity status.

Willy Messerschmitt, like Reginald Mitchell, was a visionary genius of airplane design, and like Sydney Camm he could turn his hand to anything with wings (his versatility was such that before the end of the war he would be responsible for the design of the world’s largest transport plane, the six-engine Me 323; the world’s first operational jet fighter, the Me 262; and the world’s only operational rocket-propelled fighter, the Me 163). Messerschmitt was unlike Camm and Mitchell, however, in that his fighter did not at once win the confidence and enthusiasm of the air force it was designed for, and from the first it was inextricably mixed up in the politics—or the vicious personal rivalries that passed for politics—of the Third Reich.

In the early 1920s, Messerschmitt had founded his own aircraft firm in Bavaria, and received a subsidy from the Bavarian state government (as well as clandestine funding from the defense ministry in Berlin).
²
His rival was another Bavarian aircraft manufacturer, Bayerische Flugzeugwerke, but in 1927, in the bad economic times and under severe financial pressure, the Bavarian government, unable to subsidize both firms, forced them to merge—a shotgun marriage that pleased nobody.

Unlike Camm and Mitchell, Messerschmitt was not just a gifted airplane designer; he was a businessman-entrepreneur with large ambitions, who had no desire to simply sit at his drawing board designing airplanes for other people to build and profit from. From the very beginning of the unwelcome merger, he dominated the new company, which got its first windfall in the shape of an order for a small, ultrafast modern monoplane airliner, designed to carry ten passengers. The order came from the new national airline Lufthansa, whose managing director and director of procurement was Erhard Milch. Half Jewish or not (the question was not yet of critical importance in 1927), Milch was, then as later, overbearing, an intriguer, opinionated, and a bad man to have as an enemy. Messerschmitt promptly proceeded to make an enemy of him. The airplane he had designed crashed during its development testing in 1928, and Milch canceled Lufthansa’s order. Messerschmitt quickly produced an improved prototype, and the order was reinstated, but after further delays Milch once more canceled it—the relationship between the two men was already touchy—and demanded the return of Lufthansa’s down payment. Bayerische Flugzeugwerke was unable to return the money, having spent it to produce the two prototypes, and as a result was forced into bankruptcy in 1931. During this disagreeable period dislike between the two men ripened into outright loathing, so it was not good news for Messerschmitt when Hitler came to power in 1933 and Milch emerged as the second most powerful figure after Göring in the German aviation world.