Such optimism was accepted at face value in Berlin. The moment had come in early September, therefore, it was thought, to launch the next phase of the attack, namely the destruction of British industry, transport and morale by the mass bombing of major British cities. Bombing raids of this kind had already begun, though not in any co-ordinated way, and an attack on the East End of London on 24 August 1940 had prompted the Royal Air Force to launch a counter-raid on Berlin the following night. Although it was not very effective in terms of destructive power, it caused dismay in the German capital, and outraged Hitler, who declared at a public meeting held in the Berlin Sports Palace on 4 September 1940 that if the Royal Air Force dropped a few thousand kilograms of bombs on German cities, ‘then we will drop . . . one million kilograms in a single night. And should they declare they will greatly increase their attacks on our cities, then we will erase their cities!’
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Yet neither the British nor the German raids at this stage of the war, however, were what Hitler on 1 August called ‘terror attacks’. He referred to this tactic only in order to insist that it should not be employed except on his explicit orders, which he did not in fact issue until 4 April 1942, after the first major British air raid on a non-military target, the north German city of Lübeck.
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Whatever the propagandists said, aircrews on both sides were under orders only to release the bombs when they could see a suitable target of economic or military significance - such as, for example, the London docks. In practice, of course, such instructions were less than wholly realistic, given the impossibility of accuracy with the bombing equipment of the time. Moreover, the bombing of London had begun almost a fortnight before Hitler’s speech of 4 September. What was different now was the frequency and intensity of the raids. On 7 September, 350 bombers attacked the London docks in a daylight raid, causing massive damage. Both the bombers and the accompanying fighter squadrons had to fly at high altitude to avoid anti-aircraft fire, so the British withdrew their fighter squadrons westward from the coastal airfields so as to gain time to scramble, and maintained a permanent roster of airborne patrols in anticipation of German raids. As they climbed, the British pilots gave false estimations of their altitude over the radio, so as to fool the German fighter-pilots into staying relatively low. All of this reduced British losses, while the Germans were soon forced to carry out raids mainly at night in an attempt to minimize theirs. Between 7 September and 5 October 1940, the German air force carried out 35 large-scale raids, 18 of them on London. In the week from 7 to 15 September 1940 alone, 298 German aircraft were shot down as against 120 British. On 15 September, more than 200 bombers attacked London, accompanied by a substantial fighter escort. 158 bombers made it to their target, some being shot down before reaching the city, others being forced to turn back for one reason or another. 300 Hurricanes and Spitfires engaged them over the capital, shooting down 34 bombers and 26 fighters and damaging many more.
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The Junkers 88, mainstay of the German bomber force, was slow-moving, it was too small to carry a really effective payload, and it lacked the manoeuvrability and the defensive capacity to ward off the British fighters. Other bombers such as the Heinkel 111 and the Dornier 17 were not only relatively small in size but were also antiquated in many respects; indeed they were being replaced by the Junkers 88 over time despite its defects. The German bomber force was simply inadequate to achieve its task. A quarter of the original 200 bombers did not return from the 15 September raid alone. Losses on such a scale were unsustainable.
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Fighter planes and, still more, pilots were in increasingly short supply. Escorting a ‘large raid’ over London on 17 September, Ulrich Steinhilfer, in a new, upgraded Me109, ‘met amazingly strong fighter opposition’.
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On 29 September 1940, ‘when we got to London and the dog-fighting started I suddenly found that there were only the five aircraft from our squadron with me and about thirty to fifty Spitfires against us’. He only escaped because the British fighters flew off to attack a more important target. By October, he was telling his father that in his Group ‘there are only twelve left from the old crew’; they could not take inexperienced newcomers into battle for fear of losing them and there was a new type of Spitfire so fast that ‘our Me can hardly keep up with it . . . there is no more talk of absolute superiority’.
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‘The leadership of our air force,’ Chief of the Army General Staff Franz Halder noted after a situation report on 7 October 1940, ‘has underestimated the British fighters by about 100% . . . We need 4 times as much to beat the English down.’
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By the time Steinhilfer himself was shot down, baling out on 27 October 1940, to spend the rest of the war in captivity, the fighter battle had effectively been lost.
On 14 September 1940, the eve of the original deadline for the launching of ‘Operation Sealion’, the invasion of Britain, Hitler convened a meeting of the leaders of the armed forces to concede that ‘on the whole, despite all our successes, the preconditions needed for Sealion are not yet there . . . A successful landing means victory; but this requires total command of the air’, and this had not been obtained. ‘Operation Sealion’ was postponed indefinitely.
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Hitler was persuaded by Raeder to continue with night raids, especially over London, to destroy the city’s military and economic infrastructure. Increasingly also the raids were justified in terms of their impact on civilian morale. The decision was welcomed by many in Germany. ‘The war of annihilation against England has now really begun,’ wrote Lore Walb with satisfaction in her diary on 10 September 1940: ‘Pray God that they are soon brought to their knees!’
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This ‘war of annihilation’ was known in London as ‘the Blitz’. In all, some 40,000 British civilians were killed during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. But morale did not break down. A new German ploy of sending fighters and fighter-bombers flying at high altitudes - 253 such raids were carried out in October 1940 alone - was designed to wear down both civilian morale and British fighter strength. In October 1940, some 146 Spitfires and Hurricanes were lost. But the Royal Air Force had adapted its tactics by mounting high-flying patrols, and in the same month the Germans lost another 365 aircraft, mostly bombers. In November one raid on the midland city of Coventry by a fleet of almost 450 bombers destroyed the entire city centre, including the medieval cathedral, killing 380 civilians and injuring 865; British intelligence had failed to anticipate the raid, and the city had been left effectively without protection.
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But this was a rare lapse. Mostly, the German bombers met heavy and well-prepared resistance. Deciding that such attacks achieved little, Raeder persuaded Hitler to switch the bombing campaign to Britain’s seaports from 19 February 1941, but while many raids were mounted, Britain’s night-time defences quickly became effective here too, as radar and radar-controlled guns came into operation. By May 1941 the raids were being scaled down. British civilian morale, though shaky during the initial phase of the bombing campaign, had not collapsed. Churchill had not come under any significant domestic pressure to sue for peace. British aircraft production had not been seriously affected. 600 German bombers had been shot down. Ordinary Germans began to get depressed about the outcome of the conflict. ‘For the first time since the war began,’ wrote Lore Walb in her diary on 3 October 1940, ‘my constant optimism has begun to waver. We are making no progress against England.’
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And in December 1940 Hans Meier-Welcker was forced to conclude privately, as many others had already done, that there was no sign of ‘a collapse of morale among the English people’.
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For the first time, Hitler had lost a major battle. The consequences were to be far-reaching.
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‘PATHOLOGICAL AMBITION’
I
As it became clear that the German air force was not going to win command over the skies between Britain and the Continent, Hitler cast around for alternative methods of bringing the stubborn British to their knees. His attention turned to the Mediterranean. Perhaps it would be possible to enlist Italy, Vichy France and Spain in the destruction of British sea-power and British naval bases there. But a series of meetings held in late October produced nothing of any concrete value. The canny Spanish leader, General Franco, while thanking Hitler for his support during the Spanish Civil War, made no promises at all, but simply said he would come into the war on Germany’s side when it suited him. In his view the war was still undecided, and he poured open scorn upon the German belief that Britain would soon be defeated. Even if there was a successful invasion, he said, the Churchill government would retreat to Canada and continue the fight from there with the aid of the Royal Navy. Moreover, it was quite possible that the USA would back Churchill; already, indeed, on 3 September 1940 US President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed an agreement leasing fifty destroyers to the British navy. Given his unwillingness to force Vichy France to surrender any of its colonial territories in North Africa to the Spanish, Hitler had little or nothing of value to offer Franco in return for his entry into the war, and the Spanish dictator knew it. ‘These people are intolerable,’ Franco declared to his Foreign Minister after the meeting. ‘They want us to come into the war in exchange for nothing.’
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The meeting broke up without any concrete result. A furious Ribbentrop railed against Franco as an ‘ungrateful coward’ whose refusal to help was poor thanks for the aid Germany had given him in the Spanish Civil War, while Hitler told Mussolini a few days later that he would rather ‘have three or four teeth taken out’ than go through another nine such hours of negotiations with the Spanish dictator.
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Hitler fared little better with Marshal P’tain and his Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, who wanted a firm promise of new colonial territory for the Vichy regime in return for lending French support to the attack on Britain. The meeting ended without either side having promised anything. Worse still was the situation in Italy. The Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini had come more closely into the German orbit in the late 1930s, but had stayed out of the war when it began in September 1939. His ambition to create a new Roman Empire in the Mediterranean had gained strength, however, from his defeat and annexation of Ethiopia in 1936 and his successful participation on Franco’s side in the Civil War in Spain from 1936 to 1939. By this time, Mussolini had begun to emulate Hitler, introducing German-style racial legislation in the late autumn of 1938.
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Having started his career as Hitler’s teacher, Mussolini was beginning to become his pupil. Every German foreign policy success threatened to put Italian Fascism further in the shade. Soon after the German occupation of rump Czecho-Slovakia in March 1939, therefore, Mussolini invaded Albania, already run by Italy from behind the scenes but never formally annexed. Another piece had been slotted into the jigsaw of the new Roman Empire. Just over a year later, on 10 June 1940, as it became clear that Hitler was achieving complete dominance over Western Europe, Italy finally joined the war in the hope of gaining British and French colonies in North Africa, along the southern shoreline of the Mediterranean. Since Vichy France was, in effect, an ally of the Third Reich, this would not be easy to achieve. The Italian dictator was unceremoniously excluded from the negotiations in the railway carriage at Compiègne, and Hitler rejected his claim on the French fleet even before it was destroyed by the British raid on Mers-el-K’bir.
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Irritated and disappointed, Mussolini looked around for another opportunity to build his new Roman Empire. He found it in the Balkans. On 28 October 1940, without informing Hitler in advance, Mussolini sent an Italian army across the Albanian border into Greece. The German Leader was furious. The terrain was difficult, the weather was atrocious and would inevitably get worse as winter approached, and the whole venture seemed an unnecessary distraction.
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Hitler was right to be concerned. The Italian troops were poorly trained, under-strength and ill prepared. They lacked the winter clothing necessary to brave the rigours of the mountain snows. They were without the naval support that would have made possible amphibious landings of the kind that had proved so effective in Norway and Denmark. They had no maps to help them traverse the largely pathless terrain across the Albanian-Greek border. Italian armour was utterly inadequate to overwhelm the Greek defences. There was no unified line of command. The Italian Foreign Ministry had been unable to prevent information about the invasion leaking out in advance. The Greeks thus had time to take defensive measures. Within a few days the Italians were being repulsed all along the line. On 14 November 1940 the Greeks began a counter-offensive, supported by five squadrons of British planes that bombed key Italian ports and lines of communication. Mussolini’s army had been pushed back deep into Albanian territory within a few weeks. The Italians lost nearly 39,000 men out of just over half a million; more than 50,000 were wounded and over 12,000 suffered from frostbite, while a further 52,000 had to be invalided out of the action for a variety of other reasons.
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The invasion was a fiasco. Despite propaganda attempts to paper over the disaster with rhetoric, Mussolini’s humiliation could hardly have been more obvious.