Their Finest Hour (37 page)

We have seen how our many anxieties and self-questionings led to a steady increase in the confidence with which from the beginning we had viewed the invasion project. On the other hand, the more the German High Command and the Fuehrer looked at the venture, the less they liked it. We could not, of course, know each other’s moods and valuations; but with every week from the middle of July to the middle of September, the unknown identity of views upon the problem between the German and British Admiralties, between the German Supreme Command and the British Chiefs of Staff, and also between the Fuehrer and the author of this book, became more definitely pronounced. If we could have agreed equally well about other matters, there need have been no war. It was, of course, common ground between us that all depended upon the battle in the air. The question was how this would end between the combatants; and in addition the Germans wondered whether the British people would stand up to the air bombardment, the effect of which in these days was greatly exaggerated, or whether they would crumple and force His Majesty’s Government to capitulate. About this Reichsmarshal Goering had high hopes, and we had no fears.

END OF BOOK ONE

The Decisive Struggle
—
Hitler’s Dilemma
—
Three Phases – Advantages of Fighting in One’s Own Air — “Sea Lion” and the Air Assault
—
The German Raid Against Tyneside — Massacre of the Heinkels — Lord Beaverbrook’s Hour
—
Mr. Ernest Bevin and Labour
—
Cabinet Solidarity — Checking German Losses
—
First Attacks on London
—
Uneasiness of the German Naval Staff
—
My Broadcast of September
11
— The Hard Strain from August
24
to September
6
— The Articulation of Fighter Command Endangered
—
A Quarter of Our Pilots Killed or Disabled in a Fortnight — Goering’s Mistake of Turning on London Too Soon
—
A Breathing Space
—
September
15
the Culminating Date
—
With Number
11
Group
—
Air Vice-Marshal Park
—
The Group Operations Room
—
The Attack Begins — All Reserves Employed
—
A Cardinal Victory
—
Hitler Postpones “Sea Lion” September
17
— Afterlight on Claims and Losses — Honour for All.

O
UR FATE
now depended up on victory in the air. The German leaders had recognised that all their plans for the invasion of Britain depended on winning air supremacy above the Channel and the chosen landing places on our south coast. The preparation of the embarkation ports, the assembly of the transports, the minesweeping of the passages, and the laying of the new minefields were impossible without protection from British air attack. For the actual crossing and landings, complete mastery of the air over the transports and the beaches was the decisive condition. The result, therefore, turned upon the destruction of the Royal Air Force and the system of airfields between London and the sea. We now know that Hitler said to Admiral Raeder on July 31: “If after eight days of intensive air war the Luftwaffe has not achieved considerable destruction of the enemy’s air force, harbours, and naval forces, the operation will have to be put off till May, 1941.” This was the battle that had now to be fought.

I did not myself at all shrink mentally from the impending trial of strength. I had told Parliament on June 4: “The great French Army was very largely, for the time being, cast back and disturbed by the onrush of a few thousand armoured vehicles. May it not also be that the cause of civilisation itself will be defended by the skill and devotion of a few thousand airmen?” And to Smuts, on June 9: “I see only one sure way through now – to wit, that Hitler should attack this country, and in so doing break his air weapon.” The occasion had now arrived.

Admirable accounts have been written of the struggle between the British and German Air Forces which constitutes the Battle of Britain. In Air Chief Marshal Dowding’s despatch and the Air Ministry pamphlet number 156, the essential facts are fully recorded as they were known to us in 1941 and 1943. We have now also access to the views of the German High Command and of their inner reactions in the various phases. It appears that the German losses in some of the principal combats were a good deal less than we thought at the time, and that reports on both sides were materially exaggerated. But the main features and the outline of this famous conflict, upon which the life of Britain and the freedom of the world depended, are not in dispute.

The German Air Force had been engaged to the utmost limit in the Battle of France, and, like the German Navy after the Norway Campaign, they required a period of weeks or months for recovery. This pause was convenient to us too, for all but three of our fighter squadrons had at one time or another been engaged in the Continental operations. Hitler could not conceive that Britain would not accept a peace offer after the collapse of France. Like Marshal Pétain, Weygand, and many of the French generals and politicians, he did not understand the separate, aloof resources of an island state, and like these Frenchmen he misjudged our will-power. We had travelled a long way and learned a lot since Munich. During the month of June he had addressed himself to the new situation as it gradually dawned upon him, and meanwhile the German Air Force recuperated and redeployed for their next task. There could be no doubt what this would be. Either Hitler must invade and conquer England, or he must face an indefinite prolongation of the war, with all its incalculable hazards and complications. There was always the possibility that victory over Britain in the air would bring about the end of the British resistance, and that actual invasion, even if it became practicable, would also become unnecessary, except for the occupying of a defeated country.

During June and early July, the German Air Force revived and regrouped its formations and established itself on all the French and Belgian airfields from which the assault had to be launched, and by reconnaissance and tentative forays sought to measure the character and scale of the opposition which would be encountered. It was not until July 10 that the first heavy onslaught began, and this date is usually taken as the opening of the battle. Two other dates of supreme consequence stand out, August 15 and September 15. There were also three successive but overlapping phases in the German attack. First, from July 10 to August 18, the harrying of British convoys in the Channel and of our southern ports from Dover to Plymouth; whereby our Air Force should be tested, drawn into battle, and depleted; whereby also damage should be done to those seaside towns marked as objectives for the forthcoming invasion. In the second phase, August 24 to September 27, a way to London was to be forced by the elimination of the Royal Air Force and its installations, leading to the violent and continuous bombing of the capital. This would also cut communications with the threatened shores. But in Goering’s view there was good reason to believe that a greater prize was here in sight, no less than throwing the world’s largest city into confusion and paralysis, the cowing of the Government and the people, and their consequent submission to the German will. Their Navy and Army Staffs devoutly hoped that Goering was right. As the situation developed, they saw that the R.A.F. was not being eliminated, and meanwhile their own urgent needs for the “Sea Lion” adventure were neglected for the sake of destruction in London.

And then, when all were disappointed, when invasion was indefinitely postponed for lack of the vital need, air supremacy, there followed the third and last phase. The hope of daylight victory had faded, the Royal Air Force remained vexatiously alive, and Goering in October resigned himself to the indiscriminate bombing of London and the centres of industrial production.

* * * * *

In the quality of the fighter aircraft there was little to choose. The Germans’ were faster, with a better rate of climb; ours more manoeuvrable, better armed. Their airmen, well aware of their greater numbers, were also the proud victors of Poland, Norway, the Low Countries, France; ours had supreme confidence in themselves as individuals and that determination which the British race displays in fullest measure when in supreme adversity. One important strategical advantage the Germans enjoyed and skilfully used: their forces were deployed on many and widely spread bases whence they could concentrate upon us in great strengths and with feints and deceptions as to the true points of attack. But the enemy may have under-rated the adverse conditions of fighting above and across the Channel compared with those which had prevailed in France and Belgium. That they regarded them as serious is shown by the efforts they made to organise an efficient Sea Rescue Service. German transport planes, marked with the Red Cross, began to appear in some numbers over the Channel in July and August whenever there was an air fight. We did not recognise this means of rescuing enemy pilots who had been shot down in action, in order that they might come and bomb our civil population again. We rescued them ourselves whenever it was possible, and made them prisoners of war. But all German air ambulances were forced or shot down by our fighters on definite orders approved by the War Cabinet. The German crews and doctors on these machines professed astonishment at being treated in this way, and protested that it was contrary to the Geneva Convention. There was no mention of such a contingency in the Geneva Convention, which had not contemplated this form of warfare. The Germans were not in a strong position to complain, in view of all the treaties, laws of war, and solemn agreements which they had violated without compunction whenever it suited them. They soon abandoned the experiment, and the work of sea rescue for both sides was carried out by our small craft, on which of course the Germans fired on every occasion.

* * * * *

By August, the Luftwaffe had gathered 2669 operational aircraft, comprising 1015 bombers, 346 dive-bombers, 933 fighters, and 375 heavy fighters. The Fuehrer’s Directive Number 17 authorised the intensified air war against England on August 5. Goering never set much store by “Sea Lion”; his heart was in the “absolute” air war. His consequent distortion of the arrangements disturbed the German Naval Staff. The destruction of the Royal Air Force and our aircraft industry was to them but a means to an end: when this was accomplished, the air war should be turned against the enemy’s warships and shipping. They regretted the lower priority assigned by Goering to the naval targets, and they were irked by the delays. On August 6, they reported to the Supreme Command that the preparations for German mine-laying in the Channel area could not proceed because of the constant British threat from the air. On August 10, the Naval Staff’s War Diary records:

Preparations for “Sea Lion,” particularly mine-clearance, are being affected by the inactivity of the Luftwaffe, which is at present prevented from operating by the bad weather, and, for reasons not known to the Naval Staff, the Luftwaffe has missed opportunities afforded by the recent very favourable weather….

The continuous heavy air fighting of July and early August had been directed upon the Kent promontory and the Channel coast. Goering and his skilled advisers formed the opinion that they must have drawn nearly all our fighter squadrons into this southern struggle. They therefore decided to make a daylight raid on the manufacturing cities north of the Wash. The distance was too great for their first-class fighters, the M.E. 109’s. They would have to risk their bombers with only escorts from the Me 110’s, which, though they had the range, had nothing like the quality, which was what mattered now. This was nevertheless a reasonable step for them to take, and the risk was well run.

Accordingly, on August 15, about a hundred bombers, with an escort of forty M.E. 110’s, were launched against Tyneside. At the same time a raid of more than eight hundred planes was sent to pin down our forces in the South, where it was thought they were already all gathered. But now the dispositions which Dowding had made of the Fighter Command were signally vindicated. The danger had been foreseen. Seven Hurricane or Spitfire squadrons had been withdrawn from the intense struggle in the South to rest in and at the same time to guard the North. They had suffered severely, but were nonetheless deeply grieved to leave the battle. The pilots respectfully represented that they were not at all tired. Now came an unexpected consolation. These squadrons were able to welcome the assailants as they crossed the coast. Thirty German planes were shot down, most of them heavy bombers (Heinkel 111’s, with four trained men in each crew), for a British loss of only two pilots injured. The foresight of Air Marshal Dowding in his direction of Fighter Command deserves high praise, but even more remarkable had been the restraint and the exact measurement of formidable stresses which had reserved a fighter force in the North through all these long weeks of mortal conflict in the South. We must regard the generalship here shown as an example of genius in the art of war. Never again was a daylight raid attempted outside the range of the highest-class fighter protection. Henceforth everything north of the Wash was safe by day.

August 15 was the largest air battle of this period of the war; five major actions were fought, on a front of five hundred miles. It was indeed a crucial day. In the South all our twenty-two squadrons were engaged, many twice, some three times, and the German losses, added to those in the North, were seventy-six to our thirty-four. This was a recognisable disaster to the German Air Force.

It must have been with anxious minds that the German Air Chiefs measured the consequences of this defeat, which boded ill for the future. The German Air Force, however, had still as their target the port of London, all that immense line of docks with their masses of shipping, and the largest city in the world which did not require much accuracy to hit.

* * * * *

During these weeks of intense struggle and ceaseless anxiety, Lord Beaverbrook rendered signal service. At all costs the fighter squadrons must be replenished with trustworthy machines. This was no time for red tape and circumlocution, although these have their place in a well-ordered, placid system. All his remarkable qualities fitted the need. His personal buoyancy and vigour were a tonic. I was glad to be able sometimes to lean on him. He did not fail. This was his hour. His personal force and genius, combined with so much persuasion and contrivance, swept aside many obstacles. Everything in the supply pipeline was drawn forward to the battle. New or repaired airplanes streamed to the delighted squadrons in numbers they had never known before. All the services of maintenance and repair were driven to an intense degree. I felt so much his value that on August 2, with the King’s approval, I invited him to join the War Cabinet. At this time also his eldest son, Max Aitken, gained high distinction and eleven victories as a fighter-pilot.