Brushing aside the few RAF fighters that rose to meet them as they approached the capital, the bombers flew on over the suburbs of the city. More fighters tried to attack, but were kept at bay by the escorts. The bombers then began to release their bombs. In the House of Commons the no confidence debate was brought to an abrupt halt as the members sought shelter in the cellars. Half an hour later the bombers set off for home leaving death and destruction in their wake. Some 700 Londoners had been killed and many others injured. Some of London’s most famous streets and buildings were reduced to rubble. Two bombs had hit the Houses of Parliament.
As the shaken members streamed out of their cellars, Churchill finally accepted that his time was up. In a few brief sentences he announced his resignation. He and Lord Halifax then made their way to the palace for an audience with the king. Twenty minutes later, Lord Halifax reappeared as Prime Minister and went to the BBC at Bush House to make an emergency broadcast to the nation. At 1730 he announced that he was about to instruct the British ambassadors to neutral Sweden and Switzerland to make approaches to their German opposite numbers with a view to making peace. In the meantime, he was instructing the Armed Forces to cease fire unless they were attacked.
Within forty-eight hours the war in Europe came to an end. On July 7, Halifax flew to Berlin and signed an armistice. By this time the Royal Family, accompanied by Churchill, were on their way across the Atlantic to Canada. Britain was placed in much the same category as Vichy France, but foreign policy was now controlled by Berlin. The rest is history.
The four-day Battle of Britain marked airpower’s coming of age. The dream of the air prophets like Guilio Douhet and Hugh Trenchard had been realized. For the first time in history, victory had been achieved by airpower alone.
The actual story of the Battle of Britain was, of course, very different. For a start, prior to the fall of France, only the German Navy had given any consideration to the eventuality that it might become necessary to mount an invasion. Hitler himself assumed and, indeed, hoped that once France had been vanquished, the British would seek an honorable peace. It took him a month to decide that an invasion would have to be prepared, and it was not until mid-August that the Luftwaffe mounted its concentrated offensive. This breathing space proved invaluable for RAF Fighter Command, enabling it to recover from the ravages of the Battle for France and to strengthen its defenses. This was helped, in part, by Dowding’s success in May in drastically limiting the number of fighters sent to France.
The Luftwaffe’s conduct of the Battle of Britain was fatally flawed for a number of reasons. First, its target list was too varied. Attacks on ports and the British aircraft industry stood little chance of achieving positive results in the short term. Göring failed to maintain his attacks on the Home Chain radar system, not appreciating that its ability to provide early warning of the Luftwaffe attacks was the cornerstone of Britain’s defenses. Furthermore, Luftwaffe intelligence was poor. Much effort was wasted in attacking airfields that did not belong to Fighter Command and could have little influence on the battle. It’s true, however, that the British organization for airfield repair was lamentably weak, lacking plant and being too reliant on civilian labor.
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The German Air Force 1922-1945: An Anatomy of Failure
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Hooton, E. R.,
Eagle in Flames: The Fall of the Luftwaffe
(Brockhampton Press, London, 1997).
Hough, Richard, and Richards, Denis,
The Battle of Britain: The Jubilee History
(Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1989).
James, T. C. G.,
The Battle of Britain
(Frank Cass, London, 2000).
Macksey, Kenneth,
Invasion: The German Invasion of England July 1940
(Arms and Armour Press, London, 1980).
Overy, Richard,
The Battle
(Penguin Books, London, 2000).
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The Luftwaffe Data Book
(Greenhill Books, London, 1997).
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, vol. 1, (HMSO, London, 1993).
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Gilberto Villahermosa
The period of Soviet inactivity and appeasement was over. By the end of May more than a dozen German reconnaissance and fighter aircraft had disappeared over the Soviet Union, bringing an end to overflights by the Luftwaffe. Moscow met Berlin’s diplomatic inquiries with a wall of silence. A rupture in communications with the Abwehr (Armed Forces High Command Foreign Intelligence Service) teams operating in Russia only exacerbated the loss of the aircraft. German agents working in the Soviet Union reported that the groups had “disappeared.” The agents themselves were next to drop off Berlin’s intelligence net during the first week of June, the final transmission a brief “They know! They are ready!” Scores of pro-German Russian citizens and infiltrated Abwehr operatives were arrested, tortured, interrogated, and then executed by an overzealous and unrestrained NKVD, the Soviet secret police. The German intelligence network in Russia was shattered. Finally, members of the German embassy staff were followed and harassed by the secret police before being restricted to their apartments and the embassy and then arrested for spying. Soon after, they were declared persona non grata and ordered to leave the country immediately.
The German Foreign Ministry’s protests were of no avail, and the German ambassador, Count Friedrich Werner von Schulenberg, was recalled to Berlin. Several flights of Stalin’s newest Yak-1 and MiG-3 fighters escorted the count’s aircraft to the border. The pair on either side of von Schulenberg’s Ju 52 sported newly painted small German swastikas below their cockpits. Stalin wanted to make it quite clear what fate had befallen so many German reconnaissance aircraft. The Soviet pilots grinned and waved at the ambassador, who simply nodded back. He looked down to see the highways running from Moscow to the Polish border choked with troops and equipment moving westward. Long lines of Soviet trains were carrying scores of clearly visible tanks and artillery pieces.
Maj. Gen. Ernst August Köstring, the German military attaché to Moscow, noted that the vehicles appeared to be new types of heavy and medium tanks. He had heard a great deal about the Red Army’s rapidly growing tank force and its newest armored vehicles, but had not seen them before. Köstring counted several dozen heavies and a like number of medium tanks, before realizing that Stalin wanted the ambassador to see all of this: the new aircraft, the tanks, the artillery, the trains, all moving west. Only a few weeks ago these same trains had been loaded with Soviet grain, oil, manganese, chromium, and a host of other precious supplies bound for the Third Reich. Hundreds of thousands of tons of material, the price of a fragile and elusive peace, had been delivered to Germany as promised by Moscow, and then the flow, like every other manifestation of Soviet-German friendship, had abruptly stopped in the middle of May 1941. Perhaps it was all a bluff. If so, it was too late. For the next few days the world would hold its breath as Germany and the Soviet Union teetered on the brink of war.
Köstring reflected on the Führer’s plans to end this uneasy peace along the German-Soviet frontier. In July 1940 the OKH (Army High Command) had begun preparing Operation Barbarossa, which called for the Wehrmacht to crush Russia in a lightning campaign. The objectives included the destruction of the Red Army, the seizure of enough territory to ensure the security of both Germany’s armaments plans in the eastern portion of the country and Romanian oilfields, and the creation of an independent Ukraine and a confederation of Baltic States under German domination. The plan called for three army groups to attack along separate axes to destroy the Red Army while advancing deep into Russia. The thirty divisions of Field Marshal Wilhelm von Leeb’s Army Group North had the mission of securing the Baltics, including the key city of Leningrad. The 51 divisions of Field Marshal Fedor von Bock’s Army Group Center were tasked with capturing Moscow. Finally, the 57 German and Romanian divisions of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt’s Army Group South would roll into the Ukraine toward Kiev. Four powerful Panzer groups, comprising nineteen Panzer and fifteen motorized divisions, would plunge deep into Soviet territory ahead of the army groups to facilitate their advances. The Wehrmacht massed more than 150 divisions for the operation, as well as 3,350 tanks, 7,200 artillery pieces, and 2,800 aircraft.
1
Another fourteen Finnish divisions and a like number of brigade-sized Romanian divisions rounded off the German order of battle. Intelligence estimated that the Red Army could oppose the attack with 200 infantry, armor, and cavalry divisions, as well as fifty brigades deployed in the western Soviet Union.
2
It was also believed that the Red Air Force could field 10,500 combat aircraft, including 7,500 in European Russia.
3
Deployment for Barbarossa began in February 1941 and continued through May. Yet even as the Wehrmacht was moving into its final attack positions, Hitler and his generals still had an incomplete picture of the Red Army and its deployments. High altitude missions, flown by Col. Theodor Rowehl’s special strategic reconnaissance squadron from bases in Germany, Poland, and the Balkans, filled in some of the blanks. The squadron flew specially modified aircraft with pressurized cabins and an operational ceiling of 40,000 feet, making them impervious to Red Air Force interception.
4
The intelligence that was available confirmed that Stalin knew about the German attack on Russia and was preparing to meet it. Behind the cordon of Red Army aircraft, air defense artillery, and Border Troops were the unmistakable outlines of an army occupying positions near the border. But what type of positions—defensive or attacking? Hitler ordered a postponement of Barbarossa, the second since planning for the operation began. Initially scheduled for May 15, it had first been deferred at the beginning of April after the start of the Balkan campaign. The General Staff argued that even if Stalin knew about Barbarossa, it was too late to push back the operation yet again and better to launch now. The Russians would be better prepared later that summer. But the Führer stood firm, and the glint in his eyes as he studied the operations map told those around him that there was a method to his madness.
5
On May 15, 1941, with the armed peace between Germany and Russia coming to an end, Red Army Gen. Georgi Zhukov met with Josef Stalin. After briefing the Soviet dictator on the Wehrmacht’s preparations for Barbarossa, the new chief of the Soviet General Staff forcefully argued for a preemptive attack on enemy forces massing in eastern Poland. Zhukov presented the plan within the context of a justifiable preventive war with limited aims. He sought, however, nothing less than the complete destruction of what were believed to be 100 enemy divisions massing southeast of Warsaw. To accomplish this, the Red Army’s Western and Southwestern Fronts would launch a double envelopment with 150 divisions from Byelorussia and the Ukraine deep into Poland. Having destroyed the forward echelon of the German Army, the two fronts would then swing north to the coast, acting as the anvil for an attack by the Northwestern Front to destroy follow-on German echelons remaining in East Prussia.
6
When Zhukov had finished, Stalin, who had hoped to delay the beginning of war with Germany for at least a year, pointed out that the Red Army was not ready for such large-scale operations. He told Zhukov that in light of the German Army’s brilliant performance against Poland and France, the plan amounted to a desperate gamble. Yet Stalin recognized that the Soviet Union might never again have such an opportunity. Even if the attack did not succeed entirely, the damage to the Germans might be heavy enough to cause Hitler to reconsider or at least delay his planned invasion of Russia. The Soviet Union would continue to mobilize its armed forces, as it had been doing since the beginning of May, and would be ready to face the onslaught.
7
Zhukov was the closest thing Stalin had to a protégé. The forty-four-year-old general had defeated the Japanese Army at Khalkhin Gol, Mongolia, in 1939 through the innovative use of armor and airpower in a double envelopment similar to the one he now proposed. Made a Hero of the Soviet Union, Zhukov was next given command of the Kiev Special Military District. “Bear in mind,” warned Stalin at the time, “that in a fight with the probable enemy, your district is going to play the chief part.”
8
Six months later he appointed this reluctant cavalry officer his chief of the General Staff. Less than five months after that, Zhukov was urging a preemptive attack on Hitler. Stalin recognized the roots of the plan in the Red Army’s victory in Mongolia, as well as its strategic deployment of October 1940 (when the General Staff considered invading East Prussia while the Germans were tied down in France) and the war games of January 1941. During those exercises, Zhukov’s invading Blue forces (representing the German Army) had decisively defeated Gen. Dmitri Pavlov’s defending Red forces (representing the Soviet Union). In this new proposal, however, the objectives were far bolder. Could he do it? Stalin wondered. Could he catch Hitler and his vaunted Wehrmacht with their pants down in Poland? If he succeeded, the political advantages would be tremendous. It would be the beginning of the end for Hitler, he thought. Having defeated the German Army, the Soviet Union would gain the respect of the entire world, but especially Britain and America. More important, it would have the peace it needed to finish rebuilding the Red Army. After that, all of Europe was theirs for the taking.