The Battle of Britain had important ramifications for the course of
World War II. The most immediate of those that aided the Allied cause
were the dividends that accrued from the fact that Germany had suffered
its first major defeat in the war. The British triumph gave hope to the
peoples of occupied countries in Europe and helped feed partisan
resistance against German occupation forces. More important, this battle
helped convince many in the neutral United States to favor offering
greater assistance to Britain. Increasing popular support assisted
President Franklin D. Roosevelt in securing passage of the March 1941
Lend-Lease Act, which provided vital war supplies to Britain and to
other countries fighting the Axis powers.
In military terms, the Battle of Britain had a tremendous impact on
Germany’s war effort. The Luftwaffe never fully recovered from its
losses in the battle, as Britain then surpassed Germany in aircraft
production. Also, because Britain remained in the war, Germany now had
to spread its military resources even more thinly, including assisting
Italy in combatting British forces in the Mediterranean. Rather than the
quick conclusion of the war that German leader Adolf Hitler and
commander of the Luftwaffe Reichsmarschall (Reich Marshal) Hermann
Göring had believed was inevitable, the Germans faced a protracted
conflict that placed great strain on their limited military resources.
This situation became far worse for Germany with the June 1941
commencement of Operation BARBAROSSA, the German invasion of the Soviet
Union. The Battle of Britain played a role even before the opening of
hostilities between the Germans and the Soviets. Hitler’s decision to
conquer the Soviet Union was based on his long-held belief in the need
to secure Lebensraum (living space) for the German people, but he also
expressed the opinion that a German defeat of the Soviet Union would in
turn force Great Britain to surrender. Ultimately, BARBAROSSA resulted
in a protracted two-front war in Europe. Following the entry of the
United States into the conflict as an Allied power, U.S. military might,
as well as substantial American material and military resources
provided to Britain and the Soviet Union, presented the Germans with a
war that they could not win, for Allied resources far surpassed those
available to Germany. The June 1944 Allied landing in Normandy was the
final proof of the importance of the Battle of Britain. This amphibious
assault on Hitler’s Europe was made possible only because Britain
remained a secure base for the assembly of the vast armada needed for
the operation. In many respects, the 1940 struggle for mastery of the
skies over Britain had changed the entire outcome of World War II in
Europe.
The Battle of Britain, which took place between July and October 1940, was a major air campaign in which Britain's Royal Air Force defended the British Isles against Nazi Germany's air force, the Luftwaffe. Described by prime minister Winston Churchill as the RAF's finest hour, it was the first major military campaign in history to be fought entirely in the air.
By early 1943 enough evidence had accumulated in Britain of German
secret weapon development to alert several of the responsible
authorities to the danger of pilotless weapons – or other forms of
long-range attack. The authorities included R.V. Jones, who advised
the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), as well as the Air Ministry,
and who enjoyed the Prime Minister’s favour as the ‘man who broke
the beams’, the Luftwaffe’s radio guidance system during the
Blitz of 1940; Professor C. D. Ellis, the army’s scientific
adviser; Dr A. D. Crew, Controller of Projectile Development at the
Ministry of Supply, the British equivalent of Albert Speer’s
Armaments Ministry in Germany; General Ismay, Churchill’s personal
military staff officer; the Joint Intelligence SubCommittee, which
co-ordinated the work of MI6, MI5 (the internal security service) and
Special Operations Executive (SOE), Churchill’s subversive
organisation overseas; and the government’s Scientific Advisory
Committee. Too many fingers in the pie, no doubt; but the crucial
initiates were Lord Cherwell (Professor F.A. Lindemann),
Paymaster-General but holding that post as Churchill’s personal and
long-time scientific adviser, and Duncan Sandys, since 20 April
chairman of the committee, soon to be known as the Bodyline, then
Crossbow Committee, charged with overall responsibility for
investigation of the secret weapon threat.
Churchill believed in ‘creative tension’ as a principle of
administrative efficiency, the fostering of rivalries between
government servants to generate energy in the examination of problems
and the keenest critical response. It was a sound principle, as long
as normal personalities were involved. There was nothing normal about
the personalities of Sandys and Cherwell, or in turn about their
relationship with their overlord. Sandys was an ambitious young
politician of grating disposition, who had a possessively filial
attitude to the Prime Minister. Cherwell, a rich bachelor scientist
of exceptional intelligence, also had a possessive attitude towards
Churchill. Never quite at home in England, though he was a Fellow of
the Royal Society, an Oxford professor and a resident of Devon, he
seemed unable to shrug off his sense of foreignness, the product of
German birth and education, burning British patriot though he was. He
had attached himself to the Prime Minister during Churchill’s
wilderness years, adulated him personally and jealously guarded his
own status as the medium through whom Churchill received scientific
advice. The appointment of Sandys to head the secret weapons
committee touched him to the quick. Observers noted that –
discreetly heterosexual though he undoubtedly was – he trembled
with an almost feminine indignation at the slight. The regrettable
outcome was that, because Sandys early espoused the idea that Nazi
Germany was indeed developing a long-range rocket, Cherwell grasped
at every strand of his extensive scientific knowledge to decry the
thought: liquid fuel was unmanageable, only a solid-fuelled rocket
would work, it would have to be a multi-stage monstrosity, its launch
sites would be so large as to be undisguisable, it probably existed
only in the minds of unreliable foreign agents. The idea, he argued
in a phrase that inextinguishably attaches to his considered advice,
was ‘a mare’s nest’.
The secret weapons intelligence plot, between the first deliberate
overflying of Peenemünde by RAF photographic intelligence aircraft
in April 1943 and the arrival of the first pilotless weapon on
British soil on 13 June 1944 (a flying bomb, not a rocket), was
therefore bedevilled at every turn by reasoned disagreement between
the parties to the investigation. To his credit, Cherwell never
dismissed the feasibility of a cruise missile (the flying bomb).
Indeed, he argued that, if a pilotless weapon threat existed, it was
probable that it would take a cruise missile form. Because, however,
agents’ reports of the V-1 came later, while evidence of the rocket
threat, however vague and misleading, came earlier and more
plentifully, the British were both misled and caused to disagree
among themselves. The disabling weakness of the German secret weapons
programme was to attempt to do too much with too little; the British
were further confused by the German investment in a multi-stage
long-range gun (the ‘high-pressure pump’) and a rocket-propelled
anti-aircraft missile, the Wasserfall (Waterfall). The weakness of
the British intelligence counter-attack lay in an absence of
practical knowledge of rocket or cruise missile technology and so a
lack of clarity in their attempt to perceive what it was they were
seeking to identify. The very wealth of intelligence received during
April, May, June and July 1943 – from agents, prisoner-of-war
interrogations and air photographs – required laborious analysis
but in its diversity and imprecision provided something for anyone
who had taken up an intellectual position on the nature of the threat
or who denied its reality.
Among those contributing were a captured German tank technology
officer who co-operated so enthusiastically with his interrogators
that he was appointed a British civil servant and posted to the
Ministry of Supply as ‘Mr Herbert’. He had information on
anything he was asked about including, eventually, the German secret
weapons programme. He claimed that he had been involved in the
development of projectiles weighing a hundred tons, launched either
from a tube or a ramp. A senior officer of the Luftwaffe experimental
unit, captured in April, told of his superior, Colonel Rowehl, being
summoned to see Hitler at Berchtesgaden to discuss the bombardment of
Britain with rockets and jet-propelled aircraft in the coming summer.
‘Mr Herbert’, when re-interrogated, remembered that he had
witnessed the launch of a sixty-ton rocket and knew of another of
twenty-five tons. He mentioned the involvement of the Askania company
and of Peenemünde, and other circumstantial facts, all later proved
accurate. During 1–5 June, four reports were received in London
that substantiated, in one way or another, information on hand. They
mentioned Rechlin, the Luftwaffe experimental station, Usedom, the
island on which Peenemünde was located, described it as a German
army, not Luftwaffe, establishment (important, because the rocket was
an army weapon) and, in the last report, described the firing of
three rockets, 50–60 feet long, from ‘testing pit No. 7’. Large
pits, clearly visible on air photographs of Peenemünde, had puzzled
the interpreters. The reference was misleading, since the rockets
were fired from transporter-erectors positioned in the open, but it
seemed to emphasise that the British should be interested in
Peenemünde.
This pot-pourri of information merely helped to harden attitudes
among the investigators in Britain, not to elucidate. The positions
were as follows: Duncan Sandys was fairly certain that the Germans
were developing a rocket; R.V. Jones was uncertain but had an open
mind; Lord Cherwell was absolutely convinced that a rocket was not
technically feasible. His argument was fiercely reasonable: take-off
would demand an enormous thrust; such thrust could only be supplied
by an enormous charge of solid fuel inside a very large rocket; a
very large rocket would need a conspicuous launch platform, either a
‘gun’ or a large ramp; no such structures had been identified;
therefore the rocket did not exist. He dismissed the notion that the
Germans might be using liquid fuel – he appears not to have studied
Goddard’s pre-war experiments in America and to have been unaware
of recent British experiments, conducted by Isaac Lubbeck for the
Shell Petroleum Company – on the grounds that it would be
impossible to control the flow of gases out of the rocket, which
could not therefore be guided. Cherwell was to persist in this view
until the contrary evidence became incontrovertible.
Meanwhile, photograph reconnaissance of ‘cylindrical’ or
‘torpedo-like’ objects at Peenemünde accumulated; interpretation
suggested dimensions of ‘38 feet by eight [in diameter]’, ‘40
feet by 4 feet thick’, ‘35 feet long with a blunt point’ (we
now know the warhead had not been fitted), ‘a cylinder tapered at
one end and provided with 3 radial fins at the other’. On 23 June a
photographic mission returned with film of two ‘torpedo-like’
objects, both thirty-eight feet long, six feet in diameter and with
three fins. These photographs proved critical in advancing the debate
about what Peenemünde threatened.
Sandys summarised the evidence in a report on 28 June. ‘The
German long-range rocket has undoubtedly reached an advanced state of
development . . . frequent firings are taking place at
Peenemünde.’ Prisoner-of-war and agent reports implied a range of
130 miles, making it likely that it would be fired from the Pas de
Calais, the part of northern France nearest London. Work of a
suspicious nature – in fact the construction of a large concrete
bunker – had been detected at Wissant. However, the report again
grossly overestimated the rocket’s weight, at between sixty and a
hundred tons, with a warhead of up to ten tons, and was still based
on the suggestion that it was solid-fuelled.
That was unfortunate, given that so much of the assessment was
correct, for the continual false judgement could only lend weight to
Cherwell’s dismissal of such a monster rocket’s existence. On 29
June the Defence Committee (Operations) of the Cabinet met in
Churchill’s underground command centre in Whitehall. Sandys and
Cherwell were present, so was Jones, so were the Chiefs of Staff and
the Prime Minister. The meeting opened with a presentation of the
most recent Peenemünde photographs, described by Sandys as providing
conclusive evidence of the rocket’s existence. Cherwell responded
by raising again his technical doubts, his warning that the signs
observed might be decoys, and concluded by suggesting that, if there
were a secret weapon, it was probably a pilotless aircraft. Jones,
asked by Churchill to comment, then disconcerted Cherwell by coming
down on the side of Sandys. Thitherto he had harboured real doubts,
reinforced by the deference he owed to Cherwell as one of his former
Oxford pupils. Now he declared himself convinced that the rocket
existed. Cherwell raised the final objection that, if so, the ‘flash’
of its launch must have been observed, say by Swedish fishermen in
Baltic waters. Since there were no reports of ‘flash’, there
could be no rocket. His objection, however, rested on his fixed
belief that launch speed could only be achieved by the detonation of
a large charge of cordite. The committee chose not to consider the
question of whether the Germans might have overcome the difficulty of
using liquid fuel. Instead it accepted the probable evidence of the
rocket and made three decisions: to continue even more vigorously the
examination by every means of the area of northern France within 130
miles of London; to attack rocket-launching sites in that area as
soon as they were located; and to bomb Peenemünde.
The Peenemünde raid took place on the night of 17–18 August
1943. It was mounted by 433 Stirling, Halifax and Lancaster heavy
bombers of RAF Bomber Command, while eight Mosquitoes staged a
diversionary attack on Berlin. Earlier in the day the US Eighth Air
Force had bombed Schweinfurt in southern Germany. The Germans were on
the alert – a low-level British code they had cracked revealed that
a night raid would take place – but they expected the target to be
Bremen, another north German city, or Berlin. The sky was clear,
though partly obscured by cloud over Peenemünde itself. Cloud would
partially disrupt the British bombing pattern. The dropping of
radar-confusing foil over Denmark by the Mosquitoes on their way to
Berlin would distract the German night-fighter defence.
Soon after midnight, the Pathfinders of the RAF bomber force began
dropping their indicators on Peenemünde. Some fell astray, with the
result that the aiming point moved southward, away from the test area
at the tip of the island. One effect of the misplaced indication was
to direct heavy bombing on to the camp occupied by foreign workers,
killing several hundred. Nevertheless, many hits were achieved on the
laboratories, the rocket factory and the scientists’ housing
estate. About 120 of the scientific and technical staff were killed.
In the aftermath, it was decided to move the technical facilities to
Kochel, in Bavaria - Peter Wegener was one of the scientists
transplanted – and the manufacture of the A-4 (V-2) to a new
underground Central Works in the Harz Mountains at Nordhausen.
Nordhausen was to be built and operated largely by foreign labour;
but the destruction of the camp at Peenemünde not only killed
apparently all the foreign workers who had supplied London with
secret-weapon intelligence – several were Luxemburgers – but also
ended the comparatively free conditions which had allowed them to
communicate with British intelligence. Nevertheless, A-4 intelligence
was not completely ended. The firing range was transferred to Blizna,
a remote village in southern Poland, at the confluence of the Bug and
Vistula rivers, and Polish agents’ reports were to keep the
Crossbow Committee, as the British committee tracking the pilotless
weapons’ development was known, supplied with information in the
coming months.
Meanwhile, perturbed by reports of ‘long-range guns’ and
suggestions that mysterious buildings in both the Pas de Calais and
the Cherbourg peninsula might be connected with the enemy’s secret
weapons programme, the Allies were led to attack a conspicuous
concrete building at Watten, in the Pas de Calais, on 27 August. It
was almost completely devastated by the USAAF; later it was
discovered to be a rocket store, not a launch site. Other sites,
including a bunker at Siracourt and a ‘high-pressure pump gun’
battery at Mimoyecques, were to be destroyed by precision bombing in
1944.
Armchair General has partnered with The Map as History, a company that produces outstanding animated maps with accompanying narration. Each month, a link to one of their animated maps will be featured on the ACG site. This month's map explores the Battle of Britain and "the Blitz," Adolf Hitler's air war 1940-41 that was intended to bring Britain to its knees.
The Most Dangerous Enemy: An Illustrated History of the Battle of Britain. By Stephen Bungay. Zenith Press, 2010. 210 pages, hardcover. $40.00. For most British, the Battle of Britain holds a place of reverence similar to the esteem that many Americans have for defining moments of American history, such as the American War for Independence or the Alamo.
Very nice full set (50 cards) of British cigarette cards depicting “Aircraft Of The Royal Air Force”, issued in 1938.
The Royal Air Force (RAF) came into being in 1918 and was an
independent force on an equal footing with the Royal Navy and the army.
Its civilian head was the secretary of state for air, who presided over
the Air Council. The top uniformed officer was the chief of the air
staff. Until May 1940, there was also, on the Air Council, an air member
for development and production, but this position was obviated by the
creation of a separate Ministry of Air Production. In 1941, this
ministry was reintegrated into the Air Council and was headed by the
controller of research and development.
Operationally, the wartime RAF was divided into Bomber Command,
Fighter Command, Coastal Command, Reserve Command, and Training Command.
Training Command subsequently absorbed Reserve Command but was itself
divided into Flying Training Command and Technical Training Command.
Before the war ended, more commands were added: Army Co-Operation
Command, Balloon Command, Maintenance Command, and Ferry Command
(responsible for delivering aircraft from factories to combat units). In
practice, Coastal Command was under the control of the Admiralty, and
Fighter Command assumed control of all homeland air defense, including
antiaircraft artillery. Each RAF command was organized into groups,
which were in turn divided into squadrons. Fighter groups also featured a
“fighter wing,” which was intermediated between the group and squadron
level.
Bomber Command
True strategic bombing targets cities, but does so mainly to destroy
industrial production and transportation networks, then only secondarily
to terrorize the civilian population and undermine a nation’s will to
continue to fight the war. Strategic bombing is a form of economic
warfare, which directly attacks war production and other industrial and
transportation enterprises. Among British as well as American air
officers were many who believed that a large-scale program of strategic
bombing could create a devastating and therefore decisive economic
effect, including, ultimately, the complete destruction of the enemy’s
war economy. Despite significant political resistance in Britain and the
United States during the 1930s, advocates of strategic bombing managed
to persuade their governments to fund the design and construction of
heavy four-engine bombers (including, in Britain, the Wellington,
Whitley, and Hampden; and in the United States, the B-17, B-24, and
B-29), which were the necessary platforms from which heavy, long-range
bombing could be executed.
The British conducted strategic bombing under cover of night. This
had the advantage of making the bombers difficult to intercept with
fighters or to hit with ground-based antiaircraft artillery. Early in
the war, long-range fighters were unavailable to escort the bombers deep
into enemy territory; this made the bombers especially vulnerable. Yet
night bombing had the distinct disadvantage of rendering targets all but
invisible; precision bombing was therefore out of the question;
therefore, the British employed carpet- bombing (also called
area-bombing) techniques. Instead of targeting particular industrial
plants or transportation hubs, for example, the British would bomb an
entire urban area, hoping to hit valuable industrial targets in the
process. This was a highly destructive approach, but there was no
guarantee that a raid would hit anything of real strategic value.
Fighter Command’s Finest Hour
After initial skirmishes over the Channel during July and early
August, the battle of Britain began officially for the Luftwaffe on
Adlertag (“Eagle Day”), or August 13, 1940, which commenced the
protracted Operation ADLERANGRIFF (“Eagle Attack”). Although the fight
in the sky was extremely dramatic at the time and in later recollection,
at no point was the RAF on the verge of defeat. It lost many aircraft
and good men in fighting over the south, but it was able to replace both
without drawing down its main reserves by depleting the defense of the
north of Britain. The fundamental problem for the Germans was a basic
failure to understand that air warfare by its nature was attritional and
therefore, that the RAF could not be eliminated in a single “decisive
battle.” The Luftwaffe was also ill-equipped for the mission, with slow
medium bombers with inadequate bomb loads and fighters escorts of still
more limited range. That was true even though it had tried to develop a
strategic bombing capacity before the war and had a significant lead in
long-distance navigation and other blind-bombing aids.
There were several keys to the outcome. The RAF fighter force was
larger than the Luftwaffe realized when the fight began, despite heavy
losses over France and the Low Countries in May and June. Also, Britain
was able to significantly outproduce Germany in fighter aircraft
throughout the campaign: Luftwaffe intelligence calculated a fighter
replacement rate of 180-300 per month, whereas the RAF actually achieved
a rate of nearly 500 per month. The Wehrmacht held back resources from
German fighter production, which underachieved its goal by 40 percent in
the summer of 1940. The RAF thus readily replaced its aircraft losses
where the Luftwaffe did not. Similar erroneous estimates of RAF losses
marked incompetent Luftwaffe intelligence reports throughout the battle.
Also, the fight took place over Britain. That meant the RAF recovered
many downed pilots but the Luftwaffe lost aircraft and crews: nearly
1,400 aircraft all told and many crews killed, taken prisoner, or lost
in the Channel. British training schemes were already operating at full
tilt, whereas the Luftwaffe’s were not. The RAF therefore did not have
to draw down main reserves from the center and north of the country
without also replacing those more idle squadrons with fresh aircraft and
pilots. Fighter Command was further aided by a series of bad decisions
born of sheer Nazi arrogance and the erratic decision-making system in
Germany. The most fateful of these was Hitler’s choice-provoked by rage
over two small British raids against Berlin-to switch bomber targeting
from RAF airfields to attacks on British cities. That caused many
civilian deaths but allowed the RAF to continue to attrit German bombers
and fighters alike. The fundamental reason for the German defeat was
the fact that the Luftwaffe was asked to improvise a strategic air
campaign for which it did not have the right planes or doctrine, against
sophisticated British air and ground defenses in preparation over
several years. Finally, the Luftwaffe had no precedent, let alone direct
experience, in attacking an enemy that waited behind a comprehensive
early warning radar system and had an excellent command-and-control
radio net with which to direct fighter air defenses.
Coastal Command
From 1936 RAF Coastal Area operations were elevated to a full Coastal
Command. The Royal Navy and RAF thereafter cooperated in coast watch,
shipping defense, and anti-submarine warfare around Britain’s coasts and
over the North Sea. In 1941 the Admiralty was given operational control
of the aircraft of RAF Coastal Command, although its assets remained
listed under the RAF order of battle. Through late 1940 the
anti-submarine element of Coastal Command was limited by lack of
“Sunderland” or other reconnaissance aircraft, and by a more urgent need
to fl y invasion-watch missions. During 1941 longer-range aircraft were
added, and anti-submarine reconnaissance was emphasized. There followed
a growing role for older bombers in hunting and killing U-boats, as new
four-engine heavy bomber types began to leave British factories and
deploy over the continent. This led to serious interservice arguments:
RAF Bomber Command’s Arthur Harris did not want heavy bombers used for
defensive purposes. It required direct intervention by Prime Minister
Winston Churchill in August 1942, to guarantee that the Royal Navy got
the long-range reconnaissance aircraft and bombers it needed for its
vital battle at sea.
Tactical Air Force
RAF units supported British and Allied ground and naval forces in all
theaters in Africa and Europe. The Regia Aeronautica was blasted from
the skies of East Africa by the RAF by the end of 1941. The Western
Desert Air Force then established theater superiority over the Italian
and German air forces in North Africa. Waves of RAF fighters strafed
enemy ground forces by day, while tactical bombers struck troop and
armor concentrations and supply points at night. Long-range indirection
was carried out against deep rear targets such as supply depots and rail
lines. Total victory was achieved early in 1943. Meanwhile, fighter
defense of Malta survived heavy Axis assault to inflict devastating
bomber losses on the Luftwaffe and catastrophic losses on all asset
classes of the Regia Aeronautica. The campaign continued to Sicily and
Italy in the second half of 1943. The RAF became highly tactically
innovative as it applied lessons from North Africa that carried over to
the fight in Italy, then France and Germany in 1944-1945. For instance,
close support of ground forces was reduced in favor of winning the air
battle at some remove; overall operations were directed from a single
headquarters; actionable intelligence was closely integrated into air
operations; and sophisticated control and communications systems were
established between air and ground forces based on mobile radio
transmitters carried in trucks that accompanied the troops and armor.
Above all, as Richard Overy has noted, the RAF came to understand that
maintaining air superiority meant continuous and unrelenting pursuit of
the enemy. From these interservice lessons, and given its multinational
cast, the RAF was able to fairly smoothly work out inter-Allied
relations as larger American forces arrived in the ETO.
The RAF was supplemented by the Royal Auxiliary Air Force and the
Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. Also, the air forces of the
dominions, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South Africa, were
incorporated into the RAF, as were elements of the air forces of nations
that had been invaded and occupied by the Germans: Czechoslovakia,
Belgium, Netherlands, France, Norway, and Poland. Although these
elements were absorbed into the RAF, they were often permitted to retain
their unique identity by forming into national legions or squadrons.
Women also played a role in the RAF through the Women’s Auxiliary Air
Force (WAAF) and Princess Mary’s RAF Nursing Service. The RAF drew many
of its ground personnel, especially radar operators, plotters, and radio
communications monitors, from the WAAF.
Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA)
A British volunteer aviation unit comprised mainly of civilian
pilots. For reasons of age, gender, or health-there were several
one-armed or one-eyed ATA pilots-these pilots were not draftable into
active duty with the RAF. Although the ATA was administered and clerked
by British Airways civilians, it was nonetheless put under command of
the RAF, and its pilots were issued an RAF-style uniform. As military
pilots were pulled from RAF ferry duties into combat, the ATA took up
the load of flying urgent supplies within Britain, then the still more
urgent business of ferrying aircraft from factories and storage
facilities to forward air bases. ATA tasks included long-haul ferries of
Lend-Lease aircraft manufactured in the United States and flown to the
southern UK via Newfoundland, Iceland, and Scotland. Despite early RAF
resistance to allowing women pilots into the ATA, a group of eight women
began ferrying single-engine Tiger Moth trainers as early as November
1939-wartime necessity proved a partial gender equalizer. By the end of
the war, 166 women pilots served in the ATA. They ferried all types of
RAF aircraft during the war, including several Meteor jets. Twelve women
qualified to fly four-engine heavy bombers, while 82 were certified on
various medium bombers. Other women served as ATA grounds crew or
mechanics. ATA male pilots ferried combat aircraft directly to bases in
France from mid-1944. They were joined in that duty by female pilots
from September. Civilian pilots of the ATA- representing 30 Allied
nationalities-ferried 300,000 military aircraft by the end of the war.
The British army, navy, and air force all drew on conscription for
personnel. However, all RAF aircrews were volunteers, many of them
trained through the British Empire Air Training Scheme, in which the
dominions participated extensively. Indeed, the time-consuming training
of aircrews, especially pilots, was the chief factor limiting the
effectiveness of the RAF-a far more limiting factor than aircraft
production.
The RAF numbered 193,000 men at the outbreak of war in September 1939
and peaked at 992,000 in September 1944. The WAAF had 17,400 women in
September 1940 and peaked at 180,300 in September 1943. RAF losses
included 69,606 killed, 6,736 missing, 22,839 wounded, and 13,115 taken
as prisoners of war.
Serious German aircraft losses from the spring campaign greatly weakened the Luftwaffe before the Battle of Britain.
Had that been the only disadvantage under which the Luftwaffe operated,
German strategic problems would have been daunting enough, given the
difficulties of mounting a major combined arms operation. Unfortunately
for the Germans, the strain that recent battles had imposed on their
military structure represented only a small portion of the problem; a
whole host of strategic, economic, tactical, and technological problems
had to be faced and surmounted before the Reich could solve the “British
question.”
What made an inherently complex task impossible was the
overconfidence that marked the German leadership in the summer of 1940.
Hitler, basking in a mood of preening self-adulation, went on vacation.
During a visit to Paris after the signing of the armistice, tours of
World War I battlefields, and picnics along the Rhine, the last thing on
Hitler’s mind was grand strategy.” The high command structure, however,
was such that without Hitler there was no one with either the drive or
strategic vision to pick up the reins-a state of affairs precisely in
accord with the Fuhrer’s wishes.
Until mid-July 1940, Hitler believed that England would sue for a
peace that he would have happily extended to her. As early as May 20,
Hitler had remarked that England could have peace for the asking.
Nothing in British behavior in the late 1930’s suggested that Hitler’s
expectation was unrealistic. In fact, there were still some within the
British government who regarded Churchill’s intransigence with distaste.
In late May, Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, expressed his alarm
at the relish with which Churchill approached his task, while “Rab”
Butler, Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, told the Swedish
minister in London that “no opportunity would be neglected for
concluding a compromise peace if the chance [were] offered on reasonable
conditions .”
But the mood in Britain had changed. Churchill, furious at Butler’s
indiscretion, passed along a biting note to Halifax. Butler’s whining
reply that he had been misunderstood and had meant no offense indicates
how much things had changed since Churchill had assumed power.” But one
must stress that Churchill’s toughness as the nation’s leader reflected a
new mood in Britain. In late June 1940, Admiral Dudley Pound told the
French liaison officer at the Admiralty that “the one object we had in
view was winning the war and that it was as essential for them [the
French] as for us that we should do so. . . . All trivialities, such as
questions of friendship and hurting people’s feeling, must be swept
aside.” Indeed they were, when for strategic reasons, the British
government ordered the Royal Navy to attack and sink the French fleet at
Mers-el-Kebir.
The Germans missed the new British resolve almost completely, and
Hitler’s strategic policy from the summer of 1940 through 1941 sought a
method, whether it be military, diplomatic, or political, to persuade
the British to make peace. The mood in Berlin was euphoric, since the
Germans believed that the war was nearly over. All that remained, from
their viewpoint, was to find the right formula for ending hostilities.
Confirming this perspective was a strategic memorandum of late June in
which Alfred Jodl, the number two man in the OKW, suggested that “the
final victory of Germany over England is only a question of time.’
Jodl’s approach to the English “problem” reflected a general failing
within the officer corps of all three services. As the campaign in the
west in 1940 had shown, the tactical and operational performance of
German military forces was without equal. The problem lay on a higher
level: that of strategy. The Germans, if they had mastered the tactical
and operational lessons of World War I, had not mastered the strategic
lessons of that terrible conflict. While the French failure to learn
from the last war had immediate consequences in May 1940, in the long
run German unwillingness to face that war’s strategic lessons had an
even more catastrophic impact on their history.
German strategic planning and discussions throughout the summer of
1940 reflect, in glaring fashion, a failure to grasp the essentials of
strategy. The navy had squandered its battle cruiser assets in
strategically meaningless operations off Norway in the late spring. The
army drew up a plan for the proposed cross-channel invasion, code named
“Sea Lion,” that one can charitably describe as irrelevant to and
ignorant of the general state of available naval strength . The
Luftwaffe throughout the summer, following Goring’s lead, paid minimal
attention to the operational problems of a channel crossing by the army
in the belief that its victory over the RAF would make an invasion
unnecessary.
Jodl’s June memorandum posed two possibilities for German strategy
against England: (a) “a direct attack on the English motherland; (b) an
extension of the war to peripheral areas” such as the Mediterranean and
trade routes. In the case of a direct strategy, there existed three
avenues: (1) an offensive by air and sea against British shipping
combined with air attacks against centers of industry; (2) terror
attacks by air against population centers; and (3) finally, a landing
operation aimed at occupying England. The precondition for German
success, Jodl argued, must be the attainment of air superiority.
Furthermore, attacks on British aircraft plants would insure that the
RAF would not recover from its defeat. Interestingly, Jodl suggested
that air superiority would lead to a diminishing capacity for the RAF
bomber force to attack Germany. It is in this context that German
attacks in the coming struggle on Bomber Command’s bases must be seen.
By extending the air offensive to interdict imports and to the use of
terror attacks against the British population (justified as reprisal
attacks), Jodl believed that the Luftwaffe would break British
willpower. He commented that German strategy would require a landing on
the British coast only as the final blow (“Todesstoss”) to finish off an
England that the Luftwaffe and navy had already defeated.
On June 30, 1940, Goring signed an operational directive for the air
war against England. After redeployment of its units, the Luftwaffe
would first attack the RAF, its ground support echelons, and its
aircraft industry. Success of these attacks would create the conditions
necessary for an assault on British imports and supplies, while at the
same time protecting German industry. “As long as the enemy air force is
not destroyed, it is the basic principle of the conduct of air war to
attack the enemy air units at every possible favorable opportunity-by
day and night, in the air, and on the ground-without regard for other
missions.” What is apparent in early Luftwaffe studies is the fact that
the German air force regarded the whole RAF as the opponent rather than
just Fighter Command. Thus, the attacks on Bomber Command bases and
other RAF installations partially reflected an effort to destroy the
entire British air force rather than bad intelligence. Parenthetically,
the losses in France directly influenced Goring’s thinking. He demanded
that the Luftwaffe maintain its fighting strength as much as possible
and not allow its personnel and materiel to be diminished because of
overcommitments.
In retrospect, the task facing the Germans in the summer of 1940 was
beyond their capabilities. Even disregarding the gaps in interservice
cooperation-a must in any combined operations-the force structure,
training, and doctrine of the three services were not capable of solving
the problem of invading the British Isles. The Norwegian campaign had
virtually eliminated the Kriegsmarine as a viable naval force. Thus,
there were neither heavy units nor light craft available to protect
amphibious forces crossing the Channel. The lack of escorting forces
would have made “Sea Lion” particularly hazardous because it meant that
the Germans possessed no support against British destroyer attacks
coming up or down the Channel. The Admiralty had stationed 4 destroyer
flotillas (approximately 36 destroyers) in the immediate vicinity of the
threatened invasion area, and additional forces of cruisers,
destroyers, and battleships were available from the Home Fleet.” Even
with air superiority, it is doubtful whether the Luftwaffe could have
prevented some British destroyers from getting in among the amphibious
forces; the Navy certainly could not. The landing craft that
circumstances forced the Germans to choose, Rhine River barges,
indicates the haphazard nature of the undertaking as well as the tenuous
links to supplies and reinforcements that the Germans would have had
across the Channel. Just a few British destroyers among the slow moving
transport vessels would have caused havoc.
Air superiority
itself represented a most difficult task, given Luftwaffe strength and
aircraft capabilities. Somewhat ironically, the strategic problem
confronting the Germans in the summer of 1940 represented in microcosm
that facing Allied air forces in 1943. Because of the Bf 109’s limited
range, German bombers could only strike southern England where fighter
protection could hold the loss rate down to acceptable levels. This
state of affairs allowed the RAF a substantial portion of the country as
a sanctuary where it could establish and control an air reserve and
where British industrial power, particularly in the Birmingham-Liverpool
area, could maintain production largely undisturbed. Moreover, the
limited range of German fighter cover allowed the British one option
that they never had to exercise: Should the pressure on Fighter Command
become too great, they could withdraw their fighters north of London to
refit and reorganize; then when the Germans launched “Sea Lion,” they
could resume the struggle. Thus in the final analysis, the Luftwaffe
could only impose on Fighter Command a rate of attrition that its
commanders would accept. The Germans were never in a position to attack
the RAF over the full length and breadth of its domain. Similarly in
1943, Allied fighters could only grapple with the Germans up to a line
approximately along the Rhine. On the other side of the line, the
Luftwaffe could impose an unacceptable loss rate on Allied bombers. Not
until Allied fighters could range over the entire length and breadth of
Nazi Germany could Allied air forces win air superiority over the
continent.
