A VICTORY OF SORTS
I think we have managed to avoid losing this war. But when I think how on earth we are going to win it, my imagination quails.
HAROLD NICOLSON, DIARY, 8 NOVEMBER 19401
We shall win, but we don’t deserve it; at least we do deserve it because of our virtues, but not because of our intelligence.
WINSTON CHURCHILL, 10 AUGUST 19402
Britain was not driven into the ground in 1940 and Germany did not win the war. These statements are commonplace enough. The difficulty is to decide what, if anything, connects them, for the Battle of Britain did not seriously weaken Germany and her allies, nor did it much reduce the scale of the threat facing Britain (and the Commonwealth) in 1940/41 until German and Japanese aggression brought the Soviet Union and the United States into the conflict. The issues in 1940 cannot be reduced to a simple dividing line between victory and defeat.
In the first place the threat from the German Air Force was just one of the problems Britain faced in the autumn and winter of 1940. The war against Italy in north and east Africa was a major contest, whose outcome was just as critical for the long-term survival of Britain’s global imperial position. In August Italian armies invaded Somaliland, and in September crossed into Egypt. The large Italian Navy forced Britain to fight a major naval campaign in the Mediterranean at a time when ships were desperately needed for defence against invasion and to protect the vital trade routes across the Atlantic on which Britain’s long-term survival depended. This war against Italy exposed how fragile Britain’s position was in 1940, fighting two European great powers, her navy under constant submarine threat, the economy in crisis, a predatory Japan in eastern Asia, waiting for Britain’s star to fall like France before her. In the end only a small portion of the war effort of Britain and the Commonwealth was exerted against the German Air Force in the autumn war in the air.
The German threat itself was only partly reduced as a result of the air battles. In late November 1940 a pessimistic Churchill was reportedly still anxious that Germany ‘will strive by every means to smash us before the Spring’.3 The one thing that the Battle of Britain could not prevent was the bombing. Even during the daylight clashes between July and September, a high proportion of bombers reached and bombed their targets. German air fleets could not bomb at will, and they sustained what proved to be debilitating loss rates by day, but there was no effective way of preventing bombing, even when the navigational beams were finally jammed by British counter-measures in November. The factors that undermined the effectiveness of the bombing campaign both by day and by night were self-inflicted: bomb attacks were carried out with small bomb-loads, with relatively small numbers of aircraft, and over a widely scattered number of targets. Many of these targets were of secondary importance; no target system, whether airfields, communications, ports or industry, was attacked repeatedly, systematically or accurately. When British Air Intelligence analysed the German bombing effort in late September 1940, they found the results ‘remarkably small in proportion to the considerable effort expended’. In the absence of any observably consistent bombing strategy, the British concluded that the German Air Force bombed ‘with the primary object of lowering morale’, which it failed to do in any significant sense.4
The onset of the bombing war in September 1940, the ‘Blitz’ as it soon became known, revived anxieties about a sudden overwhelming strike from the sky to force surrender on a stunned people. When Harold Nicolson visited the Master of Corpus Christi College in Cambridge in January 1941, he was warned that the public had no idea ‘how gigantic the German knock-out blow will be when it comes’.5 Gas warfare was a persistent fear. In November the Labour Leader Clement Attlee was given responsibility to get Britain’s stock of poison gas up to the level of 2,000 tons agreed before the war, in case the Germans used gas as a final resort. Churchill became more anxious as time passed that desperation might push the enemy to resort to chemical weapons. In February 1941 a cypher message arrived from Budapest, courtesy of the American legation, warning not only that the invasion of Britain was scheduled for March, but also that German scientists had perfected ‘a new soporific gas’ whose effects would last for thirty-six hours whilst German forces stormed ashore. To Churchill’s immediate inquiry about Britain’s gas capability, the Air Staff replied that the RAF could attack the German population with gas bombs for only four or five days, but if gas was mixed in with high-explosive bombs the campaign might last for two or three weeks.6
That same month came further intelligence from Switzerland that Germany had retained a secret force of 10,000 aircraft to hit Britain with one massive aerial blow at a critical moment. Churchill now asked the Air Staff to tell him what kind of aerial ‘banquet’ the RAF could lay on in retaliation. Though the RAF was rightly sceptical about any secret air force, they relayed to Churchill the cheerless statistical conclusion that Germany could probably send across some 14,000 aircraft, while the RAF could scrape together only 6,514, including 2,000 trainers and 3,000 reserves.7
The edginess evident among British political circles reflected the widespread belief that invasion had only been postponed in September 1940 by the exertions of Fighter Command, not cancelled. In the spring of 1941 the Ministry of Information renewed the circulation of pamphlets about invasion in an effort to challenge popular complacency; Fighter Command was issued with new operational instructions early in March for the fight over the invasion beaches. Information from Europe was ambiguous, partly because Hitler had ordered a campaign of deception to mask the operational preparations to attack the Soviet Union by apparently maintaining the pressure on Britain; and partly because Hitler did not entirely exclude the possibility of invasion if Britain became sufficiently weakened or demoralized. In discussion with the German Navy commander in January, he suggested that the aerial and naval blockade of British imports might lead to victory as early as July or August 1941, or create the conditions necessary to permit successful invasion and occupation, or, finally, produce the coveted ‘negotiated’ peace.8
It is evident that Hitler’s view of the British problem did not alter a great deal between the summer of 1940 and the spring of 1941. The air battles of August and September 1940 were regarded from the German side as just one part of a campaign that lasted almost a year to find ways of bringing sufficient pressure on Britain to get her to give up. The campaign included a political offensive to persuade Spain and Italy to collaborate in destroying Britain’s precarious military position in the Mediterranean and North Africa (an effort that stumbled on Franco’s refusal to join the war, and Mussolini’s decision, kept secret from Hitler, to move into the Balkans instead by invading Greece in October 1940). The naval war, which grew into what became known as the Battle of the Atlantic, developed as a blockade strategy largely independent of the invasion operation, and one that pushed the British war effort to its limit long after the Battle of Britain. Invasion itself was always just one option, and one for which Hitler himself had deep reservations.
It is open to debate whether the air battle of the autumn of 1940 was the decisive factor affecting the German decision whether or not to invade. There were other reasons for delaying. It is often forgotten that there stood more than an air force between Hitler and conquest of Britain. The German Navy was heavily outnumbered by the Royal Navy, even one stretched taut by the demands of other theatres. The German Navy as a result always remained half-hearted about the whole operation, and made its views felt throughout the weeks of preparation. The British army may not have been a match for the German army in the field, but it represented a considerable threat to a landing attempt. The German army leadership undertook what preparations they could, but they were faced with an operation for which there was simply no precedent in German military history, and one for which preparation was at best improvised. General Günther von Blumentritt, an army staff officer assigned to Operation Sealion, later described the preparations carried out in 1940 as woefully inadequate: ‘It must not be forgotten that we Germans are a continental people,’ he wrote. ‘We knew far too little of England. We knew literally nothing of amphibious operations. At the time we were preparing Sealion plans, accounts of the campaigns of Caesar, Britanicus and William the Conqueror were being read…’9 Above all, the German leadership recognized, as the western Allies were to realize in the invasion of Normandy, four years later, that defeat would be a political and military catastrophe. ‘It is imperative,’ wrote General Alfred Jodl, Hitler’s Chief of Operations, in August 1940, ‘that no matter what might happen the operation dare not fail.’10
There need be no doubt that under the right circumstances Hitler was serious about invading Britain in 1940. There remained, none the less, a genuine ambivalence in his attitude to the British problem. He understood how difficult the practical questions were and was keen to avoid ‘risky experiments’ and ‘high losses’. He confessed to an audience of Party bosses that he was ‘shy of the water’, which may explain why he listened so closely to what Raeder and the navy had to say in 1940.11 He wanted invasion to be foolproof, ‘absolutely assured’. He kept the door open to a political settlement: ‘Even today the Fuehrer is still ready to negotiate peace with Britain,’ ran the minutes of a Führer conference in January 1941.12 Hitler’s view of Britain is well known: a curious blend of envy and admiration, of contempt for her current state of decadence and respect for a famous history. In his memoirs Adolf Galland recalled a conversation with Hitler when he came to Berlin from the air battle in September 1940 to collect Germany’s highest military award, the oak leaves to the Knight’s Cross. Alone with Hitler, Galland told him the unalloyed truth about how tough air combat against Britain had proved to be. Instead of the diatribe of contradiction he had expected, Hitler explained his respect for the Anglo-Saxon peoples, his regret at the life-and-death struggle between the two states – the ‘world-historical tragedy’ that now promised only total destruction where there might have been fruitful collaboration.13
It is evident that not a lot was needed to deter Hitler from the idea of invading Britain. Fighter Command tipped the scales. The failure to destroy the Royal Air Force ruled out the possibility of a cheap, quick end to the war in the west and kept alive an armed anti-Axis presence in Europe. The full significance of this outcome was not realized on the British side as the air battle shifted to its new and more deadly phase from September 1940. But when Dowding forwarded to the Air Ministry in mid-November a report on the previous two months of air fighting compiled by Air Vice-Marshal Park, he began at last to develop some sense of what his force had now achieved:
… the point to remember is that the losses sustained by the enemy were so great that heavy day attacks by bombers were brought to a standstill and that the Command did, in fact, win a notable victory; since, if the attacks had not been brought to a standstill, the invasion would have been facilitated and the war might well have been lost.14
It is this achievement that came to be described as the Battle of Britain.
Victory in this narrow but important sense has been explained in many ways. German airmen were at a disadvantage attacking over enemy territory with very limited fighter range. Fighter Command was able to draw on the resources of the other nine-tenths of the British Isles outside the range of the Me 109. Even if the forward airfields had been lost permanently, British fighter forces could still have been deployed from bases further inland, though they might then have taken a lower toll of the enemy bomber force. The German fighter force became tied to the bomber stream as the battle drew on, limiting its radius of action and manoeuvrability without affording the bombers real security from attack on the way out or the way back. All the time Fighter Command was improving the means to identify and engage the enemy through radar and signals intelligence.
In a great many respects, however, the two forces were remarkably matched. Both commanded a small group of committed, highly trained and courageous pilots; both forces responded with considerable tactical ingenuity to sudden changes of direction in the course of the battle; both exploited fighter aircraft at the cutting edge of aviation technology; both forces fought the battle with operational commanders of real distinction – Dowding and Park, Kesselring and Sperrle. There were periods in the battle that favoured the German side, others in which Fighter Command began to exact a higher toll. Every small technical or tactical drawback suffered by one force can be matched by problems experienced by the other.
The contest was not, of course, a draw. German air fleets did not gain air supremacy over southern Britain, for all their skill and technical competence. Two factors gave the edge to the RAF: the balance of forces between the two sides, and the role of intelligence. For the whole of the battle period, the British aircraft industry outproduced the German by a considerable margin. This allowed a continuous flow of replacements to compensate for the higher loss rates sustained by Fighter Command. The Command grew steadily stronger between June and October. On 19 June there were 548 operationally ready fighters (with 200 more ready for the following day); on 31 October there were 729 ready to fly, 370 in store at a day’s notice, and a further 110 at four days’.15 German levels of production and serviceability were too low to establish an effective numerical superiority. German fighters flew in large groups with the bombers, which gave an impression of overwhelming numbers, while Fighter Command aircraft were divided between Groups, not all of which were in the front line. But Dowding’s system of rotation ensured that most squadrons saw service in southern England, and that each German attack was met in sufficient force to exact casualties.
The balance of pilots was also more favourable than the legend of the ‘few’ suggests. German single-engined fighter pilots available for the battle remained below the British figure throughout the three months of combat. The impact of regular fighting under difficult conditions eroded combat numbers. At the beginning of September only 74 per cent of German fighter pilots were operationally ready, and that month pilot losses reached almost one-quarter of the force, 23.1 per cent.16 Moreover, and importantly, German pilots and aircrew were lost to the battle if they were shot down and captured on British soil. Between 1 July and 31 October, 967 prisoners were taken and 638 bodies definitely identified. The ΡOWs were found to be experienced pilots. Only two had been trained since the war began. The oldest was fifty-one years old, a veteran of the First World War; the oddest was the 47-year-old Oberleutnant Haffl von Wedel, a Berlin history professor recruited to write the air force official history, who was permitted to fly in combat to give his scholarship a practical foundation. He was shot down on his twenty-fourth mission.17 The pre-war origin of the pilot population suggests that the German Air Force suffered the loss during the battle of a high proportion of its cadre force. Nor was there to be any heroic break-out from POW camps; three-quarters of those captured were shipped overseas to Canada.18
The true balance of forces was never properly understood on either side. The result was a mutual misperception that played a critical part in the conduct of the battle. Throughout the summer, indeed ever since the outbreak of war, German Air Intelligence, run by Colonel Josef ‘Beppo’ Schmidt, had greatly underestimated the size of the RAF and the scale of British aircraft production. Across the Channel the Air Intelligence division of the Air Ministry consistently over estimated the size of the German air enemy and the productive capacity of the German aviation industry. As the battle was fought, both sides exaggerated the losses inflicted on the other by an equally wide margin. However, the intelligence picture formed before the battle encouraged the German Air Force to believe that such losses pushed Fighter Command to the very edge of defeat, while the exaggerated picture of German air strength persuaded the RAF that the threat it faced was larger and more dangerous than was actually the case.
German misperception encouraged first complacency, then strategic misjudgement. The shift of targets from air bases to industry and communications was taken because it was assumed that Fighter Command was virtually eliminated. On 16 September, the day after the mauling inflicted on the daylight bomber raids against London, Goering announced that Fighter Command had just 177 operational aircraft left. German Air Intelligence estimated that there were only 300 British fighters left altogether, including reserves, and a monthly output of 250. On 19 September Fighter Command had an actual operational strength of 656; there were 202 aircraft in immediate reserve, 226 in preparation; output of fighters between 7 September and 5 October was 428.19 The discrepancy was critical. German airmen were ordered to fight in September as if Fighter Command had been all but eliminated; the reality was a level of attrition so high that the German Air Force could not sustain it for more than a few weeks. The casualties of this paradox were German aircrew who fought a battle that bore little relation to the one their commanders told them to expect.
Fighter Command, on the other hand, could not afford to be complacent. The high losses inflicted on the German Air Force reduced the threat, but as long as it was assumed that the enemy was much stronger there could be no question of relaxing any particle of effort. In the western intelligence community there existed a profound misapprehension of the scale and character of the German air fleets, even though by August details were being supplied regularly from ‘Ultra’ decrypts of German Air Force Enigma traffic. For a long time it was assumed that each German squadron was stronger than it actually was because the balance between reserves and operational aircraft had not been properly understood. American air intelligence officers calculated German aircraft output at around 26,000 in 1940, rising to 42,000 in 1941, with at least 31,000 pilots trained between July 1939 and December 1940 to fly them; German first-line combat strength was estimated at 11,000, with 100 per cent reserves. British estimates were more modest than this: Air Intelligence suggested output of 24,400 aircraft in 1940, and a front-line strength of 5,800 in August. The true figures were far below these estimates. Aircraft output was in fact only 10,247 in 1940 and 12,401 in 1941; German Air Force first-line strength in September 1940 was 3,051 aircraft of all types, of which 2,054 (68 per cent) were serviceable. Of this figure approximately 80 per cent was used for the assault on Britain.20 Some intelligence estimates were better than others (the Ministry of Economic Warfare was spot on with an estimate of 3,000 front-line strength, but was disregarded by the airmen). Not until the spring of 1941 did estimates begin to approach reality. The British fought the air battle as if it were a last-ditch struggle against an overwhelming enemy; the German side fought against a force persistently misrepresented as technically and tactically inept, short of aircraft, pilots and bases. This psychological contrast put the German Air Force at a perpetual disadvantage.
The German failure to win air supremacy was beyond doubt by October as the air conflict slowly subsided. Neither side was defeated in any conventional sense. Though the battlefield was littered with the debris of combat, the two fighter forces in October each had around 700 operational aircraft and sufficient numbers of trained pilots to fly them, a balance of forces not very different from the start of the battle. German losses greatly exceeded those of the RAF because of the vulnerability of bombers and dive-bombers. Between 10 July and 31 October the RAF lost 915 aircraft, the German Air Force 1,733. Losses on both sides were soon made good. The outcome was technically a stalemate. British forces had little prospect of re-entering Continental Europe; German forces could not, under present circumstances, invade or occupy Britain.
The public was at first only dimly aware of the significance of the battle they had witnessed day after day, framed against the autumn skies. When Orwell read the official narrative in April 1941, he was surprised by ‘the way in which “epic” events never seem very important at the time’.21 The conflict was not yet presented as the familiar Battle of Britain. When Churchill used the term in a speech in June, he was referring to the whole field of conflict, not simply to the battles of air defence. When the speech was reprinted later in the year, the Battle of France was capitalized, but the ‘battle of Britain’ was not. Park talked about the Battle of London; the army commander-in-chief of Southern Command, General (later Field Marshal) Alexander thought that the heavy night bombing in the winter heralded the onset of what he called the ‘Battle of England’.22
The lack of any clear sense that a great battle had been won was reflected in the treatment of those who had won it. The fighter aces for the most part remained anonymous because the RAF wanted to avoid the pitfalls of glamorizing a few heroes at the expense of the rest of the force. Once the daylight battles were over, the commanders who brought victory were dispensed with. Throughout the battle a backstairs intrigue was conducted against Newall and Dowding, involving, among others, the veteran airman Lord Trenchard and the Minister of Aircraft Production, Lord Beaverbrook. A whispering campaign against Newall’s alleged incompetence, begun by a junior officer in the Air Ministry, reached Sinclair and Churchill. Enough of the mud stuck. On 2 October it was decided that Newall should be replaced by Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal. Dowding in the meantime found himself once again at odds with the Air Staff, who believed that he was not taking effective action against German night-bombing. Despite Churchill’s support for him earlier in the year, the political pressure to get rid of the man who had just led Fighter Command to victory became irresistible. Dowding was finally replaced in November by Sholto Douglas. He departed under a cloud; he was posted to America to help promote Britain’s campaign for economic aid, but he was not a success. He retired in 1941 to indulge his enthusiasm for paranormal phenomena.23
The Air Ministry decision to publish a publicity pamphlet on the air battles finally gave the conflict the narrative shape it had hitherto lacked. Battle of Britain, a 32-page account of the air battle, was produced in March 1941. More than a million copies were sold in Britain alone. It was printed and distributed separately in the United States and the Dominions. The Ministry chose 8 August as the date the battle started, and 31 October was selected arbitrarily for the end. More than anything else, Battle of Britain gave the conflict the legendary dimensions it has borne ever since. Dowding was not involved, or even mentioned in the text. He was supposed to have been invited to write his own despatch on the air operations, but the Ministry forgot to authorize it. Only later in 1941, when Churchill asked to see what Dowding had written, did the Ministry invite him to offer his views on the battle. The ‘Battle of Britain Despatch’ was completed in August 1941. A year later Churchill asked once again what impact the despatch had had when it was distributed, only to be told that it had been too sensitive a document to circulate beyond a select few in the Ministry.24 Dowding’s views on the battle, which were a good deal more hard-headed than those presented in the Air Ministry pamphlet, were locked away until the war was over.
One of the purposes in producing the pamphlet was for propaganda, particularly in the United States where the battle had attracted less attention than the Blitz. The images of blazing London filed by American journalists, along with poignant eye-witness accounts of the bombing, stirred popular opinion, though it did not bring the United States any nearer to belligerency. The battle had less resonance abroad, in part because it was just one corner of a larger canvas of war. The American public maintained a lively scepticism over the claims made about German aircraft losses, and Churchill in August 1940 thought about banning American journalists altogether from the field of battle.25 The American public was more interested in the Japanese war with China and the war at sea, and leaders and led alike were absorbed in Roosevelt’s efforts to be elected president for an unprecedented third term. Many influential Americans came to favour giving Britain economic assistance, but in government circles the view still circulated that Britain might well be defeated as France had been, and American goods fall into the wrong hands. In August, at the height of the air battle, the most important issue in Anglo-American relations was the argument over the precise terms of the deal to give Britain 50 destroyers in exchange for American bases on British colonial territory. Even a lifeline as slender as this was interpreted at home and abroad as a symbol of America’s willingness to support the efforts of an embattled sister democracy. Yet in the long run, as Churchill rightly recognized, Britain’s successful defiance of Germany made possible American’s later entry into Europe, without which Britain’s hope of victory was slight.
The Battle of Britain mattered above all to the British people, who were saved the fate that overtook the rest of Europe. The result was one of the key moral moments of the war, when the uncertainties and divisions of the summer gave way to a greater sense of purpose and a more united people. This was a necessary battle, as Stalingrad was for the eastern front. In June Kenneth Clark reported to the Ministry of Information the effects of a recent morale campaign. He confessed that the campaign had not been a success: ‘people do not know what to do… difficulty arose in satisfying the people that the war could be won’.26 By November the mood was less desperate. A Gallup Poll showed 80 per cent of respondents confident that Britain would win in the end. Ministry informers reported a widespread desire to end the propaganda ‘Britain can take it’ and to substitute the slogan ‘Britain can give it!’27
Even civilians enjoyed the sense that they, too, could contribute directly to the war effort through their own sacrifices and endeavours. There emerged an evident mood of exhilaration when the population found itself fighting at last after months of inactivity. Men flocked in thousands to join the Local Defence Volunteers, though they were poorly organized and scarcely armed by the time invasion was likely: many would have been treated, as the German side made clear at the time, as irregular militia, subject to summary execution. The Battle of Britain and the Blitz that followed contributed to the growing sense that this was a people’s war. There is more than a touch of irony that the battle was actually won by a tiny military elite, and at the cost of only 443 pilots in four months.28 The heroic defences on the eastern front, of Moscow and Sevastopol and Stalingrad, cost the defender, soldier and civilian, millions of war dead. The efficiency of Britain’s defensive effort in 1940 was one of its most remarkable features. The ‘few’ did indeed save the many from a terrible ordeal.
The air battles were necessary to rouse the self-belief and staying power of a people demoralized by the sudden collapse of democratic Europe in the summer of 1940. No one pretends that the Battle of Britain decided the war, or that it papered over all the cracks that appeared in British morale and outlook in 1940. With hindsight it might have been fought more effectively, though British air defences were manifestly better organized than most other areas of Britain’s war effort. The cost of losing the battle would have spelt national disaster. No appeasing peace with Hitler could have masked the reality of defeat. The Battle of Britain was the first point since 1931, when Japan occupied Manchuria, that the forces of violent revision in world affairs were halted. In a radio broadcast in 1942, George Orwell reminded his listeners that Trafalgar Day had just been celebrated. He suggested that Trafalgar played the same part in the Napoleonic wars ‘as the Battle of Britain in 1940 occupied in this one’. In both cases invasion and defeat would have meant a Europe ‘given over to military dictatorship’. After Trafalgar the invasion scare subsided ‘and though it took another ten years to win the war, it was at any rate certain that Britain could not be conquered at one blow’.29 To the British people, then and now, that was sufficient.