Max Hastings Two-Book Collection: All Hell Let Loose and Catastrophe. Max Hastings
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suffered such damage, sometimes total and fatal. As many as one-third of both Dowding’s and Goering’s overall losses were accidental.
Few pilots who bailed out offshore were recovered: a man in a dinghy looked pathetically small to rescue-launch crews scouring the Channel and North Sea. Ulrich Steinhilper gazed below as he flew back over the Channel from a September mission: ‘Our track across those wild waters became dotted with parachutes, pilots floating in their lifejackets, and greasy oil slicks on the cold water showing where another Me109 had ended its last dive. All along the coast near Boulogne we had seen 109s down in the fields and on the grass, some still standing on their noses.’ Nineteen German aircrew drowned that day, while just two were picked up by floatplanes.
The chivalrous spirit with which the British, at least, began the battle faded fast. David Crook returned from a sortie in which his roommate had been killed, and found it strange to see the man’s possessions just where he had left them, towel hanging on the window. ‘I could not get out of my head the thought of Peter, with whom we had been talking and laughing that day. Now he was lying in the cockpit of his wrecked Spitfire at the bottom of the English Channel.’ That afternoon, the dead pilot’s wife telephoned to arrange his leave, only to hear the flight commander break news of his death. Crook wrote: ‘It all seemed so awful. I was seeing at very close quarters all the distress that casualties cause.’ After Pete Brothers’ squadron was engaged a few times and he had lost friends, he abandoned his earlier notions that they were playing a game between sporting rivals. ‘I then said, “Right, these are a bunch of bastards. I don’t like them any more. I am going to be beastly.”’ Very early in the struggle, pilot Denis Wissler wrote in his diary: ‘Oh God I do wish this war would end.’ But few of the young men who fought for either side in the Battle of Britain stayed alive through the five-year struggle that followed it. To fly was wonderful fun, but a profound and premature seriousness overtook most aerial warriors in the face of the stress and horror that were their lot almost every day they were exposed to operations.
Through August the Luftwaffe progressively increased the intensity of its assaults, attacking Fighter Command airfields – though only briefly radar stations. Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, C-in-C of Fighter Command, began the battle with an average of six hundred aircraft available for action, while the Germans deployed a daily average of around 750 serviceable bombers, 250 dive-bombers, over six hundred single-engined and 150 twin-engined fighters, organised in three air fleets. South-east England was the main battleground, but Dowding was also obliged to defend the north-east and south-west from long-range attacks.
The first concerted bombings of airfields and installations took place on 12 August, when Ventnor radar station on the Isle of Wight was put out of action. The Luftwaffe intended ‘Eagle Day’ on 13 August to be decisive, but in thick weather this degenerated into a series of poorly coordinated attacks. The Germans mounted their heaviest effort two days later on the 15th, dispatching 2,000 sorties over England, losing seventy-five aircraft for thirty-four British, two of those on the ground. Raiders flying from Scandinavian airfields – too remote for single-engined fighters – suffered especially heavy losses, and the day became known to German aircrew as ‘Black Thursday’. The two sides’ combined casualties were even higher three days later on the 18th, when the Luftwaffe lost sixty-nine planes against Fighter Command’s thirty-four in the air and a further twenty-nine on the ground.
Both air forces wildly overestimated the damage they inflicted on each other, but the Germans’ intelligence failure was more serious, because it sustained their delusion that they were winning. Fighter Command’s stations were targeted by forty Luftwaffe raids during August and early September, yet only two – Manston and Lympne on the Kent coast – were put out of action for more than a few hours, and the radar receivers were largely spared from attention. By late August the Luftwaffe believed Fighter Command’s first-line strength had been halved, to three hundred aircraft. In reality, however, Dowding still deployed around twice that number: attrition was working to the advantage of the British. Between 8 and 23 August, the RAF lost 204 aircraft, but during that month 476 new fighters were built, and many more repaired. The Luftwaffe lost 397, of which 181 were fighters, while only 313 Bf109s and Bf110s were produced by German factories. Fighter Command lost 104 pilots killed in the middle fortnight of August, against 623 Luftwaffe aircrew dead or captured.
The RAF’s Bomber Command has received less than due credit for its part in the campaign: between July and September it lost twice as many men as Fighter Command, during attacks on concentrations of invasion barges in the Channel ports, and conducting harassing missions against German airfields. The latter inflicted little damage, but increased the strain on Luftwaffe men desperate for rest. ‘The British are slowly getting on our nerves at night,’ wrote pilot Ulrich Steinhilper. ‘Because of their persistent activity our AA guns are in virtually continuous use and so we can hardly close our eyes.’
Goering now changed tactics, launching a series of relatively small bomber attacks with massive fighter escorts. These were explicitly designed to force the RAF to fight, especially in defence of airfields, and for the German planes to destroy it in the air. Dowding’s losses were indeed high, but Luftwaffe commanders were dismayed to find that each day, Fighter Command’s squadrons still rose to meet their attacks. Increasing tensions developed between 11 Group, whose fighters defended the south-east, and 12 Group beyond, whose planes were supposed meanwhile to protect 11’s airfields from German bombers. In late August and early September, several stations were badly damaged. Why were 12 Group’s fighters absent when this happened? The answer was that some of their squadron commanders, Douglas Bader notable among them, favoured massing aircraft into ‘big wings’ – powerful formations – before engaging the enemy. This took precious time, but in arguments on the ground the ‘big wing’ exponents shouted loudest. They were eventually given their heads, and made grossly inflated claims for their achievements. The outcome was that the reputation of Keith Park, commanding 11 Group, suffered severely from RAF in-fighting that in September became endemic, while 12 Group’s Trafford Leigh-Mallory – more impressive as an intriguer than as an operational commander – gained influence. Posterity is confident that Park was an outstanding airman, who shared with Dowding the laurels for winning the Battle of Britain.
Many of the RAF’s young fliers, knowing the rate of attrition Fighter Command was suffering, accounted themselves dead men, though this did not diminish their commitment. Hurricane pilot George Barclay’s 249 Squadron was posted to one of the most embattled stations, North Weald in Essex, on 1 September. A comrade said bleakly as they packed for the move, ‘I suppose some of us here will never return to Boscombe.’ Barclay himself took a slightly more optimistic view, writing in his diary: ‘I think everyone is quite sure he will survive for at least seven days!’
At the end of August, the Germans made their worst strategic mistake of the campaign: they shifted their objectives from airfields first to London, then to other major cities. Hitler’s air commanders believed this would force Dowding to commit his last reserves, but Britain’s leaders, from Churchill downwards, were vastly relieved. They knew the capital could absorb enormous punishment, while Fighter Command’s installations were vulnerable. The men in the air saw only relentless combat, relentless losses. George Barclay wrote to his sister on 3 September in the breathless, adolescent style characteristic of his tribe: ‘We have been up four times today and twice had terrific battles with hundreds of Messerschmitts. It is all perfectly amazing, quite unlike anything else…One forgets entirely what attitude one’s aeroplane is in, in an effort to keep the sights on the enemy. And all this milling around of hundreds of aeroplanes, mostly with black crosses on, goes on at say 20,000ft with the Thames estuary and surrounding country as far as Clacton displayed like a map below.’
Sandy Johnstone ‘nearly jumped clean out of my cockpit’ on getting his first glimpse of the massed Luftwaffe assault of 7 September. ‘Ahead and above a veritable armada of German aircraft…staffel after staffel as far as the eye could see…I have never seen so many aircraft in the air all at one time. It was awe-inspiring.’ At the outset, German aircrew derived comfort from flying amid a vast formation. ‘Wherever one looks are our aircraft, all around, a marvellous sight,’ wrote Peter Stahl, flying a Junkers Ju88 on one of the September mass raids. But he and his comrades quickly learned that security of mass was illusory, as formations