Fighter, p.23
Fighter, page 23
The Messerschmitt’s weak wings were providing its pilots with a new problem. The Spitfire pilots had discovered how to make use of the superior strength of the Spitfire wings. Faster in the dive, the Messerschmitts were being overtaken because they pulled out in a shallow curve, nervous that they might rip their wings off. The care with which the German pilots applied G force to their own machines prompted them to invent tactics such as Negative-G diving turns with bottom rudder. And it was this same caution, about the wing roots, that gave rise to the still widely held belief that the Bf 109 could not turn as tightly as a Spitfire. In theory its turn was tighter, but few pilots were prepared to test it to its limit.
The Luftwaffe intelligence report dated 16 August estimated RAF fighter losses at 574 since July, and added another couple of hundred fighters lost on the ground and by accidents, etc. Believing that the British factories had not supplied Dowding with more than 300 fighters, they now calculated that his total resources would be 430 fighters, of which 300 were probably serviceable. The airmen at Göring’s conference were sceptical. These figures were difficult to reconcile with the mauling their missions were still getting at the hands of Fighter Command. They were right to be sceptical. In that same week when Göring thought the RAF had about 300 fighters serviceable, the true figure was over 700.
The Spitfire had proved itself an excellent all-round weapon, with faults but no inherent weaknesses. And the energies of Lord Beaverbrook were providing Hurricanes and Spitfires in ever increasing numbers. By the end of August he would be able to report that 1,081 fighters were immediately available, and another 500 were undergoing repair.
It was the supply of pilots that was Dowding’s headache. In the week since Adlertag he had lost nearly 80 per cent of his squadron commanders (dead, wounded or withdrawn from battle). The men now leading the interceptions were often without any combat experience whatsoever. One squadron commander took over without ever having flown a Hurricane: he did three circuits and landings before leading his squadron into battle.
And if the commanders lacked experience of battle, the pilots following them had often logged no more than ten hours flying in single-seat fighters. For such men, it was a brave feat to land a high-speed fighter, let alone to do battle in one. And on 10 August, Dowding agreed to cut the Operational Training period still further. Now the pilots would have only two weeks between learning to fly and coming into combat. Until July, this same course had lasted six months.
Dowding had already approved a secret plan for putting the OTUs into the fighting. A sequence of fighter squadron numbers – 551 onwards – had been set aside for this purpose. History records that the OTUs were never put into combat. But in fact, slashing the training period from six months to two weeks meant that the men who should have been students at the OTUs were already in combat.
In strategic terms such expedience was perhaps justified. By November the Battle would be over, for better or for worse. The men arriving from OTUs after that would not affect the result. And yet, in human terms, it was a tragic decision. In wartime the OTU becomes a vital link between the theories of training and the hard facts of operations. The OTUs should have been telling their pupils about the new German tactics, and how to counter them. But the sad truth was that squadrons brought into the Battle for the first time seldom knew anything of modern air combat. Some had never fired their guns. And they were still flying the tight vee formations and were not even properly alerted to the dangers of ‘the Hun in the sun’.
Neither were the squadrons in the north getting any practice or instruction about the fighting – some were not even flying. At Usworth in Durham, 607 Squadron had to pretend they were doing engine tests in order to fly their Hurricanes. The official excuse was a shortage of spare parts.
However exemplary the feeding of the fighter squadrons into battle, the preparation of the squadrons for battle was a scandal – for there was no preparation! In spite of the generous supply of aircraft, and the availability of battle-weary veterans withdrawn from the south, there was no attempt to combine these assets in such a way that the rotated squadrons went into battle with some idea of what they faced. Possibly the RAF had doubts about the morale of their battle-weary veterans, and feared the effect that the experienced pilots might have had upon the morale of the untried units.
Phase Three: the Attacks upon 11 Group Airfields, 24 August–6 September
The Air Fleets complied with Göring’s demand for a round-the-clock offensive. They sent raiders – sometimes no more than a single bomber – to all parts of the United Kingdom by day and by night.
During daylight, Kesselring continued ceaseless air activity over his coastline, so that the British radar operators were unable to distinguish which aircraft were raiding formations forming up. This often enabled the real raids to attack coastal targets and get away intact. Hurriedly the fighters of Air Fleet 3 were moved to the Pas de Calais so that by 24 August they were all together. Now the German formations had large numbers of fighters flying tightly above them, and often there were more below them too. Neither side liked these tactics. Ten RAF fighters, climbing to meet ten German bombers escorted by ten fighters, saw it as a battle in which they were outnumbered two to one. The German fighter pilots saw it as a battle in which the odds were against them, for they faced an equal number of fighters, while trying at the same time to protect the bombers.
The fighter aircraft was designed with forward-facing armament, expressly for an attacking role. To be used, it had to fly towards an enemy. Keeping close to the bombers prevented the German fighter pilots from attacking in this way. No longer could the fighters dive out of the sun upon an unsuspecting enemy. The new tactics resulted in fewer losses in the bomber fleets, but German fighter casualties went up.
From the High Command’s point of view, however, the new German tactics were effective. These tight formations forced their way through to the targets, and sometimes devastated them.
On 26 August the smouldering dispute between Park and his severest critic – Leigh-Mallory, commanding 12 Group – flared up. As was the usual practice, Park asked his northerly neighbours to patrol threatened airfields north of the Thames Estuary while he put his own fighters forward to intercept German raids. Park’s airfield at Debden, Essex, was left undefended. The Germans bombed it. Park asked why Leigh-Mallory’s fighters were not there, and the latter replied that he was asked too late.
The dispute was part of a long-standing disagreement between the two men. Unwittingly the bad feeling was fanned by the theories of the legless fighter pilot, Douglas Bader, who now commanded one of Leigh-Mallory’s squadrons.
Bader, a 30-year-old Squadron Leader, was a graduate of the new RAF College, Cranwell. He had crashed very soon after graduation. Both legs had to be amputated. In spite of a demonstration that he could fly with tin legs better than most men could fly with real ones, the RAF refused to let him continue, so Bader’s career seemed to be over before it had begun. Throughout his many years of civilian life Bader made continual applications to go back to flying, but not until November 1939 did the Air Ministry relent. The same courage and determination that had enabled him to conquer the double amputation made him a fabled fighter pilot. Within six months of his return he caught up with his Cranwell contemporaries.
Leigh-Mallory had much the same interest in Bader’s career that Dowding had shown in Leigh-Mallory, Park and Sholto-Douglas, who had been his subordinates a generation before. Squadron Leader Bader took command of 242 Squadron in June 1940, just in time for the Battle. Already his name was known throughout Fighter Command.
Bader argued that Park was wrong to put his fighters up in squadron-size units. Bader said that only very large formations of fighters, attacking together, could deal a lethal blow to the German formations.
These ‘big wings’ (they were sometimes called Balbos, after a famous Italian aviator) took a long time to form up in the air. For 12 Group, who usually had generous warning of a German attack, they were more practical than for the front-line needs of 11 Group. The big-wing advocates, however, were heard to say that it was better to decimate a German raid after it had bombed than to scratch at it before it had bombed. Such reasoning failed to take account of the importance of the sector airfields or of the whole control system. Yet, for that very reason, it appealed to men who felt constricted by the Controller’s orders. For Leigh-Mallory, Bader provided an outspoken critic of two men he particularly disliked: Park and Dowding. And so it was a heaven-sent circumstance that had provided for Bader an adjutant who was a Member of Parliament of some fourteen years’ experience.
It was a curious circumstance, and for Dowding it perhaps proved a fateful one. According to Bader’s biographer, Paul Brickhill, this MP spoke directly to the Air Minister about the squadrons’ problems. So it was arranged that he should spend an hour and a half with Churchill, who ‘next day began sending for various Group commanders’. As we shall see, this astounding revelation shed light on later events that for many years remained a mystery.
Some of the most high-spirited pilots of 12 Group envied the 11 Group squadrons, who were constantly in the fight. Flying on the leash of strict ground control was particularly chafing for veterans of an era of open-cockpit flying. To be sent to guard the airfields of the pilots who were doing the fighting must have seemed the last straw to such men. Even the least critical members of this school of thought believed that ground Controllers should advise and ask rather than order. Squadron Leader Bader believed that very large formations of fighters should have enough latitude to engage the enemy at the time, the place and in the fashion that the formation leader saw fit.
Had it not been for the times when German raids heavily bombed 11 Group’s airfields entrusted to 12 Group’s protection, the big-wing theories might have gone unremarked in spite of Bader’s adjutant and those discussions with higher authority. But Park reacted sharply to having his fighter airfields left open to bombers. Leigh-Mallory’s response was to criticise Park’s entire strategy and to mention Bader’s theories to his friends, among them Sholto-Douglas, by now Air Vice-Marshal and Deputy Chief of Air Staff.
FIGURE 30. 24 August–6 September
The time between 24 August and 6 September became known to Fighter Command as ‘the critical period’. The attacks centred upon the sector airfields of 11 Group, which Park commanded. From these airfields came orders of the Sector Controllers to fighters in the air. Other Fighter Command airfields did not have such Operations Rooms.
During the critical period’s first few days Messerschmitt Bf 109s were moved from the Cherbourg region to the command of Jafü 2, so that by the end of August a great concentration of single-seat fighters built up in the Pas de Calais. This changed the operational area (red dotted line) slightly.
Note that Duxford airfield to the north is under the command of Leigh-Mallory of neighbouring 12 Group. Kesselring’s advanced (underground) HQ is shown; his normal HQ was in Brussels. Note the way in which the short-range German fighters flying home from south-east England needed only a slight navigational error to miss the Pas de Calais.
The dotted line shows the extreme limit of the Bf 109’s range (the westerly part of this was lost when the fighters were moved from the Cherbourg area). The range of the British radar (CHL) is also marked.
The exaggerated combat claims by both sides were usually in proportion to the number of aircraft in action. (This was because several pilots would take a quick shot at an enemy plane, and then all report it as it went down.) Inevitably Leigh-Mallory’s big wings benefited from this fundamental law of air fighting. On one occasion, the big wing claimed fifty-seven Germans downed, when post-war scrutiny of German records showed that only eight of the raiders failed to get home. Usually 12 Group’s big wings met the Germans at the extreme limit of the Bf 109’s range. This gave them a reputation for being able to turn the German raids back. And so it was that the big-wing theorists captured the imagination of the Air Ministry, and probably of Churchill too.
The attacks upon the sector airfields brought more people into the Battle. As electricity, telephones, teleprinters, sewage and transport were destroyed, fighter aerodromes relied upon the ground staff, and civilians, to put the pieces back together. At Manston on Saturday 24 August, Post Office engineers sat down next to an unexploded bomb and sorted through hundreds of severed wires to reconnect the Operations Room and the fighters to Group Headquarters. Electricity workers, WAAFs and fire brigade men were taking risks as great as the pilots, but it was not everyone’s finest hour.
RAF Manston – built on a cliff-top alongside the sea – was suffering not only the scheduled bombing attacks, but also spontaneous ground-strafing from fighters which came in low over the sea and crossed the airfield at near ground level. Many airmen had been sitting in the air-raid shelters ever since the attack that Fink had delivered to the airfield at lunchtime on 12 August. (About one hundred raw recruits arrived just before the heaviest raids.) Now the terrified men would not budge, and the accountant officer could not even find enough airmen above ground to hold a pay parade. Squadron Leader J. A. Leathart, of 54 Squadron, had only just prevented another officer from going into the shelter to shoot the first man who refused to come out.
The chaplain disarmed an officer who was threatening to kill everyone in the Mess. While the RAF were in the shelters, local civilians took the opportunity to loot the damaged buildings for RAF tools and spares.
Manston was not the only airfield where men spent week after week petrified in the shelters. The provision that some far-sighted Air Ministry official had arranged to deal with bomb craters had now gone badly wrong. The civilians, who had been receiving wages for doing nothing until the action started, now decided that it was too dangerous to work while an air-raid alert was in force. So they, too, sat in the subterranean shelters, and the few men left to service the aircraft and keep the airfields and Operations Rooms running went out with the shovels and filled in the craters too. By this time most pilots had learned something of the job of refuelling and rearming the fighters.
But even the less glorious moments of the Battle retained their class-conscious nature. Europe’s cataclysmic movements of nations and races and their social aftermath were still to come. This war in the air belonged to varsity men, with technical-school graduates as travelling reserves. Sharing the same middle-class values as their opponents, the Stuka crews – like those of Bomber Command – frequently carried their bombs back to base if they failed to identify their military targets. And at least one German flyer was reprimanded by Mölders for attacking such ‘an unmilitary target’ as a train. The survivors would live to wonder at such niceties.
Meanwhile they photographed each other patting pet dogs, playing cards, and relaxing in deck chairs on neatly trimmed grass. In 1940 there was honey still for tea, in this the world’s last romantic battle.
25 August
To get to 11 Group’s sector airfields – ringed round London – Kesselring often routed one raid direct and another along the great blind spot created by the Thames Estuary. In the small hours of Sunday 25 August a night raid used the Estuary route to the oil tanks at Thameshaven. The crew of one aircraft lost their way, continued too far westwards, and dropped their bombs. They hit the City of London. The raid caused more dismay among the British War Cabinet and the staff of Air Fleet 2 than among the Londoners. The outer suburbs had already been bombed and Londoners had been expecting raids. The bomb-load of just one errant bomber was a gentle introduction to total war.
Just as the Rotterdam bombing prompted the 15 May War Cabinet to send the RAF to bomb the Ruhr next day, so now did Churchill authorise an immediate reprisal raid upon Berlin. During this period RAF Bomber Command believed themselves to be ‘reducing the scale of German air attack by bombing aircraft assembly plants’. Now eighty-one RAF bombers departed for Berlin on the night of Sunday 25 August. More civilians died. Here bombs were unexpected: the Nazi leaders had promised that Berlin was inviolable. They vowed to avenge the ‘atrocities’. So began a chain of incidents that eventually ended not only the Battle of Britain, but – at Hiroshima – the war.
The German fighter formations had returned to the practice of flying well above the bombers. A Fighter Command Intelligence Summary of 30 August reported that fighters had been keeping to altitudes between 25,000 and 20,000 feet while the bombers were usually at 13,000 feet, with certain German units coming down to bomb at 4,000 feet.
For new pilots the high-altitude battles could be a frightening experience. It was very, very cold at 25,000 feet, and the Spitfires slipped and skidded through the thin air, as the propeller blades failed to bite. Invariably the Perspex misted over and reduced visibility. Only slowly did the aircraft add a few hundred feet, and for this reason the throttles remained wide open. It meant that if a pilot dropped back from his formation through lack of flying skill, he could never catch up with them again. And above them were the Bf 109s, watching and waiting for just such a straggler. This was the way that many young men died: alone and cold in the thin blue air, peering through the condensation into the glare of the sun, unable to see the men who killed them.
FIGURE 31. German Beams
The Knickebein (literally, bent-leg or dog-leg) system required no more equipment or experience than was needed to use the Lorenz blind-landing gear, fitted into most of the German bombers already. Just as in a landing, the pilot heard a continuous note if he was on a correct course to his target. If he wandered off course he heard in his earphones dots or dashes, according to which way he had wandered. At the target, a second beam intersected and told the bomb-aimer to release the bombs.
The X-Gerät system was more complex and required trained crews with special equipment. The Kampfgruppe 100 was the chosen unit and, as 1940 continued, the ‘pathfinders’ dropped only incendiary bombs to mark the target for the ordinary bombers.
