CHAPTER 7
THE defeat of France reduced hostilities in Europe to a single point, the Anglo-German fight. In Great Britain some people felt that the war was over, though not many cared to say so. When a French collapse began to seem inevitable the British cabinet discussed whether to invoke Mussolini as a mediator between Hitler and the two western allies. In the period between Hitler’s Polish campaign and his attacks in the west, Churchill had been willing to contemplate a negotiated peace (but with a Prime Minister other than himself). Now he opposed such a move. The cabinet was divided. Chamberlain, Halifax and others favoured an appeal to Mussolini, and Halifax may have threatened to resign if Churchill insisted on obstructing a negotiated return to peace. The issue was resolved by leaving it to the French government to invoke Mussolini on its own, should it so wish. Churchill has been criticized for his obduracy at this point but it is difficult to believe that Hitler would have entertained proposals for peace when he was on the verge of a resounding triumph, or that Mussolini would have invited a snub by trying to interfere. Churchill’s character and temperament told against a compromise peace and his gifts infused the British spirit and confirmed a latent feeling that, although the fighting had so far been disastrous, Hitler was so wicked an enemy that peace with him would be dishonourable. Disgust with the barbarities of Nazism kept the British at war under a new leader who was himself pugnacious enough in spirit to shoulder the miseries and scent the triumphs to come.
Hitler more than half hoped that Great Britain would make peace. On 19 July he made a speech which, in his eyes at least, amounted to a peace offer, but its tone and tenor were very ill adapted to any such purpose and it was brushed off by Churchill. As after the defeat of Poland Hitler had ready no precise plan of what to do next. He was half-hearted about attacking Great Britain. He wanted not to conquer it but to ensure that it would let him have his way on the continent. Moreover Great Britain was not only an island fortress but also a Mediterranean power, so that a continuing war could oblige Hitler to campaign against British bases and routes in the Mediterranean, to occupy or at least control the whole of France and Spain, and to put German forces into North Africa. War on this scale would be something very different from the Blumenkriege and Blitzkriege which he had fought so successfully on the continent. Great Britain was the wrong kind of enemy for the German armed forces, and Hitler, who liked short sharp operations with discernible ends, could not see where such a war might take him. On the other hand Great Britain unsubdued was a thorn in the German side, and so long as the British Isles remained in the war there was a danger that they might become a base for a new war between Germany and the United States. Although the German army could not march into England as it had marched into other countries, the German navy might blockade and starve the British, or the German air force might pound them into submission or destroy their defences and so let the army in.
A naval strategy entailed submarine warfare supplemented by commerce raiding by surface vessels and the mining of coastal waters. But Hitler had neglected his navy, partly because he was not much interested in it and partly because he never wholeheartedly faced up to the possibility of a fight to the finish with Great Britain. At the outbreak of war the German surface fleet consisted of two antiquated and Baltic-bound battleships, three pocket battleships, two battle cruisers, eight cruisers, twenty-two destroyers and as many torpedo-boats and E-boats. In the Norwegian expedition three cruisers and nine destroyers were sunk and two cruisers and one destroyer were damaged. These losses were never made good, although two new battleships and a cruiser – Bismarck, Tirpitzand Prinz Eugen – were commissioned in 1941. The submarine fleet was quite inadequate. On the outbreak of war Admiral Doenitz, the supreme U-boat commander, had only fifty-seven ocean-going boats and, although he made good use of what he had, no prospect whatever of fulfilling his hope of having 300 boats at sea at a time; normally the striking force would consist of one in three – or, at best and for short periods, one in two – of the total force. The British navy, although hardly less antiquated, was much larger.
The alternative to a naval blockade was an air offensive designed either to make Great Britain capitulate under the sheer weight and terror of bombing or to clear the way for an invasion by destroying the air defences of Great Britain, especially its fighter squadrons. This was what Hitler and Goering tried to do and, in the two months from mid-July to mid-September 1940, failed to achieve.
The renown of the Luftwaffe after the campaigns of 1939 and the first half of 1940 was prodigious and its morale was excellent. Officially it was only five years old since the treaty of Versailles had denied Germany an air force and none had been acknowledged until 1935. But the reality was different. The prohibition was evaded in a number of ways. Aircraft designers were sent to work in other countries and German aircraft types were developed in the USSR, Sweden and elsewhere. The commercial airline Lufthansawas used to train men, to test machines and above all to keep alive the experience and the spirit of airmanship built up during the First World War.
The principal fashioners of the Luftwaffe were Erhard Milch and Ernst Udet – together with Walther Wever, whose early death in 1936 deprived the Luftwaffe of the heavy bomber force which he alone among the three believed in. Milch was the organization man who created an aircraft industry behind the scenes, supervised the development of new types of aircraft, and used Lufthansa (of which he was chairman), weekend flying clubs and foreign factories and bases to make Germany a first-class air power. He became a friend of Goering, who appointed him to take charge of the Air Ministry in March 1935 when the Luftwaffe’s existence was officially revealed. It was largely thanks to Milch that the Luftwaffe sprang into existence with over 1,000 aircraft, 20,000 men and the not implausible ambition of achieving parity with the Russians by growing to 4,000 aircraft by 1939–40.
But Milch and Goering fell out; probably Milch became jealous of Goering, while Goering found Milch a bore. The result was a rise in the influence of Udet and a shift in policy. Udet was lively to the point of instability – he committed suicide in 1941 – but he was no organizer and lacked Milch’s capacity to get things done. He was interested in fighters and dive-bombers rather than bombers and can claim some of the credit for the appearance in 1938 of the single-seater Messerschmitt (Me.) 109E, an excellent aircraft with good manoeuvrability and an armament of four machine guns or, alternatively, two machine guns and two cannon. Udet also set his faith in the Junkers (Ju.) 87 Stuka or dive-bomber, a fearsome aircraft which dived on its target at 200 m.p.h. in order to drop its two bombs with special precision and with the added psychological effect to be derived from fitting screaming devices and painting sharks’ faces on the nose of the aircraft: but it was slow and had a low ceiling and so was better at attacking refugees in open country than at surviving anti-aircraft fire or enemy fighter attacks. It was successful against shipping so long as ships’ anti-aircraft guns were poor, as they tended to be at the beginning of the war, but after its successes in the continental land battles the Ju. 87 suffered severely at the hands of British ground and air defences and had to be virtually withdrawn from the battle. Udet, finally, neglected the heavy bomber. Plans for two four-engined bombers like the British Stirlings, Halifaxes and Lancasters were dropped in the mid-thirties and a third – the Heinkel (He.) 177, originally designed as a long-range reconnaissance aircraft – failed to hold Udet’s interest when he discovered that this huge machine could not be made to dive. Thus Germany entered the war and fought it with fast, lightly protected medium bombers – the He. 111 and Dornier (Do.) 217, supplemented from 1940 by the Ju. 88 – which were very vulnerable in daylight unless heavily escorted by fighters. But the Me. 109E was not right for this work and had not been designed for it. It was short in range and endurance – its range was 100–125 miles and its endurance about one and a half hours – and the combination of a fighter of this kind with medium bombers was the wrong recipe for the Battle of Britain. The Luftwaffe’s long-range fighter, the Me. 110, was something of a disappointment and had to be relegated to night fighting and light bombing; its failure meant that German bombers operating beyond the south-east corner of England had to do so unescorted.
In the Spanish civil war a force of 400 German aircraft – the Kondor Legion – practised bombing and mobility under war conditions and tested new types, all with gratifying results. At the time of Munich the Luftwaffe had a front line strength of 2,800 (it was believed to be stronger) and a year later, on the outbreak of the World War, its front line strength had passed the 4,000 mark. Its reserves, however, were low because the war was expected to be short. The R A F’s front line strength in September 1939 was 1,660 but its reserves were proportionately more than twice as large as the Luftwaffe’s and, more significant, British aircraft production was rising the faster. It did not, however, overtake German production until it passed the thousand a month mark in the spring of 1940 and so began at that point to close the gap. The French air force had, on paper, a first line strength slightly above Great Britain’s but poor reserves and an even more alarming degree of obsolescence.
In the Polish campaign the Luftwaffe committed less than half its front line strength: 700 long-range bombers, 400 fighters, 150 Stukas and 350 reconnaissance aircraft. Besides bombing Warsaw, they were used chiefly to attack Polish airfields and army communications and they met little effective opposition from an enemy who had out-of-date fighters and no radar or other early warning system. The force used in Norway was less than half that used in Poland. Its tasks were to attack enemy shipping, patrol and protect German units at sea, and convey small parachute detachments to seize Norwegian airfields. These tasks were performed efficiently and, as in Poland, with very little loss in spite of atrocious weather. For the Luftwaffe the Norwegian campaign was a cross between a real war and a training exercise, and an opportunity to introduce the Ju. 88 bomber into active service for the first time. The attack on the Low Countries and France was much more serious and varied work. Practically the whole of the Luftwaffe’s front line strength was involved and for six weeks it averaged 1,500 sorties a day. In Holland parachutists were used in large numbers for the first time, capturing Rotterdam airport in the face of tough Dutch opposition. After the surrender of the Dutch the weight of the German air effort went into the support of the German army against the French army and against the British in Belgium. Airfields and factories were also attacked but the role of the Luftwaffe was first and foremost army cooperation. Only after the disintegration of the French ground forces was certain did the German bombers operate seriously against French railways, harbours and towns. The sole check to the Luftwaffe’s easy superiority was in its encounters with the R A F over Dunkirk. This was symptomatic.
There was at this time still no way of measuring the effects of the heavy air bombardment of a defended target. The Germans had wiped out Guernica in Spain and had bombed Warsaw and Rotterdam, but against virtually no opposition. It appeared that the real test would come in Great Britain. In the event German bombing never came near to the point of winning the war by destroying the British economy or morale. The Second World War showed that this could not be done before the development of nuclear weapons. But air forces continued to believe that it might be. So did civilian defenders. In London committees had been set up many years before the war to estimate the probable weight and effects of bombing. They came to the conclusion that Great Britain must expect 3,500 tons of bombs in the first twenty-four hours of war, followed by a further 700 tons a day, each ton causing fifty or more casualties – that is to say, nearly two million casualties in the first two months. The material damage, which commercial insurance companies refused to underwrite on any terms, was put at £550 million in the first three weeks, and this apocalyptic vision of the triumph of Belial included the need to evacuate three quarters of the population of London and bury corpses in their thousands in quick-lime, and to witness the complete collapse of communications and other public services, panic, epidemics and three to four million cases of mental breakdown in six months. These forebodings, so unlike the contents of the usual government paper, were carefully concealed from the public. They were also very wide of the mark, for over the whole course of the war casualties per ton of bombs dropped in Great Britain were under twenty and totalled 60,000 dead and 86,000 seriously and 149,000 slightly injured.
Even had it been technically possible for an air force to inflict in 1940 the sort of damage which the planners of the thirties feared, the German air force had not been designed primarily for that function. Its heavy bombing arm was, as we have seen, the least developed and the Luftwaffe – paradoxically, in view of its status as an independent service – was built up as a partner of the army rather than as an independent force which was going to win wars on its own. The bombing of British military or civilian targets in order to wreck production or break morale was therefore only one way of approaching the problem of how to defeat Great Britain, and not the obvious way. The alternative – assuming that the slow process of blockade and starvation were rejected – was a combined operation in which the Luftwaffe would begin by nullifying the RA F and would then, with the navy, cover the transport of the German army into England. What actually happened was something between the two: a projected invasion in force preceded by an independent onslaught by the Luftwaffe which oscillated between the attempt to destroy Great Britain’s Fighter Command and heavy assaults on centres of production and population. Since the Luftwaffe’s attack failed, the invasion never took place.
The idea of an invasion was popular in army circles but nowhere else. The navy regarded an invasion as almost impossibly risky. Raeder’s conditions were control of the air, the right weather and an attempt no later than the autumnal equinox. The navy regarded the army’s requests for naval protection for its vast and lumbering armadas against the Royal Navy as grotesquely unreal, although the naval staff was not very successful in conveying this appreciation to the army staff. The Luftwaffe was not so much hostile as uninterested. Goering and his principal lieutenants hardly troubled to reply to memoranda or attend conferences about it. Hitler himself was half involved, half aloof. He so far responded to the enthusiasm generated by the army staff as to order plans and preparations and he may have hoped that the navy’s precondition would be met by the Luftwaffe’s separate operations. Men were assigned and trained; barges, tugs and other craft were assembled. There was a great deal of exercising and (often contradictory) paper work. Hitler kept all the options open, including retreat. He was sceptical but also serious. He would have been delighted to finish off the war in the west this way but never confident that he could do so and therefore prepared both to give it a try and to abandon it if it did not work.
The first plan for a landing, produced by the army staff in December 1939, aimed at the east coast. After cutting naval criticism this idea was abandoned in favour of landings at a series of points along almost the entire south coast. The navy consistently argued that the only feasible operation, if any, was one concentrated in the south-east where the waters were narrowest. The first directive to prepare an invasion was issued by Hitler on 17 July 1940. It prescribed that the R A F must first be reduced to insignificance, that all minefields be cleared and that the Royal Navy be kept at a distance in northern waters or the Mediterranean. If these circumstances were met the army proposed to put ashore 260,000 men in three days, assemble a force of eleven divisions in two weeks and bring Great Britain to surrender in a month. Landings would take place along three stretches of coast between Folkestone and Brighton to the accompaniment of feints against Scotland and Iceland to distract the Royal Navy. The SS would follow with a list of 2,700 persons to be incarcerated, and a special booklet was prepared for the use of the six SS commanders and their staffs who were to extinguish opposition (including the Boy Scouts who were thought to be an arm of British Intelligence). The invasion fleets moved from their assembly points to their departure stations in the first days of September, but in these same days the R A F was thwarting the Luftwaffe in what Churchill had already christened the Battle of Britain.
In July 1940 Generals Kesselring and Sperrle, commanding Luftflotten 2 and 3 in Belgium and northern France, and General Stumpf, commanding Luftflotte 5 in Denmark and Norway, had a front line strength of around 3,000 aircraft, including some 1,400 long-range bombers, 300 dive-bombers, 800 single-engined fighters and 280 twin-engined fighters or fighter bombers. Of this force 2,500 aircraft at most were serviceable and ready for action at the beginning of the battle. In the engagements which followed, Kesselring and Sperrle could on a normal day put up 800 long-range bombers and 820 fighters. On the other side the Royal Air Force had emerged from the Battle of France with less damage than might have been the case if Dowding and Churchill had not hardened their hearts against sending more fighters to help the French. (Half of those sent were lost. The R A F’s losses between 10 May and 20 June were 944. They were made good by mid-July but pilot losses were not. Milch wanted to invade Great Britain on the tail of the Dunkirk retreat.) Morale was undented by the fall of France and leadership from Dowding downwards excellent. The R A F’s front line strength on the eve of the Battle of Britain was 1,200. It included 800 Hurricane and Spitfire single-seater fighters, of which 660 were operational, and in this sphere the British were roughly equal in numbers to the units opposed to them. Reserves were healthy, production good and expanding but there was only a narrow margin of trained pilots. This weakness was a worrying one, for although one new aircraft was as good as the machine it replaced, a new pilot was not the equal of an experienced one. On the other hand the R A F saved many more of its pilots than did the Luftwaffe since the former could bale out over their own territory and return to the fight, whereas most of the German pilots in the like case became prisoners of war.
The Hurricane and Spitfire, with their eight guns apiece, had the best single-engined fighter armament in the world – thanks largely to Squadron Leader R. S. Sorley and to Dowding. They could destroy an enemy bomber with a two-second burst. Sorley had been so impressed by the mock-up of the Hurricane that he tried, unsuccessfully, to get it put into production before it had flown. The prototype of the Hurricane first flew in 1935 and by the outbreak of war 578 had been made (by the middle of 1940 1,747). The Spitfire, which first flew a year later than the Hurricane, began to reach the service three months before Munich and nine squadrons had been formed by the outbreak of war when 299 had been made (by the middle of 1940 809). At one point during the Battle of Britain reserves of Spitfires fell to thirty-eight but at no time did the Command ask in vain for replacements of this or any other type of aircraft. On the eve of the battle fighter production was verging on 500 a month, which was considerably higher than German fighter production or some German estimates of British production. (Goering thought that British production of all types was only 300.)
Besides this force Great Britain relied for its defence on an early warning system of revolutionary and decisive importance. It was based on radar or, as it was at first called in Great Britain, RDF – Radio Direction Finding – a method for detecting the position of distant objects by the reflection of radio rays. Without radar too many bombers would have got through. After the First World War the problem of how to stop the bomber was acute. Some despaired of solving it. Others examined desperate remedies like the death ray, an attempt to find ways of killing enemy aircrews by (for example) suddenly raising their blood to boiling point, or ways of stopping their engines by radio transmissions. No death ray was ever invented but from 1934 radar was developed by a number of men, including in particular Professors Henry Tizard, A. V. Hill and P. M. S. Blackett; H. E. Wimperis, a civilian engineer who was given a post at the Air Ministry; and Robert Watson-Watt of the Radio Research Laboratory. (Considerable discord was introduced into the research and its application when Professor F. A. Lindemann, later Lord Cherwell, was injected into the work on the insistence of Churchill who, although not in the government, had been made privy to these and other secret matters. Lindemann was neither liked nor highly regarded by many of his fellow scientists. He was wholeheartedly anxious to give of his best for the defence of the country but he tended to treat research as a branch of politics. His day came when Churchill became Prime Minister. He was one of Churchill’s closest advisers.) A chain of fifty-one radar stations was built round the coast. Although still incomplete, it was brought into continuous operation in the spring of 1939 and it was later supplemented by a second chain specially designed to detect low-flying aircraft. As early as 1936 Tizard suggested that very small radar sets could be made to go into aircraft and help fighter pilots to find and destroy enemy bombers at night.
Supplementing the radar system was the Observer Corps which, armed with binoculars, manned a network of posts which spotted aircraft as soon as they came within sight or hearing. There were a thousand of these posts. They and the radar stations were connected by telephone with an operations room, to which they transmitted their estimates of the positions, speeds, heights, numbers and directions of all aircraft within their ken, and this information was plotted on large tables by counters which were moved across the table as the information came in. Orders to aircraft, whether waiting on the ground or airborne in search of the enemy, were given by Controllers watching these tables day and night. Radar and the Observer Corps relieved Fighter Command of the need to keep forces on permanent patrol in the air in order to be able to engage the enemy and avoid destruction on the ground. The Controller in the operations room, watching the plots coming in every few seconds and knowing that the aircraft represented were no more than 12–20 miles ahead of the position shown, could order his aircraft off the ground in time and direct them on the right course at the right height until the pilots could see the enemy with their own eyes (or, in later battles, with the radar devices in their cockpits). In the operations room hours of watchful, almost motionless routine would be suddenly broken when a girl in uniform placed a small arrow on the edge of the table which, if it did not turn out to be an atmospheric freak or a flock of geese, was the prelude to action – down below the drama of tenseness combined with the efficiency of techniques mastered by familiarity; up above the more fearful drama of the duel as the pilots cast around them for the enemy and then pitted against him their flying skills and their marksmanship. The Germans knew about radar but underrated its value to the defence of Great Britain.
The preliminary phase of the Battle of Britain was an attempt by the Luftwaffe, beginning on 10 July, to establish local air supremacy over the straits of Dover. Attacks on shipping still using this passage were used as a dress rehearsal to test the tactics and capacities of Fighter Command before proceeding to the main purposes of enticing it into a major battle in order to destroy it. By the end of the month the advantage lay with the R A F which had lost 150 aircraft (promptly replaced) to 286 lost by the Luftwaffe. On the other hand this initial success gave little indication of the ultimate result since the R A F had to husband its strength after its losses in France and could not afford a steady drain of aircraft, whether or not German losses were higher. In the second week of August the Luftwaffe began to attack Fighter Command’s airfields and operations rooms with the intention of crippling it on the ground or provoking it into a major battle in which it would be destroyed in the air. Owing to bad weather the Luftwaffe was unable to keep up its attacks on consecutive days and again in this phase the Luftwaffe’s losses were the greater – 290 aircraft to 114. In the main battle of this phase, on 15 August, the losses on the German and British sides were 75 and 34. Attacks on shipping continued, chiefly with Ju. 87s which suffered so severely that they virtually disappeared from front line operations. After a pause between 19 and 23 August the attack on Fighter Command was resumed in combination with secondary night attacks on cities. This phase, which lasted until 6 September, opened well for the Luftwaffe but was not decisive. The British suffered heavy damage on the ground. Fighter Command’s No. 11 Group, covering London and south-east England, had six of its seven sector (or main control) airfields seriously damaged and five of its forward stations put out of action. One sector headquarters, Biggin Hill, had its operations room and all its communications wrecked. Further blows of this kind would have exposed London to great danger and would have forced upon Fighter Command a change in tactics (owing to the disruption of ground control) which might have overstrained its resources. But except on one day German losses of aircraft of all types exceeded British losses and by the end of this phase German losses were approaching 1,000 while Great Britain’s were 550. On the other hand, in fighters alone the R A F’s losses were greater and although by the end of the month the R A F was making more sorties per day than the Luftwaffe, fighter losses were beginning to exceed current production and the pilot situation was becoming a grave worry.
Although Great Britain’s defences were severely tested during this phase the Luftwaffe failed to take a step which could have strained them even more severely. On direct orders from Goering it gave up attacking radar stations. Goering may have underrated the vital significance of these stations. He certainly underrated the possibility of putting them out of action. Their slim masts were not an ideal target for aircraft and nobody on the German side noticed that one of them – at Ventnor on the Isle of Wight – had been knocked out by a raid which left delayed-action bombs lying on the site. This was one of the more notable failures of Intelligence during the whole war. The radar screen continued to function almost without interruption throughout the Battle of Britain. German attempts to jam it were too primitive to impair it to any significant degree.
A second major error on the German side occurred at the beginning of September when the mounting attack on Fighter Command was abandoned in favour of attacks on London and other cities. It is impossible to be sure of the chief reason for this switch. Both sides enormously exaggerated enemy losses and on the German side the inflated figures were taken to mean that Fighter Command and fighter production had been virtually eliminated from the battle. Kesselring, though not Sperrle, shared the view of the Air Staff that the battle was won. In addition both Hitler and Goering had been stung by British bombing raids into retaliating against British cities. On 25 August, and thereafter on a number of nights, Bomber Command raided Berlin. The first of these raids was itself a retaliation for the first German raid on London which was itself a mistake – so that the German bomber offensive which began on 7 September was in a sense a consequence of a German error. (The first raid by either side on a town had taken place on 10–11 May when the British attacked München Gladbach, a few miles west of Düsseldorf.) The British raids on Berlin did little material damage but they had enormous psychological effect. They were a great surprise. Neither the Nazi leaders nor the people of Berlin thought that Great Britain was in a position to do anything of the kind, and the former had expressly assured the latter that they could not. The answer was to attack London. An afternoon attack on 7 September was followed by another raid that night. The damage was very heavy and a thousand people were killed. This daylight raid was not repeated and the next night raid did not come until four nights later, but the attack was then renewed.
In Germany hopes rose high. The invasion craft moved to their action stations. On 11 September Churchill broadcast an invasion warning. But the day before Hitler had – for the second time – postponed the day for taking the decision whether to order the invasion or not. He would decide on the 14th. When the 14th came he postponed the date again and on the 15th – the final major engagement of the Battle of Britain took place. In the course of two battles in the morning and afternoon the German bombers suffered heavily (they lost sixty aircraft that day, the R A F lost twenty-six fighters) and the German fighters again failed to win the clear victory that they had been seeking for so many weeks. Two days later, on 17 September, Hitler called off the invasion by postponing the day of decision indefinitely. In October, when the Italians arrived to take part in the air battle, it was over. By the middle of that month the barges and other transports had all melted away. The Luftwaffe turned to night bombing of London and other cities. The famous raid on Coventry took place on 14 November. (Post-war stories to the effect that this raid was known of in advance from Ultra intelligence, and that these warnings were ignored in order not to jeopardize that source, have been scotched.) With radar not yet developed for night defence the Luftwaffe was able to cause serious damage at comparatively small cost to itself until the preparations for Barbarossa took the bulk of the bombers to the east, but once more Great Britain was able to fend off part of the attack by its technological skill. The German bombers were directed on to their targets by radio beams, flying along one beam until an intersecting beam told them that they were over the target, but British scientists quickly discovered how to jam the beacons transmitting the beams and so cause many German bombs to be dropped in the wrong place – preferably of course in open country but sometimes on an unintended target, as for instance when Dublin was bombed by a German force which had been making for Belfast.
Losses can be computed in different ways. No precise figure is unchallengeable. But, taking the Battle of Britain to have lasted from 12 August to the last day of September, the Luftwaffe may be said to have lost in operations over 1,100 aircraft of all types (not 2,698 as the British claimed at the time). The defence of Great Britain cost Fighter Command about 650 aircraft (not 3,058 as the Germans believed).
The reasons for the Luftwaffe’s failure were various. Its previous triumphs were to some extent delusive. They had been won in the role of army support and not in combat with an enemy air force, and the handling of the Luftwaffe in this role had necessarily been governed in practice by the strategy of the army command. Having taken little or no part in the battles in France Goering took charge during the Battle of Britain with the enthusiasm of one who feels that his moment has come. It might have gone better for the Luftwaffe if he had not, for he must take the greater part of the blame for the Luftwaffe’s ill-considered switching from one strategy and one set of targets to another. To some extent this mistake may be ascribed to bad intelligence. The gross overestimates of casualties made by both sides were more damaging to the attackers than the defenders. The German higher command, ignorant of the continuing powers of resistance of Fighter Command, made wrong decisions. Similar mistakes by the British were of less consequence, since the R A F’s role was to go on resisting in any case. But there were two other and more important reasons for the Luftwaffe’s loss of the battle. The first was that it did not have enough fighters. Of 1,050 fighters stationed in France and Belgium 800 were Me. 109s, excellent aircraft but not ideal for close escort work and not numerous enough to provide adequate cover for bombers on daylight missions which, ideally, required at least two fighters for every bomber. The bomber squadrons in Norway and Denmark had no single-engined fighter escort and only a small protecting force of twin-engined Me. 110s. This secondary force in Scandinavia was intended by the German Air Staff to split Fighter Command’s effort by attacks on north-eastern England, but only one such attack was made during the Battle of Britain and the Me. 110s proved in general insufficiently manoeuvrable for the role of bomber protection. Consequently the German commanders found themselves in a constant dilemma, since every strengthening of the fighter escort which they provided for their bombers reduced the number of fighters available to engage the British fighters. In the event the bombers failed to wreck Fighter Command on the ground and the fighters failed to destroy it in the air.
The second principal reason for the defeat of the Luftwaffe was Fighter Command – itself the spirit of its pilots and the quality of its machines, the ceaseless toil in the factories where production kept ahead of losses, the efficiency of the repair services which put damaged aircraft back into service in the shortest possible time, and finally the higher strategy adopted by Dowding and his principal lieutenant Air Marshal Park and persisted in against mounting criticism which, after the battle, ensured the replacement and semi-disgrace of these two steadfast and wise commanders. The greatest danger to Great Britain during these two months was the erosion of its fighter force. The reserves were never exhausted but they were never plentiful. Dowding and Park had therefore to minimize losses by cautious handling of their men and machines without thereby courting defeat or lowering morale. They could not afford to indulge in unnecessarily dashing tactics. They had to count the cost every day. In the end the sum came out right.
The Battle of Britain was lost by Germany; the invasion of Great Britain was never attempted; the blockade went on. But much was changed that summer. Great Britain’s prestige was raised high by the R A F and Hitler was tempted into a blunder. Having failed to end the war with Great Britain before attacking the USSR, he now proceeded to attack the USSR none the less. He had always meant to attack the USSR at some time in order to get Lebensraum. The fact that he now deluded himself into attacking the USSR on the grounds that this was a way to defeat Great Britain is an example of how disappointment can impair judgement. Moreover, the failure in the Battle of Britain prevented Hitler from concentrating all his strength against the USSR and eventually transformed a cloud in the west no bigger than a man’s hand into the Anglo-American hurricane which, in concert with the blast from the east, was finally to devastate the Third Reich. The Battle of Britain was therefore one of the decisive events of the war.
Nevertheless Great Britain’s position was still precarious and it is a measure of the continuing British crisis in this year that Churchill was prepared to contemplate two extremely un-British steps. The first, already mentioned, was the offer of a union with France – an offer so unreal that it faded almost immediately from the British consciousness. The second was even more startling and for that reason concealed. Although sceptical about the union with France, Churchill seems to have been in earnest when, in June, he offered to give Northern Ireland to the Irish Republic. The price was to be the use of Irish ports and the establishment of military and air bases in Ireland for the duration of the war, the cession of the northern counties to be effected when the war ended. De Valera countered with a proposal to permit the Americans to use Ireland in return for the immediate neutrality of a united Ireland. Churchill was ready to grant immediate unity but asked for Irish belligerence, not merely neutrality. De Valera doubted whether Churchill could deliver the unity of Ireland in the face of opposition from the Protestant rulers of the north (who got wind of the talks and were preparing to sabotage them) and of Churchill’s own colleagues. So Britain forfeited a chance, albeit a slim one, to solve its Irish problem – just as, in 1915, it had proposed to trade Cyprus for Greek belligerence only to withdraw the offer within weeks and so saddle itself for half a century more with that intractable and unrewarding colony.
These two forays into the improbable did not obscure the crucial fact that from mid-1940 Great Britain was reduced to waiting for the Americans to come to Europe. Victory over Germany, as distinct from its harassment, could be achieved in no other way. Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States at the end of 1941 ensured that the Americans would indeed come, but where many in Britain went wrong was in supposing that they would do so as reinforcement for Britain, ready and anxious to supplement British arms and execute British plans. This was perhaps the spirit in which Roosevelt, while his country was still at peace, proclaimed that one neighbour must lend his hosepipe to help put out another’s fire, but it was not the spirit in which a great power sends millions of men and women to war. For this the Americans made their own plans. The British became the auxiliaries, occupying however an indispensable forward base.
To the Americans Germany was a great land power to be defeated by a greater land power. Stalin saw Germany the same way, but with the difference that Russians and Germans were at grips with one another from the first day of their hostilities, whereas the Americans had still to get to Europe. There must therefore be some delay during which two things must be accomplished: the Atlantic must be cleared of U-boats (Great Britain’s last major contribution to victory) and a transport fleet must be built. Meanwhile American air forces would join the British and their continental and commonwealth allies in maiming German strong-points, German industry and the German people. From the American point of view the outstanding question was not what had to be done but how long the preliminaries would take before very large, mainly armoured, land forces could be brought face to face with the German armies – in northern France.
The British contribution to the ultimate victory included one further major and peculiar achievement in the breaking of many of the Germans’ most secret ciphers, the theoretically unbreakable Enigma machine keys used by all branches of the German armed services including the Abwehr (military intelligence), by the SS and police, and by the railways and certain other specialist services.
To read enciphered wireless messages of any grade, high or low, it is necessary, first, to intercept them and take down the enciphered texts and, secondly, to render these back into plain language by deciphering them. The interceptors were men and women with earphones listening in relays round the clock at various points in the British Isles and elsewhere in the world to German (and other) traffic transmitted at strengths designed to carry to other Germans but not far beyond. This gruelling and tedious work was the essential precondition. It was capped by cryptographers who, concentrated at Bletchley Park in England, achieved the intellectually remarkable and operationally crucial feat of breaking Enigma keys, often promptly enough to make the contents of the resulting intelligence (called Ultra) operationally valuable to the waging of battles in progress. Bletchley Park began as a British venture but became in 1943 an Anglo-American one.
The Enigma machine was originally a commercial machine first put on the market in Holland in 1919. It was adapted by the German armed services (who gave it its name) in the twenties and progressively developed for their most secret communications. The first breaks were made by the Polish secret service which reconstructed the machine’s internal workings, solved the problem of setting it to read a particular key on a particular day, and read Enigma traffic between 1932 and 1938; but the Poles were then foiled by the complexities continuously added by the Germans, whereupon they disclosed to the French and British secret services all they knew about Enigma and what they themselves had achieved and handed over two Enigma machines reconstructed by them. The French disappeared from the picture with their defeat in 1940 but by then the British had overcome initial scepticism about breaking Enigma (they had assigned to it only one cryptographer in 1938 and two in 1939) and were making astonishing progress in penetrating Enigma keys.
At their wartime peak the Germans used about 200 different Enigma keys simultaneously among their various higher commands and special services. All these keys were changed every twenty-four hours and in minor respects every eight hours, and even in wartime the Germans continued to add complicating elements to the machine itself. The challenge to the British cryptographers, who possessed Enigma machines thanks to the Poles, was to set the many movable parts of these machines in exactly the same way as the German operators and receivers had set their machines at the given time and for the relevant key – a formidable task. A number of keys were never broken, chiefly owing to the paucity of the traffic which they carried; others were broken irregularly or tardily; but one in particular – the principal key used by all higher formations in the Luftwaffe – was broken every day from a date (still disputed) in April or May 1940 to the end of the war, frequently on the day for which it was valid.
This intelligence had two special features. It was authentic and uniquely credible since it consisted of what the Germans were saying to one another; and it could be operationally valuable since much of what they were saying was known to the allies almost as soon as they said it. But its beginnings were not dramatic. When war began it was by no means certain that Ultra would be of much use, even if it could be got. The first fruits were meagre, scattered and unexciting. They came from breaking the key used by the German Wehrkreise, the static administrative regions or home commands, each corresponding to an army corps, into which Germany itself was divided. These scraps of information dealt with recruiting, training, travel arrangements and so on. The first indications of Ultra’s further potentialities came during the Norwegian campaign of April 1940. The key used by the inter-service command created for the occasion was read within a week of the beginning of the operation and yielded in all about one thousand decodes. Their operational value, however, was negligible because the breaks were usually tardy and the material in them was strange and largely unintelligible in the absence of experienced intelligence officers. It was a portent but not yet a weapon.
During the campaigns of May and June in the Low Countries and France, Ultra rendered some service although again its practical application was minimal. But in, or shortly before, this period Bletchley began its uninterrupted penetration of the principal Luftwaffe key. There had been sporadic breaks of this key since the very beginning of the year but on 1 May the Germans introduced changes into the Enigma machine which countered these successes. But the difficulties created by the new obstacles were rapidly surmounted and – a fact not realized at the time – this key would never again be lost.
Two developments converted these successes into a major weapon. The first was the establishment alongside the cryptographers of intelligence staffs whose business it was to collate and interpret the scraps of information contained in the decodes. In the vast majority of cases each decode was in itself trivial and uninformative; only in association with other snippets did it become illuminating. The value of Ultra derived from the volume of stored intelligence into which each day’s new items – now running into hundreds per day – fitted and from the ability of experienced intelligence officers to appreciate these items in the light of broader knowledge. Secondly, a system was elaborated from 1941 for conveying selected and paraphrased items of operationally valuable Ultra to commanders-in-chief in the field and their special intelligence staffs.
Ultra’s most characteristic service was its detailed disclosure of the German order of battle: locations of units, their strengths and shortages, day by day, in men, equipment and supplies. Such intelligence became for the first time significant in the Battle of Britain. Although it did not suffice to correct exaggerated estimates of the Luftwaffe’s total strength and standards of serviceability or yet provide information on the output of German factories, it gave clues to the scale of impending attacks and also details of the units stationed in northern France, Belgium and Denmark and their precise locations. It also confirmed that Hitler had abandoned his plans to invade England, at any rate for that year. In the North African campaign intelligence of this kind was supplemented by regular information on the timing and routes of tankers and other supply vessels crossing the Mediterranean from Greece to the German and Italian forces. Even more decisive was Ultra’s contribution to the Battle of the Atlantic where the breaking of the U-boat key at the end of 1942 was the crucial factor in giving the victory to Britain. Ultra continued to produce copious intelligence to the end of the war. Besides its specific uses, it transformed the conduct of war on the allied side by revealing the enemy as no enemy had ever before been revealed. It created in senior staffs and at the political summit a state of mind which transformed the taking of decisions. To feel that you know your enemy is vastly comforting. It grows imperceptibly over time with the regular and intimate observance of his habits and actions. Knowledge of this kind makes counter-planning less tentative and more assured, less harrowing and more buoyant. Directing a great war is immensely tiring and good intelligence reduces the strains wonderfully. When, for example, Churchill, Roosevelt and their Chiefs of Staff met at Casablanca in January 1943 to decide what they should do after clearing North Africa and recovering control of the Mediterranean, they had been receiving a steadily increasing stream of Ultra intelligence about their enemy for three years. Without it their view of the war would have been entirely different, very much less distinct. Their decisions were still difficult, but they did not have to feel that they were planning in the dark.
The British cryptographers at Bletchley Park might have read Enigma ciphers through their own efforts but the timing of their first successes – and timing can be crucial in war – owed much to the brilliance and ultimately the generosity of the Poles. The Poles owed much to the French in their dual task of reconstructing the internal processes of the German Enigma and in breaking particular keys on particular days. And the French got the information which they gave to the Poles from a German in the German cipher service who leaked precious documents to Paris from 1931 onwards. He was at all relevant dates a member of the Nazi party and he was called Hans-Thilo Schmidt. He was a traitor and a lecher, a man whom it is impossible to admire but to whom very great thanks are due.