Battle Of Britain
Hitler Never Again the Master of Events
During the Thirties, Hitler’s Germany, by trickery and by force without war, had recovered the Rhineland, the eastern Baltic cities, had effected the union with Austria, expressly forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, and had absorbed Czechoslovakia.
In the first stages of the Second World War, Hitler was to win yet more astounding triumphs. After the rapid conquest of Poland, Hitler offered France and Britain peace. Then, early in the spring of 1940, he occupied Denmark and Norway, defeating an ill-co-ordinated and insufficient Allied effort to prevent him doing so. Only the British Navy came relatively well out of the defeat in Scandinavia. On 10 May, Hitler began his Blitzkreig in the West, invading Holland, Belgium and France simultaneously. By 10 June, when the second phase of the Battle of France ended with German columns crossing the Seine, the French armies were broken; and on 17 June a new French government, headed by Marshal Petain, sued for an armistice.
The gigantic Battle of France saw both sides fairly equally matched as regards numbers, with the French possessing as many tanks as the Germans and with a far better trained Army as regards what was considered conventional warfare on the pattern of that of 1914-1918. The battle was really won by the German understanding of the powers of the armoured offensive and the paralysis of the French command to react to it. Some 150,000 young men who made up the seven Panzer divisions which broke the Allied armies in two, starting that attack in a sector, the steeply wooded Ardennes Hills where the French High Command believed no serious attack could be mounted, were the real victors. The massed armoured formations supported by dive-bombers and a large airforce had proved invincible. The only bright spot in this terrible defeat had been the evacuation of 350,000 men from Dunkirk, but they were brought back without their arms. The lesson of the Battle of France was that Germany had developed a new and masterly technique for land and air warfare.
Britain on 17 June was, therefore, alone in the fight, with small groups of exiles, Poles, Czechs, Norwegians, Dutch and Belgians and what was literally a token French force under General de Gaulle. It was clear that if Hitler could land even half of the thirty-nine divisions massed on the coasts of Western Europe from Hamburg to Cherbourg, Britain would be knocked out for all the fact that her relatively unequipped Army and her Home Guard would put up a desperate and bloody fight. “Britain will have her neck wrung like a chicken,” was the comment of General Weygand, the Commander-in-Chief of the French armies from the end of that disastrous month of May.
Hitler hoped and thought that Britain would accept the peace terms he now offered. They included the retention by Britain of all her colonies except those taken from Germany in 1919. The peace offer was refused off-hand. On 17 July, from the Fuhrer’s headquarters, Directive No. 16 was issued:
“In spite of the hopelessness of her military position, England has so far shown herself unwilling to come to any compromise. I have therefore decided to begin to prepare for and if necessary to carry out an invasion of England. This operation is dictated by the necessity of eliminating Great Britain as a base from which the war against Germany can be fought and, if necessary, the island will be occupied. The preparations for a large scale invasion must be concluded by the middle of August.”
Detailed plans were already drawn up for the subjugation of the island during and after the invasion. They included the deportation from Britain of all males between the ages of 17 and 45. Huge fleets of barges were assembled in all the Dutch, Belgian and French ports. There was to be a feint invasion in the north; but once the conditions for “Operation Sea Lion” were fulfilled, a direct massive thrust against London was to be made from landings in Essex, Kent and Sussex, with slightly later landings in Dorset and Hampshire.
The conditions were two, both depending on the Luftwaffe. One was the disabling of British naval forces in the southern ports, which would enable, at the right moment, the German fleet of barges to cross the channel in lanes between minefields; the second, on which the carrying out of the first depended, was the smashing of the fighter squadrons of the Royal Air Force. It was essential for the Germans to have mastery of the air by day. To that end the British airfields were to be put out of action at any cost.
The Battle of Britain began around 6 August. It was to last, as it turned out, until 7 September. Like the Battle of France, which lasted over a month and ranged over so much territory, the Battle of Britain was essentially one single battle though it included changes in strategy and direction. Starting on 10 July, the Luftwaffe began its preliminary operation of heavy attacks on sea-ports and its attempts to destroy airfields, acting in fact according to the strategy required by the German Navy which was responsible for the carrying of the invasion force across the Channel.
Luftwaffe losses were surprisingly high and the damage which those raids had done appeared, to the German Air Command, inconsiderable. Goering, who stood next to Hitler in the Nazi hierarchy and was almost a law unto himself, had never, in his heart of hearts, believed in Operation Sea Lion. He firmly believed in absolute air warfare, that by massive attacks on London and southern England he could destroy the RAF and at the same time paralyse the heart of Britain’s war effort and cow the people and government into submission. He could, he thought, fulfil the necessary objective for invasion of air mastery by day, and probably end the war before the invasion barges had to move.
In early August began the decisive stage of the battle. The Luftwaffe had now collected 2,665 operational aircraft of which over 1,200 were fighter planes. On 15 August a German bomber force of 100 planes were sent against Tyneside, whilst 800 fighters swarmed over southern England to pin down the British fighters. Fortunately that kind of diversion had been foreseen and seven Hurricane and Spitfire squadrons were resting in the north. These planes shot down 30 German bombers for the loss of two pilots and a few more planes; the experiment of a daylight bomber raid without fighter protection was never tried again. In the south that day 22 British squadrons went into the air, some three times over, and this hard-fought battle inflicted greater losses than the British suffered, though only just. It was the largest air battle yet fought in the war.
The British air strength in fighters was still much smaller than that of the Germans, although by now the output of new and repaired planes was streaming into the British central reserve, thanks to the tremendous ability of Lord Beaverbrook to cut through bottle-necks in production and to the zeal and determination of the aircraft industry’s workers and executives. Nonetheless, British strength in numbers was to remain perilously small throughout the battle.
During the next phase, the German air effort was devoted to large-scale bombing of British cities by daylight and by night, and thus the Luftwaffe with its huge numbers of bombers and fighters was able to carry on for a long time. Indeed from 7 September, when Goering publicly assumed command of the battle, an average of 200 bombers was to attack London every night until 7 November. The emphasis was definitely away from the bombardment of British sea-ports and airfields and on to that of London. The port of London was partially wrecked. It was not London’s condition-London could take it and London had to take a great deal more still, that worried the British leaders. It was the situation of the RAF which was becoming increasingly critical, in spite of reinforcements. Squadrons in the constant daylight battles were becoming depleted and airfields put out of action. Goering might still obtain daylight mastery of the air; and, though mid-September had been now reached and the favourable time for invasion was liable to end with the end of September, there was still time for Operation Sea Lion.
On Sunday morning, 15 September, a hot summer day, an elderly man smoking a large cigar with his wife beside him, sat in what was like the dress-circle of a small underground theatre in Uxbridge, Middlesex. The whole stage was an immense blackboard divided into six columns, each containing a large number of light-bulbs. In what was the stalls were several long tables covered with maps and telephones, around which were grouped a number of highly trained men and women. On the left side of the stage was a glass box in which four or five officers were sitting, and on the right another glass box. In this last box the officers wore khaki; they were there to report the activity of London’s anti-aircraft guns. All the others in the theatre were wearing Air Force blue. For this was the underground Headquarters of No. II Fighter Group which commanded the air defence forces of Hampshire, Sussex, Essex and Kent, the southern approaches to London. It was commanded by Air Vice-Marshal Park.
The old man in the dress circle was Mr Winston Churchill who had driven over that morning from the Prime Minister’s residence at Chequers. “I don’t know whether anything will happen to-day. For the moment all is quiet,” said Park when his illustrious visitor arrived unexpectedly.
Very soon reports came in of the attackers. “Forty Plus from Dieppe.” Then another attack with Sixty Plus, and then another with Fifty Plus. On the flat tables the raid plotters were busy, In an uncanny low hum of activity. Orders were given in undertones telephone conversations were in the quietest: of voices. From the box on the left, the Observer Corps, there was a constant stream of messages. The bulbs on the black-board began to glow; first as various squadrons were ordered to stand by, then other bulbs “at readiness”, and finally red lights showing squadrons engaged. It did not take long before every squadron was in the air.
Half an hour passed, then nearly an hour. Our planes had to descend for rearming after a five-minute burst of firing; all had to refuel after seventy or eighty minutes. What would happen if the enemy put in another Sixty Plus? Air Vice-Marshal Park,, walking silently among the raid plotters, telephoned Number 12 Group for three squadrons. These were needed for the defence of London and yet it would be fatal to allow the Luftwaffe freedom to attack our planes on the ground. There were five critical minutes when over half the squadrons were on the ground. Churchill, in a low voice like everyone else, leant over and asked Air Vice-Marshal Park: “What other reserves have we?” “None,” was the answer.
Then suddenly the movements of the discs on the plotting tables showed an eastward movement of the German planes. They too needed to refuel. Goering did not dare to send in more reinforcements. The raid was over.
Mr Churchill climbed the stairs and reached the open bright day as the All Clear was sounding. It was the end of the biggest: daylight raid on Britain and the most critical. It was the decisive incident in the decisive phase of the Battle of Britain and Churchill was right in his Memoirs when, with retrospective judgment, he likened it to Waterloo, which also took place, as he noted, on a Sunday.
Churchill drove back through the quiet Buckinghamshire roads to Chequers. He went to bed for four hours, one of the secrets of his astonishing ability to conserve his energy, and, when he rang for his principal Private Secretary at eight, he noted in his Memoirs that all the news given him was “repellent”, heavy sinkings in the Atlantic, unsatisfactory replies from so and so, but all this was washed out by the news of the air battle: 183 German losses for a British loss of under 40. It did not matter that post-war information showed that this estimated loss was quite wrong, that in fact the Germans had only lost 56 planes; for on 17 September, Hitler gave the order to postpone Operation Sea Lion indefinitely.
Goering had failed to obtain daylight mastery of the air. The invasion threat was to come up again in the spring of 1941 but it was never so serious. The RAF triumphantly ruled the daylight sky over Britain.
The Blitz on London was to continue for a long while, the climax being the moonlight raid on 29 December, concentrated, on (the City, when nearly fifteen hundred fires were started. So great was the damage that in retrospect it looks as though Goering could have had a better chance of success had he started his attacks on London earlier. (It is interesting to note that his German naval critics thought that he had started too early.) The devastating raids on Coventry and Birmingham and many other cities were still to come. But Britain was able to wage war. She was able to attack in Libya and come to the rescue of Greece, to remain, in the months of the winter of 1940-41, a single light of hope in the darkness for those groaning under Hitler’s sway in Europe.
After Hitler’s failure to smash the Soviet Union in the first campaign of 1941, his defeat seemed probable and, after the entry of the United States into the war, certain. Had Hitler knocked out the British homeland in the Battle of Britain,, even though a British government in exile had remained in Canada, Europe would without question have been his. He might not have been the master of the world. But he could have decided whether, how and when to attack the Soviet Union and the U.S.
After the Battle of Britain Hitler was never again to be master of events. Britain had saved Europe from Napoleon by saving herself from invasion in 1805. She did it again in 1940 and saved Europe, and possibly the world, from a domination more ruthless, efficient and horrible than anything conceivable in the civilized eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.