The Prime Minister’s broadcast had barely faded from the air when – as Churchill termed them – the ‘banshee wailings’ of the air-raid sirens struck a chill into several million hearts. An unidentified aircraft had crossed the Kent coast, and three of the civil defence regions had been put under raid warning ‘red’ – which should have been ‘yellow’. In Whitehall, brass hats and mandarins trooped obediently down to the cellars, on local initiative a few fighters in the south took off to investigate, and one of the authors of this volume, conditioned like most of his contemporaries to expect instant air attack, gazed apprehensively at the skies as he motored off to snatch an hour or two – possibly his last hour or two – with his betrothed. He, and the others, need not have worried. For the time being, the Luftwaffe was under orders to confine its attacks in the West to retaliatory action against naval targets;1 and the intruder was only a friendly ‘civil’ from France, flight plan unfiled, heading happily for the aerodrome at Croydon.
Within the same half-hour similar false alarms scared the inhabitants of Edinburgh and Newcastle, also without dire consequences. But three days later, on 6 September, a much more serious incident occurred. Soon after dawn a searchlight battery on Mersea island, in the Thames Estuary, reported to 11 Group some incoming aircraft that it suspected were hostile. Group swiftly alerted sector at North Weald, and sector sent off Hurricanes of 56 Squadron to investigate. But the radar station at Canewdon, in the Estuary, was – according to Dowding – malfunctioning. The screening to block off echoes from the landward side, where the Observer Corps was responsible for raid reporting, seems to have been ineffective, so that when blips from the Hurricanes appeared on the cathode-ray tubes they were taken as indicating, in the usual way, approach from the sea.* Also they may have suggested a larger force than II Group had ordered up: the Group had asked for six aircraft, but sector had allowed the squadron, in excess of zeal, to put up fourteen. At all events they were taken for ‘hostiles’, and further squadrons – 151 (Hurricanes) from North Weald, and a squadron and two flights of Spitfires from Hornchurch – were ordered up and vectored into the same area. Amid a whirling confusion of aircraft, to which local anti-aircraft batteries contributed by shooting freely despite the firing of recognition signals, a section of Spitfires from 74 Squadron, sun-dazzled, mistook a section of 151 Squadron for Me 109s and shot two of them down, killing one of the pilots. Worse would doubtless have followed had not the CO of 151, Squadron Leader E. M. Donaldson,** one of three well-known brothers in the RAF, shouted out over his R/T: ‘Do not retaliate. They are friendly.’2
This tragic shambles, hushed up at the time, was dubbed in the RAF ‘the Battle of Barking Creek’ – a place several miles from the shooting-down but one which, like Wigan Pier, was a standing joke in the music halls.
These incidents told all too plainly of raw nerves, inexperience and technical imperfections. Fortunately there was ample opportunity, in the absence of serious enemy air attack, for improvement during the next few months. Flying Officer Alan (‘Al’) Deere, † a New Zealander with 54 Squadron at Hornchurch, who had spent an hour during the ‘Barking Creek’ episode trying to join up with his squadron ‘which was receiving so many vectors that it was impossible to follow them’, later recalled that five of his next six training flights were devoted to tactical exercises in co-operation with the reporting and control organisation.3 The fact of the matter, not surprisingly, was that controllers, filter-room plotters, radar operators, pilots, gunners and members of the Observer Corps all needed much more practice, and that the last three groups also needed basic training in aircraft recognition. Thanks to the enemy’s very restricted activity in the air, they were able to get it more or less in peace.
For this reason the period which American journalists, impatient for action, dubbed the ‘Phoney War’ was of vital importance for future success in the Battle of Britain. As the British and French had decided to defer all offensive action, except at sea, until they grew stronger, and as Hitler, having failed to pull off a profitable peace after the defeat of Poland, was husbanding his resources for an attack on France, nothing happened between September 1939 and April 1940 to disrupt either the British air defences or British war production. Enough, however, happened to give many of the defenders useful experience.
During the autumn of 1939 much of this experience arose from the Luftwaffe’s operations against the Home Fleet. On 16 October, for instance, when nine Ju 88s struck at naval vessels in the anchorage at Rosyth, on the Forth, pilots of 602 (City of Edinburgh) and 603 (City of Glasgow) Squadrons had an early taste of combat and enjoyed the distinction of shooting down the first two German aircraft to be destroyed over Britain since 1918. They came down in the Firth of Forth after what was described as ‘a roof-top chase over Edinburgh’. This was first blood to the Auxiliaries – and equal scoring between Hurricanes and Spitfires! But again there was trouble with the reporting system. Wireless intercepts had given good advance warning of the raid, and an extra fighter squadron – 607 (County of Durham) – had been brought up in readiness, only for the local radar to become ineffective through a power failure. So the attackers were able to inflict serious damage on two cruisers and a destroyer, and would doubtless also have crippled the recently docked battleship Hood had they not been forbidden to drop bombs which might fall on land.4 All told, the day’s work was scarcely a success for the defences. According to the Ministry of Home Security’s report the following day, ‘no general warning was given, and great indignation has been expressed by the local populace, who crowded into the streets to watch under the impression that a practice was in progress’.5
Coming on top of the episode two days earlier on 14 October, when U-boat 47 had penetrated the waters of Scapa Flow and sunk the battleship Royal Oak, this raid caused the main fleet to retire to the west coast, where it was poorly placed for speedy intervention in the North Sea. But by great exertions the defences approved for Scapa Flow in the summer of 1939, including a balloon barrage and two fighter squadrons on a newly built airfield, were completed, together with new under-water defences, months ahead of schedule, and by March 1940 the Home Fleet could safely return to the Orkneys.
Among the combats resulting from the Luftwaffe’s interest in British warships two left valuable legacies. On 28 October 1939 a He 111 was brought down in the Lammermuir Hills, north of Edinburgh. Months later its Lorenz blind-landing set yielded to Dr R. V. Jones, the brilliant young Assistant Director of Scientific Intelligence at the Air Ministry, the secret of how the Germans were able to use a radio beam system (‘Knickebein’) for night bombing (see page 268). Equally satisfactory, another Heinkel, forced to land near North Berwick on 9 February 1940, suffered so little damage that it could soon be flown and systematically evaluated. When 111s began operating against Britain in force six months later, their strengths and weaknesses were thoroughly well known to the defenders.
The other main type of operational experience at this time was the usually wearisome and uneventful business of flying patrols to protect east-coast merchant shipping. This work, shared by Fighter and Coastal Commands, from time to time also produced combats, and usually successful ones – such as that on 29 October 1939, when 46 Squadron destroyed four He 115B reconnaissance-bombers out of nine in an encounter off the Humber Estuary. Similarly 43 Squadron, while protecting another convoy off Yorkshire on 3 February 1940, shot down three He 111s. At that stage in the war the chivalry of the air still prevailed. One of 43’s victorious pilots, Flight Lieutenant Peter Town-send, visited a badly injured member of the German crews in hospital; and at the burial of two others there was a wreath bearing the message: ‘From 43 Squadron, with sympathy’.
Most of the German attacks, with the resulting combats, took place off the east coast, and it was not until 21 March 1940 that the Luftwaffe achieved a sinking in the English Channel. On that occasion the merchant ship Barn Hill, sailing alone, was hit by a bomb during the hours of darkness and set on fire. At fearful risk from the heaving vessel and from explosions, men of the Eastbourne lifeboats rescued most of the crew, while others of the Eastbourne fire brigade, brought out in the lifeboats, fought the flames. This was experience of a different sort, involving civilian services – and an early instance of that widespread courage and concern for others which was to be such a source of strength to the country later in 1940. Not everyone, however, was as yet fully imbued with this spirit. The Ministry of Home Security’s report next day recorded: ‘Twenty-eight survivors are now in hospital and in the Grand Hotel, Eastbourne, the management of which has asked for their removal today.’6
All told, the Luftwaffe directed some 400 reconnaissance or bombing sorties towards or over Britain’s coasts before the end of March 1940. In the course of these operations, it lost forty aircraft, but during the same period Fighter Command suffered no combat losses at all. Such a contrast augured well for the more strenuous days ahead and suggested, comfortingly but also correctly, that against the defences now built up in Britain unescorted daylight raiding from Germany would not be – for the Germans – a profitable operation of war.
On 3 April 1940 a pilot of 41 Squadron, in dealing successfully with an He 111, was himself fired on and compelled to ditch. This was the first time that a home-based fighter pilot was brought down through enemy action. Obviously, Dowding was not worried by losses during this period. Several other matters, however, worried him greatly. The shipping patrols took up long flying hours which otherwise would have been devoted to operational and combat training; the Germans were increasingly attacking shipping off coasts north and west of the defence system proper; and some of the great technical improvements in progress or in prospect, notably those affecting radar reporting, fighter control and aircraft performance, might not be fully achieved before the storm broke. But Dowding’s greatest worry of all, or at least the one about which he was most vocal, was that his Command was gravely short of the number of squadrons agreed to be necessary for his supremely important task.
Some of these worries lessened as time went on. Fighter Command’s responsibilities at sea became confined to a belt extending five miles from the coast, Coastal Command looking after everything farther out. To counter German attacks beyond the existing defence system, Dowding pressed for the creation of a new Fighter Group (No. 14) covering Scotland north of the Tay – a recommendation accepted but impossible to implement before the autumn of 1940. For the west, where another Group (No. 10) had already been approved before the war to cover the area between Portsmouth and Bristol, but was not yet formed, Dowding recommended, and got, an extension into Devon, Cornwall and South Wales. The full defence organisation would thus shortly cover all but the most remote parts of the country – the parts least accessible to the Luftwaffe. The problem, however, still remained of equipping the new parts of this organisation with all the necessary fighters, guns, searchlights, balloons, airfields, communications, radar stations, observer posts and centres.
The improvements which the Air Ministry and Dowding were able to make within Fighter Command during the quiet months of the war were crucial to its later success. First and foremost there was the addition of more squadrons, discussed later. Next in importance came the re-equipping of Blenheim and Gladiator squadrons with Hurricanes or Spitfires. Beyond this, there were the modifications made to the Hurricanes and Spitfires themselves – notably the fitting of constant-speed airscrews, which gave a dramatic increase in take-off speed, rate of climb and ceiling. Also, for the Hurricanes and Spitfires as yet without them, there was the addition of bullet-proof windscreens and armour-plate behind the pilot’s seat. No one as yet, alas, thought of coating the petrol tanks with a dope which would seal bullet holes.
Even more important were the new developments in the radar reporting system. During the 1938 trials it had become clear that the standard CH stations could not be relied on to detect aircraft coming in low. Special sets and aerial arrays to detect intruders below 5,000 feet had accordingly been developed just before the war and began to appear along the coasts from September 1939. These subsidiary stations, thirty in number, the CHL, were all in place by July 1940 – a vital element in the defensive system. Vital, too, was the fact that between September 1939 and June 1940 all British operational aircraft were fitted with IFF, so that no episode of the ‘Barking Creek’ kind ever occurred again.
All these matters progressed fast during the ‘Phoney War’ – and still faster after Germany broke the stalemate in April 1940. But for Dowding the supreme task, even more than speeding up these improvements, was how to get, and keep, his full quota of squadrons. This problem was bound up with another vitally affecting Dowding’s Command, but not within his sphere of responsibility – how to provide fighter protection for the BEF on the continent. Herein lay a conflict of requirements which gnawed at Dowding’s heart from the very first days of the war.
In the final defence plans of 1938 and 1939 it had been agreed between Dowding and the Air Ministry that forty-six modern fighter squadrons were needed to protect the country against an estimated first-line strength by April 1940 of the 1,750 German bombers. Peace, it was thought, might not last beyond 1941, and Dowding’s force was to be brought up to the recommended level during 1940 and 1941. It was reckoned that these forty-six squadrons could ensure that losses of thirteen to sixteen per cent were inflicted on raiders operating from Germany, and that the Luftwaffe – like any other air force – could not sustain a regular casualty rate of this order.
During the last months of peace, as indicated earlier, arrangements had been made to send a BEF to France and to implement the long-standing plan by which four Field Force squadrons from within Fighter Command should accompany it. These four squadrons were accordingly not counted as part of the forty-six. But last-minute requirements had also arisen for Fighter Command to defend Northern Ireland (one squadron), Scapa Flow (two squadrons) and shipping in the North Sea (four squadrons). At the outbreak of war the total number of squadrons projected for Fighter Command was thus four for despatch to France and fifty-three for duties at home.
Towards this total of fifty-seven squadrons Dowding on 3 September 1939 had in fact thirty-nine, of which one or two were non-operational. Of these thirty-nine squadrons, twenty-five were regular and fourteen auxiliary – the latter soon to be indistinguishable in competence, if not in character, from the former. Only twenty-six of the thirty-nine, however, had Hurricanes or Spitfires: the rest were on outdated biplanes (Gladiators, Gauntlets, even a few Hinds) or the makeshift fighter adapted from the Blenheim bomber. And when four Hurricane squadrons – 1, 73, 85 and 87 – left England to form part of the Air Component of the BEF in France, as they did on 8 and 9 September 1939, Dowding’s Command was reduced to twenty-two squadrons of first-class fighters out of the agreed requirement of fifty-three. No wonder he was worried.
Several accounts of this situation have assumed that in this the Air Staff had let Dowding down – that they had defaulted on their ‘promised’ totals, and that it took a long campaign by Dowding, more or less single-handed except for a boost in the final months from Lord Beaverbrook, to get matters right in time for the Battle. This, of course, is nonsense. The full fifty-three squadrons were ‘promised’ – if that is the right word: ‘planned’ would be better – for the financial year 1940–41, not September 1939; and twenty-two modern squadrons could not suddenly become fifty-three simply because Hitler plunged the world into war rather earlier than the British Government (or his own generals or Mussolini) had allowed for. It is certainly true that Dowding now waged a vigorous, sustained and absolutely justified campaign to bring his Command up to the fifty-three squadron total as soon as possible; but in this, though he often seemed unaware of it, he had the Air Staff with him all the way.
Commanders and others in the field have a frequent tendency to see their battles as waged against two enemies, the foe in front and their own Service bosses behind. If everything is not provided which seems necessary, it is common to impute the deficiency to the stupidity, sloth or ill-will of those sitting at desks in Whitehall. The fallacy in this thesis, little noticed, is that the officers in the field and the officers in Whitehall are usually the same set of people at different stages of their career. Dowding, for instance, had been ‘Air Ministry’ from 1930 to 1936, and would willingly have become so again had he been appointed, as he once thought he would be, to succeed Sir Edward Ellington as Chief of the Air Staff. He did not suddenly develop new qualities of energy, wisdom and good will by going out to a Command, nor would he have lost these qualities by returning to Whitehall. Differences between staff in a Service Ministry and commanders in the field in fact usually arise not, as those at the sharp end commonly think, from complacency and obstruction at the centre, but from the different nature of their responsibilities. The commander needs to stress only one set of needs – his own; senior staff at the centre have to decide between or balance competing needs. It is in this light, rather than in the one somewhat luridly cast by his more extravagant champions, that Dowding’s dealings with the Air Ministry should be seen.
Dowding’s first shots in his campaign to get his fifty-three home-based squadrons before the scheduled date were fired at the Air Ministry within a few days of the outbreak of war. He requested that twelve more fighter squadrons should be formed immediately – which he knew could not be done with Hurricanes or Spitfires, since the output of these was needed to re-equip the Blenheim and biplane squadrons. The Air Staff were already determined on all possible fighter expansion, and after discussion Dowding reduced his request from twelve to eight. But in doing so, in a letter on 16 September, he described the situation in a way which can hardly have failed to give offence. He asserted that the four squadrons which had left his Command during the first week of the war to support the BEF had been sent despite the fact that he had been ‘repeatedly told that these squadrons would never be despatched until the safety of the Home Base had been assured’. This claim was far-fetched, to say the least. Dowding had known for months that the BEF would be going to France at the outbreak of war, and that the four squadrons must go soon afterwards unless Britain was under air attack. To maintain in effect that the BEF should receive no RAF fighter protection at all until the Luftwaffe had attacked Britain and been defeated, or until the full total of Home Defence squadrons planned for 1941 was in place, was distinctly overplaying his hand.
Moreover, Dowding went on to refer to recent orders that he should put six more Hurricane squadrons on a mobile basis by 1 January 1940 in case they too were needed in France. ‘Although I received assurances’, he wrote, ‘that these would never be withdrawn from the Defence unless this could be done with safety, I know how much reliance to place on such assurances.’7 A more tactful man would have avoided impugning his colleagues’ good sense and good faith, but tact was not a weapon in Dowding’s armoury. He went on to observe that once the squadrons in France had begun to operate intensively they would inevitably suffer much wastage and that in his opinion ‘the despatch of the four Field Force squadrons had opened a tap through which will run the total Hurricane output’. This, too, was an exaggeration, but one which displayed percipience. The same could be said of his characteristically forthright conclusion: ‘The home defence organisation must not be regarded as co-equal with other Commands, but … should receive priority to all other claims until it is firmly assured, since the continued existence of the nation, and its services, depends on the Royal Navy and Fighter Command.”
The combination of Dowding’s pressure and the Air Staff’s parallel concern soon led to highly important developments. The Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Cyril Newall, an attractive and able leader who had guided the RAF’s expansion and presided over the Chiefs of Staff Committee skilfully during the last two years of peace, conferred with Dowding and arrived at acceptable solutions. The eight new squadrons requested by Dowding were to be created. According to the Supply and Organisation Department, aircraft output would permit at that moment the formation of only two, and those on Blenheims; but by dint of utilising these, upgrading and splitting a training squadron, and forming a number of other half-squadrons, all on Blenheims, Dowding’s eight could be created in nucleus form for future growth.
Within a few days Newall took still more radical action – action which would upset all previous notions of the correct balance between defence and offence in the RAF, and give it for the first time more fighter than bomber squadrons. On 17 October 1939 he called a meeting of Air Members and Air Staff. He did not begin by discussing how new fighter squadrons could be formed in the absence of any surplus of suitable aircraft. He began by baldly stating that the eight nucleus squadrons he had recently promised Dowding must be formed by the end of the month and that ten more must be formed by the end of November. He then invited discussion on how this could be done.9
Like the decision to build a radar chain while technical problems still abounded, this was a decision of flair and courage, which was a vital ingredient of success in the Battle of Britain. These eighteen new squadrons brought Dowding’s force, on paper at least, and for the time being, up to the target figure of fifty-three. They could, of course, be formed only on inadequate aircraft mostly taken from bomber resources – Blenheims and even the appallingly vulnerable Battles – and with crews consisting largely of novices. Yet because they were formed in the autumn of 1939, on the wrong aircraft, most of them were operating in the line of battle on the right aircraft – Hurricanes and Spitfires, as the production of these increased – weeks earlier than if their formation had been deferred until the correct equipment came along. In the summer of 1940 those weeks – weeks of extra training and experience – were to prove precious beyond measure.
Though Dowding now seemed assured of his fifty-three squadrons in 1940 instead of 1941, there soon proved to be nothing hard and fast about this total. In February 1940 the four ‘trade defence’ squadrons formed on Blenheims in 1939 were, by Dowding’s wishes, handed over to Coastal Command, so relieving Fighter Command of any responsibility for maritime protection beyond five miles from the coast. This brought Fighter Command’s approved objective down to forty-nine squadrons; but during March and April 1940, in view of the thinness of the defences in the extreme north and west, the fact that more squadrons might be needed for France, and an anticipated rise in the German bomber force to 2,250 aircraft, the Air Staff began to contemplate a new target of sixty squadrons for September 1940 and eighty squadrons for April 1941.
Meanwhile, Dowding had in fact lost two of his fully operational squadrons. Signs of a forthcoming German attack in the West in mid-November 1939 – an attack projected but cancelled – had resulted, in the continued absence of serious air attack on Britain, in the despatch of two AAF Gladiator squadrons – 607 and 615 – to join the Air Component of the BEF. By the end of March 1940, however, all the approved new squadrons had formed, and, with the loss of the four to Coastal Command and the extra two to the Air Component, Dowding had under his command, in one condition or another, forty-seven squadrons. This was twelve more than six months earlier. Moreover, inside another two months the number of Hurricane and Spitfire squadrons within his force, twenty-two in mid-September, had risen to thirty-eight. This considerable feat of supply and organisation on the part of the Air Ministry, the factories and Maintenance Command has not received the recognition it seems to deserve.
The ‘Phoney War’ could not last for ever. In the early hours of 9 April 1940 Hitler’s forces seized Denmark and the main ports and airfields of Norway. The bonus of time, so productive for Britain’s air defences, was at last running out.
* Watson-Watt had another explanation – that a British fighter had originally been on the seaward side. IFF sets for British aircraft had been devised and ordered, but not yet generally fitted.
** Later Air Commodore E. M. Donaldson CB, CBE, DSO, DFC.
† Later Air Vice-Marshal A. C. Deere OBE, DSO, DFC, AFC.
