8–14 SEPTEMBER
Even after the news spread among Fighter Command squadrons of the fearful bombing of London on the night after the first great day battles over the capital, most pilots registered in their minds only an intensification of the Battle as a preliminary to invasion. At a higher level of command the switch in German tactics was seen as the possible salvation of 11 Group. It also caused a certain amount of bewilderment. There had been plenty of evidence over past weeks that enemy intelligence was weak and ill-informed, so the failure to recognise how close to breakdown the command and communications structures of 11 Group had become might account for the folly of not giving it the coup de grâce.
Clearly, the invasion threat remained real. But why bomb London as a preliminary? There was little military advantage in setting fire to a lot of warehouses and killing a few thousand civilians. On the other hand, the invasion of Poland and of Holland had been accompanied by intimidating attacks on Warsaw and Rotterdam, presumably to cow the population. Did Goering really believe that a few thousand tons of bombs on the capital would lead the British to succumb to the threat of invasion? Yet early morning recce flights on 8 September showed no sign of an invasion fleet sailing. It was all very puzzling.
Meanwhile, the relative quiet over the south-east after the tumult of the past twenty-four hours led Dowding to relieve two of his hardest pressed squadrons. No. 43, which had lost its exceptional and much loved CO, Caesar Hull, and a flight commander the previous day, was pulled out and sent north – what was left of its pilots and aircraft. And John Thompson’s 111, already extracted from the heat of Croydon to Martlesham, was now sent far north to Drem with its remaining seven Hurricanes, when they were fit to fly.
In their place, Dowding brought in 92 Squadron’s Spitfires from South Wales, where life had not been as quiet as it might seem.
There was little daylight activity, but as night fell the people of London, whose lives had been greatly disrupted and sleep disturbed the previous night, heard again the ominous murmur of bombers as an accompaniment to the chorus of howling air-raid sirens. For the next week, the average number of bombers attacking London at night was 200, with supplementary raids on provincial cities. On this second night of the London ‘blitz’ (as the victims called it), with fifty-seven more consecutive nights to come, over 400 citizens were killed and some 750 injured, not a great number relative to later bombing on both sides, but worth noting by the anti-Bomber Command historians of today who perhaps have not heard of Macaulay’s dictum that ‘the essence of war is violence’.
Besides destroying civil property, the bombing did unexpectedly heavy damage to railway lines and stations. The Combined Intelligence Committee commented on this:
The selection of targets for attack was evidence of a thorough and carefully thought-out plan. There is insufficient evidence, however, to show whether it was designed for its nuisance value by the disruption of passenger traffic and of the transit of goods for industrial purposes, or whether it was definitely intended as a prelude to invasion.1
There was never any difficulty for the German bomber crews in finding London even on the darkest of nights, unless the cloud was 10/10ths: its proximity and the estuary of the Thames, pointing to its heart, were quite sufficient. It was a different problem with the provincial cities and towns and specific isolated industrial targets. For these targets, the Luftwaffe relied heavily on Knickebein, the intersecting-beam navigational aid first found on that shot-down He 111 the previous year. Knowledge of this dangerous navigational aid had since been enhanced by a combination of Enigma intercepts, ‘bugged’ 268 conversations of German prisoners and information from more German bombers which had crashed on British soil.
British counter-measures, devised by Dr R. V. Jones and others, were installed rapidly after June 1940 in the form of listening posts and jamming apparatus which distorted or blotted out the Knickebein signal. By these means the accuracy of Knickebein-aided bombing, which had been roughly within a square mile of the target, was more or less destroyed.
In addition, within two or three days, the gun strength of the Inner Artillery Zone round London was more than doubled, partly at the expense of the airfields to which the guns had only recently been despatched.
Although no official orders had been given, there was much informal and competitive talk among Kampfgeschwader air crews about destroying Buckingham Palace, and at least three attacks were made in daylight. Of the second of these, on 11 September, the King wrote in his diary:
We went to London & found an Air Raid in progress…. The day was very cloudy & it was raining hard. We were both upstairs with Alec Hardinge talking in my little sitting room overlooking the quadrangle; (I cannot use my ordinary one owing to the broken windows). All of a sudden we heard an aircraft making a zooming noise above us, saw 2 bombs falling past the opposite side of the Palace, & then heard 2 resounding crashes as the bombs fell in the quadrangle about 30 yards away. We looked at each other, & then we were out into the passage as fast as we could get there. The whole thing happened in a matter of seconds. We all wondered why we weren’t dead … 6 bombs had been dropped. The aircraft was seen coming straight down the Mall below the clouds having dived through the clouds.… There is no doubt it was a direct attack on Buckingham Palace….2
These individual bombing attacks, which hurt no one and did less damage than the numerous photographs suggested, were a blessing to the King and Queen, and provided a great lift to the morale of Londoners – ‘a bond forged between the King and his people’, as George VI’s biographer wrote. ‘Now’, remarked the Queen, in relief, ‘we can look the people of the East End in the face.’
But generally the cloudy weather, which did not trouble the night bombers, was the cause of a reduction in the number and strength of daylight raids during this period. On the other hand, when they did cross the coast, it was very much more difficult to keep track of them by contrast with those blue days of August and early September. The Observer Corps did their best, but it was hardly possible for them to follow the flight path of, say, 100+ Me 109s flying at well above 20,000 feet and separated from the earth by several cloud layers.
One of the most successful daylight bombing raids of this week was carried out on 10 September not by any of Kesselring’s Kampfgeschwader but by Bomber Command Blenheims on the Luftwaffe base at Eindhoven in Holland when nine He 111s were destroyed, more than were shot down by AA Command in a week at this time.
After 9 September, when 200 German bombers attempted unsuccessfully to attack London and the enemy lost twenty-eight aircraft, the busiest, and bloodiest, day during this period was 11 September. After a series of feint attacks designed to draw up 11 Group’s fighter squadrons, two formations of 50+ and 100+ respectively were picked up by Dover CH at around 3.20 p.m. Seven squadrons were at first scrambled and then nine more, including the Duxford Wing, at around 3.45 p.m.
As on 7 September, the German fighter escort was extremely heavy, and none of the defending squadrons could make much impact on the usual tight vic formations of Heinkels and Dorniers which thundered north across Kent at the unusual height of up to 24,000 feet. There was very heavy fighting between the single-engined fighters, with many casualties, until the Me 109s had to duck away back home, red lights flickering on the instrument panel like urgent Morse code signals.
Once the 109s were out of the way it was a different story. About half the bombers had dropped their loads over the City and dock areas of London when they became vulnerable. KG26 fared worst. This Geschwader had been involved in the raid on the north-east on 15 August, flying from Stavanger in Norway, and had suffered heavily then. Now they were operating under Kesselring, and several of their senior officers died this afternoon, among them Hauptmann Kuenstler, leader of 1 Staffel, and his crew, who were shot down over Horsham by Sergeant Pilot Brzozowski of 303 (Polish) Squadron. (He got another He 111 later.) Sergeant Pilot Ted Scott of 222 Squadron was responsible for the destruction of another KG26 Heinkel over Hornchurch, killing Oberleutnant Abenhausen and all his crew. Four more of this Geschwader crashed near London or into the sea, and many more aircrew were killed or wounded in eleven more seriously damaged 111s.
To set against these and many more Fighter Command successes were some savage losses, including five Spitfires of 92 Squadron alone. Wednesday 11 September was one of the very few days in the Battle when Fighter Command’s losses were greater than the Luftwaffe’s.
At 4.20 p.m. Pilot Officer Carver of 229 Squadron, Northolt, was shot down by a 109. His Hurricane caught fire and he baled out, badly burned about the face and wrists. Ken Carver, who was awarded the DFC, was only one of dozens of pilots who suffered burns injuries, the most dreaded of all. Many of these sufferers were treated at the Maxillo-Facial Unit of the Queen Victoria Hospital, East Grinstead. Here Archibald McIndoe treated Richard Hillary, the surgeon and patient who between them made this work known to the world. Another notable patient was Tom Gleave, CO of 253 Squadron and later a pillar of the Battle of Britain Fighter Association.
After dealing successfully with four 109s on one sortie, Gleave himself had been shot down on 31 August: ‘I heard a metallic click above the roar of my engine … a sudden burst of heat struck my face, and I looked down into the cockpit. A long spout of flame was issuing from the hollow starboard wing root.... I had some crazy notion that if I rocked the aircraft and skidded, losing speed, the fire might go out. Not a bit of it; the flames increased until the cockpit was like the centre of a blow-lamp nozzle. There was nothing to do but bale out.’3
Stunned by the shock, Gleave was not conscious of the agonising pain until, after his landing, he was in an open car being driven rapidly to hospital. Later there was an injection of morphia, his burns were covered with damp gauze, and then he was on another journey, this time, the first of so many, to the operating theatre on a trolley. He later wrote: ‘From that moment I started to accumulate a debt that mounted daily, and still mounts; a debt I can never repay, against which human thanks seem utterly inadequate. Every time I see a nurse or a doctor now I feel a hidden sense of humility, prompted not only by the ceaseless care and attention I received and still receive from them, but also what I saw them do for others far worse than myself, all but dead casualties who have become living miracles.’4
A WAAF stenographer, Olive Noble, also recalled the tender care and patience that was needed to help aircrew to recover in these Burns Units. At her hospital,’ “the first of the few” aircrew were put together again after being injured and burnt escaping from their burning aircraft. I typed up the case reports and worked with the doctors and nursing sisters. These reports sometimes made gruesome reading. In my spare time off duty I used to read to the airmen who had been blinded and whose morale was pretty low. All of them were encased in plaster, from head to toe in some cases. The surgeons did remarkable work in skin-grafting, and I was very privileged to be able to work alongside them….’
Further tactical developments of some significance occurred on both sides during this period. Once the Luftwaffe’s main attention had turned to targets well inland and there was more time to intercept, Park had decreed that squadrons should as far as possible work in pairs. His order to this effect went out on 5 September. This was a sensible decision, giving a greater impact to every attack.
For his part, Kesselring offered the first intimation not only that this tactic was working, but that Fighter Command remained rather stronger than the tattered remnants of a defeated defence as had earlier been imagined: ‘In the event of formation leaders meeting heavy opposition they are now permitted to disengage,’ ran the German High Command instruction.
A marked deterioration in the weather on 12 and 13 September gave the defences a respite from large-scale attacks, but on both days the Germans took advantage of the cloudy conditions to send single aircraft deeper into the country than was usual in daytime. Air Ministry buildings at Harrogate, an aluminium works at Banbury and the railway junction at Reading were attacked by single aircraft on the 12th, and at the last two places railway traffic was affected. On the 13th there was rather more of the same sort of activity, commencing with the first incidents to be reported from Ulster.5
The weather was not much better on 14 September, but Kesselring sent over some Ju 88s from KG1 and some twenty Heinkels, which hovered about the southern suburbs of London and dropped their bombs haphazardly over the flimsy semis, killing fifty people. Others flew over the coastal resorts of Eastbourne and Brighton, killing or seriously injuring sixty more civilians, belying any further ridiculous claims by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda machine, that the Luftwaffe attacked only military targets.
And so this week of mixed fortunes for both sides drew to an uncertain conclusion; and at his usual late hour, General Sir Alan Brooke wrote in his diary: ‘Ominous quiet…. Have Germans completed their preparations for invasion? Are they giving their air force a last brush and wash up? Will he start tomorrow, or is it all a bluff …?’6
He could not know, despite all the information derived from ‘Sigint’,* reconnaissance and agents, that on 3 September the Germans had moved back their earliest possible invasion date from 15 to 21 September, with a firm decision to be taken ten days beforehand.7 Nor could he know that when 11 September came, Hitler had deferred the decision for three days, and that on 14 September he had postponed it for a further three.8 The Luftwaffe, it seemed to the German Service chiefs, was near its goal but still not near enough. Fighter Command was weakening, but the British bombers and minelayers were proving increasingly disruptive. Everything would now depend on the success of the final hammer blows about to be delivered.
* General Sir Alan Brooke, C-in-C Home Forces.
* Signals intelligence, including the ‘Ultra’-secret information derived from breaking the top-grade German codes.