Adler-Angriff
AFTER THE EUPHORIA of victory, the German armies went back to training. In July, 7. Panzerdivision, for example, transferred to an area west of Paris, where it began preparing for Operation SEALION, the codename for the planned invasion of Britain. ‘This,’ noted Leutnant Hans von Luck, ‘was the start of wearisome weeks and months of preparation.’ On the River Seine, it practised loading and unloading converted barges over and over. The young paratrooper Martin Pöppel, meanwhile, having been briefly posted to Norway to support the troops at Narvik, was now back in Germany at a training camp at Gardelegen north of Magdeburg. For his actions in Holland on 10 May, he had been awarded both the Iron Cross First and Second Class and promoted to Oberjäger, the equivalent to a sergeant. He was also now a machine-gunner in a newly formed machine-gun battalion. If they were training for the invasion of Britain, however, no one said so. The Fallschirmjäger, part of the Luftwaffe, came under Göring’s command, and he had so far refused to commit them to SEALION.
In Britain, it was the prospect of massed formations of German paratroopers suddenly falling out of the sky that was among the greatest fears of many. A. G. Street was hard at it farming by day – he had ploughed up 90 acres of grassland and had begun the year’s grain harvest – and keeping watch for enemy parachutists by night, having joined his local Home Guard. By the beginning of August, there were still not enough uniforms and weapons to go round, but the situation was improving. ‘Observation duty,’ he wrote, ‘had now settled down to a regular feature of every man’s everyday life, while the evening and Sunday morning drill had turned what had been an unsoldierly rabble into a body of men who could obey simple orders without question, and who now yearned for less drill and more weapon training.’ The Home Guard has traditionally been seen as part of the amateurish backs-to-the-wall approach of Little Britain, but for the most part these units quickly sorted themselves out into a valuable second-string force, mixing former soldiers from the last war, who knew a thing or two about army discipline and front-line experience, with those in reserved occupations. In the country, farmers, especially, tended not only to be good shots, but also knew the land like the backs of their hands. Some were too old to fight in the Regular Army, but recruiting older men was not unique to Britain; Germany was doing so too, and most of what the OKH termed Third and Fourth Wave troops were reservists with little training or former 1914–18 veterans. These amounted to some 1.6 million men, so a similar number to those now in the Home Guard.
Meanwhile, the Regular Army troops were recovering from their ordeal in France. Bill Cheall and the survivors of his battalion of The Green Howards were sent to Cardiff, where they were fattened up and given the chance to regain their strength, then, on 18 June, to Cornwall, to a Nissen hut camp near Launceston. Here the battalion was rapidly brought up to strength and transferred to the newly formed 50th ‘Tyne Tees’ Division. Cheall was also impressed with the swiftness at which all their equipment, left in France, was replaced. ‘We were given a full complement of Bren guns, Bren carriers, anti-tank weapons, 15 cwt trucks plus all the backing the division could now provide,’ noted Cheall. ‘We had anything we needed to enable us to take offensive action.’
By early July, they were on the move again, this time to the south coast, near Bournemouth, on anti-invasion duty, which, for the most part, was enjoyable enough. They were based near Highcliffe Castle, and, as batman to the company commander, Cheall was given a room in the castle itself. Most of their daily tasks were preparing beach defences: building gun emplacements and laying wire and mines. ‘We felt very confident of our ability to give a good account of ourselves should the enemy try to set foot on our part of the coast,’ Cheall wrote. ‘Our earlier confrontations with the Germans had given us the confidence – we had been well blooded in warfare.’
Also now serving with The Green Howards was Hedley Verity, the England cricketer, who had been given a commission and was an officer in the 1st Battalion and helping to train troops at the Green Howards’ depot at Richmond in Yorkshire. He had quickly gained a reputation as a strict disciplinarian, but a fair-minded one too. Not only that, but he was happy to bowl to his men in the cricket nets at the end of the day’s training. Many of them already idolized him for his cricketing prowess; bowling to them helped create an even greater sense of loyalty.
There could be no invasion, however, without control of the air – the risks to the troops crossing the Channel and the support operations of the Luftwaffe in containing British defences would otherwise be too great. No matter how disparate the plans of the German Army, Navy and Air Force, there was no dispute over this essential prerequisite for SEALION. The RAF had to be destroyed.
By the beginning of August, the Luftwaffe had three air fleets ready and raring to go. There were Luftflotte 5 in Norway, Luftflotte 3 in Normandy and the largest, Luftflotte 2, in northern France and the Low Countries. The last was commanded by a former Luftwaffe Chief of Staff, Feldmarschall Albert Kesselring, who had proved himself a far more able air commander than administrator during the battles for Poland and France and had been promoted to five-star rank as a result. Together, these three air fleets amounted to 3,358 aircraft on the various Staffeln and Gruppen lists, and a serviceable number, ready to fly, of 2,550 of all types.
On 1 August 1940, Hitler issued his latest War Directive, No. 16, ‘On preparations for a landing operation against England’. Raeder had told him the Kriegsmarine would not be ready for the invasion before 15 September, and in fact they were still arguing with the OKH over the size and breadth of the potential invasion front. This date, however, became the deadline for which all preparations had to be completed, and that included not only defeat of the RAF but also containment of the Royal Navy and creating a corridor through the English Channel that had been swept clear of mines.
Incredibly, Göring had still not asked his air fleet commanders for their own thoughts on the forthcoming air battle, but, with Hitler’s directive now issued, he ordered them to submit their own plans the same day. Again, the idea of sitting round a table and working a solution out together does not appear to have occurred to him. Hitler’s directive had been quite specific: civilian targets were to be avoided, and the attack was to focus on destroying the RAF in the air and on the ground, yet even with those guidelines the plans then submitted by the air fleets were all quite different. Not until 6 August had they been ironed out into a co-ordinated plan, but then the weather intervened. Göring reckoned it would take just four days in all to knock out the RAF, but the caveat was four continuous days. Not until 13 August did the weather appear to be playing ball. This, then, was to be Adlertag, ‘Eagle Day’ – the launch of the ‘Attack of the Eagles’.
Up to this point, Göring was confident of victory and that his four-day time frame was a reasonable appreciation. This was largely due to the Luftwaffe’s intelligence picture, which was some way off reality, to say the least. The Luftwaffe had a number of different intelligence units, but it was the 5th and the 3rd Abteilung that were the most important. The former was run by Oberst ‘Beppo’ Schmid, who was a good party man, had been at the Beer Hall Putsch in 1923, and served on Göring’s personal staff as well as commanding the 5th Abteilung, whose task was to gain information about enemy air forces. Schmid had never travelled, spoke no foreign languages, had never learned to fly, but was shrewd and cunning and knew how to keep in Göring’s good books. The 3rd Abteilung, on the other hand, was a signals unit and radio-listening service and was run by General Wolfgang Martini. Despite Martini’s superior rank, however, there was no question that Schmid had considerably more influence. Because intelligence meant power in Nazi Germany, rival units were not very good at sharing information, which did not help when trying to create a full intelligence picture of the enemy.
In fact, for the most part, German intelligence was not especially good. Göring’s Forschungsamt had been very helpful in the run-up to war because many of the key players were communicating from within the Reich – such as the French and British ambassadors – and their communications were easy enough to both tap and intercept. This was no longer the case, so while the Forschungsamt remained critically important for Göring in keeping a check on his rivals and enemies within Germany and the Axis, it was less useful in adding to the broader intelligence picture.
Elsewhere, intelligence was split between the Nazi party security service and intelligence within the Wehrmacht. The security service, the Sicherheitsdienst, or SD, which included the Gestapo, the secret police, was concerned mainly with internal security within the Greater Reich and all occupied territories rather than specifically military intelligence. Under the control of the OKW, there was the Foreign Information and Counter-Intelligence Service, the Abwehr. This was commanded by Admiral Canaris, who, since Hitler’s move on Czechoslovakia, had turned against the Führer and the regime; he had even been co-operating with the British to keep Fascist Spain neutral. Under him there was also a Foreign Information Division and a Press Evaluation Group, as well as a cipher branch. The Kriegsmarine had its own intelligence service and its own signal intelligence branch, the B-Dienst.
This meant very little of German intelligence was in any way joined up; the lack of co-operation within the Luftwaffe’s own intelligence department was symptomatic of the German intelligence organization as a whole. The reality was that the only time this intelligence came together was at the very top – that is, with Hitler himself.
It was perhaps, then, not surprising that it was Colonel Beppo Schmid, not General Martini, who on 16 July submitted to Göring the principal intelligence appreciation of the RAF, which became the basis for the Luftwaffe General Staff’s plans. He underestimated the strength of squadrons, claiming they were eighteen aircraft strong, when in fact they had between twenty-two and twenty-four aircraft. He also stated that only a limited number of airfields could be considered operational with modern maintenance and supply installations, which was nonsense. He badly underestimated current aircraft production figures to the tune of about 50 per cent and claimed there was ‘little strategic flexibility’, when, in fact, Dowding’s air defence system provided exactly the opposite. The Me110, he claimed, was a superior fighter to the Hurricane. Even more glaring were the omissions. The Luftwaffe had no concept of how the air defence system worked, no concept of there being three different commands – Fighter, Coastal and Bomber – and no understanding of how repairs were organized. ‘The Luftwaffe is clearly superior to the RAF,’ he concluded, ‘as regards strength, equipment, training, command and location of bases.’ He was correct in terms of strength only. The rest of his claims were utter twaddle. On the eve of Adlertag, Schmid further reassured the Luftwaffe General Staff that some 350 British fighters had been destroyed since the beginning of July and that they were already being shot down faster than they could be produced. In fact, up to 12 August, 181 had been destroyed and more than 700 new fighter aircraft built. The gulf between fact and fiction was quite startling.
The British, by contrast, had a far more joined-up intelligence organization even though, like Germany, each of the armed services had its own intelligence structures. There was also the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, which handled foreign intelligence, as well as MI5, which handled home security and counter-intelligence. There were also further units such as MI9, formed in December 1939 to help foreign resistance fighters in enemy-occupied territories.
As far as Air Intelligence was concerned, the biggest source of information came from ‘sigint’ – signal intelligence. Since 1935, the RAF had maintained a radio intelligence service known as the ‘Y’ Service, for listening in to and collating low-grade wireless traffic, usually between aircraft, low-grade radio and telephone traffic, and other signals traffic such as navigational beacons. More recently, the service had acquired high-grade ciphers encrypted by the German Enigma coding machines. The Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, north of London, had grown rapidly since the outbreak of war, and the intelligence work there had benefited from the recruiting of brilliant young mathematicians such as Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman, both from Cambridge University. GC&CS was its own entity but within its structure had teams dedicated to decoding ciphers on behalf of the three different services.
The Germans had assumed that their Enigma machines were infallible. In fact, thanks to information passed on by the Poles before the war, GC&CS had begun to break general Enigma traffic regularly during the Norwegian campaign and the Luftwaffe key fairly regularly since January. Luftwaffe Enigma traffic was not yet being deciphered with any great speed, but, combined with Y Service sigint, it had enabled Air Intelligence at the Air Ministry in London to build up a fairly accurate picture of the Luftwaffe, its structure and dispositions, as it built up strength for the air assault on Britain. As with Dowding’s air defence system, the components of British intelligence added up to much more than the sum of their individual parts. It was certainly the case that dictatorships were more likely to produce highly disciplined militaristic societies, but democracies were more conducive to efficient intelligence.
One of those trying to advise Dowding and the British war chiefs on the Luftwaffe’s strength was Group Captain Tommy Elmhirst. Aged forty-five, diminutive and quietly spoken, Elmhirst had sharp, twinkly eyes and uncommonly bushy eyebrows that lent him an air of experience and wisdom that was not without foundation. His background had been the Royal Navy – from ships he had been transferred to airships in the last war, and then switched again, to the newly formed RAF in 1918. Although he had become an experienced pilot, since 1925 he had served in intelligence, first on the Middle East Section and most recently as Air Attaché at the British Embassy in Turkey.
Now he was Deputy Director of Air Intelligence and head of the German Section, which also gave him a seat on the Joint Intelligence Committee. This met daily, and was where all the various intelligence agencies came together and drafted intelligence summaries for the Chiefs of Staff and War Cabinet. The Germans had no equivalent joint organization.
His task was twofold. In the first instance, he had to advise on suitable bombing targets, for which he created a committee formed of representatives of Bomber and Coastal Commands, the War Office, the Admiralty and the Ministry of Economic Warfare, the latter having been formed to fan the fires of resistance in the occupied territories. By pooling data and information, they were able to provide Bomber Command HQ with a weekly directive.
Elmhirst was dubious about how effective Bomber Command’s bomber force was, and not as confident as many of his colleagues that there were key targets in Germany’s industrial heartland in the Ruhr region in the western Reich which, if destroyed, would paralyse the German war machine. If for him the glass was half empty as far as the RAF’s bombing capability went, it seemed to have nothing left in it at all when he contemplated the Air Force’s ability to resist the German onslaught when it finally came. The last weeks of July were mostly glorious summer days, but for Elmhirst and his colleagues at Air Intelligence they were ‘one long nightmare’. He tried to hide his pessimism, but he was pretty certain they had a clear picture of the Luftwaffe’s order of battle, and that made him far from sanguine. Throughout July, his department watched the grouping of the enemy Air Force as it moved airfields near to the coast in Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, Flanders, Normandy and Brittany. By the beginning of August, they knew there were three air fleets now ranged against them; they knew the numbers of bomber, fighter and other groups, as well as the details of squadrons and other units. The only thing they were not so clear about was the individual unit strengths. However, based on the premise that a German Staffel was the same size as an RAF squadron, i.e. around 20–24 aircraft strong, they had quickly arrived at a figure of about 4,500 aircraft, of which around 3,000 were perceived to be combat-ready. With Fighter Command’s daily combat-ready strength at less than 700 aircraft, this was a terrifying disparity. ‘Uppermost in my thoughts,’ Elmhirst noted, ‘was the question of whether we should have sufficient fighter aircraft to beat off the German attack when it came.’
Elmhirst warned his superiors to expect heavy attacks on RAF airfields and an attempt to destroy the Air Force on the ground. It would, he believed, be a battle of attrition. ‘And the outcome would depend on whether each of our pilots could destroy three enemy aircraft for the loss of one of their own.’ This was the stark equation as far as Elmhirst was concerned. It was one that made him feel sick with worry, because those odds, following on from defeat on the Continent, seemed too high. ‘We, in my Department,’ he noted flatly, ‘could not be optimistic.’
Elmhirst’s prediction about Luftwaffe strategy was bang on the money, although before Göring finally launched Adlertag on 13 August 1940, there had been some important softening-up operations. General Martini was well aware of the British radar chain but was uncertain exactly how it was being used. A series of attacks on radar stations all along the south coast were carried out. Ventnor was knocked out, but impulses were then sent out from a mobile transmitter that gave the impression it was still working. Otherwise, Pevensey was up and running again within a few hours and the rest were largely undamaged. Airfields at Lympne and Manston on the south-east tip of Kent were hit and believed to be permanently knocked out. In fact neither was. Part of Dowding’s preparations had been to establish not only secondary Operations Rooms, but also huge piles of soil and scalpings with which to fill in bomb craters.
Adlertag itself, when the great day dawned at long last, was something of a damp squib. The bombers of KG2 took off early to attack RAF airfields only to discover they had no fighter escort. In fact, low cloud had prompted cancellation of the operation but while the fighters had received this information, the bombers had not. Once they were airborne and incommunicado, there was no way of recalling them and so they pressed on, were attacked twice, lost a number of planes, and eventually bombed Eastchurch, a Coastal Command airfield with no fighters. Despite this, KG2 claimed ten Spitfires destroyed on the ground. Eastchurch itself was fully operational again within ten hours, even though, like Lympne and Manston, Oberst Beppo Schmid had crossed it off his list as another airfield the Germans no longer needed to worry about.
Further attacks were made throughout the day, including by a formation of around thirty Stukas escorted by some forty fighters, which were heading for an attack on Middle Wallop airfield. The intention had been to achieve complete surprise and smash the aircraft on the ground. However, their progress across the Channel had been picked up and 609 Squadron had been scrambled to meet them. Leading the squadron into battle was Squadron Leader George Darley. Leaving one section up-sun and high in the sky to cover any attack by fighter escorts, he led the rest of the squadron straight into the middle of the Stuka formation. They hurtled through, firing as they went, and Stukas began falling out of the sky or hurriedly dropping their bomb loads and heading for safety. The squadron claimed thirteen enemy aircraft that day for no loss of their own. It would not always be so one-sided, but this one engagement was symptomatic of a day that had not panned out nearly so well as Göring had hoped and expected.
Certainly, Britain’s war leaders were rather underwhelmed by the Luftwaffe’s efforts of the past few days. ‘The question everyone is asking today,’ scribbled Jock Colville, ‘is what is the motive of these gigantic daylight raids, which cost so much and effect so little? Are they reconnaissance in force, or a diversion, or just the cavalry attack before the main offensive?’
As it happened, Churchill was more concerned that day with issues further afield. Chief of these was what to do about the Middle East, where Britain had considerable interests. Middle East Command was huge, incorporating Egypt, the Suez Canal, Palestine, Iraq, Persia, Aden, East Africa, Transjordan and the island of Malta. Even though Egypt was officially a ‘protectorate’ and not part of the Empire, it was the hub of this huge swathe of land. General Headquarters, Middle East, was based in a leafy Belle Époque suburb of Cairo called Garden City. Hand-in-hand with Middle East Command was Britain’s considerable naval presence. The Royal Navy had been the dominant power in the Mediterranean since Nelson’s day, with key ports at either end – Gibraltar in the west, Alexandria in Egypt in the east, and with tiny Malta slap bang in the middle, some sixty miles off the south coast of Sicily. The French armistice, however, had massively changed the picture. No longer was north-west Africa in the hands of an ally. The French also had colonies in Lebanon and Syria, all of which were now Vichy- and thus Axis-controlled.
Now the Royal Navy, already stretched despite its size, would have to take on the Italian Navy and Regia Aeronautica alone, while between Gibraltar and Malta the seas were almost entirely hostile. Supplying the Middle East would be difficult and realistically would mean, for the most part, a long route via South Africa and the Suez Canal, which might take three months. Time counted a great deal in supplying a war. With the Mediterranean closed it was now 13,000 miles instead of 3,000, while to Bombay it was now nearly 11,000 instead of just over 6,000. Malta itself, a crucial staging post and critical offensive base for operations against the Italians, was also now in grave danger – so much so that the Mediterranean Fleet had already moved to Alexandria, which was not much better placed and was highly vulnerable to attack.
In terms of land forces, the British had a mixed body of British, New Zealand and Indian troops in Egypt amounting to roughly two divisions, i.e. around 36,000 men. There were 27,500 men in Palestine, including the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, while there were three British battalions in Sudan as well as the Sudan Defence Force, and a couple of brigades in East Africa. RAF Middle East, meanwhile, had just over 200 aircraft of all types.
Across the border from Egypt in Libya, the Italians now had an entire Ninth Army, and it was clear as day that it was only a matter of time before it made a move on Egypt and the Middle East. Churchill was a great admirer of Admiral Andrew Browne Cunningham, C-in-C Mediterranean Fleet, who had just the kind of bullish fighting spirit of which he approved, but was less sure about General Sir Archibald Wavell, who was widely respected for his intellect, but who the PM suspected lacked mental vigour and resolve. In this, however, he was largely alone, as among others Wavell had a very high reputation. The truth was, Wavell’s command was enormous and he simply did not have the means to effectively defend all of it. What Churchill took for defeatism in Wavell’s signals was actually just realism.
‘The PM is very much on edge,’ noted Jock Colville on 13 August, ‘concerned with the quickest method of sending reinforcements to the Near East before the expected attack on Egypt.’ Certainly, on paper, Britain’s position did not look promising. The Mediterranean Fleet had just one aircraft carrier and lacked escorts and minesweepers, while the land and air forces were similarly understrength. With the Mediterranean route now all but closed, any reinforcements would take months to arrive. ‘Thus,’ noted Churchill, ‘we might easily rob the Battle of Britain without helping the Battle of Egypt.’ It was a conundrum, but one Britain decided to tackle. After all, if British forces surrendered there, the Mediterranean and Middle East would be gone for good; on the other hand, if they fought on, they might well hold out against the Italians. In fact, they might do better than that.
However, if they were going to defend the Middle East, it would need commitment and that meant sending reinforcements. To do this at the very moment the German aerial onslaught over home soil was beginning was a big call, but one Churchill and his war chiefs were prepared to make.
There was good news from the USA, where the President had at last notified Churchill that America would be prepared to hand over the fifty destroyers in return for leases on British bases in the Western Atlantic. By this time, Roosevelt had declared that he would stand for re-election for a historic third term. It is not clear when exactly he decided, but it was no coincidence that he had spent four days at his house at Hyde Park, New York, just as France was signing the armistice and the crisis in Europe looked at its bleakest. Hopkins had been urging it upon him since the previous year. Massive rearmament was just in the process of beginning, but would another president see this through? Who else had the vision and authority needed to protect the USA from Nazi hegemony? This was not immodesty on FDR’s part; this was a pragmatist realizing he was best placed to fulfil the task, even though his Republican opponent, the suave and charismatic Wendell Willkie, was no isolationist.
With the third-term issue now settled, with growing support to aid Britain, and with Willkie assuring Roosevelt he would offer no objection, what had been politically impossible two months earlier was now acceptable. Legal technicalities were overcome, and although there was some negotiating and small print yet to resolve, the destroyers would be handed over to the Royal Navy.
Red Tobin and his two fellow Americans had all been posted to 609 Squadron at Middle Wallop, and, much to their relief, this had meant flying Spitfires. Tobin’s first flight had not been a disappointment – never before had he felt such power in an aircraft. ‘For the first time in my life,’ he said, ‘I had a real taste for speed.’ Since joining George Darley’s new-look squadron at the beginning of August, however, all three had yet to be allowed to fly operationally. Much to Tobin’s annoyance, he had missed out on the big fight on 13 August, but a day later Darley asked him to fly his own damaged Spitfire to be repaired. Tobin was strolling over to Hangar 5 with another pilot when a lone Ju88 swooped in low and dropped a stick of bombs. Both men dived to the ground. ‘My head was spinning,’ said Tobin. ‘It felt as though I had a permanent ringing in my ears. I felt the blast go over me as I lay there flattened on the ground.’ As the blast subsided, they staggered to their feet and ran towards the wreckage of Hangar 5. One man was lying there with his foot and half a leg blown off, while another was writhing in agony with an arm missing.
Effective though this attack was, moments later another 609 Squadron pilot, Sergeant Feary, was airborne and, shortly after the bombs had fallen, managed to shoot down the marauding Junker. Therein lay the conundrum for the attackers: to cause effective damage, bombers needed to attack from a low height; but to do so was risky in the extreme.
The weather in August was not quite so clear and perfect as Göring would have liked, but the Luftwaffe continued to come over, bombing airfields and getting into tussles with Fighter Command. The trouble was, lots of cloud badly hampered the ability to bomb accurately.
On 15 August, Göring summoned all his senior commanders to Carinhall, north of Berlin and thus away from the battle front. He told them there was no point in attacking British radar sites and that all efforts should be directed at the RAF and nothing else – no ships or factories. So worried was he about Stuka losses, he also told them that from now on they had to attach at least three fighter groups to each Stuka group – one to attack with the Stukas, one to fly ahead over the target, and one to protect the entire attack from above. He insisted Stukas should be escorted all the way. He also berated them for misusing his precious Zerstörers, which were also getting a pasting.
Having told them all this to their faces, it was then written down formally as a directive. It was, frankly, madness. Radar was key to the British ability to successfully intercept German attacks. Me109s and 110s were not dive-bombers and flew at very different speeds; by keeping close escort they were negating one of their very great advantages: speed. Nor were there enough fighters to consistently provide escorts at a rate of three to one.
A huge air battle developed on Sunday, 18 August. Jock Colville witnessed some of it, as he was spending the weekend with friends near Chichester in Sussex. Sitting out on the terrace of the house, looking towards the sea and to Thorney Island, he and his friends watched as anti-aircraft guns opened fire, puffs of smoke peppering the sky. Then they heard the roar of engines and the sound of machine guns. Suddenly, a number of aircraft were engaging in the sky above them, black dots spiralling and twirling. A bomber came hurtling down trailing smoke, then a parachute opened and dropped gracefully down through the whirling mêlée. Two minutes later it was over, the aircraft having moved on across the sky. In all, some sixty-seven German planes were shot down that day, the Luftwaffe’s worst losses since 10 May; Fighter Command lost thirty-three.
The air fighting continued, with the Stukas and Me110s, especially, continuing to be hit hardest; every day the Luftwaffe came over, it continued to be pecked at by Spitfires and Hurricanes – twelve here, half a dozen there, occasionally two dozen at once, but harrying the German planes for much of the time they were over English soil. Helmut Mahlke’s Gruppe had only flown a couple of times, but they had also worked out that while there was no avoiding the risk of enemy fighters during the attack, by diving to the deck and flying back as low as possible they were at least fairly safe on the return trip. He had been enjoying watching terrified Brits on the ground diving for cover as they hurtled over. ‘But unfortunately,’ he noted, ‘not every Stuka unit has escaped as lightly as us. StG 2, in particular, had suffered disproportionately high losses.’ In fact, they had lost twenty-five aircraft in the week following Adlertag, a loss rate of around 30 per cent.
Meanwhile, British squadrons were developing ways of getting the Me110s. As soon as they came under attack, the Zerstörers tended to put themselves into a defensive ring. George Darley, for example, had worked out that if he flew straight over this ring, firing as he went, it tended to break up and then they were easy pickings. ‘But not only did the chaps manage to get the 110s,’ said Darley, ‘the most important thing was that the bombers were left unescorted, and therefore became easier meat.’
On 19 August, Göring summoned not only his air fleet commanders but also some of his younger fighter commanders, berating them for not protecting his bombers better. Just a month earlier he had issued orders insisting fighters be allowed to fly freely in order to maximize their advantages; now he was telling them to close-escort bombers all the way to the target and back again. For the Me109 pilots, this meant flying so slowly they were almost dropping out of the sky; it also made them very vulnerable to attack from Spitfires and Hurricanes.
Fighter Command had been suffering too, however. Although only one airfield in all of Britain had so far been put out of action for more than twenty-four hours, the main fighter airfields of southern England were in a sorry state. Hangars had been destroyed, buildings wrecked, and Operations Rooms put out of action, and the airfields themselves were now pockmarked with hastily filled-in bomb holes. An attack on Kenley, to the south of London, on 18 August, was symptomatic of the kind of damage these front-line airfields were suffering. Just nine low-flying raiders attacked at 1.10 p.m., zooming over at just one hundred feet off the ground. Ample warning had been given, but their approach was masked by trees and hangars and, although two were shot down, the damage they inflicted was heavy. Shortly after, a further fifty bombers attacked from 10,000 feet, of which twelve were reported as being shot down. This attack was less effective than the low-level raid, but overall nine people were killed on the ground and a further ten wounded at Kenley that afternoon. Four Hurricanes were destroyed and two Hurricanes and three Spitfires damaged. Twenty vehicles and ten trailers were also destroyed, as were eleven hangars, the sick quarters, two married quarters and part of station headquarters. A number of other buildings were badly damaged. Nearby Biggin Hill and Croydon were also attacked; damage at Biggin was similarly severe.
Aircraft and pilot losses were also mounting throughout August. Fighter Command suffered 176 pilot and aircrew casualties in the month and 389 aircraft. Production of new aircraft, combined with a truly astonishing number of repaired and returned aircraft, ensured that losses were being more than met, but it was pilot casualties that were really concerning both Dowding and Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park, whose 11 Group was bearing the brunt of the battle. Many squadrons were operating at only 75 per cent strength, a figure that both men believed was unacceptably low.
In the same period, the Luftwaffe had lost 993 aircrew and 694 aircraft; that was a ratio of not even 2:1 in favour of Fighter Command. In other words, in terms of aircraft losses, the ratio that Tommy Elmhirst and those at Air Intelligence believed was necessary in order to win was not being met.
Tommy Elmhirst was not alone in fearing the worst. As August gave way to September, Dowding, Park and Britain’s war leaders were beginning to worry about just how much longer Fighter Command could hold out. The Battle of Britain appeared to hang very much in the balance.
While the very visual air battles were raging over southern England, and while daily newspapers and BBC reporters were gleefully announcing the numbers of downed German aircraft as though they were cricket scores, there was another battle going on out at sea, and one about which, for the most part, the average member of the British public was largely ignorant.
It certainly suited the purposes of the Government and the Ministry of Information not to shout too loudly about it, because the losses of Allied merchant ships since June had been horrendous: 134 sunk in June, 102 in July and 91 in August, amounting to over a million tons. These successes were a huge relief to Dönitz, who had agonized over what to do about the defective torpedoes suffered in Norway: should he send his crews back out into the Atlantic with the problem still not fully rectified or wait until all the torpedo problems had been solved? The former could wreck morale even more, but the latter risked letting Britain off the hook at a vital moment.
In the end, he had decided to order a maximum effort in the Atlantic, although he banned the use of magnetic pistols and instead switched to using torpedoes with new improved contact pistols. It had proved a wise decision; his U-boat force was still some way short of the 500,000 tons per month he had reckoned they needed to sink to bring Britain to its knees, but these small numbers of U-boat crews lurking off the Western Approaches started to call this the ‘Happy Time’. Morale was certainly no longer an issue.
One of the U-boats cashing in was U-48. After Narvik, Kapitänleutnant Herbert Schultze had been taken ill and was relieved by Hans-Rudolf Rösing, who was then thirty-five and had an already long naval career behind him. Certainly Teddy Suhren rated him highly, and there is no doubt that although there were barely ever more than a dozen U-boats operating in the Atlantic at any one moment during the summer of 1940, this band of brothers were at least commanded and manned by extremely experienced men.
On Rösing’s first patrol with U-48, they sank no fewer than eight ships. The favoured way to attack was to do so at night, when they could usually operate on the surface. The Mk VII U-boats operated at speeds of around 17 knots on the surface, which was faster than any convoy; on the other hand, when submerged, the best they could manage was around 7 knots. Because they were usually lower in the sea than the vessels they were stalking, they tended to blend in with the darkness of the water and therefore could often get so close they could hardly miss. However, it required nerve, cunning and skill to get away quickly once a successful attack had been made.
On 20 June, however, U-48 pulled off an astonishing shot at a distance which reflected both the skill and the high confidence of the crew. Any underwater attack was handled almost entirely by the captain, but if on the surface it was the 1WO, the torpedo officer, who tended to carry out the shooting, and on U-48 that was Teddy Suhren.
It was a little before 5.30 p.m. when Suhren had been up in the bridge and had spotted a large tanker in the distance, travelling at a decent speed. There was no chance of catching it, but having made calculations of the distance, course and speed of the tanker, and having then combined these with their own position and worked out the angle at which a torpedo would need to run, he called out, ‘Eels at the ready!’
Rösing was deeply sceptical, however. Surely, he thought, the distance was too great. But Suhren thought otherwise. ‘Don’t let’s waste time talking about it,’ he told the Kapitänleutnant, or ‘Kaleu’. ‘If we don’t get the torpedo off soon, the opportunity will slip through our fingers.’
With some reservations, Rösing agreed to let him take the shot, which Suhren reckoned was a massive 5,000 metres away.
Just before firing, he made a last-minute adjustment by 0.6 degrees then gave the order. ‘No one believed it would hit,’ noted Suhren. Tension grew as the minutes passed – one, then two, three and even four, but nothing. Those up on the bridge grinned at him resignedly, then turned away. Rösing shrugged.
But after five minutes they suddenly saw an enormous fireball in the distance and following that the sound of an explosion as the sound finally reached them. The men were dumbstruck, while Rösing shook his head, gave Suhren a quizzical look, then left the bridge. ‘But the Kommandant,’ noted Suhren, ‘never queried my judgement again.’ The ship they had sunk had been a Dutch tanker, the Moordrecht, one of the many merchant vessels from now occupied countries that had chosen to continue sailing on behalf of the Allies. At 7,493 tons it was a big ship and had been carrying more than 10,000 tons of fuel at the time. No wonder it had been such a big explosion. Of the twenty-nine crew, only four survived, picked up five days later.