Scramble: A Narrative History of the Battle of Britain Read online

  Scramble

  A Narrative History of the Battle of Britain

  Norman Gelb

  © Norman Gelb 1986

  Norman Gelb has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in Great Britain in 1986 by Michael Joseph Ltd.

  This edition published in 2016 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  FOREWORD

  PREFACE

  PRELUDE

  BRITAIN AT BAY

  THE BATTLE IS JOINED

  ATTACK OF THE EAGLES

  CRISIS

  LONDON’S BURNING

  FINALE

  POSTSCRIPT

  Appendix I

  Appendix II

  Appendix III

  Appendix IV

  This book is dedicated to the memory of

  HUGH CASWALL TREMENHEERE DOWDING

  ‘After Stuffy was made to retire, the war blew up into a global thing. Great names arose — Eisenhower, Montgomery, Alexander, Bradley. Great battles were won — Alamein, D-Day, the crossing of the Rhine. But they were all courtesy of Stuffy Dowding. None of those people would even have been heard of if Stuffy hadn’t been there, if he hadn’t won the Battle of Britain. His statue ought to be standing atop a plinth in Trafalgar Square.’

  Squadron Leader Sandy Johnstone

  FOREWORD

  The Battle of Britain was one of the most dramatic and important periods in the history of our Islands. In 1940 the outlook was dark. Although supported strongly by Empire and Commonwealth, we stood alone in Europe to face an enemy who had occupied much of the Continent in a very short period of time, leaving our country in a state of shock. With the fall of France came the loss of many of our forces: the Battle of Britain had begun. The whole country took part in that battle, civilian and serviceman alike, but the brunt of it fell upon the Royal Air Force and in particular Fighter Command, which had few resources; indeed, the experience level of many of its pilots was pitifully low. The battle lasted only a few months, but it was ferociously fought and it prevented an assault upon our country. Thereafter, the opportunity for Germany to contemplate invasion never returned. Britain was given the necessary respite, enabling her to lick her wounds and prepare for the long fight ahead — a fight which was ultimately to culminate in victory, achieved in concert with our Allies some five years later.

  1940 was a time of great valour, innovation, dedication to the task and skill, not just in the air but on the ground, with controllers and engineers and all the panoply of support that goes with operating an air force in such difficult circumstances.

  Much has been written about these epic times, but I believe this book to be unique in that it is a series of recollections of people who actually took part in the battle, many of whom will continue to echo in the halls of fame and in legend, and it is attributed to them by name. The stories of ordinary men and women as well as the great and brave are blended in such a way as to provide a continuous but personal history of those dangerous and crucial times. It would be easy in such a work to produce little more than a scattering of fragmented memories, interesting though they may be, but the author has carefully and superbly threaded them together to provide a series of crescendos, interspersed with light relief, to give one a feel for the events and difficulties that faced our people. It gives one a sense of the moment.

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Peter Harding KCB CBIM FRAeS RAF

  Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Royal Air Force Strike Command

  PREFACE

  It was the summer of 1940. A shroud of gloom had settled over the cities, towns and villages of Britain. The future looked ominous. Within a few short months, most of Europe had fallen under the shadow of the swastika. From northern Norway to the Bay of Biscay, from Poland to the westernmost reaches of France, Adolf Hitler’s steel-helmeted legions had spread terror and despair, and now were not far away. The Wehrmacht stood poised and threatening twenty miles from the cliffs of Dover and the beaches of southeast England.

  The country was braced for a German invasion which most people in Britain were certain would be attempted and which a few, including the American ambassador in London, believed would succeed. Winston Churchill, newly named Prime Minister, made things perfectly clear: ‘Hitler knows he will have to break us in this island or lose the war ... If we fail, then the whole world, including the United States ... will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age.’

  The abyss which most concerned the German High Command at the time was something less spectacular but still very daunting to their tacticians. It was a geological trench, the English Channel. Not since William the Conqueror had crossed over from Normandy to seize the English crown nine hundred years earlier had the Channel been successfully bridged by foreign forces trying to invade and conquer Britain. Napoleon had, at one time, cooled his heels in the French Channel port of Boulogne, waiting a full year for the right moment to launch his attack on the English coast. That moment never came.

  Hitler was aware of the difficulties. He had hoped the British would swallow their pride and accept with good grace the humiliating setbacks their forces had suffered while trying to hold back the Germans on the continent. He had hoped they would surrender part of their empire to Germany as a gesture to the realities of the situation and agree to back out of the fighting. The British at home would thus be spared the horrors of war which had been visited on the Poles, French, Dutch and others in Europe. The Germans would then go about consolidating their conquests and turning loose their forces on the Soviet Union, which boasted no similar frontier moat to frustrate the advance of the German armoured divisions and which, not long before, had obligingly signed a non-aggression pact with the Nazis.

  However, the British had no intention of acquiescing to a Europe dominated by Germany, and certainly not a Nazi Germany. They would not meekly bow out of the struggle, nervously to await the moment when Hitler would cast his eyes in their direction again. If the Germans wanted them out of the war, they would have to knock them out.

  Intoxicated with the string of easy conquests his forces had accumulated and enraged by British obstinacy, Hitler thereupon decided to do exactly that. He would pound the British mercilessly, invade their island homeland and force them to submit. The cross-Channel operation would present problems. But Hitler believed he knew how it could be managed.

  During their rampage across Europe, the Germans had proved that airpower was a surgical instrument with which to sap enemy morale and destroy enemy resistance. It would be employed just as effectively against the stubborn British as it had been against the Poles, Norwegians, Dutch, Belgians and French. The British, too, would learn the meaning of total war.

  There was, however, a difficulty. The British had lost many of their fighter planes and pilots in a futile effort to stop the German advance in France. But though seriously weakened and heavily outnumbered by the Luftwaffe, the Royal Air Force’s Fighter Command was still intact. It would have to be eliminated — shot out of the skies or destroyed on the ground — to give Germany uncontested mastery of the skies over England.

  Such was the making of the Battle of Britain, the first and only time in history in which a major military confrontation having a critical bearing on the ultimate outcome of a war was fought and decided exclusively in the air. It was a relatively brief episode in the Second World War, lasting a mere 114 days — from 10 July to 31 October 1940. But it came at a crucial moment and it taught a crucial lesson. Despite previous evidence to the contrary, the British showed in that battle that the forc
es of Nazi Germany, which had subjugated and terrorized so many nations, were not invincible. And they showed that freedom was not necessarily doomed to extinction across the face of Europe.

  When their moment came, they mustered both the pilots and the planes to stem the tide. During that historic summer and early autumn of 1940, many of those pilots took to the air in their Spitfires and Hurricanes half-trained, learning survival skills in their first interceptions and dogfights over the rolling countryside of southern England, but not always learning them fast enough. Losses were heavy, leading one pilot to recall afterwards: ‘I felt there was nothing left to care about because obviously one could not expect to survive many more encounters.’ To cope with hearing a seemingly endless rollcall of friends and colleagues killed or maimed as the days and weeks fled by, the young pilots, most of them barely out of their teens, learned to accept the cruel face of war. They masked with feigned indifference the conviction that they themselves would not escape death or disfigurement, or had their fears overridden by the thrill of being young, dashing and engaged in daily, heroic, life-or-death encounters in defence of their homeland — with other equally aroused, spirited, youthful warriors flying and fighting at their side.

  Whether exhilarated by the excitement or half-comatose with exhaustion from going up and down all day from dawn to dusk to meet the German challenge, the men who fought the Battle of Britain fashioned a decisive moment in modern history. Had the Luftwaffe been able to obliterate the RAF’s Fighter Command, a German invasion of England might well have succeeded. Freedom’s first line of defence against the expanding Third Reich would have been forfeited. By frustrating Nazi invasion plans, the Battle of Britain pilots guarded the base from which the successful invasion of German-occupied Europe was to be launched four years later. Theirs was a memorable achievement.

  The Battle of Britain was, however, not won only by the men at the frontline bases who, for weeks on end, were engaged daily in mortal combat with the German foe. Many were shunted in and out of the battle to maintain the operational effectiveness of their hard-pressed squadrons. Some were assigned to less pressured patrol and intermittent combat duty at rear bases. They were held there in reserve by their commander, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, who never knew whether German tactics would be altered to expose other parts of the country to airborne attack, and who wanted those reserves to draw upon when his men in the front line approached exhaustion. Some were sent up in mostly fruitless efforts to find and attack German bombers coming over at night.

  The battle was also won by the ground crew who serviced, fuelled, armed and patched up the planes, often restoring them to combat-ready status to meet new enemy raids within minutes of their landing. It was won by ground control personnel, radar operators, the Observer Corps, which fed a steady stream of reports on visual sightings of incoming German raids, and others who provided essential back-up for the outnumbered and harried fighter pilots and crew.

  It can be argued that the Battle of Britain began in France in the spring of 1940 when, with formidable aerial cover, German ground forces slashed through French defences, launched their dash to the English Channel, and commenced the process of crushing or neutralizing the Allied armies which stood between them and the British Isles. But the actual assault on British home defences began after the Germans had, to some extent, consolidated their victories on the continent and could concentrate on their single remaining, defiant adversary in Western Europe.

  There were five phases to the Battle of Britain. Between 10 July and 12 August, the Luftwaffe was in action mostly on the periphery of England — over the English Channel and English coastal areas — probing frontline defences. Between 13 August and 23 August, the Germans, their invasion plans in hand, moved on to a calculated effort to destroy the Royal Air Force's Fighter Command, stepping up and expanding their assault on Britain’s battered aerial shield during the third phase of the battle, 24 August to 6 September. The fourth phase, 7 September to 15 September, marked the turning point in the battle. The onslaught was shifted to London, which was subjected to the most horrific aerial bombardment any city had yet seen. The final phase, 16 September to 31 October, was the climax of the Battle of Britain, fast and furious at first, but gradually petering out as the Germans, forced to concede that the planned invasion of England would have to be ‘postponed’, started along the road that led to their eventual defeat and to the end of the vicious Nazi reign of terror.

  *

  When I began this project, the curator of the Battle of Britain Museum in north London warned me that battle veterans might be reluctant to talk about the parts they played. And I knew from my own experience that the English are a private people, not usually given to talking about their personal lives. So it was with some misgivings that I first approached those on whose recollections I planned to base this account of that historic moment. It soon became apparent, however, that instead of the reserve and reticence I had expected, they were wonderfully forthcoming, refreshingly informative and a great pleasure to meet and speak with.

  Some had stayed on in the Royal Air Force after the war and a few of those, very junior in rank during the battle, had achieved very senior positions of authority in the RAF. Others had settled back into civilian life. Almost all began by warning me they would have difficulty recalling events of more than four decades ago. But, with very few exceptions, once we began talking of those days, their memories flooded back, often in vivid detail. I am grateful to them for their welcome, their assistance and their gracious hospitality.

  I am grateful in particular to Wing Commander N.P.W. Hancock, secretary of the Battle of Britain Fighter Association, Len Bowman, Group Captain Dennis David and Air Vice Marshal A.V.R. Johnstone for their help, courtesy and friendliness. I am also much obliged to Eric Monday of the Air Historical Branch of the Ministry of Defence in London and to the personnel of the British Public Records Office at Kew, the Imperial War Museum and the Royal Air Force Museum, who helped make the time I devoted to research almost as agreeable as my meetings with the people who fought the Battle of Britain. I am grateful most of all to my wife, Barbara, for reliving the battle with me.

  Norman Gelb

  The ranks by which military personnel are identified in the following pages are, with a few exceptions, those they held at the commencement of the Battle of Britain, though many were promoted to higher ranks during the course of the battle.

  PRELUDE

  On 13 May 1940, four days after invading Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, the German army punched a hole through French defences at the town of Sedan on the River Meuse and poured through to fan out across France. In the process, the Germans set the stage for the Battle of Britain, an episode which was foreseen neither by them nor by the British, and which transformed the dimensions of the conflict that was soon to become the Second World War.

  The war had begun with the lightning conquest of Poland the previous September. Subsequently, Denmark and Norway had also succumbed to the ferocity of Hitler’s military machine. But there had been no major battlefield clashes, nothing like the murderous confrontations of mass armies in the First World War. Except for those who had fallen under Nazi rule, it was almost as if the peace had remained undisturbed. In Paris, officials had continued to boast that the Germans would never be able to crack the fortifications which made up their Maginot Line, never imagining that the enemy would outflank it. Sophisticates in London had begun calling the conflict ‘the bore war’. Journalists dubbed it ‘the phoney war’. But with German armoured divisions blasting their way across northwestern Europe, the war could be called phoney and boring no longer.

  As the German blitzkrieg thundered forward, as the panzers roared across France and Belgium, British leaders, who had been almost as complacent as the French, realized to their horror that the unthinkable was happening. Suddenly they faced the prospect of having to abandon the comparative convenience of British troops — deployed in France during the uneventful winter of
1939/40 — confronting the enemy only on foreign soil, well away from England’s green and pleasant land. Each day, word from the front conjured up the distinct possibility that the British homeland might itself soon be directly threatened with invasion by the cunningly commanded, superbly armed, ruthless, unpredictable and seemingly invincible military forces which were having no trouble whatsoever scattering and demolishing the once much respected French army on its home ground.

  Even more ominous, the British Expeditionary Force in France (BEF), which consisted of practically all the combat ready troops at the disposal of the British High Command, including most of its trained field officers and NCOs, was being forced to retreat, retreat and retreat again. Panic was not the British style, but there was growing alarm about the ordeal in store for the country.

  Winston Churchill had succeeded Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister the day the German offensive began, it having by then become apparent to Parliament that circumstances demanded the presence of a dynamic, aggressive bulldog of a national leader in London, one not easily cowed by Hitler’s bluster and belligerence. But, like his military advisers, Churchill was astounded by German field successes. He was prepared to concede that the enemy had inflicted a serious blow — the news could not be kept from the British public. But he was not prepared to signal gloom or despair. He would not abandon his belief that proud France could still be counted on not to capitulate, nor his conviction that the forces of Britain and France combined could not merely be brushed aside by the onrushing Germans. Nevertheless, he issued a ringing call to arms.

  *

  Winston Churchill

  It would be foolish ... to disguise the gravity of the hour. It would be still more foolish to lose heart and courage or to suppose that well-trained, well-equipped armies numbering three or four millions of men can be overcome in the space of a few weeks, or even months, by a scoop, or raid of mechanized vehicles, however formidable. We may look with confidence to the stabilization of the front in France, and to the general engagement of the masses, which will enable the qualities of the French and British soldiers to be matched squarely against those of their adversaries ... Centuries ago, words were written to be a call and a spur to the faithful servants of truth and justice: ‘Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar. As the Will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be.’