The Battle of Britain (33 page)

And so it is only with hindsight that one can see clearly where the turning point came, for certainly it was not clear at the time, any more to those directly
involved in the Battle than to the millions on the ground who suffered from the daily and nightly bombings. But, although Operation Sealion was not officially postponed until early October, the real opportunity to invade, to activate the huge fleet of assorted vessels assembled across the Channel, had passed by mid-September. And from then on, Fighter Command's strength, instead of ebbing away, began to pick up again. The all-out assault of September 15 was repeated, twice, albeit on a reducing scale – on September 17 and 28. But, by then, although we did not know it at the time, the Battle had been won and lost. There was more fierce fighting to come in October, but it is significant that, after September 28, the German twin-engine bombers were withdrawn from daylight operations. A number of Bf 109s and 110s were converted to the fighter-bomber role. Their attacks were more than merely irritating and meant that the squadrons of No. 11 Group were kept hard at it all through October; but they were not capable of completing the job which Goering had undertaken so confidently three months before.

In reviewing the course of this decisive battle it is impossible to avoid the one aspect of the RAF's conduct of it which gave rise to serious discordance. I refer to what came to be known as ‘the Big Wing controversy'. The ‘Big Wing' in question was assembled by the Air Officer Commanding No. 12 Group. Air Vice Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory. The boundary between him and No. 11 Group was only a few minutes' flying time, by Spitfire or Hurricane, north of London, the Group's southernmost sector being at Duxford, a few miles southwest of Cambridge. There, in late August, Leigh-Mallory assembled a force of three squadrons to operate as a single wing formation under the leadership of one of the RAF's most brilliant and courageous officers, Squadron Leader Douglas Bader. Early in September the strength was increased to five squadrons of Hurricanes and two of Spitfires. Day after day, as the Battle raged in the south over No. 11 Group's area, this formidable force stood ready at Duxford. It could only enter the Battle to the south, over No. 11 Group's area, as and when so directed by Fighter Command and requested by No. 11 Group. Frequently the request was made and there were several occasions when the Duxford Wing was in action.

The controversy arose because Leigh-Mallory insisted, in a rather vociferous and public manner, that his squadrons could have been used by Park to much greater and better effect. In short, he felt that he and his squadrons were deliberately excluded from the centre stage of the action. At the time it seemed to me, from the worm's eye view of a junior pilot officer, that Leigh-Mallory's attitude was justified. My own squadron frequently formed part of the Duxford Wing
during September, having been withdrawn from No. 11 Group to re-form following very severe losses when flying from Kenley during the second half of August. And, indeed, quite often we did find ourselves sitting there on the ground while large-scale actions were taking place to the south of us.

I have thought about this question a great deal and studied it in some detail. My own interest in it is the greater because of my unbounded admiration of and affection for Douglas Bader, with whom I flew throughout the summer of 1941 when Fighter Command had turned from defence to attack. The broad conclusion I have come to is that the squadrons assembled at Duxford could have been used more effectively, but that the reason why they were not is to be found more in Leigh-Mallory's attitude than in Park's. It was essential that full control of the battle over London and the south-east should rest with Park and that the squadrons made available to him from Nos. 10 and 12 Groups should be fitted into his tactics, as they developed hour by hour and minute by minute.

There was a marked difference between the attitudes of Leigh-Mallory and Brand, his No. 10 Group opposite number, in this regard. The latter unhesitatingly and unfailingly put his squadrons at Park's disposal and did so without reservation. Leigh-Mallory, on the other hand, having developed his theory about the usefulness of operating at Wing strength, sought to influence the way in which his squadrons should be used by No. 11 Group, an attitude exemplified by his decision, already mentioned, to increase the strength and size of his Wing from three squadrons to five. That decision was undoubtedly made in the knowledge that Park was, to say the least, lacking in enthusiasm about the usefulness of a Big Wing in the circumstances in which he was fighting the Battle. And undoubtedly it reduced the Wing's flexibility and increased the time it took to get off the ground, assemble and reach the area where Park needed it. There was certainly no doubt about Bader's desire and determination to get to grips with the enemy. His leadership, given the inherent limitation of the Big Wing's usefulness in the circumstances of the Battle at the time, was, as always, inspirational. And there were occasions when Bader's ‘balbo' came together with the enemy with great effect. There were also occasions when No. 12 Group's help was desperately needed and called for but failed to materialise as Park and his controllers required and this led to much bitterness and recrimination.

All of this resulted, I believe, more from a clash of strong and unbending personalities than anything else. And its bitterness was exacerbated when, the Battle of Britain having been won, and that great victory having been achieved essentially by Park's brilliant handling of Dowding's superb creation, the former
was, in November, replaced by Leigh-Mallory as Commander of No. 11 Group and the latter was put out to grass. And so those in No. 12 Group, who had sometimes felt that they were being kept out of the Battle, perhaps because Park and No. 11 Group wanted to ‘hog' it all, were inclined to crow; and those in No. 11 Group, who had borne the main burden of Battle, felt let down. It was the one unhappy and unworthy aspect of an otherwise glorious triumph for the Royal Air Force and Fighter Command.

And triumphant it certainly was. There can be no doubt that the Battle of Britain was one of the truly decisive battles of history. In reaching that conclusion it is necessary to ask oneself two questions. First, what would have been the consequence, for Britain and for the world, if, as so nearly happened, Fighter Command had been brought to breaking point in September 1940? And what was the impact on the subsequent course of the war of the fact that by the narrowest of margins, near-defeat was tipped over to victory?

The short answer to the first question is that the Germans would have made a determined effort to invade and would probably have succeeded. It is true that the British Home Fleet would have remained intact and no doubt the Royal Navy would have moved that fleet down into the unsheltered south-eastern approaches in an effort to destroy the invasion fleet. But with the Luftwaffe in control of the skies it is doubtful whether sea power alone could have prevailed. Indeed, the Royal Navy would undoubtedly have suffered terrible losses. We were to see, a few months later, how naval superiority counted for nothing against air superiority, when the Royal Navy lost ship after ship at the hands of the Luftwaffe while attempting to disrupt the German occupation of Crete, which was successfully carried out by air power alone. Even if, for some reason, the Germans had found it necessary to postpone the actual invasion, Britain's plight would have been dire. The Luftwaffe would have been in command of our skies, able to disrupt the production of aircraft, fighters and bombers alike, and of weapons desperately needed by the Army, to sink the convoys as they approached our harbours and to do great damage to internal communications, including the railway network.

Although the spirit of the nation, buoyed up by Churchill's leadership and exhortation, was utterly defiant, it is hard to see how we could have survived as a fighting force, still less how the anti-invasion ground forces, under the command of General Sir Alan Brooke, could have been built up and strengthened to a condition in which they might have prevailed against an invasion launched in the spring of 1941. When Brooke took over, after Dunkirk, he found himself with one Corps Headquarters, one Regular Division and two
Territorial Divisions – all desperately short of equipment – with which to defend the coast from Kent to Wales. And although, under Fighter Command's umbrella, he had succeeded in building up the strength of his force by September, it remained terribly inadequate in relation to what Hitler could have sent over against it.

Without doubt, therefore, the frustration of the orders issued by Hitler and Goering to the effect that the RAF was to be destroyed averted a disaster of catastrophic proportions. What, then, were the positive effects?

I think that one which is not often identified or mentioned, probably because it is intangible, is the far-reaching effect which the RAF victory – perhaps, even more so, the Luftwaffe's defeat and the consequent failure to invade – had on the hearts and minds not only of the protagonist nations but of the watching world at large, and most particularly the people of North America. Following the subjugation of all northern and western Europe in a few weeks of devastating Blitzkrieg, most people probably thought that the German war machine was unbeatable. And, although the memory of it has conveniently been allowed to die, there is no doubt that quite a lot of people, most particularly in North America, still saw Hitler and Hitler's Germany as a quite desirable bulwark against Bolshevism. To them the prospect of a patched-up peace between Germany and Britain was therefore, in June and July 1940, not altogether unwelcome.

The Battle of Britain did much to change both attitudes and expectations. It was fought in full daylight and in full view of millions of spectators. It was fought to the encouraging and incomparable commentary of Winston Churchill, whose words affected attitudes far beyond Britain. And it was fought also to the commentary of some outstandingly brilliant reporters, notably the Columbia Broadcasting Company's great Ed Murrow whose daily broadcasts – ‘This is London . . .' – carried the mood and the sound and the drama of the Battle into millions of American homes. The David and Goliath nature of the conflict, as it was projected, the reports and photographs of the bombing of London and other British cities, the undoubted heroism not only of British airmen but of millions of men and women on the ground, tilted sympathy our way.

All of that added up to a factor of enormous importance in the development of the war against Germany. It was a factor which cannot be precisely measured, but it must certainly have contributed as significantly to ultimate victory as did others of a more tangible and measurable nature.

The first and most obvious of these was that the British were able to institute the process of turning their own war machine from one which was
primarily focused on the anti-invasion role to one more concerned with offence. It is true that Sealion was not finally abandoned altogether as part of the German war plan until February 1942. Hitler had reluctantly accepted its postponement on October 12, 1940, but it had been, quite specifically, only a postponement. And so in the spring and summer of 1941 the British Army in southern Britain still assumed a defensive stance. Even when the Germans invaded Russia, in July of that year, the idea that England itself might be invaded was not altogether or formally set aside either in the German or the British High Commands. There were those in the latter as well as the former who believed that Russian resistance would last only a few weeks. And so the switch from a defensive to an offensive attitude was a gradual one. But the mental move towards it had already begun as the last daylight raids of the Battle of Britain took place in October 1940.

By the spring of 1941 the Army was already thinking in terms of offensive operations, against Fortress Europe, manifested in the first place by ‘Commando' raids and eventually to culminate in full-scale invasions, first through Sicily and Italy and later through Normandy. Bomber Command of the Royal Air Force was carrying the war to Germany's heartland night after night. Fighter Command was embarking on a campaign which was to reproduce over north-east France the daily pattern of high-altitude dog fights which only a few months previously had been seen over south-east England. The aircraft factories, which for a few desperate weeks in September 1940 had been unable to maintain a rate of production equal to the rate of Fighter Command's losses, were now building up output in comparative safety, for although they were still vulnerable to night bombing, this was infinitely less effective than the daylight attacks, of 1940.

And so Fighter Command's victory had been crucial in opening the way for our own bomber offensive and, perhaps even more important, for the expansion of Coastal Command, which now had to play a role over the Atlantic no less vital than that which Fighter Command had played over south-east Britain and the Channel. The Battle of the Atlantic was about to begin, in earnest. It does not have the historical glamour of the Battle of Britain. But it was every bit as vital to victory. And it could not have been won if the Battle of Britain had not been won first, because air power as well as sea power was an essential factor in its prosecution.

The frustration of Hitler's plan to crush Britain was also, of course, a factor of enormous importance in his most far-reaching plan of all – the invasion and defeat of Russia. As the eastward advance developed in the late summer and
autumn of 1941 it seemed to many that Russian resistance must inevitably collapse. Of course, Russia's capacity for absorbing punishment, for surviving and continuing the fight, for producing infantry division after division after division to replace those steamrollered out of existence by the Germans in defeat after defeat after defeat, was a war-winning factor all on its own. But whether it could have done the trick if Germany had been able to concentrate its entire war effort on the eastern front, on Russia and Russia alone, must be doubtful. And so the outcome of the Battle of Britain most certainly was a factor of major importance on the outcome of the Battle for Russia.