The Battle of Britain: an Anthem for Youth

	This page: British and German Air Forces.
	James 'Sandy' Sanders - personal experiences of a fighter pilot.

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R P Beamont's Hurricane of 609 Squadron, showing five victories and just fitted with glaze shields for night fighting - October 1940.
[R P Beamont]

Imagine two nations drawn up to do battle.

On one side, a country with an economy working at full-steam, out producing the other in key weaponry at the rate of two to one; fielding a force led by hard-bitten professionals working to a carefully prepared strategic and tactical plan developed with the help of first-rate intelligence; a weapons-system which not only brilliantly exploited the latest applied technology but was also extraordinarily robust; and troops who fought as disciplined teams, and displayed ruthless determination.

On the other side, a country with an economy so inefficient that despite spending almost twice as much as its opponent it failed to match its output; fielding a force led by a romantic amateur who instigated a chaotic planning process, improvised tactics and was completely misled by faulty intelligence; a weapons-system which had some very potent elements but neglected modern communications technology and lacked depth of reserves; and troops who fought as gifted individuals, guided by an aristocratic old-world ethos which was sporting and chivalrous.

That, in a nutshell, was the Battle of Britain.

The first side won, of course - the British. Given all the above, the second side - the Germans - had the odds stacked heavily against them from the outset, and indeed they never came close to achieving any of their muddled goals.

None of this is in the least surprising. It is, however, quite extraordinary that the British should subsequently convince themselves that they could have won by doing the opposite.

Extraordinary, but understandable given the circumstances.

After winning a shattering victory in France, Hitler very reasonably expected Britain to make peace. Churchill was determined to defeat the peace lobby and continue belligerence, but he needed victory in the air, or his precarious hold on the reins of government could fail. He announced on June 18th that the Battle of Britain was about to begin, and so gave it its name before it started in earnest. He then began deliberate myth-making to turn the young fighter pilots into heroes. The country needed the myth then. It worked.

The Germans were already heavily committed to mythology. Nazi ideology fostered the cult of the warrior-hero who could overcome all foes through his prowess in battle. The use of the fighter pilot as a hero had its roots in the air fighting of the 1914-18 war. Revolted by the anonymity of the arbitrary slaughter in the trenches, every belligerent country seized on the exploits of its fighter pilots to create heroes for the public to worship. Drawn at first mainly from the cavalry, the pilots too liked to think of themselves as Knights of the Air, nobly jousting man-to-man in fair fights. For them, it made the war just about bearable. The whole ethos was symbolised by Baron Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron.

The metaphor of the Knights of the Air sits uneasily with the one more commonly used by the Baron himself - that of hunting. A hunter does not fight another armed man on equal terms: he creeps up on an animal and shoots it unseen. So it was with air fighting. Most kills were achieved by diving on an opponent out of the sun, getting close and pumping bullets into the cockpit. It was an aerial ambush, called a 'bounce'. The best way to become a great ace was to follow the Richthofen method: creep up on your enemy, shoot him in the back, and then run for home before his friends spot you. This worked equally well in 1940.

The young bloods of the Luftwaffe fighter arm all wanted to be Red Barons themselves. It got them some very high personal scores, but it did not win battles. That required a lot more professionalism. The British pilots were not a superior breed to their opposite numbers over the Channel. The difference which made the difference was in the leadership.

Goering was a fighter pilot in the First World War, and actually ended up commanding von Richthofen's unit. It made good headlines to make a one-time ace the head of the Luftwaffe, but Goering had no understanding of or interest in modern technology, air strategy or running large organisations. Helped by Ernst Udet, the second highest scoring German pilot after von Richthofen, these two 'practical men' introduced romantic amateurism at the top of Germany's new Air Force. Aircraft production raced ahead to create enough front-line strength to add credence to the propaganda claims, but unlike the RAF, the Luftwaffe did not build up reserves. In Britain, the Air Ministry and private industry worked together to solve the enormous problems of mass-producing Hurricanes and Spitfires, and adopted innovative measures such as dispersal and the building of shadow factories. In Germany, the Nazis intimidated entrepreneurs like Hugo Junkers and with their 'divide and rule' philosophy failed to exploit the advantages of production scale. In 1940, the Luftwaffe ran short of both new aircraft and spare parts. Fighter Command had plenty of both.

Unlike Goering, Dowding was not just an airman, but an organiser with a deep understanding of technology. He was the builder of a battle-winning weapon. The man who laid the ground-plan was the now-forgotten Major General Ashmore, who took over London's air defences in 1917 and created the plotting system, gun lines, barrage balloons and the Observer Corps. Without his work, Dowding could not have been ready in time.

When he took on the new job of C-in-C Fighter Command in 1936, Dowding spent four years creating the most formidable air defence system in the world. At its centre was a unique command, control and communications system featuring the world's first large-scale intranet, using analogue technology, as well as radar. At its cutting edge were the only fighters in the world to match the Messerschmitt 109. The system acted as a force- multiplier, enabling Dowding to deploy his 6-700 fighters with the effectiveness of many more. It was so good that its principles are unchanged today. It had a lot of in-built redundancy and was extremely hard to destroy. The Germans never even understood which bits of it mattered and which did not. Even if they had, hitting them often enough to cripple rather than just impair the system would have taken more time than they had and a lot of luck.

Dowding's right-hand man was a New Zealander, Keith Park, who helped him to work up the system and then took over the forces covering the vital south-east. He performed with such brilliance that the Germans christened him 'the defender of London'. The Battle of Britain and the Battle of Malta are the only two air batties ever won by the defence. Both were won by Park.

With his profound understanding of the unique nature of air fighting, Park used small formations to hack bleeding chunks out of the Luftwaffe's bomber fleets, like groups of Indians ambushing Redcoats in a Fennimore Cooper novel. This has added to the impression that 'the few' were hopelessly outnumbered. In fact, although the Germans had some 1,500 bombers which Fighter Command also had to face - though never all at once - they only had about 100 more single-seater fighters than the British and their numbers steadily declined whilst Fighter Command's rose. Large formations of German aircraft would be attacked successively by small groups of British fighters, which maximised German losses and minimised the risks to themselves by each making one pass and away to re-arm and re-fuel. In the course of a raid by 100 aircraft the Germans might well be attacked by over 100 British planes.

The irony is that of all the fighting forces in history, none have themselves eschewed heroics more than Fighter Command. Some of them have got quite sick of the adulation. One of the pilots, Brian Kingcome, wrote in 1990: 'I think it quite wrong that, because the Battle of Britain turned out to be quite an important event in retrospect, the participants should be automatically classed as 'heroes'... it denigrates all those others whose contribution and sacrifice were just as great, but whose exploits hadn't been pushed into the public eye by Churchill's splendid oratory.' 'The hero-worship ought to stop', he wrote, 'otherwise we'll start wearing our medals on our pyjamas'.

All the veterans I have met are genuinely modest men who say they were just doing their job. One of them has said he thinks the bomber crews were far braver - they had to fly on and take whatever was thrown at them. It does indeed seem to have been forgotten that during the Battle of Britain, the RAF also deployed the 1,000 or so aircraft of Bomber and Coastal Commands to thwart the invasion preparations.

During the four months of the Battle, Bomber Command alone lost 801 aircrew killed or missing, almost 50% more than Fighter Command. In some ways fighter pilots had a great time: no NCOs screaming at them, no sleeping in cold, wet trenches, no snipers, no being mortared in the middle of the night. They had a clean bed, good food, a wonderful machine to fly and marvellous company.

Article by Stephen Bungay.
First published in the Centre's Journal Everyone's War, Issue No. 10.

	This page: British and German Air Forces.
	James 'Sandy' Sanders - personal experiences of a fighter pilot.