By John W.R. Taylor
Within minutes of the declaration of war on September 3, 1939, air raid warning sirens sent Londoners scuttling for shelter. They had few illusions about what lay ahead. Many had considered war inevitable since the mid-1930s when the German dictator, Adolf Hitler, began the process of aggression and terrorisation that brought the Rhineland, the Saar, Austria and Czechoslovakia into his clutches,
The creation of the Luftwaffe (the German air force) had taken place secretly, in defiance of the 1919 Peace Treaty. When it was revealed in 1935, its size and the quality of its aircraft had come as a shock to France, Britain and other nations that had good reason to fear a rebirth of German militarism. Nor had minds become any easier when Germany and Italy, land of the other Fascist dictator Mussolini, dispatched air forces to support General Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Memories of what German bombers had done to the almost defenseless town of Guernica were still fresh in September 1939 and it was easy to picture similar scenes of death and destruction in the great cities of Europe.
That first air raid alert was a false alarm, and so were some of the worst fears of the Londoners. They were to suffer grievously later, but Britain was not Spain and the Royal Air Force was not overawed by the numerical superiority of its enemy. In the Hurricane and the Spitfire, it had two of the finest fighter aircraft imaginable. On seeing the latter for the first time, the German Air Attaché to Britain had regarded its small size and beautiful lines with contempt, calling it a toy: his colleagues were soon to learn how very wrong he was. More important, the first radar aerials were going up around the British coast. By detecting and locating enemy aircraft while they were still many miles away, these invisible 'eyes' would avoid the need for defending fighters to maintain standing patrols, and so enable each squadron to do the work of two or three, without straining its pilots to breaking point. Nor had Britain neglected its bomber force. The new Wellington and Hampden monoplanes were as efficient as they could be at a time before their pilots had electronic aids to help them locate their targets. And on the drawing boards and in the experimental workshops of Britain's aircraft industry, a new generation of four-engined bombers named Stirling, Halifax of unprecedented striking power and Lancaster was taking shape.
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| Realising that war with Hitler's Germany was almost inevitable, the R.A.F. had conceived a new generation of mighty four-engined bombers in 1936. First to enter service, in February 1941, was the Short Stirling, lower picture, which could carry seven tons of bombs for 590 miles and was armed with eight machine-guns |
Most important of all was the heritage left by Trenchard, when he planned the future of the R.A.F. after the first World War. With the support of Winston Churchill, he had fought off all attempts by the older Services to have the air force split up once more into Army and Navy wings, under their control. This policy was changed slightly in 1937, after aircraft carriers had reached such a degree of importance and efficiency that carrier-based squadrons of the Fleet Air Arm were transferred to Admiralty control; but the land-based squadrons of Coastal Command remained part = of the R.A.F., and the Air Ministry still had complete control of operations by Bomber Command, even when these were in direct support of the war on land or at sea.
Thus, on that September day in 1939, Britain had an air force that was not so large as that of its enemy, but was independent, equipped with aircraft second-to-none in quali-ty and backed up by the electronic miracle of radar. But its greatest asset was the quality of its men.
In 1919, there had been no money for new aeroplanes. - Having just won 'the war to end wars', the British government allocated so little cash to the Air Ministry that Trenchard had decided to spend most of it on training. His aim was to create a nucleus of highly-trained officers and men with what he called the 'air force spirit'. Better aeroplanes could come later. He was, he said, laying the foundations for a castle; if no-one built anything bigger than a cottage on them, it would at least be a very good cottage! Now, the cottage was under siege, and the scene from its windows was pretty frightening.
The Luftwaffe was still primarily a tactical air force, intended to support the operations of the German army, at the beck and call of army officers and this appeared to work. Within little more than a month, Hitler's blitzkrieg (lightning war) tactics had added Poland to the territory of his Third Reich, which he boasted would last for a thou-sand years. Nothing, it seemed, could withstand the onslaught of German armoured divisions backed up by the terrifying attacks of Junkers Ju 87 dive-bombers.
In the west, this was the period of the 'phoney war months in which the R.A.F. dropped propaganda leaflets instead of bombs on Germany, while the opposing armies viewed each other from the underground concrete forts of the Maginot and Siegfried Lines. Suddenly, in the spring of 1940, the blitzkrieg began again. Within weeks Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, even the once-mighty France had fallen to Hitler's tanks and dive-bombers. The futility of concrete defences like the Maginot Line was proved for all time. The Germans did not even bother to attack this Line, they simply went round one end of it.
Hitler stated that he had now only to 'wring the chicken's neck of Britain; to which Britain's new leader, Winston Churchill, replied: 'Some chicken, some neck and so it proved.
As a prelude to Operation Sealion, the invasion of England, the Germans had to destroy the Royal Air Force. This did not appear too difficult. They had been able to wipe out whole squadrons of the R.A.F.'s Battle bombers despatched on suicidal raids to destroy bridges in front of the German armies advancing in Western Europe. They had more respect for Fighter Command's Hurricanes and Spit-fires, but there were so few of them.
There would have been even fewer if the Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, had given in to French requests that the whole of his force should be flung into the battle on the other side of the Channel; but he knew this would make no difference to the outcome, and would only leave Britain defenceless afterwards. So, with Churchill's assent, most of the fighters stayed in Britain; although they did play a major rôle in enabling the British army to be taken off the beaches of Dunkirk, by keeping the Luftwaffe at bay further inland.
If war had come in 1938, as seemed likely at the time of the German take-over of part of Czechoslovakia, Fighter Command would have had only 93 Hurricanes and Spitfires, plus 573 outdated biplanes, to oppose about 1,200 modern German bombers. The year of grace, gained by the apparent weakness of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, enabled the force of modern eight-gun monoplane fighters to grow to 500 by the outbreak of war. Now, as Britain awaited Hitler's all-out attack in August 1940, Dowding had under his command 704 serviceable aircraft, of which 620 were Hurricanes and Spitfires. Opposing him were the 3,500 aircraft of Air Fleet 2 under Kesselring, Air Fleet 3 under Sperrle and Air Fleet 5 under Stumpff. Only now, looking back, can we see that the R.A.F. was superior to the Luftwaffe in everything but numbers.
The dive-bombers that had swept a path through Europe for Hitler's armies proved so vulnerable to determined attack by modern fighters that they achieved little. Mass raids by hundreds of twin-engined bombers escorted by hundreds of fighters achieved more, because of the very weight of their attack, but they paid a terrible price. The harvest fields of Southern England soon bore a strange crop of wrecked aircraft marked with the black cross of Germany, and the Luftwaffe lost so many of its finest, most experienced crews that it never regained its old efficiency.
British and German statisticians disagree on the number of aircraft of each side that were lost in the Battle of Britain - as if it really mattered. The significant fact is that Britain, and the whole civilised world, had been saved by the quality of 704 aeroplanes and the courage and self-sacrifice of 1,000 pilots of the R.A.F. who refused to be beaten.
The war was to continue for five more grim years, and was to extend over almost the whole world, bringing in countries like America, Japan and Russia; but after the Battle of Britain, defeat for the Allied cause was unthinkable.
Driven from the daylight skies, the Luftwaffe turned to night bombing, and London's ordeal began in earnest. Then the R.A.F. began to hunt down the enemy bombers at night with the aid of radar carried in its fighters. Soon, even the darkness no longer provided cover for the twin-engined Heinkels, Dorniers and Ju 88s, and the night bombing ceased. Hit-and-run daylight raids by fighter-bombers were to continue throughout the war, supplemented in 1944-45 by the Wellsian offensive of Germany's V-weapons the V-1 flying-bomb and V-2 rocket. But, although brilliantly conceived, these first robot missiles were an admission of defeat. They had to be used because the piloted aircraft of the Luftwaffe had been beaten. Their offensive failed because it was already too late the launch-sites were quickly destroyed or captured, and the factories producing them were bombed so heavily that the attack was only a fraction of the overwhelming war-winning onslaught that Hitler had planned. Furthermore, Fighter Command's equipment had become so fine that its pilots were able to shoot down the V-Is with almost contemptuous ease.
Instead of England, it was Germany which learned the true terror of modern air attack. Under a non-stop offensive, by R.A.F. Bomber Command at night and the U.S. Army Air Forces by day, its cities crumbled and burned, its factories were obliterated, the oil essential to keep its armies on the move ceased to flow. Two million Germans spent their time on anti-aircraft duties, trying to repel the air armadas and repair the ravages when the bombers had gone. They were too few to prevent the destruction of 500 acres or more in the heart of 31 cities and the death of 305,000 of their people. A further 74 million were rendered homeless. Having sown the wind, Germany reaped the whirlwind.
Even at sea, the aircraft carrier replaced the battleship as the spearhead of a navy's fighting strength. The deadly Battle of the Atlantic, which might have starved Britain into submission, was saved when aircraft from escort car-riers, and long-range flying-boats and bombers from shore bases, were able to strike back at German submarines.
In the Pacific, the tide of Japanese success was turned in a succession of great sea battles, fought by naval aircraft without the crews of the opposing ships ever seeing each other. At Midway alone, American Dauntless dive-bombers sank four Japanese carriers. Each victory carried the Allied forces nearer to Japan; but final invasion of the enemy homeland was not necessary, as it had been in Europe.
American long-range bombers, operating from island bases recaptured from the Japanese, wrought wholesale destruction on enemy cities. The Japanese tried to hold back the Allied forces by the most desperate means, devising even special suicide aircraft in which pilots were able to win an honourable soldier's death by diving into British and American ships, blowing themselves to pieces with their enemies. All to no avail. Even before American B-29 Superfortresses dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the war was virtually over. A single raid on Tokyo with incendiary bombs on March 9, 1945 had killed more people than either of the atomic weapons and Japan had had enough.
By the time World War 2 was over, everyone had seen enough of war or so it seemed. The aeroplane had done its job only too well. The last vestiges of the old knights in shining armour' kind of single-handed combat went with the end of the Battle of Britain. After that, air power became a relentless steam-roller against which nothing could survive, controlled by men but no longer bearing any resemblance to the kind of flying that had once seemed worth striving for.
The aeroplane had met every demand made upon it. When bombers had sought the cover of darkness, fighters had acquired radar to track them down and destroy them. When it was discovered in 1941 that Bomber Command was missing most of its targets, radio and radar aids were introduced which turned darkness into light. When there were tanks to be destroyed, fighters carried guns as big as anti-aircraft weapons, and rockets. When there were Ger-man dams to be breached, Lancaster bombers carried ingenious skipping weapons to do the job. When the Ger-mans laid magnetic mines to sink British ships, Wellington bombers flew with great rings around them, to explode the mines harmlessly as they flew overhead. Yet all of these weapons and aids to destruction paled into insignificance by comparison with the atomic bomb. Having become the supreme instrument of destruction it seemed that the aeroplane might also have become so all-powerful that a third world war was already completely out of the question, for ever.
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