[BITList] The Battle of Britain, a long hot summer surrounded by myths

[John Feltham]

From The Times Literary Supplement
September 15, 2010
The skies of 1940

The Battle of Britain, a long hot summer surrounded by myths

John Gooch
On Saturday June 8, 1940, West Ham beat Blackburn Rovers in the FA Cup Final. Ten days later, Winston Churchill warned the British people that a somewhat more serious contest was in the offing: “The Battle of France is over”, he told the House of Commons. “I expect the battle of Britain is about to begin.” Soon the skies were criss-crossed with vapour trails as the airmen of Fighter Command fought it out with the Luftwaffe over the waters of the Channel and the fields and towns of southern England. Almost before it was over, the duel had won them legendary status. National mythology set the defeat of the Luftwaffe during that long hot summer alongside the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 as one of the defining moments of English history – and of the English character. Myth wrapped itself around the facts, as myth will at such moments. Britain “stood alone”, a David facing Goliath as “the Few” fought for the skies and kept an all-conquering German juggernaut at bay.

United as one, and stiffened by the “Dunkirk spirit”, the country stood behind its Prime Minister, ready to fight to the last. Its saviour, during that hot anxious summer, was the thin blue line of the Royal Air Force, embodied in the lethal beauty of the Supermarine Spitfire – a plane every schoolboy could recognize instantly years after the battle was over. After myth came controversy – over Hugh Dowding’s leadership of Fighter Command, over the merits of his subordinates, over the tactics they used and over the weapons with which the battle was fought. There is even controversy over whether there was a “Battle of Britain” at all, although that is little more than a terminological storm in a teacup. Seventy years on, the pilots who fought the battle are almost all at rest but its historians still are not.

Malcolm Brown’s Spitfire Summer is history written in the spirit of 1940. One of the most bitter and long-lasting controversies has been between the supporters of Keith Park, who used the squadrons of 11 Group flexibly to defend south-eastern England, and those who stood (and still stand) behind Trafford Leigh-Mallory, whose 12 Group was ranged immediately behind Park, and whose “Big Wing” tactics never seem to have paid off. Brown’s decision not to raise “essentially behind-the-scenes issues” leaves the controversies unexplored. Instead, the story focuses on “those men who bore the brunt of the fighting”. Brown nods in the direction of the supporting cast – the ground crew “erks”, the WAAFs in the operations rooms and all the others who played vital supporting roles and who are so often overlooked – but in the main his is a very traditional narrative, full of tales of derring-do and packed with reminiscences by young men who found it all “tremendous fun” as they fought their individual duels with the enemy. This is indeed how much of the memoir material paints the air war – but it is by no means the whole story.

Brown’s background knowledge is sometimes a little shaky: he feels that Hitler’s order on May 24 to halt the Panzers advancing across France “will always remain a matter of controversy”, when the majority of historians are now agreed about what happened and why, and he goes for the story that the accidental bombing of Berlin by the RAF on August 24/25, 1940, was what caused Hitler to switch his attack from Fighter Command’s airfields to the city of London, which recent historiography plays down. But Brown knows where he stands: the battle he recounts from the front-line perspective was “an undoubted victory”, and the Spitfire was the “best hero of the summer”.

Appropriately for a battle still surrounded by controversy, there is even disagreement about when it actually started. The Air Ministry chose August 8. Park opted for August 11, when major German attacks on the fighter airfields began, while the Germans themselves settled on August 13 – “Eagle Day”, when their assault formally started. Dowding selected July 10 as his start date. James Holland goes back further still, crossing his preferred start line early in 1940 with Hitler’s decision to opt for Manstein’s “sickle cut” through the Ardennes and only reaching Goering’s operational orders for the air assault on Britain, issued on June 30, half-way through his book. Seen from this perspective, the Battle of Britain is no longer a privileged event. Instead it becomes an episode in a longer continuum of conflict – one of a series of linked campaigns, much influenced by what went on before it began and by what was going on while it happened, not least at sea.

Starting this far back makes for a crowded canvas with a large cast of characters as well as some very substantial historical episodes to describe and explain. Both are handled with aplomb. Detail is applied thickly. Meeting Goering, we are told all about the quasi-baronial splendours of Karinhall, the Reichsmarschall’s Ruritanian uniforms and the origins of his drug habit. Sometimes Holland over-explains, as when a footnote informs the untutored reader that “Nazi” is an abbreviation. Holland is fairly well abreast of current scholarship on the fall of France and carries the reader along on a tide of zesty and vigorous prose. He is generally reliable, clearly explaining the dynamics of the forty-eight-hour “halt” order on May 24/25 and giving the French their due for their role in defending Dunkirk, which not everyone yet does.

Once the Battle of Britain begins, some of the myths surrounding it are dismantled. The odds were not as badly stacked against the RAF as they appeared at the time, or as myth would still have it. There were many factors in Britain’s favour. German intelligence on the RAF was massively inaccurate. Fighter strength was underestimated, as was fighter production, which was expected to decrease but did not; in fact, Britain out-produced Germany during 1940. Radar was ignored and Fighter Command’s structure was wrongly deemed to be rigid and inflexible. Once the battle began, attrition rates favoured the British: Fighter Command lost fewer aircraft than their enemy, received more new ones, and were able to repair significant numbers of crashed and damaged machines. It could also get its downed pilots back into battle much more readily.

There were shortcomings in aerial tactics, but Park got his operational methods right, first beating off the German attack on the airfields in August and then decimating the bombers that attacked London from September 7 and forcing the Luftwaffe to switch to night bombing. As the Battle of Britain gave way to the Blitz, Hitler called off the invasion of England. Richard Overy’s large-format book tells the same story with exemplary lucidity, aided by reproductions of contemporary documents that give flavour to an authoritative text.

In the immanent myth of 1940, “the Few” sally forth to battle aboard the iconic Supermarine Spitfire. Conflict rages among aficionados over whether it or the Messerschmidt 109 was the better machine. Weighing up the technical pros and cons in clear, accessible language, Holland comes down in favour of the German machine. Numerically, though, Spitfires made up only one-third of the fighter force. The workhorse was the Hawker Hurricane. “Drab but deadly looking” (according to Flight magazine), it was robust, stable, easy to fly and easy to repair. Technical history can be off-putting, but weapons matter in war and Leo McKinstry’s model history of a plane that served its country in pretty much every theatre ranges widely over the politics of design and manufacture, as well as the nitty-gritty of performance and achievement. In his hands, it is an absorbing story.

Blue skies, not blue seas, form the backdrop to the myth of 1940, and historical convention has it that command of the air was the essential precondition for a German invasion of England. Acknowledging that the Luftwaffe had not won it, Hitler postponed Operation Sealion indefinitely on September 17. There is another side to the story, posing what role the Home Fleet, moored at Scapa Flow under the command of Admiral Sir Charles Forbes, played in helping deter invasion. Anthony J. Cumming is determined to set the record straight: “sea power . . . prevented the invasion” and the Royal Navy, not the Royal Air Force, “won the battle of Britain”.

There is undoubtedly a case to be made for the role played by a “fleet in being” in influencing German strategy, but since the Home Fleet remained a distant threat, and British warships would have been vulnerable to German bombing without air cover, it has to depend on more than suppositions about what would have happened at and after a second Trafalgar. Over-keen to rehabilitate Forbes as an unsung hero of 1940, Cumming pushes his case to extremes. It is disconcerting, to say the least, to read that the Luftwaffe “did not lose the air battles” in 1940 and indeed “emerges as the more effective organization during the summer of 1940”. The sailors may like this book but the airmen most certainly won’t.

Malcolm Brown 
SPITFIRE SUMMER 
When Britain stood alone 
240pp. Andre Deutsch/Imperial War Museum. £18.99.
978 0 233 00287 3

James Holland 
THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN 
Five months that changed history, May–October 1940 
678pp. Bantam Press. £25.
978 0 593 05913 5

Richard Overy 
THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN EXPERIENCE 
64pp. Carlton Books. £30.
978 1 84732 531 0

Leo McKinstry 
HURRICANE 
Victor of the Battle of Britain 
373pp. John Murray. £20.
978 1 84854 340 9

Anthony J. Cumming 
THE ROYAL NAVY AND THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN 
256pp. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press. $34.95.
978 1 59114 160 0


John Gooch is Professor of International History at the University of Leeds. His most recent book is Mussolini and His Generals: The armed forces and Fascist foreign policy, 1922–1940, 2007. He is writing a military history of Italy in the First World War.

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article7166536.ece


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