Attacks on RAF airfields

The last two days of August 1940 were the hardest of the whole Battle of Britain for the British fighter force. On 30 and 31 August Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s Luftflotte 2 sent wave after wave of bombers and fighters against the sector airfields of No. 11 Group, which defended London and south-east England. Biggin Hill, Hornchurch, Debden, North Weald, Kenley, Croydon and Detling were bombed several times each, and on 31 August Fighter Command lost more fighters than on any other day of the battle. In these same days the Polish No. 303 Squadron went into action, and over the following weeks it became the most successful fighter unit in the RAF.

Some war chronologies record under 30 August that from then on London was bombed in reprisal for the raids on Berlin, and call this day “the beginning of the Blitz on London”. That is inaccurate. On 30 and 31 August the Luftwaffe’s daylight attacks were aimed above all at airfields, and the bombs that fell within Greater London hit airfields and factories on its outskirts or strayed into residential districts. At night the main blows fell on Liverpool and other industrial cities. Hitler did indeed decide in those days to retaliate for the RAF raids on Berlin, but the Blitz, the massed bombing of London, began only on 7 September.

The critical fortnight

After the Hardest Day of 18 August and the conference at Carinhall came several days of bad weather and regrouping. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring withdrew the Ju 87 dive-bombers from operations over England, concentrated most of the Bf 109 fighters in the Pas-de-Calais under Kesselring’s command, and ordered them to stay close to the bombers. From 24 August the Luftwaffe resumed its great daylight attacks, this time aimed at the very heart of the defence system: the sector airfields of Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park’s No. 11 Group. From each of them controllers directed the squadrons of their sector by radio, and without them the fighters would have been blind even with the radars working perfectly.

British historians call the period from 24 August to 6 September the “critical period” of the Battle of Britain. Of the 33 major German raids in that time, 24 were directed against airfields. Biggin Hill and Hornchurch were bombed four times each, Debden and North Weald twice each; heavy attacks fell on Croydon, Gravesend, Rochford, Hawkinge and Manston, and the Coastal Command airfield at Eastchurch, which the Germans wrongly believed to be a fighter base, was hit as many as seven times. The Bf 109s, sent out in large numbers with every raid, forced the British squadrons to fight the escort, and increasingly they also caught Hurricanes and Spitfires before these had time to gain height.

30 August

Friday 30 August was fine, and from the morning there was fighting over Kent. At about half past seven more than a hundred German aircraft attacked a convoy in the Thames estuary. In the late morning and at midday two further waves, each of more than a hundred machines, crossed the coast between Dungeness and Dover and split up over the county; bombs fell on Biggin Hill and Eastchurch. Park sent more than a dozen squadrons into action, and, as usual in those days, the squadrons of Air Vice-Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory’s No. 12 Group were to cover the airfields north of the Thames. One of the bombs dropped that day cut a power line, knocking out the Chain Home radar stations on the Kent and Sussex coast, including those at Dover, Rye and Pevensey, for about three hours. For that time the defence lost sight of what was gathering over France.

After four in the afternoon came the biggest attack of the day, some three hundred aircraft by British reckoning. Some of them turned north of London. About twenty He 111 bombers reached Luton and bombed the Vauxhall works, which made lorries for the army and would soon be making Churchill tanks as well; 53 workers were killed and about 140 people injured. Towards evening – between five and six, according to various accounts – nine Ju 88 bombers swept low over Biggin Hill and dropped heavy bombs. They destroyed workshops, stores, the armoury, barracks and one of the hangars, and cut the telephone lines and the water and gas mains. A direct hit on a shelter trench killed 39 people and injured several dozen. It was the most tragic raid on Biggin Hill of the entire war. That same day Detling, Kenley, North Weald and the airfield at Lympne were also bombed.

On 30 August Fighter Command flew 1,054 sorties, more than on any previous day. Squadrons took off three or four times. According to British figures, the RAF lost some 25 fighters and nine pilots that day, and the Luftwaffe about forty aircraft. That night Liverpool was bombed for the third night running, and an alert lasted several hours over London as bombs fell in various suburban districts.

No. 303 Squadron’s first victory

On the afternoon of 30 August No. 303 “Warsaw” Fighter Squadron, the Kościuszko Squadron, also fought its first action. Formed on 2 August at Northolt, on the western outskirts of London, the squadron had not yet been declared ready for combat. The British, wary of airmen with little English and little knowledge of British radio procedures, kept it in training, although its pilots, most of them veterans of the fighting in Poland in September 1939 and in France in 1940, had more combat experience than many of their British colleagues. Under the Anglo-Polish agreement every command post was filled twice over: the British commanding officer, Ronald Kellett, had a Polish counterpart, Zdzisław Krasnodębski.

That day six Hurricanes of B Flight were practising dummy attacks on British Blenheim bombers over Hertfordshire. At about 4.35 p.m. Lieutenant Ludwik Paszkiewicz spotted a large German formation nearby. He reported it by radio to Kellett and, receiving no reply, broke formation, attacked and shot down a twin-engined aircraft which he described in his report as probably a Dornier. It was in fact a Messerschmitt Bf 110 of Zerstörergeschwader 76; some authors treat the victory as shared with a pilot of the British No. 56 Squadron. According to an often-repeated account, after landing Paszkiewicz was reprimanded by Kellett for leaving formation without permission and then immediately congratulated. According to Polish accounts, this kill convinced Group headquarters that the squadron was ready.

On 31 August No. 303 Squadron was declared operational. In the late afternoon it took off on its first official combat sortie and clashed with Messerschmitt Bf 109s over Kent. Kellett, Zdzisław Henneberg, Mirosław Ferić and Sergeant Stanisław Karubin claimed four confirmed and two probable kills, without loss to themselves. It was the beginning of a run that saw No. 303 Squadron finish the battle with the highest number of credited victories of any RAF squadron. The first Polish fighter squadron, No. 302 “Poznań” Squadron, was fighting at this time in No. 12 Group, and several dozen Polish pilots were flying in British squadrons.

31 August

Saturday 31 August began early. Shortly before eight the radars detected several large raids over France, more than 250 aircraft in all. One of them struck Debden in Essex, where more than a hundred high-explosive bombs fell, and others Duxford, North Weald and Eastchurch. No. 1 Squadron RCAF, which had not received the order to withdraw, ran into the escort and lost three Hurricanes. At lunchtime the Germans attacked Biggin Hill and Hornchurch simultaneously. Messerschmitt Bf 109s swept the sky over Biggin Hill before the bombers arrived; the bombs destroyed two hangars, barracks and the officers’ mess, and a hit on the operations block cut all communications. At Hornchurch several dozen Do 17 Dorniers of Colonel Johannes Fink’s Kampfgeschwader 2 arrived just as No. 54 Squadron’s Spitfires were taking off. Three of them were blown into the air by bomb blasts and wrecked on the runway; all three pilots, among them the New Zealand ace Alan Deere, survived. After one in the afternoon bombs fell on Croydon, destroying the Rollason aircraft works.

In the late afternoon eight low-flying Dorniers carrying heavy bombs attacked Biggin Hill for the second time that day, undetected by the observer posts. A direct hit on the operations room brought down its concrete ceiling and destroyed the table on which the positions of raids were plotted. The telephonists and operators of the WAAF worked to the last moment; for their conduct during the raids on Biggin Hill in August and early September three of them were awarded the Military Medal, rarely given to women. The operations room was moved to a makeshift site in the village, and two of the three squadrons based at Biggin Hill were handed over to the control of neighbouring sectors. Hornchurch and Debden were also hit a second time.

The day’s balance was the worst of the whole battle for Fighter Command. According to various tallies, the RAF lost between 38 and more than 40 fighters, and between nine and fourteen pilots were killed; many others were wounded or burned. By British reckoning the Luftwaffe lost about 39 aircraft. On the ground some 40 RAF personnel and more than 40 civilians were killed. In the evening the bombers returned over Liverpool, and also over Leeds and Bradford.

The radars

The attacks on the radar stations proved ineffective, though the matter was more complicated than it seems. The first strikes on the radars on 12 August had shown that the lattice masts of Chain Home were very hard to destroy: the blast passed through the open framework, and damaged stations were back at work within a few hours. Only the station at Ventnor on the Isle of Wight was put out of action for longer. German intelligence also failed to understand how important the radars were to the British command system, and on 15 August Göring expressed doubt as to whether it was worth continuing to attack them. Even when the power cut of 30 August knocked out several stations for three hours, the Germans did not know about it and could not exploit it. The damage to the sector airfields, their operations rooms and their telephone lines was a greater threat to the defence.

Was the RAF losing?

Historians still argue over how close Fighter Command came to breaking point at the turn of August and September. In their classic 1961 book The Narrow Margin, Derek Wood and Derek Dempster calculated that between 24 August and 6 September 295 fighters were totally destroyed and 171 badly damaged, while factories and repair shops delivered 269 new and repaired Spitfires and Hurricanes in that time. 103 pilots were killed or missing and 128 wounded, a drain of about 120 pilots a week from a strength of fewer than a thousand. The operational training units turned out far fewer. A squadron’s establishment was 26 pilots; in August the average was about 16. In these authors’ view the RAF was losing the battle.

Others, among them Stephen Bungay, point out that Hugh Dowding himself wrote in a letter to Marshal of the Royal Air Force Hugh Trenchard that in the last week of August and the first week of September the Luftwaffe had achieved very little. Of the thirteen heavily bombed airfields, only two were put out of action for more than a few hours, and the only sector station that briefly ceased to function was Biggin Hill. Thanks to the work of the factories overseen by Lord Beaverbrook, the number of fighters with the squadrons did not fall, and serviceability held at around 65 per cent. The real problem was men: tired pilots, the loss of flight and squadron commanders, young airmen sent into battle after a dozen or so hours on Hurricanes and Spitfires. Dowding was aware of this, and at the beginning of September he divided his squadrons into categories, so that only the fully fit ones fought in the most threatened area while the rest served as a training reserve. The Luftwaffe was in no better position. It was losing more aircraft than the RAF, its pilots shot down over England went into captivity rather than back to their units, and its intelligence consistently underestimated the enemy’s strength, so that German airmen kept encountering fighters which, according to the reports, no longer existed.

Place in the war

The attacks on the airfields went on until 6 September. Meanwhile the RAF bombed Berlin again, and on 4 September Hitler announced at the Berlin Sportpalast that he would repay the British raids a hundredfold and “wipe out” English cities. On 7 September, a Saturday afternoon, Göring, who had come to the Channel coast to take command in person, sent nearly a thousand aircraft not against the airfields but against the port and docks of London. More than 400 Londoners were killed that day. It was the beginning of the Blitz, which lasted until May 1941. For Fighter Command the change of target brought relief: the sector airfields were repaired, and the squadrons rested and made good their losses. On 15 September, in the great battle over London, it became clear that the RAF was stronger than ever, and on 17 September Hitler postponed the invasion of Britain.

That same night of 31 August/1 September, as the rubble of the operations room was being dug out at Biggin Hill, the Royal Navy suffered heavy losses off the Dutch coast. The attacks at the turn of August and September remained in the RAF’s memory as the days when the defence system built by Dowding came closest to overload, and yet held. They remained in Polish memory too: on 30 and 31 August 1940 No. 303 Squadron began the fighting that made Polish airmen, throughout the war and long after it, the symbol in Britain of an ally who fought on when Britain stood alone.