The Battle of Britain begins

On the rainy Wednesday afternoon of 10 July 1940, over a convoy of small colliers passing through the Strait of Dover, the largest air battle over the English Channel since Dunkirk was fought. Around a hundred aircraft – German bombers and fighters and British Hurricanes and Spitfires – fought for several tens of minutes between Dover and Dungeness. On the same day German bombers struck ports in Cornwall and Wales. The clash itself decided nothing, but the British came to regard the day as the beginning of the Battle of Britain, the first campaign in history fought entirely in the air. At stake was whether the Germans would win air superiority over southern England, without which they could not even contemplate a landing on the British Isles.

After the fall of France

After the Armistice of Compiègne Britain was the only major enemy of the Third Reich still fighting. Hitler expected that, with its ally defeated, Winston Churchill’s government would agree to make peace, and for several weeks he had no clear plan for what to do if it did not. Churchill had already declared on 4 June that the British would fight on, and on 18 June he told the House of Commons that the Battle of France was over and the Battle of Britain was about to begin. At the beginning of July he gave the Germans further proof that he had no thought of surrender: on 3 July the Royal Navy opened fire on French warships at Mers-el-Kébir to keep them out of German hands. Since June the British had also been at war with Italy, whose air force was bombing Malta, and the defence of the Mediterranean islands and of Egypt needed fighters too.

In this period the German high command began to consider an invasion of Britain, but everyone, from Hitler to the admirals, agreed that a crossing of the Channel was possible only if the Luftwaffe controlled the sky over the landing area and held off the Royal Navy. On 30 June the Luftwaffe’s commander-in-chief, Hermann Göring, issued guidelines for the war against England: first destroy the British air force and its supporting infrastructure, then cut the flow of supplies to the islands. Göring believed that air power alone would force the British to give way, and regarded a landing as a last resort.

The Luftwaffe, however, was not ready for an immediate offensive. In May and June it had suffered heavy losses over the Netherlands, Belgium, France and Dunkirk, and now it had to move its units to captured airfields stretching from Norway to Brittany, repair them, bring in fuel and communications, and replace equipment. Three air fleets were deployed against England: Albert Kesselring’s Luftflotte 2, headquartered in Brussels and operating from Belgium and northern France; Hugo Sperrle’s Luftflotte 3, headquartered in Paris and operating from western and north-western France; and the much weaker Luftflotte 5 under Hans-Jürgen Stumpff in Norway. According to returns of the Luftwaffe’s quartermaster service, cited by the British historian Stephen Bungay, at the end of June the German air force as a whole had more than 1,100 single-seat fighters, around 360 twin-engined fighters, around 1,400 bombers and more than 400 dive-bombers, although not all of them were serviceable and not all were earmarked for the fight against England.

Kanalkampf

Before their main forces were ready, the German commanders found a target that lay within range of their aircraft and needed no great preparation. Every week hundreds of thousands of tons of coastal shipping passed through the Channel along the south coast of England. The power stations, gasworks and factories of London and the southern ports needed coal from Wales and the north, and the railways could not carry all of it. Convoys of small, slow colliers therefore sailed right under the German airfields in France, and at the narrowest point, between Dover and Calais, they were little more than thirty kilometres from the enemy coast.

For the Germans, attacks on shipping offered a double advantage. They could close the Channel to merchant traffic, and at the same time they forced British fighters to fight over the sea, far from their own bases and radar, where a pilot who was shot down had little chance of rescue, since the RAF did not yet have an organised air-sea rescue service. The Germans called this fighting the “Kanalkampf”, the battle for the Channel. The attacks on convoys and ports were carried out above all by Bruno Loerzer’s II Fliegerkorps, and their direction was entrusted to Colonel Johannes Fink, commander of Kampfgeschwader 2 (KG 2), equipped with Dornier Do 17 bombers, who was given the title “Kanalkampfführer”. Fighter cover came from Colonel Theo Osterkamp’s Jagdgeschwader 51, based on the coast near Calais. In the western Channel, Junkers Ju 87 dive-bombers of Wolfram von Richthofen’s VIII Fliegerkorps flew against convoys and ports.

Systematic attacks had begun at the start of July. On the morning of 4 July Stukas attacked the naval base at Portland and sank the anti-aircraft ship Foylebank, killing 176 sailors, and in the afternoon they broke up a convoy sailing west of Portland. Churchill demanded that the Admiralty and the air force explain how they intended to protect shipping. In the days that followed there was fighting over the Channel every day, and German fighters increasingly flew “free hunts” to draw the British into combat. Yet no one in London was yet speaking of a great battle.

The battle over convoy “Bread”

On 10 July it rained over south-east England from the morning, and low cloud hampered flying. Eight convoys were at sea. One of them, convoy CW 3, code-named “Bread” for radio communication, had left the Thames Estuary and before noon rounded the North Foreland, heading west through the Strait of Dover. It consisted of around twenty-five small coasters sailing in ballast, without cargo, escorted by Royal Navy warships. Early in the morning it was spotted by a German Do 17 reconnaissance aircraft escorted by Messerschmitts. Although it was attacked by Spitfires of No. 74 Squadron, the crew managed to report the convoy’s composition and course.

Fink prepared a strike. At around half past one in the afternoon British radar detected formations assembling over Calais. Six Hurricanes of No. 32 Squadron were patrolling over the convoy at the time, and the commander of No. 11 Group, Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park, scrambled further squadrons. Shortly before two o’clock some twenty-five Do 17s of KG 2 appeared over the ships, closely escorted by twin-engined Messerschmitt Bf 110s of Zerstörergeschwader 26 and, higher up, by Messerschmitt Bf 109s of Jagdgeschwader 3 and 51. The commander of No. 32 Squadron mistook the Bf 110s for bombers, reported sixty bombers and called for help. Soon Hurricanes of Nos. 56 and 111 Squadrons and Spitfires of Nos. 64 and 74 Squadrons arrived.

Around a hundred aircraft were now wheeling in the sky. The radio was jammed with pilots’ shouts, and the Bf 109s did a good job of keeping the British away from the bombers. The pilots of No. 111 Squadron attacked the Dorniers head-on in close formation, which later became one of their trademark tactics. During this attack the Hurricane of Flying Officer Tom Higgs, possibly already hit by a German fighter, collided with a bomber. Both aircraft fell into the sea, and Higgs was killed. The bombers dropped around 150 bombs, but under fighter attack their aim was poor. Only one small Dutch steamer from the convoy was sunk, and its crew was rescued.

In the afternoon Ju 88s of Luftflotte 3, flying without fighter escort, attacked Falmouth in Cornwall and Swansea in Wales. At Falmouth a tanker was sunk and several other ships were set on fire or damaged; at Swansea bombs fell on the docks and industrial plants. Neither raid was intercepted by fighters.

The day’s toll, established after the war from the records of both sides, varies somewhat from one study to another. The Luftwaffe lost 13–14 aircraft that day. Fighter Command lost one fighter in combat, and a second pilot was killed in an accident in the bad weather; several other aircraft returned damaged. Pilots on both sides, as throughout the battle, claimed far more victories than they had actually achieved.

Why 10 July

In July 1940 neither the Germans nor the British believed that a great battle had begun that day. The date was fixed later. The Air Ministry’s first accounts dated the battle from 8 August, the day of heavy attacks on a convoy off the Isle of Wight. The head of Fighter Command, Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, replied that the successive phases of the fighting had merged into one another almost imperceptibly, and in his official report (his despatch), written in 1941 and published in 1946, he took 10 July as the starting point, the day the Germans first committed a large force of bombers and fighters to an attack on a convoy. The date stuck. When the “Battle of Britain” clasp to the 1939–1945 Star was instituted in 1945, it was awarded to airmen who had flown at least one operational sortie with an eligible unit between 10 July and 31 October 1940. “The Few” defined in this way number just over 2,900.

The Germans reckoned differently. For them the Kanalkampf was a prelude, and the real “Luftschlacht um England” began on 13 August, Eagle Day (Adlertag), when the Luftwaffe struck at RAF airfields. German historians also treat the air war against England as a single campaign lasting until May 1941 and including the night raids on cities that the British call, separately, the Blitz.

The Dowding system

The British went into this battle with something no other country possessed: an integrated air defence system. Its architect was Dowding, who had commanded RAF Fighter Command since its creation in 1936, and who had earlier been responsible for supply and research on the Air Council. It was he who approved the funds for Robert Watson-Watt’s first experiments with radiolocation and who ordered modern monoplane fighters.

The basis of the system was the Chain Home line of radar stations along the east and south coasts, supplemented by Chain Home Low stations, which detected low-flying aircraft. The radars could see incoming formations at several tens of kilometres, and even more than a hundred, often while they were still assembling over France, but only over the sea, and their estimates of height and numbers were not very accurate. Over land, aircraft were tracked by the Observer Corps, tens of thousands of volunteers at around a thousand posts, who reported every passing aircraft by telephone.

All reports went to Fighter Command headquarters at Bentley Priory in Stanmore, near London. In the “filter room” they were compared and combined into a single picture, which was then passed on. The country was divided into fighter groups: Park’s No. 11 Group, headquartered at Uxbridge, defended London and south-east England; Air Vice-Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory’s No. 12 Group covered the Midlands and East Anglia; No. 13 Group the north and Scotland; and No. 10 Group, formed that summer, took over the south-west. The groups were divided into sectors with sector stations such as Biggin Hill, Kenley, Hornchurch, North Weald, Northolt and Tangmere. On the operations tables of the groups and sectors, women of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) moved markers representing incoming raids, commanders decided which squadrons to scramble, and sector controllers guided the fighters onto their targets by radio. As a result the RAF did not have to keep standing patrols in the air, which would quickly have exhausted men and machines, and could send its fighters where they were needed.

The system had its weaknesses. Between the detection of a raid over France and its arrival over Kent there were usually about twenty minutes, and the fighters needed almost as long to climb to the right altitude. Over the Channel, where the July fighting took place, the British therefore often fought from a disadvantageous position. Dowding understood this. He regarded convoy protection as a waste of strength before the real battle and would gladly have seen shipping stop using the Strait of Dover. Under pressure from the Admiralty and the Prime Minister, however, he had to cover the convoys, and Park sent small detachments of a few aircraft over them, scrambling whole squadrons only when a larger raid was approaching.

Aircraft and men

At the beginning of July, according to figures cited by Bungay, Fighter Command had around 750 single-seat fighters and around 150 two-seaters in more than fifty squadrons. Most were Hurricanes – sturdy, easy to fly, maintain and repair – which shot down more aircraft in the battle than all other British types combined. The faster and more agile Spitfire was a match for the main opponent, the Messerschmitt Bf 109. Both British fighters carried eight 7.7 mm (.303-inch) machine guns. The Bf 109E, usually armed with two 20 mm cannon and two machine guns, was faster than the Hurricane and climbed better at high altitude, but had fuel for only some fifteen or at most twenty-odd minutes of combat over England. The twin-engined Bf 110, in which Göring placed his faith as a long-range escort fighter, proved insufficiently manoeuvrable against single-engined fighters. The Ju 87 dive-bombers, so formidable over Poland and France, proved highly vulnerable to fighter attack over the Channel. The main weight of the bombing attacks fell on the medium bombers: the Do 17, the Heinkel He 111 and the Junkers Ju 88. The British also had the two-seat Defiant with its gun turret, which suffered crushing losses as early as July, and fighter versions of the Blenheim.

The British were not short of aircraft: since May, when the new minister Lord Beaverbrook took charge of aircraft production, the factories had been delivering more fighters than the Germans were building Messerschmitts. Dowding’s greatest worry was pilots. Training a fighter pilot took a long time, and in May and June the RAF had lost several hundred experienced airmen in France and over Dunkirk. That was why in May Dowding had fought so fiercely against sending further squadrons to France, and why in July he husbanded his men.

Poles and Czechoslovaks

By then several thousand Polish airmen, evacuated from France after its fall, were already in Britain. Many of them had fought in September 1939 and in France. Under an agreement signed on 11 June 1940 between General Władysław Sikorski’s government and the British government, the Poles were to serve in the RAF, initially as members of its Volunteer Reserve. They were gathered in centres at Eastchurch and then at Blackpool, where they learned English, British regulations and radio procedures. The British, not knowing their worth, hesitated for a long time to send them into combat. Dowding feared that airmen who did not speak English would not cope in a system built on radio reports and orders.

It was on 10 July that Fighter Command issued the order to form the first Polish fighter squadron, No. 302 (City of Poznań) Squadron, which began to organise at Leconfield in Yorkshire. On the same day the first squadron manned by foreigners, the Czechoslovak No. 310 Squadron, was formed at Duxford with two commanders, the Briton Squadron Leader Douglas Blackwood and the Czechoslovak Alexander Hess. Both squadrons were to fly Hurricanes. The second Polish fighter squadron, No. 303, was formed on 2 August at Northolt, and in July and August individual Polish pilots began to be posted to operational training units and to British squadrons.

Place in the war

The fighting over the Channel continued until early August. The Germans sank several dozen merchant ships and several destroyers, and at the end of July the Admiralty temporarily suspended daylight passage of large ships through the Strait of Dover. As the Germans had intended, the Kanalkampf drew British fighters into combat, but Fighter Command emerged from it intact, and the Luftwaffe lost more aircraft than the RAF. On 16 July Hitler ordered preparations for a landing in England (Operation Sea Lion), and on 1 August he instructed the Luftwaffe to defeat the RAF. On 13 August, Eagle Day, the great attacks on airfields and radar stations began. In late August and early September, when the Germans were striking at No. 11 Group’s sector stations, Fighter Command went through its most difficult days. On 7 September, however, Göring turned his bombers against London, and on 15 September, after a great battle over the capital, it became clear that the Luftwaffe would not win air superiority. On 17 September Hitler postponed the invasion. By the British reckoning the battle lasted until 31 October, while the night raids on British cities went on until May 1941.

According to post-war tallies, between 10 July and the end of October the Luftwaffe lost nearly 2,000 aircraft and Fighter Command around 1,100, and some 1,500 RAF airmen were killed, more than 500 of them from Fighter Command. The Battle of Britain was Hitler’s first serious defeat. Britain survived as the base from which, in 1942–1944, the Americans and the British were able to strike at occupied Europe. 145 Polish and 88 Czechoslovak pilots took part in the battle. No. 303 Squadron, which entered combat only at the end of August, claimed more victories than any other RAF squadron, and Dowding himself wrote that without the Polish squadrons he would hesitate to say that the outcome of the battle would have been the same. It had all begun with a small convoy of colliers, over which, on the rainy afternoon of 10 July 1940, a few British squadrons and several dozen German aircraft clashed.