• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1072 0

their best opportunity to engage the Germans on favourable terms. The only class of ground or aerial weapons system in which the British had near parity with their enemies in quality and quantity was the single-seat interceptor fighter. The RAF’s Hurricanes and Spitfires were handicapped by clumsy tactical doctrine and .303 machine-gun armament with inadequate destructive power, but squadrons were controlled by the most sophisticated radar, ground-observer and voice-radio network in the world, created by an inspired group of civil servants, scientists and airmen. If the equipment and performance of Britain’s army remained unsatisfactory throughout the war, Churchill’s nation far surpassed Germany in the application of science and technology: mobilisation of the best civilian brains, and their integration into the war effort at the highest levels, was an outstanding British success story. The RAF had developed a remarkable system of defence, while their opponents had no credible system of attack.

The Luftwaffe’s commanders suffered from a confusion of objectives which persisted throughout the summer. Gen. Albert Kesselring opposed the assault on Britain, preferring instead to seize Gibraltar and gain dominance of the Mediterranean; Hitler initially vetoed bombing of British cities, while Goering rejected attacks on southern ports, which would be needed for the Wehrmacht’s landings. The Luftwaffe sought to gain dominance of the air space over south-east England by destroying Fighter Command, and embarked on an incoherent campaign to achieve this by sending bombers to attack airfields and installations, escorted by fighters which were expected to shoot down RAF planes as easily as they had done in France. Intelligence, a chronic weakness of the Third Reich, was woeful: the Germans had no understanding of Fighter Command’s detection and control network. They themselves had developed radar – Dezimator-Telegraphie, as they called it, or DeTe for short – before the British, and their sets were technically more advanced. But they failed to link them to an effective ground–air direction system, and never imagined that Fighter Command might have done so. Throughout the war, institutionalised hubris dogged the Nazi leadership, which was repeatedly wrong-footed by Allied technological initiatives; if Germans had not built a given weapon or device, they were reluctant to credit their enemies with the wit to do so.

Colonel ‘Beppo’ Schmid, head of Luftwaffe intelligence, was a charlatan who told his chiefs what they wished to hear. Goering had neither a strategic reserve of aircraft, nor manufacturing resources to create one. The Germans conducted the Battle of Britain with stunning incompetence, founded upon arrogance and ignorance. If the RAF made its share of mistakes, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding and his most important subordinate, Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park, the New Zealander commanding 11 Group, displayed a steadiness of judgement amounting to brilliance, entirely absent across the Channel. The Germans began their campaign with two assets: a modest superiority of aircraft numbers and a corps of experienced combat veterans. They failed to concentrate these, however, against the vital targets – radar receivers, fighter stations and supporting installations.

The Battle of Britain opened with July skirmishes over the Channel, as the Germans attacked coastal convoys and the RAF responded. Hitting a precision target from the air was difficult. A dive-bomber pilot attacking a 750-foot ship from astern, for instance, had only a 1.5-second margin of error in pressing his bomb release, which from abeam fell to a quarter of a second; it was a tribute to the skills of German Stuka pilots that they inflicted severe losses on British convoys. But the Ju87s flew even more slowly than the RAF’s Battle bombers, which had been destroyed wholesale in France, and it was now the turn of the British to exploit enemy vulnerability: Stukas suffered slaughter wherever Fighter Command encountered them, and eventually had to be withdrawn from the