All Hell Let Loose_ The World at War 1939-1945 - Max Hastings [56]
The chivalrous spirit with which the British, at least, began the battle faded fast. David Crook returned from a sortie in which his roommate had been killed, and found it strange to see the man’s possessions just where he had left them, towel hanging on the window. ‘I could not get out of my head the thought of Peter, with whom we had been talking and laughing that day. Now he was lying in the cockpit of his wrecked Spitfire at the bottom of the English Channel.’ That afternoon, the dead pilot’s wife telephoned to arrange his leave, only to hear the flight commander break news of his death. Crook wrote: ‘It all seemed so awful. I was seeing at very close quarters all the distress that casualties cause.’ After Pete Brothers’ squadron was engaged a few times and he had lost friends, he abandoned his earlier notions that they were playing a game between sporting rivals. ‘I then said, “Right, these are a bunch of bastards. I don’t like them any more. I am going to be beastly.”’ Very early in the struggle, pilot Denis Wissler wrote in his diary: ‘Oh God I do wish this war would end.’ But few of the young men who fought for either side in the Battle of Britain stayed alive through the five-year struggle that followed it. To fly was wonderful fun, but a profound and premature seriousness overtook most aerial warriors in the face of the stress and horror that were their lot almost every day they were exposed to operations.
Through August the Luftwaffe progressively increased the intensity of its assaults, attacking Fighter Command airfields – though only briefly radar stations. Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, C-in-C of Fighter Command, began the battle with an average of six hundred aircraft available for action, while the Germans deployed a daily average of around 750 serviceable bombers, 250 dive-bombers, over six hundred single-engined and 150 twin-engined fighters, organised in three air fleets. South-east England was the main battleground, but Dowding was also obliged to defend the north-east and south-west from long-range attacks.
The first concerted bombings of airfields and installations took place on 12 August, when Ventnor radar station on the Isle of Wight was put out of action. The Luftwaffe intended ‘Eagle Day’ on 13 August to be decisive, but in thick weather this degenerated into a series of poorly coordinated attacks. The Germans mounted their heaviest effort two days later on the 15th, dispatching 2,000 sorties over England, losing seventy-five aircraft for thirty-four British, two of those on the ground. Raiders flying from Scandinavian airfields – too remote for single-engined fighters – suffered especially heavy losses, and the day became known to German aircrew as ‘Black Thursday’. The two sides’ combined casualties were even higher three days later on the 18th, when the Luftwaffe lost sixty-nine planes against Fighter Command’s thirty-four in the air and a further twenty-nine on the ground.
Both air forces wildly overestimated the damage they inflicted on each other, but the Germans’ intelligence failure was more serious, because it sustained their delusion that they were winning. Fighter Command’s stations were targeted by forty Luftwaffe raids during August and early September, yet only two – Manston and Lympne on the Kent coast – were put out of action for more than a few hours, and the radar receivers were largely spared from attention. By late August the Luftwaffe believed Fighter Command’s first-line strength had been halved, to three hundred aircraft. In reality, however, Dowding still deployed around twice that number: attrition was working to the advantage of the British. Between 8 and 23 August, the RAF lost 204 aircraft, but during that month 476 new fighters were built, and many more repaired.