Inferno - Max Hastings [58]
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 600 aircraft available for action, while the Germans deployed a daily average of around 750 serviceable bombers, 250 dive-bombers, and over 600 single-engined and 150 twin-engined fighters, organised in three air fleets. Southeast England was the main battleground, but Dowding was also obliged to defend the northeast and southwest from long-range attacks.
The first concerted bombings of airfields and installations took place on 12 August, when the 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 fifteenth, dispatching 2,000 sorties over England, losing 75 aircraft for 34 British, 2 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 airmen as “Black Thursday.” The two sides’ combined casualties were even higher three days later, on 18 August, when the Luftwaffe lost 69 planes against Fighter Command’s 34 in the air and a further 29 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 300 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. The Luftwaffe lost 397, of which 181 were fighters, while only 313 Bf-109s and Bf-110s were produced by German factories. Fighter Command lost 104 pilots killed in the middle fortnight of August, against 623 Luftwaffe airmen dead or captured.
The RAF’s Bomber Command has received less than due credit for its part in the campaign: between July and September it lost twice as many men as Fighter Command, during attacks on concentrations of invasion barges in the Channel ports and while conducting harassing missions against German airfields. The latter inflicted little damage, but increased the strain on Luftwaffe men desperate for rest. “The British are slowly getting on our nerves at night,” wrote the pilot Ulrich Steinhilper. “Because of their persistent activity our AA guns are in virtually continuous use and so we can hardly close our eyes.”
Göring now changed tactics, launching a series of relatively small bomber attacks with massive fighter escorts. These were explicitly designed to force the RAF to fight, especially in defence of airfields, and for the German planes to destroy it in the air. Dowding’s losses were indeed high, but Luftwaffe commanders were dismayed to find that each day, Fighter Command’s squadrons still rose to meet their attacks. Increasing tensions developed between 11 Group, whose fighters defended the southeast, and 12 Group beyond, whose planes were supposed meanwhile to protect 11’s airfields from German bombers. In late August and early September, several stations were badly damaged. Why were 12 Group’s fighters absent when this happened? The answer was that some of their squadron commanders, Douglas Bader notable among them, favoured massing