Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [53]
The British did have one advantage over the Germans: they had a radar net to give them early warning of the German approach. It was a crude system but it worked. Radio direction-finding, as it was originally called, had been developed by both the British and the Germans just before the war. It was, ironically, a by-product of the search for a “death-ray” in the science-fiction days of the early thirties. The Germans knew the British had such a system; after all, they had a similar one themselves. Why they paid it so little attention remains one of the mysteries, like so many other things, of World War II.
In the last analysis, it was none of these material or technological matters that saved Britain in the summer of 1940. It was intelligence misassessments and command failures—human errors.
The Battle of Britain went through a series of different phases, marked by the Luftwaffe switching targets as they went along. In the first of these, or the first two of them, depending on how one counted, the Germans attacked the east coast shipping lanes and then the port and docking facilities of southeastern England. The whole period, lasting from early July to the second week of August, was called by the Germans the Kanalkampf, the “Channel Battle.” This was only a preliminary phase, before the Germans really hit their stride, and to a certain extent it was a misdirection of effort, concentrating on what the eighteenth-century French Navy had called “the ulterior motive”; the primary motive was the destruction of the Royal Air Force. Nonetheless, Channel strikes were a two-edged sword: either the R. A. F. would defend the shipping, and be sucked into a battle of attrition, or it would not defend them, in which case the shipping would be sunk, leading to paralysis of the east coast cities and eventual strangulation of the battle area anyway.
British Fighter Command, led by Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, did not plan to protect the coastal shipping, so they soon found themselves caught in the bind of the initial German strategy. They committed minimal support to the convoys, which took heavy losses. The pressure on the R. A. F. to provide more cover mounted, and there was a steady attrition of aircraft and pilots. The R. A. F. was not tremendously effective in this phase. Pilots had to learn new tactics, the radar and communications nets were still clumsy, and whole system needed a good shakedown period. As the Germans too were just getting organized, both sides had their troubles. Still, the initiative lay with the Luftwaffe; it was the more-experienced service in combat, and the Germans were satisfied with the way the battle was developing.
More than anything else, the British were conscious of the necessity to husband their resources. They waited until the Germans were at the limit of their range, over the coast or at least the English side of the Channel, then they intercepted with small groups of fighters—a dozen was a large-scale interception—and they kept a tight control from the ground over their pilots. The early German tactic was to send over bombers with a high-level fighter escort. The British responded by sending their Spitfires after the German fighters to keep them busy, and then sending the slower Hurricanes after the bombers to break up their formations.
For all the retrospective appearance of order and logical sequence, both sides were groping in the dark. This had never been done before,