Short History of World War II - James L. Stokesbury [55]
Next day, the day of the great assault, almost everything went wrong. The weather was chancy, and the assault was canceled. Only about half the units involved got the cancellation order, so half an attack was put in instead of the full-scale blow. The sky cleared in the afternoon, and the Luftwaffe came out in force, hitting radar stations, airfields, and aircraft factories. They flew almost fifteen hundred sorties, and the British responded with about seven hundred.
Two days later, the Germans decided on another all-out effort, with attacks not only from across the Channel but also from across the North Sea in Denmark and Norway. Again there was muddle and mix-up, with the weather playing tricks, and the Germans losing coordination. The R. A. F. lost about fifty planes, and the Germans perhaps slightly more. The Germans thought they had done poorly, however, and gloomily christened the 15th “black Thursday.” More important, they decided that their attacks on the radar stations were not paying off—just as they were beginning to—and they discontinued them, another in their chain of fatal mistakes.
Unable to assess the results of their work, the Germans began shifting targets, thus giving any stricken element in the British defense time to recuperate. The British were also modifying their tactics; they began to intercept the Germans farther out, in an attempt to break up their formations before they reached the airfields; the Germans responded by flying closer fighter escort. By the last week in August, the battle was approaching a crescendo. The Germans believed they had the R. A. F. on the ropes, and they were nearly right. The fighter pilots were exhausted; new pilots were coming into the battle with only the most rudimentary training. Some of the air stations nearest to the Germans were virtually inoperable. The Germans were taking heavy losses as well, but Goering now demanded from his Luftwaffe commanders, Kesselring and Sperrle, an all-out effort. For the last week in August and the first week in September they gave it to him.
These two weeks were like the climax of a prize fight, when two boxers, lost in the fight and oblivious to blows received, stand up and slug away at each other toe to toe. The Germans concentrated on the airfields in Kent and around London. Both sides took heavy casualties and both overestimated the damage they were doing.
To get at the London perimeter airfields, the Germans often flew up the Thames. On the night of August 25, one German bomber got lost, and dropped its bomb load on the center of London, the City. There had already been attacks on the dock areas and on some of the suburbs, where aircraft facilities of one kind or another were located. Up to this point, however, the Germans had generally tried, within the loose limits of their equipment, to strike at obviously military targets. After the Rotterdam raid during the campaign of Holland, British Bomber Command had begun raids on the Ruhr Valley. Now, after this stray hit in the heart of London, they ordered an attack on Berlin. The German leaders branded this an atrocity and swore vengeance. Out of these two arguable accidents, the bombing of Rotterdam and the hit against central London by a lost German aircrew, came all the attacks on civilian targets during the next several years. Perhaps, in a world that had already seen Guernica and the Japanese bombing of Chinese cities, such escalation was inevitable; that did not make it less a blot on twentieth-century civilization.
By the first of September, the Germans were winning; the R. A. F. had no more fresh squadrons to provide rotations, on several days in this period they lost more planes than their factories produced, the factories themselves were under attack, and if the Luftwaffe could keep up the pressure, they were home free. Then they made another mistake: they decided to believe their own figures. They gave up the direct strikes against