The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [54]
Despite the Luftwaffe’s undeniable successes in Poland, Norway, France and the Benelux countries, these had been won fighting as merely the air arm of Blitzkrieg, with surprise on their side, close to their own bases and over areas that were shortly to be occupied by the Wehrmacht. In the battle of Britain, however, the Luftwaffe was acting on its own, with Stuka dive-bombers flying horizontally at speeds much slower than when diving, over hostile territory far from their bases, and where surprise was on the side of the RAF owing to the fortuitous invention only half a decade earlier of Radio Direction Finding (RDF or ‘radar’).
The first phase of the battle opened on 10 July, with the systematic bombing of British naval and merchant shipping and port installations. Even this shows how uncoordinated German plans were, because the Luftwaffe was often bombing harbours and airfields that would have been needed by the Wehrmacht if it had landed.11 On 16 July, Hitler issued his Directive No. 16, which ordered that ‘The British Air Force must be eliminated to such an extent that it will be incapable of putting up any substantial opposition to the invading troops.’ Twenty divisions would be landed following the Jodl plan between Ramsgate and Lyme Regis, although issues such as how to transport across the Channel the vast number of horses needed to pull the majority of the Wehrmacht’s artillery were not directly addressed.
Hitler’s failure to grasp the fundamental principles of air warfare were in large part responsible for his defeat in the battle of Britain. ‘The Führer had little understanding of a strategic plan by which Britain could be forced to sue for peace by the employment of air power,’ concludes an historian of the battle. ‘He never demonstrated wide awareness of the value of either air fleets or navies; subsequently the waters of the Channel proved too great an obstacle for his land-based military thinking. The crossing of a boisterous and unpredictable sea was too much for his vision, which therefore travelled elsewhere across the map table, allowing the impetus of the attack on Britain to be lost.’12 Just as bad a strategist, though with far less excuse, was Göring, who not only spent much of the coming battle 735 miles away from Calais at his country house, Karinhall near Brandenburg in Prussia, but also regularly displayed an ignorance of the detail of logistics, strategy, technology and the capabilities of aircraft which was all the more reprehensible because he had been a First World War flying ace. For the coming assault, the Luftwaffe was split into three Luftflotten (air fleets), altogether totalling 1,800 bombers and 900 fighters and consisting of Marshal Albert Kesselring’s Luftflotte II based in northern France, Marshal Hugo Sperrle’s Dutch- and Belgian-based Luftflotte III and General Hans-Jürgen Stumpff’s Norway- and Denmark-based Luftflotte V. A further two, Luftflotten I and IV, were kept in defensive reserve. There were over fifty air bases in northern France and Holland available to the Luftwaffe, but their wide distribution afforded them none of the tight, centralized, interior defensive lines enjoyed by the RAF waiting for them in England. Nor did Kesselring and Sperrle properly co-ordinate their attacks.
The Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, had an initial total force of fewer than 700 fighters, divided between fifty-two squadrons.13 He admitted to Lord Halifax that when he heard of the fall of France he ‘went on my knees and thanked God’ that no more RAF squadrons would be sucked into that losing battle.14 A calm, resolute, highly intelligent and somewhat unemotional man, ‘Stuffy’ Dowding, based at Bentley Priory in Middlesex, kept as many squadrons as he possibly could in reserve throughout the battle. As Churchill had said of Admiral Jellicoe at the time of the battle of Jutland in 1916, Dowding was ‘the only man on either side who could lose the war in an