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By Root 1753 0

was clearly unsustainable if the Luftwaffe were able to keep up its punishing attacks on British airfields, and some RAF pilots were being sent up with only twenty hours’ training. By the end of the month eleven of the forty-six squadron leaders and thirty-nine of the ninety-seven wing commanders had also been killed or wounded. There were some extraordinary tales of heroism and devotion to duty. An historian of the Spitfire records that, in the course of destroying no fewer than seventeen enemy aircraft in the period up to August 1940, the New Zealand ace Al Deere ‘was shot down seven times, bailed out three times, collided with an Me-109, had one Spitfire of his [at an aerodrome] blown up 150 yards away by a bomb, and had another explode just seconds after he had scrambled from its wreckage’.29

As well as victory or defeat in the struggle with the RAF hanging in the balance, Saturday, 31 August found Adolf Hitler having trouble with his domestic staff. On that day his adjutant at the Berghof, SS-Hauptsturmführer Max Wünsche, wrote to Himmler in Berlin to say that two of the Führer’s personal servants there, Hauptscharführer Wiebiczeck and Oberscharführer Sander, had been dismissed for theft, and sent to Dachau. The Führer had not yet made up his mind about ‘the duration of their imprisonment in the concentration camp’.30 History does not record their ultimate fate, but we can safely assume that Adolf Hitler was an unsympathetic person from whom to thieve.

Just as Fighter Command was stretched to its outer limit, with two months still to go before the autumn weather made the Channel impassable to the flat-bottomed boats and barges that the Kreigs-marine was collecting across the Channel, the Germans made a cardinal strategic error. They changed the Schwerpunkt in the middle of the campaign, from Britain’s airfields to her cities. This vital shift in emphasis gave Fighter Command a desperately needed breathing space in which to repair its heavily damaged bases. The reason that Hitler and Göring altered the campaign objective was primarily political. They fell for a trap of Churchill’s making, which played on Nazi psychology. Inherent in National Socialism was utter intolerance of contradiction. Pluralism and debate were anathema to a political creed based entirely on the Führer’s supposed omniscience and infallibility. Thus when on 25, 28 and 29 August the RAF attacked Berlin – with eighty-one bombers in the first instance – in response to a single Heinkel He-111 bombing the City of London on 24 August (possibly by mistake when lost), Hitler’s promises to the German people to protect the capital were exposed as worthless, and in the most blatant possible way. It was inevitable that he would react with irrational fury, promising the German people on 4 September: ‘When they declare that they will attack our cities in great strength, then we will eradicate their cities.’31 Yet by switching from bombing airfields to bombing cities three days later, Hitler made as fundamental an error as he had when he ordered his Panzers to halt outside Dunkirk on 24 May.

The fourth phase of the battle thus began on the late morning of Saturday, 7 September, with a massive raid on London’s docklands. Three hundred tons of bombs were dropped by 350 bombers, protected by 350 fighters. ‘Send all the pumps you’ve got,’ one fireman told his central command station. ‘The whole bloody world’s on fire.’ Because it was high summer, the Thames was low and water correspondingly hard to pump, and burning petrol, sugar and rum from destroyed warehouses set the river alight. It was both the first and the worst attack of the eight-month Blitz, the German bombing campaign against Britain (which should not be confused with ‘Blitzkrieg’); and it has been estimated that the inferno of that single day caused more damage than the Great Fire of London of 1666.32 That afternoon – also in broad daylight – the Luftwaffe returned with a further 247 aircraft, to drop 352 tons of high explosive (HE) and 440 incendiary canisters. ‘Each of the participants realized the