Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [45]
July 10 was later officially designated as the first day of the Battle of Britain, though to the aircrew of both sides it seemed little different from those which preceded and followed it. The next month was characterised by skirmishes over the Channel and south coast, in which the Luftwaffe never lost more than 16 aircraft in a day’s combat—on July 25—and Fighter Command not more than 15. Churchill insisted that coastal convoys should continue to sail the Narrows, partly to assert British rights of navigation, partly to provoke the Luftwaffe into action on what were deemed favourable terms for the RAF. On August 11, attrition sharply increased: 30 British aircraft were shot down for 35 German. In the month thereafter, Göring launched his major assault on Fighter Command, its airfields, control centres and radar stations. Between August 12 and 23, the RAF lost 133 fighters in action and a further 44 to mishaps, while the Luftwaffe lost 299 aircraft to all causes.
By early autumn, British casualties and damage to installations had reached critical proportions. Among Dowding’s squadron commanders, 11 out of 46 were killed or wounded in July and August, along with 39 of 97 flight commanders. One Fighter Command pilot, twenty-one-year-old George Barclay of 249 Squadron, a Norfolk parson’s son, wrote after the bitter battles of September 7: “The odds today have been unbelievable153 (and we are all really very shaken!) … There are bombs and things falling around tonight and a terrific gun barrage. Has a blitz begun? The wing-commander’s coolness is amazing and he does a lot to keep up our morale—very necessary tonight.” As in every battle, not all participants showed the stuff of heroes. After repeated German bombings of Manston, one of the RAF’s forward airfields, ground crews huddled in its air-raid shelters and rejected pleas to emerge and service Hurricanes. The work was done by off-duty Blenheim night-fighter crews.
The prime minister intently followed the progress of each day’s clashes. The Secret Intelligence Service warned that a German landing in Britain was imminent. Yet it was not easy to maintain the British people at the highest pitch of expectancy. On August 3, Churchill felt obliged to issue this statement: “The Prime Minister wishes it to be known that the possibility of German attempts at invasion has by no means passed away.” He carried this spirit into his own household. Downing Street and the underground Central War Rooms were protected by Royal Marine pensioners, Chequers by a Guards company. The prime minister took personal charge of several practise alerts, against the possibility of German paratroop landings in St. James’s Park. “This sounds very peculiar today154, but was taken quite seriously by us all in the summer of 1940,” a War Cabinet Secretariat officer recalled.
Churchill practised with a revolver and with his own Mannlicher on a rifle range at Chequers, entirely in earnest and not without pleasurable anticipation. It was odd that the Germans, having used special forces effectively in the May blitzkrieg on the Continent, never thereafter showed much interest in their possibilities. A direct assault on Churchill in 1940, most plausibly by a paratroop landing at Chequers, could have paid handsome dividends. Britain was fortunate that such piratical ventures loomed far less prominently in Hitler’s mind, and in Wehrmacht doctrine, than in Churchill’s imagination. In the summer of 1940, the Germans had yet to understand how pivotal to Britain’s war effort was the person of the prime minister.
The supply of aircraft to Fighter Command was a critical factor. While propaganda lauded the achievements of the Ministry of Aircraft Production, the conduct of its leader, Lord Beaverbrook, provoked bitter criticism in Whitehall. For some weeks, he ran the department from his private residence, Stornoway House, in Arlington Street, behind the Ritz Hotel. It is easy to perceive why many people, Clementine Churchill prominent among them, deplored the press baron, then sixty-one. He was a former appeaser