Winston's War_ Churchill, 1940-1945 - Max Hastings [53]
The service chiefs were justified in fearing the outcome, if German forces secured a beachhead. Brooke believed, probably rightly, that if invaders got ashore, Churchill would seek to take personal command of the ground battle—with disastrous consequences. In the absence of a landing, of course, the prime minister was able to perform his extraordinary moral function. The British generals’ fears of an unheralded assault reflected the trauma which defeat in France had inflicted upon them. It distorted their judgement about the limits of the possible, even for Hitler’s Wehrmacht. Churchill, by contrast, was always doubtful about whether the enemy would come. He grasped the key issue: that invasion would represent a far greater gamble than Germany’s May 10 attack in the west. Operation Sealion could not partially succeed. It must either achieve fulfilment or fail absolutely. Given Hitler’s mastery of the Continent, and the impotence of the British Army, he had no need to stake everything upon such a throw.
But in the summer and autumn of 1940, preparing a defence against invasion was not merely essential—it represented almost the only military activity of which Britain was capable. It was vital to incite the British people. If they were allowed to lapse into passivity, staring fearfully at the array of German might, all-conquering beyond the Channel, who could say whether their will for defiance would persist? One of Churchill’s great achievements, in those months, was to convince every man and woman in the country that they had roles to play in the greatest drama in their history, even if the practical utility of their actions and preparations was often pathetically small. Young Lt. Robert Hichens of the Royal Navy wrote: “I feel an immense joy183 at being British, the only people who have stood up to the air war blackmail.”
Between August 24 and September 6, the Luftwaffe launched six hundred sorties a day. British civilians were now dying by the hundreds. Devastation mounted remorselessly. Yet September 7 marked the turning point of the Battle of Britain. Göring switched his attacks from the RAF’s airfields to the city of London. A sterile debate persists, about whether Britain or Germany first provoked attacks on each other’s cities. On August 25184, following civilian casualties caused by Luftwaffe bombs falling on Croydon, Churchill personally ordered that the RAF’s Bomber Command should retaliate against Berlin. Some senior RAF officers resisted, on the grounds that such an attack, by the forces available, could make little impact and would probably incite the Germans to much more damaging action against British urban areas. Churchill overruled them, saying: “They had bombed London, whether on purpose or not, and the British people and London especially should know that we could hit back. It would be good for the morale of us all.” Some fifty British aircraft were dispatched to Berlin, and a few bombs fell on the city. Though the material damage was negligible, the Nazi leadership was indeed moved to urge a devastating response against London, though this would assuredly have come anyway.
On the night of September 7, two hundred Luftwaffe aircraft raided the capital. Air Vice Marshal Keith Park, commanding 11 Group, wrote on September 8: “It was burning all down the river. It was a horrid sight. But I looked down and said: ‘Thank God for that.’” The next day, Churchill visited the capital’s stricken East End. He saw misery and destruction, but knew how vastly these were to be preferred in Bethnal Green and Hackney than at Biggin Hill airfield or the south coast radar sites. The Germans had made a decisive strategic error. Thereafter, the urban centres of Britain paid a heavy price for the Luftwaffe’s raids,