Who Fought: British (Winston Churchill) vs. Germans (Adolf Hitler).
What was at stake: The survival of democracy.
The mighty French army, touted as the best in the world, had collapsed like a punctured balloon. The British expeditionary force had dashed back to Britain, leaving almost all of its equipment and not a few of its men. France was finished; Britain was on the ropes. Adolf Hitler was so confident the Britishwould make peace that he had no plans for continuing the war against them."The British have lost the war, but they don't know it," Hitler told General Alfred Jodl. "One must give them time, and they will come around."
Hitler thought the British Empire was a stabilizing force in the world. As historian A.J.P. Taylor points out, Hitler believed that if Britain were conquered, the Americans and the Japanese—the other two of the world's three great naval powers—would divide its empire. Britain's huge navy would certainly go to the United States. Hitler wanted Britain to be a junior partner in his crusade against Bolshevism. He didn't want it to be a former power, like France.
The British hesitated. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain and Ms foreign minister, Lord Halifax,said on May 27, 1940, that they might discuss terms if "matters vital to the independence of this country were unaffected." Even Winston Churchill said he might be willing to make peace if Hitler wanted only the over lordship of Central Europe and the return of former German colonies. But the next day, he rejected the notion.In July, Hitler decided that the British had had enough time. He ordered preparations of "Operation Sea Lion," the invasion of Britain. To most of the world, Britain looked like another pushover. Germany's enormous army and air force had conquered Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and France.
Hitler and his generals knew better. The English Channel might look like a wide river on a map, but it was 20 miles wide at its narrowest—plenty of room for the Royal Navy to operate. The Luftwaffe would have to prepare the way. Although the Luftwaffe was easily the world's most powerful air force, it, unlike the air forces of most other major powers, had not been designed for strategic bombing. Italy's Giulio Douhet and America's Billy Mitchell had preached that in the next war, air power was the only force that would count.
Air forces would destroy the enemy's surface forces, his means of production, and even his cities before he could mobilize. Britain's Royal Air Force had been established to fight just such a war. The Luftwaffe, on the other hand, had been created to provide close support for the army. Hitler's friend, Hermann Goring, the Luftwaffe chief, had been an ace fighter pilot in "von Richtofen's Circus," with 22 confirmed kills over the World War I Western Front. Goring scorned the heavy bomber pilots as "truck drivers" and considered fighter pilots modern knights.On July 16, Hitler issued Fuhrer Directive No. 16, "Preparations for a landing operation against England."
The Luftwaffe was to destroy naval vessels and coastal defenses, prevent air attacks, and "break the initial resistance of enemy land forces and annihilate reserves behind the front." Goring viewed this rather large order with a cocky fighter pilot's optimism."The Fuhrer has ordered me to crush Britain with my Luftwaffe," he told his generals on August 1. "By means of hard blows, I plan to have this enemy, who has already suffered a crushing moral defeat, down on his knees in the nearest future, so that an occupation of the island by our troops can proceed without any risk." With German planes hitting Britain from Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries, and France, Goring believed, four days would be all he'd need.
The tight little island
As a fighting force, the British Army was almost defunct. Britain's navy might be strong, but its air force looked almost as hopeless as its army. Goring could concen-trate 800 Bf 109 fighters, 300 Bf 110 long-range fighters, 400 Ju 87 dive-bombers (the dreaded Stukas), and 1,500 Dornier, Junkers, and Heinkel bombers. In 1938, at the time of the Munich crisis, only six of 30 RAF fighter squadrons had modern Hurricane or Spitfire fighters. And between May 10 and June 4, the RAF had lost 430 front line fighters over France.One of the things Goring did not know, though, was that the British had greatly increased their fighter production. In 1940, Messerschmidt was producing only 140 Bf 109s and 90 Bf 110s a month. Vickers and Hawker were producing 500 Spitfires and Hurricanes a month.
The Bf 109 was a superb fighter, but no better than the Spitfire, and it had a range of only 125 miles. The German bases closest to England were more than 20 miles away; most were more than 50 miles away. The bases in Scandinavia were much farther. Operating from the closest bases, the 109s could spend no more than 25 minutes over England.British pilots shot down would land in England; if they were extremely unlucky, they'd land in the Channel, which was controlled by British ships. Lucky German pilots would also land in England, and unlucky ones would land in the Channel. In either case, they'd be out of the war. Fighting on home ground also made maintenance of British planes easier.
The RAF was able to keep more than 600 Spitfires and Hurricanes operational at all times. The Germans never had more than 800 Bf 109s ready for combat.Even more important, a British team under Robert Watson-Watt had invented radar, and British radar stations covered all of the island's eastern and southern coasts. The Ger-mans had a primitive form of radar, but they had no idea that their enemies had a far more sophisticated system. Their radar systems let the British pinpoint German attackers and concentrate fighters to meet them.
Air war
In spite of Goring's bombast, the initial Luftwaffe attack didn't look like much. It started July 10 with raids on England's south coast and ships in the channel. The Germans sent 20 or 30 aircraft on each raid. They sank a number of merchant ships but didn't touch the Royal Navy. By July 31, the Germans had lost 180 planes; the British, 70.
The operation established two facts:
1.The Bf 110, later to become a great night fighter, was totally outclassed by both the Spitfires and the Hurricanes.
2.The Stuka was a flying coffin in aerial combat.
On August 1, Hitler officially issued Fuhrer Directive No. 17, ordering the Luftwaffe to "overpower the English air force with all the forces at its command in the shortest possible time." That prompted Goring's "hard blows" announcement, but "Operation Eagle" didn't get under way for a week, and even then it was so disorganized that Goring didn't proclaim "Eagle Day" until August 13.The "Eagle" raiders attacked British air bases, but only once the radar stations.
A raid on the Spitfire factory on August 13 cost the Germans 45 planes to the British 13.On August 15, the Luftwaffe lost 75 planes to the RAF's 35. That day Goring withdrew all the Stukas from the battle and reorganized the Luftwaffe command. From now on, Goring ordered his generals, concentrate on RAF fighter bases. The new strategy began to pay off. On August 24, the Luftwaffe flew 1,000 sorties and destroyed 22 RAF fighters. It lost 38 of its own planes, but not all were fighters. Between August 24 and September 10, the RAF lost 290 fighters. The Luftwaffe lost380planes, but only half were fighters. The German raiders were coming in waves. After the British intercepters had dealt with one wave, they landed to refuel. Then a second Luftwaffe wave bombed them on the ground.
It looked as if the Germans were going to win the Battle of Britain. But time was running out. The autumn gales would rule out any chance for a seaborne invasion. Hitler had set the date for a channel crossing at September 15.
The birth of the Blitz...
The night of August 24-25, 10 German bombers, sent to bomb a fuel storage area, panicked and dropped their bombs on the heart of London. The British retaliated with a raid on Berlin. It was totally ineffective—not the city-crushing stroke envisioned by Douhet—but it made Hitler furious. He would punish the evil English by bombing London. Goring had told him the Luftwaffe had wiped out most of the RAF. Now, Hitler thought, he could break the spirit of his enemies and make invasion easy. On September 7, the Luftwaffe concentrated all its forces on London. And the British began to rebuild their air bases and increase their production of fighter planes.
What followed was a British epic. The Luftwaffe sent hundreds of planes against a city defended by masses of barrage balloons, 2,000 anti-aircraft guns, and 750 fighter planes. The German planes did a considerable amount of damage to London, but they never broke the spirit of British civilians. And the British armed forces got stronger.
....And the death of "Sea Lion"
The bombing of London, what the British called "the Blitz," continued through most of the war. But the Germans lost the Battle of Britain. If they had begun the battle with massive raids on British air bases and airplane factories, it may have been different. But they did not. Just when Germany seemed to be making progress, they switched to bombing cities. The storms began at the end of the summer, and, by that time, Britain was far stronger than it was in June. Hitler postponed Sea Lion, then cancelled it on September 17. It would never be resumed.
The Battle of Britain did not guarantee that Hitler would lose the war, but it was a long step, perhaps the longest step, toward that end. From now on, he would conduct his operations in the East with an increasingly powerful enemy at his back. That unconquered enemy was as close to the lands he occupied as Santa Catalina Island is to Los Angeles or Long Island is to New Haven, Connecticut. It not only had one of the world's largest navies, but it was developing an air force that would surpass the Luftwaffe in every way. And it provided a base for millions of new enemy troops from across the seas.
0 comments:
Post a Comment