The strange myth of the Battle of Britain and the Blitz

The British have always believed that in 1940, Germany launched an aerial assault on their country. It is not true. Britain began bombing German cities months before the Battle of Britain or the Blitz

The Battle of Britain, together with the Blitz which swiftly followed it in 1940, have been the subject of so much commentary and interpretation that it might be thought that there is little new or original to say on the subject. They may perhaps be described as Britain’s favourite myth; the days when this country stood alone against the might of Nazi Germany; like a latter-day David, resolutely facing Goliath and triumphing over him, against all the odds. The problem with this perspective is that it is almost wholly misleading and false.

We all know the accepted narrative, one to which we almost all subscribe. In 1940, the year following Britain’s declaration of war against Germany, the country stood alone. Poland and France had fallen, the British army had retreated from the continent in the course of the disastrous rout which became known as the Dunkirk Evacuation and it seemed only a matter of time before the Germans crossed the channel and invaded Britain. At that crucial juncture in British history, the country stood alone; single-handedly defying the might of Nazi Germany. As Churchill put it, future generations would say, ‘This was their finest hour’. When the German air force tried to seize control of the air above and around the British Isles, a tiny handful of brave pilots fought them off, until the Nazis resorted to the cowardly tactic of deliberately targeting civilians by bombing the larger cities. Even then, Britain showed that she could ‘take it’. Vastly outnumbered and ill-equipped, with no allies, the country soldiered on until an alliance was forged which eventually resulted in the defeat of the Nazi dictatorship and the triumph of democracy over fascism.

     Even at the time that this beautiful and heroic mythic narrative was being constructed, there were those who recognised how preposterous it was; but also realised that the myth was in many ways more important than the bare facts. The French author and critic Georges Bernanos was living in exile in South America at the time of the Battle of Britain.  He wrote that the story as it was being told then was, ‘a fairy-tale, a tale that no serious adult, no man of ability or experience, could possibly understand - a children’s tale’. It is in this sense that we must look at the accepted story of the Battle of Britain.

Let us begin with the notion that Germany attacked Britain by air and then began bombing our cities in the wave of attacks which became known as the Blitz. This unprecedented attack on our nation led us to respond in time by bombing Germany and inflicting huge casualties on their own civilian population. Serve them right, they shouldn’t have started it! This is still the subconscious attitude of most British people, that we only bombed Germany during the Second World War after they began attacking our own cities. There is not a word of truth in it.

On the night of 11 May, four months before the start of the Blitz, 36 British bombers attacked the German town of Munchen Gladbach. A great deal of damage was done to the centre of the town, although only four people were actually killed in the raid.

     Four days after the air raid on Munchen Gladbach, a hundred British bombers struck at the heart of Germany’s industrial might, in the Ruhr. They primarily targeted oil tanks.  Night after night, the bombing raids continued against railways and oil storage facilities across Germany.   Of course, what we in Britain chiefly recall about May and June 1940 is not the bombing of German cities, but rather the evacuation from Dunkirk and the feeling that this country had its back to the wall and was barely able to survive against the Nazi peril. That every night for months, British bombers were flying across the North Sea and dropping hundreds of tons of bombs on Germany spoils the satisfying and neat sequence of events which has become an integral part of the British mythos. The British bombing of German cities, four months before the German air force bombed cities in Britain, was no half-hearted or symbolic affair. On 17 May, for instance, a hundred and thirty bombers struck oil refineries and railway yards. In Hamburg, thirty four people were killed when bombs struck the centre of the city.

     Very few people in Britain today are aware that long before the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, the RAF was carrying out daily air raids on Germany; for months at a time. It jars a little, when we have for decades been asked to believe that Britain’s air force was stretched to the very limit in the defence of the country, to learn that there were at that time hundreds of bombers in the air every day, inflicting great damage on cities such as Berlin and Hamburg. Why have we not been told about this, we might ask. Properly to understand the situation, we need to go back a little to see what led up to the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. A detailed examination of the individual elements of the story as it has come down to us might serve to make this a little clearer. We begin with a fairly minor example of the misconceptions held about this part of the Second World War.

     It is popularly supposed that in the Battle of Britain, a small group of British RAF officers, most of them public school types, engaged in dogfights over the skies of southern England, against a much greater force of German aircraft who were trying to establish air superiority above the English Channel. The German aim  was to defeat the RAF and so pave the way for invasion of Britain. This, in a nutshell, is the first part of the mythical narrative at which we shall be looking; one which is still, for many, the accepted version of that period in 1940; a handful of gallant RAF officers, perhaps with handlebar moustaches, saving Britain from the Nazis.

     Because this is a quintessentially British myth, it is only natural that in our imagination, the RAF pilots in 1940 should be British officers. Some were; roughly half were not. Looking first at the notion that the pilots were British, we find to our surprise that of the RAF pilots who fought in the Battle of Britain, between July and October 1940; about a fifth were not born in this country. The RAF’s roll of honour lists two thousand three hundred and fifty three British pilots during that period, along with five hundred and seventy four who were not British. These include over a hundred and forty Poles, eighty five or so Czechs, along with Belgians, French, Australians and various other nationalities. These men boosted the numbers of pilots at that crucial time and helped win Britain’s first major battle of the Second World War.

      This enduring idea that the Battle of Britain was an exclusively British affair from this country’s point of view has led to some grotesque situations. In 2009, for instance, during elections for the European Parliament, the British National Party decided to appropriate this myth for their own purposes. They used the image of a Spitfire from that period, above which was the slogan; ‘Battle for Britain‘. The poster was meant to evoke both the spirit of the Second World War and was also a reference to the ‘Invaders from the East’ element of British mythology; in this case, Eastern Europeans, who were supposedly flooding into the country with disastrous consequences for the native inhabitants. Perhaps because history was not their strong point, the propagandists of the BNP chose a photograph of a Spitfire belonging to a Polish squadron of the Royal Air Force. The complaints about Polish builders looked a little ungracious when we recall that Polish fighter pilots had been defending Britain from invasion in 1940.

      The contribution of foreign-born pilots to the defence of Britain was no nominal or symbolic one. During the Battle of Britain, only two men managed to notch up a total of sixteen ‘kills’. One of these men was English and the other a Czech called Josef Frantisek. Among those who were pilots during the Battle of Britain, the one who went on to gain the highest number of kills during the rest of the war was a South Africa called Adolphus Malan; who brought down thirty two German planes in total. Without men such as these, the outlook for the RAF would have been somewhat bleaker.

     As for all those RAF officers flying the fighters during the Battle of Britain; a third of them were nothing of the sort. They were sergeants or flight sergeants. The idea of working-class fighter pilots is a strange one to us, but it is certainly the case that when we take away the foreigners and NCOs, we find that only about half the pilots at that time were really British officers; some of whom were the product of public schools, although many were not.

     Having dealt with a fairly minor distortion which has become part of the  myth surrounding the Battle of Britain, it is time to consider how unequally matched the two sides were. For this is the crux of the matter, that the gallant ‘few’ were, and still are, represented as being vastly outnumbered in the air by the planes of the Luftwaffe. One side in this famous battle certainly had a notable advantage over the other; both technologically and from the point of view of material resources. The only thing is, it was not the Germans who had this strong advantage, but rather the British. All things taken into account, it would have been slightly surprising had Britain not won the contest against the German air force in the summer of 1940.

     Transporting an invasion force across the channel would have entailed the use of slow-moving barges or landing craft, very vulnerable to attack from the air or from ships of the Royal Navy stationed on the south coast. To carry out this enterprise, the Germans needed to put the RAF out of action, so that they ruled the sky between France and Britain. This would enable them to use their own planes to attack any British naval vessels which threatened their seaborne  invasion force. Rendering the Royal Air Force helpless would mean attacking the airfields of Kent, and nearby counties, with bombers. These bombers would be vulnerable to attack by British fighters and so an escort of their own fighters would be necessary to protect the bombers.

     Fortunately, Britain had, during the 1930s, been following that famous Roman dictum, Si vis pacem, para bellum; If you want peace, then prepare for war. At the very height of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement, a line of radar towers were being constructed along the east and south coast of Britain to provide early warning of the arrival of German bombers. This network, called Chain Home, was very effective; allowing British operators to detect and give advance warning of the approach of German aeroplanes, as soon as they took off from airfields in France. Little wonder then that these installations were among the first targets of the German bombing raids in 1940. Of course, nobody talked about ‘radar’ at the time. This was an Americanism which did not appear until 1943. The British referred to Radio Direction Finding or RDF for short.

     The towers of Chain Home were built of girders and looked like enormous electricity pylons; one remaining one at Bawdsley is 365 feet tall. These towers were resitant to blast, being merely composed of metal struts. When the Germans bombed the radar stations in 1940, the nearby buildings were badly damaged, but the towers themselves were left unscathed. Most of the bomb damage was repaired in a matter of hours and only at the installation at Ventnor, on the Isle of Wight, was a base wrecked. Even then, it took only a matter of weeks to get this part of the system back into action. When the Germans found that attacking Chain Home was more difficult than they had expected, and  not realising how effective the British radar was, the efforts of the Luftwaffe were redirected against airfields. This was the first major blunder of the campaign. Throughout the Battle of Britain, the RAF would always know ahead of time where the Germans were heading, so that they could be ready to intercept them.

     The Chain Home towers and surrounding buildings were bombed on 9 August and then again on 11 and 12 August. The following day, with the radar system still largely intact and operational, the Luftwaffe launched Adlerangriff; the ‘Day of the Eagle’. Waves of bombers, accompanied by fighters to protect them, began attacking the airfields of southern England. In all that day, around one and a half thousand German aeroplanes crossed the English Channel. The RAF lost thirteen fighters, compared to the forty five planes of the Luftwaffe which were brought down.  The all-out attack from the air continued the following day, 14 August, when five hundred German planes flew across the channel. This time, seventy of them were shot down, while the RAF lost only twenty seven aircraft. It was clear by then that this was to be a war of attrition and the Germans hoped that they would be able to withstand their losses better than the British were able to bear their own.

     One of the factors which had to be borne in mind by the Luftwaffe was that when they lost an aeroplane to enemy action, they almost invariably lost the crew, as well as the machine itself. The RAF were fighting over Britain or the Channel. When a plane was hit, the pilot could bale out and parachute to safety. Sometimes, it was possible to crash-land and again, the pilot would live to fight another day.

     Certainly some RAF pilots  were killed when their planes were brought down; many were not. For the Germans, the case was entirely different. If a plane was brought down over Britain, then the crew, if they survived, were sure to be captured. Of the seventy planes which the Germans last on 14 August, every single crew member was either killed or taken prisoner. By way of contrast, an RAF pilot who had parachuted to safety was sometimes able to hitch a lift back to his airfield and be back in the air that very day. For example, during an attack on Biggin Hill airfield on 30 August, seventeen German planes were shot down and only one British one. The pilot of that plane parachuted to safety, hitched a lift back to his base and was in action again before the end of the day!  Sometimes, foreign pilots serving in the RAF had a rough time of it, because after parachuting from their stricken planes, they were mistaken for Germans and one or two were nearly lynched by angry civilians.

     Another advantage that the RAF enjoyed in the Battle of Britain as a result of fighting on home territory was that their planes were able to land to refuel and take on fresh ammunition; a luxury denied to the Luftwaffe. After flying from France and crossing the English Channel, the German fighters had a mere twenty minutes of flying time over England. Those which went as far as London had even less. For them, there was just ten minutes above the British capital before they had to return to France to refuel. This meant that the German fighter pilots had to keep one eye on the clock for the whole time that they were fighting above England. If they did not disengage and run for home after a few minutes, they ran the risk of having to ditch their planes in the sea, as they ran out of fuel.

     Sometimes, discussion about the Battle of Britain becomes bogged down in dissecting the rival merits of the different fighters and bombers deployed by one side or the other. The rate of climb of the German Messerschmitt Me 109Es, as opposed to the speed of the 110s, Spitfire versus Hurricane; that kind of thing. In an equal competition, matters such as speed and firepower would indeed be the deciding factors in a dogfight. However, when one of the contestants knows that he is in a desperate hurry and must break off the engagement after a few minutes; matters are not equal. The pilot who is able to nip down to earth and pick up more ammunition and fuel has a very distinct advantage. In this particular case, that strong edge was in the RAF’s favour.

     This war of attrition would be won when one side or the other ran out of aeroplanes or pilots to fly them. Despite the idea, sedulously peddled at that time, that the little island of Britain was struggling to cope with the onslaught of the military juggernaut which was Nazi Germany; the reality was somewhat different.

      Obviously,  the aeroplanes being shot down were only one part of the picture; the German bombing raids were also destroying planes on the ground at the airfields which they hit. On 16 August, for instance, sixty aircraft were blown up at RAF Brize Norton and elsewhere. With Britain and Germany losing aeroplanes at the rate of dozens a day, the crucial factor would be which side was able more quickly to make up the deficiencies produced by the ferocious combat. The answer to this question was easy and we need only look at the production figures for aircraft over the summer and autumn of 1940 to see who was doing best at this aspect of the war;

                               Britain                                      Germany

June                       446                                            164

July                       496                                             220

August                   476                                            173

September             467                                            218

October                 469                                            144

     There can be little doubt who is winning the battle for production when we look at these statistics. One can also see at a glance one reason that Germany brought the Battle of Britain to a close; realising that they were unlikely to be able to beat their enemy into submission by means of air power alone. By September, Germany was losing more planes than they were able to manufacture. Had they continued their military strategy against Britain, then the Luftwaffe would slowly have dwindled away.

     The problem for Germany was that Hitler was already at this time planning the invasion of Russia and this would need armoured vehicles, in addition to aircraft. Because the Stuka dive-bomber had proved so effective against ground troops and armour, production of this had been maintained at the expense of heavier bombers and fighters. When used against British targets as part of a strategic bombing campaign the Stuka proved a disaster. The faster British fighters soon dealt with the slow-moving Stukas and they were withdrawn from operations over Britain. Factories in Germany, because so many and varied demands were being placed upon them, began to neglect some types of military hardware in favour of others. With Operation Barbarossa, the plan for the invasion of the Soviet Union, gearing up; production of tanks took precedence over aircraft. Incredible as it may seem, at the height of this phase of the war, between September 1940 and February 1941, production of aircraft in Germany actually fell by 40 per cent.

     The Battle of Britain is traditionally seen as a desperate, defensive fight against an aerial assault which came after the end of the ’Phony War’. There was fighting in Norway, France and the Low Countries and the British Expeditionary Force was evacuated from Dunkirk at the end of May and beginning of June. Then, there was a lull of  a few months, before Germany launched air raids against Britain. The RAF fought back gamely and then, after the Germans began a more general bombing campaign, including cities, Britain hit back and began bombing Germany in retaliation. This too, as we saw earlier, is part of the fairy tale.

     There are two reasons why the story of the Germans bombing Britain first during the Second World War is an important part of the myth of the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. The first reason is that this provided some justification for the horrors of the fire bombing of Hamburg and Dresden later in the war. These dreadful atrocities could to some extent be excused by pointing out that it was Germany who had first started bombing civilian targets and that they were therefore only reaping what they had sown. The morality of this argument is, to say the least of it, open to questions, but it at least provided a salve to the conscience of those worrying about the suffering which the RAF was inflicting upon innocent women and children. This is why, even today, one will hear people defend the bombing of German cities by saying that it was they who began this kind of attack and we were only repaying the Germans in the same coin.

     The second motive for pretending that the Germans bombed Britain first is that this ties in more neatly with the struggling little country fighting back heroically against overwhelming odds image; upon which the whole mythic narrative depends.  The story of the outnumbered RAF battling to fight back the waves of Luftwaffe bombers is moving only because the British air force was hopelessly outnumbered and fighting for the very survival of their country. Knowing that for months before the Battle of Britain had even begun, the RAF had been relentlessly pounding German cities with groups of a hundred or more bombers at a time, would make a nonsense of this ‘Gallant little Island’ scenario; which is why we have done our best to bury this inconvenient truth by eradicating it from the national consciousness.

The fact that the largely fictitious version of the history of the Battle of Britain and the Blitz is still taught in schools and almost universally accepted by ordinary people is testament to the effectiveness of propaganda. We have, as a nation, come to believe our own invented history, which is a sobering reflection.