With Wings Like Eagles (9 page)

In the skies over Poland, Norway, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France, the fighter pilots had very little to do, except to escort the Stukas and the heavier twin-engine bombers, against minimal opposition. They had learned to treat the Hurricanes with respect, but the Hurricanes were few and far between in France; and, operating off hastily prepared grass airfields with no radar or fighter control to support them, they did not give the German pilots a realistic foretaste of what it might be like to fight them over southern England. Thus, the opening stages of the Battle of Britain took place before either side had a realistic view of the other.

Despite all the preparation on both sides of the Channel, Clausewitz’s famous comment about the “fog of war” still held true, even in the air.

N
obody, least of all the Führer, had predicted the rapid collapse of the French army in May 1940. The effect on the
Luftwaffe
was to bring it forward within easy reach of Britain in one unexpected swoop, as the Germans took over the airfields of the Dutch and the Belgians, and quickly afterward those of northern France. This put an immense logistic burden on the
Luftwaffe,
at the very moment when the air battle, far from being won as the land battle was being won, was only just beginning. The first serious skirmish in the Battle of Britain in fact took place in the cloudy, smoke-filled sky over Dunkirk—dark columns of greasy black smoke rose from burning ships, vehicles, and oil storage tanks—as the British Army sought to hold the town and the beaches long enough for the Royal Navy (and the famous “little ships,” ranging in size from lifeboats and motor yachts to holiday paddle steamers) struggled to bring the troops home to Britain.

For whatever reason, Hitler had been reluctant to attack the British perimeter with his panzer divisions, much to the indignation of the generals, and he accepted Göring’s promise that the
Luftwaffe
could do the job instead. Without knowing what was in Hitler’s mind—never an easy task—we can still say that the fate of the British Army did not, at this point, seem to interest him much. His eye was on Paris, and the growing likelihood of France’s imminent surrender. Once that had been taken care of, it no doubt seemed to him likely that Churchill’s government would fall and be replaced by a government of “reasonable” men willing to negotiate a peace. The United Kingdom, he thought, to quote from Gracie Fields’s famous music hall song of the period, was “dead but he won’t lie down.” That, at any rate, was what Ribbentrop, Hitler’s vain, arrogant foreign minister and former ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, believed. “Ribbentrop knows the British,” Hitler said to Göring, who had expressed doubts. “Yes,
mein Führer
,” Göring replied glumly; “but the problem is,
they
know Ribbentrop.”

In any event, Hitler’s basic demand of the British was that they stay out of European affairs altogether from now on, and the departure of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), leaving behind all its guns and heavy equipment, was certainly a step in that direction. It is possible too that Hitler wanted to show the British he could be reasonable, even merciful, rather than presenting them with a massacre on the beaches of Dunkirk. If so, he failed to achieve that effect.

The fact that the air battle above Dunkirk was invisible was to lead to great bitterness between British troops of the BEF and RAF personnel when the former returned home. There were numerous fistfights and pub brawls—from the point of view of the men on the beaches or the moles of Dunkirk, the only aircraft they actually saw were the Stukas bombing and strafing them. In fact, high above the smoke on the ground, the first real clash on something like equal terms between the RAF and the
Luftwaffe
was taking place, and since it was just beyond the useful range of RAF fighter control and radar, it was something of a free-for-all, with swarms of aircraft attacking each other. Churchill himself accurately described the desperate fighting over Dunkirk as “a kind of no-man’s-land,” in which British fighters, heavily outnumbered and mostly from Air Vice-Marshal K. R. Park’s No. 11 Group in the southeast of England, flew nearly 3,000 sorties in the course of nine days.

The fight above Dunkirk also led, on both sides, to some immediate and painful reassessments. The British had invested a good deal of time and effort in the idea of a modern all-metal monoplane mounting a four-gun power-operated turret, an idea that was based on the two-seat fighter of World War I (the Sopwith “one-and-a-half strutter” and the RE-8 had been examples). Mitchell had actually been asked to design one, but very luckily for him, the Air Ministry chose the Boulton Paul company’s design instead. The Defiant, as it was eventually named, looked like a modern fighter but carried no forward-firing guns—behind the pilot was a bulky, heavy four-gun power turret and its gunner. The pilot’s job was to fly the plane as a steady gun platform, and the gunner’s job was to shoot the enemy down. As one might have expected, the drag and weight of the heavy turret slowed the Defiant and decreased its maneuverability in dogfights to the point where it was a sitting duck for a Bf 109, a problem made worse by the fact that the only way for the gunner to get out if the plane was hit was to crank his turret around until the guns were in line with the fuselage, since otherwise the streamlined fairing prevented him from opening his escape hatch. Not many Defiant gunners whose planes were hit lived to tell the tale, and this fact did little to increase the Defiant’s popularity with its crews; it was almost immediately withdrawn from combat. Dowding had always been pessimistic about the Defiant, which was slow, was overweight, and had four guns instead of the eight in his Hurricanes and Spitfires; and as usual, he was right.

On the German side, a good deal more time and effort had been invested in producing Messerschmitt’s Bf 110, a particular object of Göring’s enthusiasm. It was designed to be a
Zerstörer
(“destroyer”). A large, sleek, powerfully armed, long-range, twin-engine escort fighter with a crew of two, the Bf 110 carried four machine guns and two twenty-millimeter cannon in its nose, as well as a gunner with two machine guns facing aft. But the Bf 110 was underpowered for its weight, and also lacked the maneuverability of a single-engine fighter, so despite the undeniably formidable Sunday punch in its nose, it was difficult for the pilot to get his sight fixed on a British fighter long enough to fire. Far from destroying enemy fighters, the Bf 110 turned out to be an easy victim for them. That was unfortunate for Göring, since it represented a substantial part of the
Luftwaffe
’s strength.

The Junkers Ju 87 Stuka, which had created such havoc in Poland, the Low Countries, and eastern France, where it had been unopposed, was still an effective (and terrifying) weapon against troops spread out on the roads and beaches, but it was also slow, ungainly, armed only with a single gun facing aft and two forward-firing fixed MGs, and totally helpless when attacked by a modern eight-gun fighter. This too came as an unpleasant shock to the
Luftwaffe
high command, and particularly to Udet—the Stuka had been built in great quantity and represented a critical part of the
Luftwaffe
’s strategic thinking. There was now some question as to whether it could stay in the air long enough to do any damage in the presence of enemy fighters. On the other hand, considering the number of Stukas in the three
Luftflotten
preparing for the air attack against Britain, not using them was hardly an option.

The air battle over Dunkirk was basically a draw, although given the
Luftwaffe
’s superiority in numbers, it ought not to have been. The British fighter pilots learned quickly that the Bf 109 outperformed the Hurricane at altitudes above 18,000 feet; that the Spitfire and the Bf 109 were fairly equal in performance at all altitudes; and that both British fighters could turn more tightly than the Bf 109, a vital factor in a dogfight, whereas the Bf 109 could often break off a fight by suddenly plunging into a steep, powered dive, since fuel injection prevented its Daimler-Benz engine from cutting out.
¹

German fighter pilots learned that although both British fighters were more maneuverable than their own, the RAF still stuck to outdated, rigid formation flying in combat. The basic unit of RAF fighters doctrine was still three aircraft flying in a V-shape formation known as a “vic”—a full squadron of twelve aircraft would consist of four vics, usually flying line astern of the leader, the whole squadron divided into two “flights” of six aircraft. Given that formation, the leader, usually the squadron commander, would call out “Tally-ho!”
*
once he saw the enemy, then call out for a specific form of attack from “the book.” Each vic would then attack in turn as prescribed, and after these attacks the squadron would re-form as soon as it could.

Combat experience in Spain had led the Germans to adopt a different, looser formation, based on what was called a
Schwarm
of four fighters. This can best be visualized by holding the right hand out with the fingers stretched as far from each other as possible. The longest finger represents the leader, the index finger represents his wingman flying slightly behind and below him to watch his back, and the two remaining fingers represent another fighter and his wingman in the same position (each pair was called a
Rotte
). Instead of flying as close to each other as possible—the “nice, neat, wingtip to wingtip formation,” beloved of RAF senior officers—the German fighters flew about 200 meters apart, and at different altitudes. They could see each other, and at the same time stay out of each other’s view to the rear, for it was a given that danger would almost always come from above and out of the sun. There was no need for them to cling to rigid formation flying; indeed, most
Schwarm
leaders discouraged it. As in a dog pack, all the fighters but the leaders moved about on the edge of the pack, looking for trouble or opportunity, drawing closer when they saw a chance to attack, and spreading themselves wider at the first sign of an enemy attack. A
Schwarm
remained “loose and maneuverable,” each pilot searching his own segment of the sky instead of trying to keep his eyes on the wingtip of the fighter next to him, as British pilots were expected to do. The RAF fighter pilots referred to the German
Schwarm
, with some envy once they had encountered it, as a “finger four” formation, and toward the end of the Battle of Britain they began to adopt it themselves.
²

Of course, in practice, once an air battle started it was more like a catfight than a dogfight—the neat, numbered diagrams that RAF pilots had memorized and practiced in formation flying tended to degenerate instantly into a wild, swirling, three-dimensional, high-speed tangle of sudden surprise attacks and quick, violent attempts to escape, with the whole thing over in minutes or seconds. (This kind of flying had been discouraged in the RAF before the war, not only because it was dangerous but also because the early Merlin engines, with their notoriously leaky seals, tended to spill hot oil during tight, high-speed maneuvers, leaving long, ugly black oil streaks to mar the regulation Duck Egg Blue paint on the lower surfaces of British fighters—an eyesore to neatness-minded senior officers, as well as to ground crews, who were judged as much on the appearance of the aircraft they were responsible for as on the planes’ performance.) Inexperienced pilots quickly learned not to waste their ammunition by firing long bursts, and to fire their guns for a maximum of only two seconds at the precise moment when the enemy was in the center of their sight. Conventional prewar wisdom had at first led the RAF to “harmonize” the eight guns of the Spitfire and the Hurricane so that the bullet streams from them (usually referred to as the “cone of fire”) converged at a distance of 650 yards. Dowding was well aware that the standard of marksmanship among his fighter pilots was low, and that there was little opportunity to improve it, so he deliberately chose to give them a widespread pattern, rather like that of a garden hose turned to full spray, on the assumption that at least some of their bullets would hit home. Experience in combat over France had led to realigning the guns to converge at 400 yards, but by the beginning of the Battle of Britain experienced pilots were defying official policy and getting the ground crew to readjust the alignment of the guns so that they converged at 200 yards, or even less.

The Germans made the same discovery, in their case made necessary by the low muzzle velocity and slow rate of fire of their twenty-millimeter cannon.
*
In both air forces, fighter pilots learned that “the book” was wrong, and the closer they were to their target before they opened fire, the better. “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes,” was just as good advice at 25,000 feet in a fighter as it had been to infantrymen on the ground during the American Revolutionary War. At 350 miles per hour, however, a distance of 200 yards (let alone 150 or 100 yards) is terrifyingly close, and the risk of a collision increases dramatically as the distance between the two aircraft dwindles. It needed nerves of steel, acute eyesight, and a steady hand for a pilot to get so close to his prey that he could be sure of bringing it down with a perfectly aimed two-second burst of gunfire, then brutally shove the stick forward to dive out of the way.

Pilots in training all over the world are instructed to handle the controls of an aircraft gently—“like a woman,” a cliché with which flying instructors have been admonishing their students since before 1914—but in combat, a pilot had to yank on his control stick with all his strength if he wanted to survive, and stamp his heavy, thick-soled flying boots mercilessly on the rudder pedals with his full weight as if he were kicking somebody on the floor in a life-or-death barroom brawl. In any case, hands and feet were too cold and cramped for gentle movement. The temperature at 25,000 feet was thirty degrees below zero, and the cockpits of the fighters weren’t heated—Dowding had persuaded a reluctant Air Council to specify ducting from the engine exhausts to the wings of the Hurricane and Spitfire as a last-minute modification to prevent the gun breeches from freezing,
*
but hadn’t thought it necessary to provide heat for the pilot. Even so, pilots sweated heavily as they manhandled their machines through violent maneuvers in the cold, bright sky five miles above the ground at 300 or 400 miles an hour, instruments and the horizon spinning crazily as they rolled, twisted, and dived; the sudden changes in g force making their limbs feel as light as a feather for one fraction of a second, and heavy as lead the next; the muscles of their neck aching fiercely from the need to keep looking behind for an enemy who might be transformed from a tiny, almost invisible dot in the sky—hardly more than a speck of dust on the transparent plastic of the cockpit canopy—at one moment to the blunt front profile of a Bf 109 appearing suddenly and brutally at close range in the rearview mirror, gun flashes bright from its fuselage and wings and tracers arcing straight at you.