World War: Battle of Britain

“What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin. . . . The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned upon us. Hitler knows he must break us in this island or lose the war. . . .

“If we fail, the whole world, including the United States, and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister and perhaps more prolonged by the lights of a perverted science.

“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’ “

To the danger and duty thus described by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, some 2,650,000 British males, variously armed and accoutred and closely deployed in an area about the size of Wyoming, last week stood up expectantly. As the French Republic went under the conqueror’s heel at Compiegne (see p. 20), they alone in all Europe were left to face what the Wilhelmstrasse last week assured them would be an attack “like nothing the world has ever seen.”

The British regular Army units to defend the homeland consisted of 1,250,000 home troops, plus 350,000 reconditioned survivors of the B. E. F., plus 50,000 newly arrived and sunburned Australians, plus a third contingent of Canadian fliers and replacements, plus 500,000 draftees in training. Some help will come from 500,000 local defense volunteers armed with shotguns and sporting rifles. To the special anti-Blitzkrieg force of old reserves, 500,000 strong, their commander General Sir Edmund Ironside said:

“If and when they [parachute troops] come down, you can shoot them, shoot them, shoot them without any reference to taking any kind of care of their future. … It is like putting antiseptic into a wound: if you do not put it on pretty quickly it rots. Similarly they will expand and push out, get down the roads, get into the houses and take a lot of getting out.”

August 15 is the date set by Adolf Hitler for Britain’s complete defeat, but no invasion by ground forces seemed likely to come until Germany’s air forces had

“softened up” the country by sustained, concentrated bombardment. Only the first phase of the Battle of Britain began last week. To meet it, 1,250,000 air-raid protection workers were at their posts. Airraid shelters which would withstand anything but 500-lb. bombs within 30 ft. were available for 12,000,000 persons. Ready also were 2,000 first-aid stations, 190,000 ambulances, 300,000 hospital beds. The public was urged to carry clean handkerchiefs or towels, be ready to see and bind up severe wounds. Lovers were warned not to park in country lanes lest they be shot as suspicious characters. Plans were rushed to evacuate 20,000 children to North America and all interned aliens, lest they be released to help the invaders. With the first wholesale loads of German bombs, a heavy new blanket of censorship fell upon the land. Until it is over, few will know the true extent of carnage in the Battle of Britain.

First Targets. Airfields of the Coastal Command, oil stores along the Thames estuary, aircraft factories, the docks of London, Harwich and Hull were preliminary targets for Nazi night raiders. Incendiary bombs were showered down after demolition charges to start fires. But the impression was that last week’s German raids were chiefly to familiarize squadron leaders with the course and to test Britain’s defenses. When unrestricted air bombing begins, with destruction raining down by hundreds of tons, last week’s raids by comparison will seem like flea bites.

Judged by the scanty number of Germans shot down, the British defenses were weak. But correspondingly few British ships were lost in heavy retaliatory raids, night after night, over the Ruhr, Bremen, Hamburg, as far east as Berlin. So upsetting to the Germans were these attacks that children were evacuated from western Germany and Air Marshal Göring was reported visiting there to calm the populace. Fact is, as frankly acknowledged by the authoritative British weekly The Aeroplane: “There is no real defense against night bombing.” At the coast and around London and other populous centres, Britain has balloon barrages which force enemy bombers above 20,000 ft. Inside these, searchlights and anti-aircraft batteries take up the job. The British have found, as have others, that sending up more than two or three fighters against a night-bomber attack is as likely to result in fighter collisions as in destruction of the enemy.

Against anti-aircraft fire, bombers can coldly figure their probability of hits and simply bring in enough planes from different angles and altitudes, to insure the desired result. Great Britain was believed by last week to have seven anti-aircraft divisions totaling some 960 guns, mostly 3.7 in., electro-automatically sighted and firing 15 shots per minute.

The quality of Britain’s airmen & equipment is higher and their numbers (according to Aircraft Production Minister Lord Beaverbrook last week) greater than ever before. But they are still woefully few compared to the Luftwaffe, which last week, by its comparative inaction, appeared to be gathering itself for its greatest lethal swoop of all. R. A. F. sought to hamper those preparations by seeking out German planes upon the ground—a technique at which the Germans excel and a cardinal practice of the U. S. Air Corps’ doctrine: “Find ’em, fix ’em and fight ’em.” At Rouen, Merville and Schiphol (Amsterdam), concentrations of German aircraft were destroyed, including troop-carrying groups. At Borkum, Brunsbiittel and Norderney, the Fleet Air Arm joined in trying to disperse the tornado that is coming Britain’s way.

Sir Hugh Elles, Britain’s civil defense chief, exhorted his countrymen: “As sure as God made little apples, we are going to get a lot more bombing. . . . It’s the noise that frightens. . . . Don’t be frightened. Be angry. It’s a good cure.” And Alfred Duff Cooper, the propaganda chief, quoted on the radio 42 lines of Poet Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Armada, to remind the British how, with bonfires instead of blackout, they reacted to invasion once before.