WESTERN THEATRE: Assault in the Air

(See Cover) There has never before been an air battle such as was fought last week in the sky over Britain. First a wave of German bombers would come over, escorted by more than their own number of fighters, ranged in tiers above them to engage as many British fighters as possible before succeeding bomber waves arrived. The British fighters on “standing patrol” along the Channel met them on two levels, one force to shoot down bombers, one to fight fighters. Often, as the British engaged the Germans, a second and third wave of bombers appeared and more British fighters would rise to attack them. Hitler had set himself to beat Britain to its knees.

Once the enormous onslaught was well under way, the Germans apologized for its delay. They explained they had had to prepare hundreds of fighting air bases in newly occupied territory, sending in hundreds of thousands of the Labor Corps for this purpose. They had had to move up vast quantities of flying fuel and lubricants, mountains of bombs, of machine-gun and cannon ammunition, parachutes, spare parts. They had had to build barracks, hangars, shops, anti-aircraft and other gun emplacements, including emplacements on the Channel for heavy artillery from the Maginot Line. U. S. correspondents who toured the Luftwaffe’s fighting-base areas last week saw few signs of a land army poised to invade Great Britain. It might have been concealed in areas where they were not taken. It might even have been concentrated in Norway to strike Britain from the northeast while the air assault came from the southeast.

But on the French Coast U. S. correspondents did see prodigious preparation and equipment for an air war the like of which was never launched before. Diligent bomb harassment by the Royal Air Force delayed this preparation, but early in August it was complete and the Luftwaffe’s master, Marshal Erhard Milch, sent word through his chief, Reich Marshal Hermann Göring, to the Führer that the Luftwaffe was as ready as it would be in 1940.

The German mass air attacks, as distinct from sporadic raids, showed a definite pattern. First they went after the naval bases and coastal air defenses—Portland, Plymouth, Dover, Southampton. Next they pressed inland looking for R. A. F. bases and aircraft factories. On Aug. 15, eleven bombers penetrated fighter and anti-aircraft defenses and reached Croydon, Britain’s greatest airport, ten miles from London’s heart. The British said all the raiders were destroyed, but so were hangars and shops at Croydon and many a neighboring house. On Aug. 16 they stepped up their pace to 2,500 planes (counting repeaters) and announced a “special” armada of some 750 planes, steered by crack pilots, to make the first actual attempt on great sprawling London. This armada split, half aiming at the London docks and Woolwich Arsenal on the east, the other half aiming at munitions stores on the city’s southwestern edge. They hit the suburbs of Tilbury, North-fleet, Enfield, Barking, Purfleet, killed and maimed an unannounced number of civilians, did small military damage. Captive balloons and a terrific anti-aircraft barrage walled them away from London’s heart. German observers in reconnaissance planes gave the world a running radio ac count of this exploit. They exaggerated enormously. Excerpts:

“Large fires have broken out on either side of the Thames. . . . Everywhere smoke is arising. . . . The wind is driving a black veil across the slums of London’s East End. . . . The German planes have dropped their bombs with the utmost precision. Like gnats over a swamp — so the fighters dance over the grey London fog. Everywhere the eye looks it sees Hurricanes and Spitfires. And, in between, the sharp contours of the Messerschmitts in chase.”

Simultaneously with this elaborately staged first attack on London, the Luftwaffe launched mass attacks on Birmingham and Rochester, in which their fast-climbing, heavily armed bomber, the Dormer 215, played an important part. On Aug. 18 they flew up the Thames Estuary and mass-attacked London again. One vital thing in danger was the city’s water supply. Thus, day after day, without intermission, except for an occasional half day of bad weather, the world’s No. 1 air force went to the attack.

The Luftwaffe. The thinking and planning and training that went into the German Air Force began a dozen years ago, but its physical entities—the men and machines—were assembled beginning in 1935. The Luftwaffe is only five years old. Its history was embodied in the activities of two men—Hermann Wilhelm Göring and his right hand, Erhard Milch. Their air force can be credited almost entirely to the execution by Milch of a program that was conceived by Göring and encouraged by Hitler long before they gained political control of Germany.

Göring met Milch in the early days of the Nazi Party. Göring had flown in the late Baron von Richthofen’s famed World War I “circus.” Milch was a former artillery officer who had become managing director of Deutsche Lufthansa, the big State-subsidized air combine. Short and chubby, bursting with energy and ability, Milch as a personality might have been taken for an able and energetic U. S. businessman. He tackled a terrific problem. Germany was a poverty-stricken nation. She was then forbidden a military air force. When the Nazis got in power (1933), Air Minister Göring made Milch Secretary of Air Traffic. Milch called War Ace Ernst Udet away from the cinema industry and together they built a shadow Luftwaffe. Besides an Air Sport League they recruited the Flying Hitler Youth, 100,000 strong, and an Air Defense League of 11,000,000 (air-raid protection corps, mechanics and maintenance men). They put aviation into the elementary-school curriculum. They taught young Germany to fly gliders. By 1935, when Hitler was ready to build up his Luftwaffe openly, they had man power in training, factories planned, designs developed. These they standardized and limited to a few models for mass production by four main companies—Junkers, Dornier, Heinkel, Bayrische Flugzeugwerke (Messerschmitt). Standardization and mass production are Erhard Milch’s passions, right down to his fliers’ toothbrushes. The Junkers 87 dive bomber is his special pet. Udet got the idea for it from the U. S. Navy.

Not all Milch’s military colleagues like him. He is more a business go-getter than a military man of the German pattern. Instead of sternness he has a bland, baby-faced smoothness. Some super-Nazis still view with suspicion his birth, despite his mother’s affidavit that he was illegitimate. Her husband, who gave the child his name, was a Jew. But Hitler likes and trusts him highly, gave him a gold Nazi Party pin (great favor).

When Erhard Milch was made a Marshal last month, absent from the ceremonies were two of his closest colleagues, who were made Marshals also. These were Albert Kesselring and Hugo Sperrle. They were all busy in the newly occupied areas, getting ready their air fleets for the grand attack on Great Britain. Like Milch, Kesselring was an artillery officer in the last war, switching to the air in 1933. He helped plan the Poland offensive and directed Air Fleet No. 1 in it. A tall, well-built, happy-go-lucky Bavarian, he is probably the Luftwaffe’s most popular top-ranking officer.

Marshal Sperrle is the Prussian type—massive, heavy-featured, monocled. He flew in World War I, was shot down and severely wounded. He led the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War, where hundreds of Germany’s best pilots received their battle training in relays.

Another central figure in the Luftwaffe’s climax performance is General Hans Jeschonnek, who became chief of the Air General Staff in 1937 after the death (in a crash) of Marshal Milch’s aide and crony, Colonel General Walter Wever.

Smashing the British was these men’s job, and their aerial Trafalgar marked an epoch in military history. The argument whether air fleets can conquer sea fleets has not been settled and may never be. But last week in the Battle of Britain, neither Germans nor Britons fooled themselves: mastery of the air was mastery of the sea.

If the Nazis gained mastery of the air they could demolish the bases from which the British Fleet operates in the Channel and the North Sea; they could make those narrow seas untenable for the trawlers which lay and sweep mines; they could sink British destroyers (whose vulnerability has already been proved) which tried to counterattack with their own torpedo boats; they could keep British convoys out of the Channel; they could destroy the western port facilities through which Britain receives the goods necessary to her life and defense. Under these conditions the British Fleet might remain unconquered, the British merchant marine might remain the greatest in the world, but Hitler would be master of the seas.

Conversely, if the British could gain mastery of the air, history would turn backward: the Royal Navy could operate with reasonable impunity close to German-held shores, Britain’s ancient mastery of the seas would become a hard fact once more and an invasion of Britain would become fantastic.

Such were the stakes for which the Luftwaffe played last week, beside such other major stakes as the destruction of war industries and the cracking of civilian morale.

British Chances. The impression that the entire air war was being fought over Britain was carefully cultivated by the Germans, who consistently pooh-poohed the damage done by British bombers to German industry, communications, supply. Because most of their objectives were too distant, and because their power-driven revolving rear turrets gave them self-protection, Britain’s bombers worked without fighter escort and mostly by night, using parachute flares to light their targets. One of their heaviest raids last week was on one of Germany’s biggest synthetic oil works, at Leuna, near Leipzig. Dropping down through heavy anti-aircraft fire, one pilot had the satisfaction of seeing one of the factory’s high smokestacks collapse. Another night, R. A. F. visited the Junkers aircraft plant at Dessau, in central Germany. A third night it was a big aluminum plant near the Swiss border, the Boulogne harbor works, 26 air-war bases. And thrice squadrons of big Blenheims crossed the Alps to bomb the Fiat plant in Turin, the Caproni aircraft plant in Milan.

Watchers on the British headlands frequently could hear air-raid sirens going in France when the R. A. F. dashed over there to smite the Luftwaffe’s fighting bases, and could see the sheet-lightning flash of bombs and resultant billows of smoke. This was heartening to Britons but not conclusive. If the Germans gained mastery of the air over Britain, British bombing raids would soon cease. But if the British were being beaten over Britain they did not know it. London news vendors chalked up the daily figures of planes shot down as if they were football scores:

ONLY ANOTHER 39 DOWN BUT

EXTRA TIME BEING PLAYED—

61 AFTER EXTRA TIME

Punch carried two cracks which epitomized the spirit of sore-beset Britain: A factory worker said, “You can’t even talk to Joe since he’s had his house bombed.” And a husband said: “Elsie, why don’t you put down that book and attend to the air raid?”

According to official British figures the number of planes downed in the Battle of Britain through last week were:

German British

Aug. 11 66 26

” 12 62 16

” 13 78 25

” 14 31 4

” 15 180 34

” 16 75 15

” 18 144 16

” 19 4 0

Total 640 136

The Nazis admitted a total of only 164 German, claimed 661 British. The British figures were to be taken with reservations, especially since they included no tally of British planes destroyed on the ground, but the Nazi claims apparently contained more military mendacity. U. S. correspondents in Britain were certain that the British fighters were shooting down around four-to-one, and even suggested the British underestimated Nazi losses,* although on Aug. 15 the Air Ministry agreed to take any pilot’s word that a German plane was shot down if he saw it crash (previously another witness was required). And U. S. correspondents testified to the honesty of British assertions that, in the first ten days of mass attack, the damage to military objectives was amazingly slight. Explanation seemed to be that the British defenses were good enough, if not to keep the Nazis from breaking through, at least to rattle their aim. In the first Croydon raid, for example, though the bombers dived to 300 feet, many of their missiles missed the huge airport entirely, landing among workers’ houses and a perfume factory near by.

After all, to build his air force Marshal Milch had to make bricks without straw. His planes were built fast and cheap. In his need for thousands of men in the air, his pilots were trained hastily.

Britons got their hopes up. Figuring that about 1,800 planes (not counting repeaters) came over on the days of the biggest raids, they estimated Nazi losses at 10% to 15%. To the Nazis the loss of pilots might hurt more than the loss of planes and since most of the fights took place over England or close to the coast, the Nazis downed were made prisoners whereas British pilots who floated down safely could fight again.

War of Attrition. That German losses were heavy was hinted by a general lack of German jubilance even after the fanfared attack on London. But the confidence of those in Britain who expected to be bombed till their teeth chattered and found it was not so bad as predicted, did not alter the fact that the British situation was grim by any standard.

Neutral military experts believed that only three of the Lujtwaje’s four air fleets were actively engaged last week, drawing replacements from the fourth. They gave Germany a total of 6,500 first-line bombers and 6,000 first-line fighters, to 3,000 bombers and 3,600 fighters for Britain. They estimated that 11,000 German pilots were pitted against 7,200 British. They believed the Germans were fighting from five main bases: Ostend, Calais, Cherbourg, St. Brieuc and Stavanger (Norway), with reserves and repair shops centred around Paris. On paper the outcome looked inevitable, only a matter of time.

The Luftwaffe’s fighting bases for the British offensive were close enough to the targets so that the planes engaged could perform two or three missions each day. The German pilots received a full day’s rest for each day’s flying but the British, hurling up to 1,200 fighters into action, got no rest days and averaged at least two missions daily, sometimes flying six. The Germans undoubtedly calculated that men could not stand such a pace forever. Perhaps the Germans remembered Finland, where the Finns outfought the Russians for three months and were overpowered in the fourth.

Last week’s assault by air on Britain was a battle of attrition. It was obvious that the Germans counted on wearing down the Royal Air Force bit by bit, and bit by bit dissecting the factories and communications on which Britain depends. R. A. F.’s plane losses might be small as compared with the German losses, the damage done on any one day by German bombs might be inconsequential. But cumulatively over a period of days or weeks it might be decisive.

Battles of attrition can end as the Finnish war ended, with the defenders engulfed, or they can end as the Battle of Verdun ended, with the attackers exhausted. The result of the air assault on Britain will become apparent: 1) if the Germans gain mastery of the air, bomb Britain to bits and follow up by a quick and easy invasion; 2) if the Germans risk a difficult attempt at invasion because they are balked in the air; 3) if the German air armada, repelled, calls it quits for 1940, and returns to intermittent raids and attacks on British shipping. This week the tale of attrition was steadily being told.

*Typical excerpt from one of several similar reports cabled by TIME’S correspondents in Britain last week: “I’ve never been so sure of anything as I am of the overwhelming trimming the Nazis have been taking in the battle against Britain. … I believe the superiority of British pilots is even more marked than the superiority of the planes.”