At the Brink of Barbarism
O'NEILL, WILLIAM L.
At the Brink of Barbarism With Wings Like Eagles: A History of the Battle of Britain By Michael Korda HarperCollins. 310 pp. $25.95. Reviewed by William L. O’Neill Professor emeritus of...
...Germany was not on the verge of destroying Fighter Command...
...Rather than sending out only the exact number of aircraft needed to meet each German attack in accordance with the plan Dowding had devised, Leigh-Mallory wanted to mass his fighters for gigantic sweeps...
...Instead of doing his job, Leigh-Mallory devised a "Big Wing" theory...
...Furthermore, even in the worstcase scenario the RAF would have played an important role...
...German troops who did reach the shore would have faced 16 British divisions, newly rearmed since the Dunkirk evacuation and deployed behind strong beach defenses and minefields...
...He insisted too, that Fighter Command's main operations center be buried underground in reinforced concrete structures, and that telephone lines running from it to a far-flung network of radar stations, local headquarters and fighter bases be laid underground protected by concrete as well...
...Luckily, just when it seemed 11 Group was on the ropes Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to attack London...
...Among its numerous mistakes, the Luftwaffe never pressed home attacks against the all-important radar stations...
...That enabled British controllers to assign exactly the right number of fighters to exactly where they were most needed...
...It did come close to that, not only because of furious Luftwaffe attacks but because of the truly astounding lack of support 11 Group received from 12 Group, the RAF's Air Staff and the Air Ministry...
...Given this breather, 11 Group restored its strength and together with 12 Group, for a change, inflicted so much damage on the Luftwaffe’ s concentrated formations that Hitler put an end to daylight bombing operations over England and canceled Operation Sea Lion, the proposed invasion...
...Actually, the United Kingdom was much better defended than is usually admitted...
...All three were cesspools of envy, ambition, hostility, and ingratitude, according to Korda...
...On June 4, 1940, he declared: “we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills...
...BUT THE STORY, accepted by Korda, has to be wrong...
...In his memoirs Churchill wrote that it was the British people who had the lion’s heart...
...The policy paid huge dividends during the Battle of Britain...
...In other words, Britain would fight to the end and beyond...
...The debt the free world owes is therefore not only to, or even mostly to, Fighter Command, for all its excellence, but to Winston Churchill and the whole British people for refusing Hitler’s olive branch and vowing to fight on alone for as long as it took the United States to wake up...
...The British made this decision collectively in the darkest days of the War...
...German bombers had more range, but in daylight without fighter escorts they were helpless against the RAF's fast, heavily armed Hurricanes and Spitfires...
...They certainly would have destroyed Hitler’s ill-equipped and weakly supported invasion force...
...we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the old...
...Although he provided inspiring leadership, Churchill did not try to misrepresent the desperate position the British found themselves in...
...After hesitant and ill-conceived attacks, in mid-August the Luftwaffe began concentrating on RAF bases and facilities in the small slice of southeast England where its bombers could receive fighter protection...
...By the time his aircraft formed up in their big wings the Luftwaffe had already attacked 11 Group’s bases...
...Though this does not do justice to his own role, he had it basically right...
...Once the Battle of Britain began, 12 Group's Air Vice Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory and his pilots quickly came to resent Dowding for assigning them a supporting role...
...Dowding argued and events proved him correct, that RAF fighters could not save France but might be required to save Britain...
...Ultimately Britain was saved from defeat and occupation largely because of Hitler’s bad decisions, or so the story goes...
...If Britain fell, freedom would disappear from Europe and in time probably everywhere else owing to American blindness and complacency...
...What is well-known yet almost always glossed over is that Fighter Command had four groups in Britain, each assigned a separate region to defend...
...While Air Vice Marshal Keith Park's 11 Group intercepted German aircraft, 12 Group was supposed to protect Park's airfields, a demeaning task in Leigh-Mallory's eyes that deprived his pilots of all the glory...
...Notwithstanding the bravery of the few, it was the many who saved the world...
...But with all due respect to Churchill, and to the brave men and women of Fighter Command including the ground crews, radar operators, and others who persevered despite heavy bombing attacks on their installations, the glamorous traditional account omits a great deal...
...Indeed, the struggle between Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF) and Germany’s Luftwaffe for supremacy over the English Channel and the beaches the Wehrmacht would have to attack to invade England is the stuff of legends...
...Owing to their puny fuel tanks, German fighters could operate over England for only about 3 0 minutes, including time spent flying to and from targets once they crossed the coast...
...Reviewed by William L. O’Neill Professor emeritus of history, Rutgers...
...He antagonized Churchill during the Battle of France by resisting with all his might, and not always successfully, Churchill's demands that more fighters be sent to the Continent...
...A somewhat weakened Fighter Command would still have been in business, along with the Royal Navy and the unjustly maligned British Army...
...the defeat in France and arrival home weaponless had demoralized it...
...And it would have come under attack from the Royal Navy, which had mustered a large number of destroyers and light cruisers...
...But in defense of their own soil behind prepared positions British troops would surely have fought better than historians suppose...
...The worst almost transpired...
...Dowding, who was the founder of Fighter Command championed the allmetal monoplane fighter at a time when everyone else believed "the bomber would always get through," regardless of defensive measures...
...Even so, by repeatedly bombing air bases at the end of August Germany was close to forcing Fighter Command's 11 Group to relocate north of London...
...If 11 Group had to redeploy its fighters, there were sufficient places west and particularly north of London to keep them in action, although the greater distances would have reduced the number of sorties (or flights by each pilot) in a given day...
...he only supplied the roar...
...The other three were smaller than 11 Group, which bore the brunt of the battle, but collectively they possessed hundreds of fighters and numerous air stations...
...He is not alone in arguing that Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding's peers and superiors, including Churchill, hated him to the point of undermining Britain's defense...
...In most books the Army is given little respect...
...It was like Thermopylae, except bigger...
...They put the best possible face on their isolation by saying “at least we don’t have any more allies to let us down...
...In With Wings Like Eagles Michael Korda, a prolific and accomplished writer, tells the story with great verve and enthusiasm, aided by his own service in the RAF some 10 years after the battle...
...Nevertheless, the aloof, relentless Dowding angered the bomber-oriented air establishment...
...When he did so the flaw became obvious...
...author, “A Democracy at War: American’s Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II” THAT THE Battle of Britain (during August and September 1940) remains a source of inexhaustible interest is clear from the many books still written about it...
...Everything seemed at stake, not only the survival of Great Britain but of freedom itself: France had already fallen to Hitler’s legions, the United States was still neutral, and the British had barely been able to evacuate their Army from the Continent, minus its weapons and equipment...
...Thus the roughly 1,000 pilots of the RAF’s Fighter Command were all that stood between civilization and barbarism...
...He was almost always right, an infuriating quality to be sure...
...Speaking of the RAF's fighter pilots on August 20, 1940, he said: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few...
...He also championed radar stations in the face of great skepticism that they would work, and developed the superb control system that funneled information derived from radar, aircraft observers, and other sources to commanders in the field, enabling them to accurately vector their fighters...
...This traditional version of the Battle of Britain was immortalized by Winston Churchill...
...This force could have crossed only during perfect weather conditions, a rarity on the English Channel...
...it was on the verge of forcing 11 Group to redeploy...
...Germany's invasion fleet consisted largely of barges and tugboats, for it had virtually no warships left...
...Leigh-Mallory got away with disobeying Dowding’s orders because the Air Ministry supported him against his superior, a breathtaking display of malice considering the stakes...
Vol. 91 • November 2008 • No. 6
