bomber, complete with sinister black crosses and a large swastika, circling the airfield and descending lower with each circuit. We landed without permission. They were, we gathered, angry. But the men on the petrol bowser were keen to do business and as soon as they understood our need for fuel they were climbing over the wings with nozzle in hand. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. Whatever kind of cap device the Luftwaffe had on their petrol tanks it did not reconcile readily with Belgian nozzles. But eventually the petrol flowed and one of the tanks was filled. I won’t describe the scene that followed as the Belgian bowser men demanded cash payment. Our pilot shrugged, the American said he had no money, and when it seemed that we were all going to be interned or imprisoned or merely beat about the head, I offered them my American Express card. In the absence of any alternative, and the petrol already aboard, they took it. It was only after we were back in the air that the American discovered that we had never been short of petrol. There was a switch above the pilot’s head which, when one tank was empty, transferred fuel to the other tank.
This unscheduled landing had delayed our arrival at Siegen by over two hours but I was amazed to see at least a thousand spectators still waiting there in the drizzling rain to greet us. As we stepped from the bomber one-time ‘General of Fighters’ Adolf Galland, the most famous of all German ace pilots, together with a group of veteran flyers, greeted us with gratitude; as if we were personally donating the Heinkel to them.
While we warmed up over coffee with the flyers in a tiny airport restaurant Galland said to me, ‘Is there anything we can do for you?’
It was a once-in-a-lifetime offer. I said, ‘I am trying to find a night-fighter veteran who flew Junkers Ju 88s against the RAF night bombers.’
‘Easy,’ said Galland and within thirty minutes I was in a light plane heading to Düsseldorf and an evening talking with ‘Fips’ Radusch, a famous Luftwaffe night-fighter ace.
I was lucky over the years to meet and correspond with combatants of all ranks on both sides of the war. As I talked to these men – aided immensely by my wife Ysabele’s linguistic skills, which enabled me to pass through doors that would otherwise have remained shut – it became clear even then that the egos of the victors had started to obscure historical fact. It was time to untwist the record. I was determined to write a history book unlike all the history books I had read – and I had read many – a book that dealt more in facts than in opinions.
So you will see I have given prime importance to the men and their machines. For example, it was Britain’s remarkable good fortune that Rolls-Royce had produced the Merlin engine. Fitted into Supermarine’s Spitfire airframe it became a weapon that was in every way the equal of the Messerschmitt Bf 109 that opposed it. The performance of the two aircraft was remarkably similar; range, horsepower, speed, ceiling and manœuverability. But while the Daimler Benz engine in the Messerschmitt was of 33.93-litres the superb Merlin had a capacity of only 26 litres. There were many elements at play in the Battle, but the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine was an incomparable masterpiece of engineering and a war-winner. Fitted into the Hawker Hurricane – a more primitive airframe but far more numerous in the Battle – it made a formidable fighter. Squadron fitters and riggers could often mend shot-up Hurricane airframes without sending them to the few overworked specialists who repaired the Spitfires. But there were other factors that can’t be ignored. In the crucial month of June 1940, while the British factories produced 446 fighters, the Messerschmitt factory at Augsburg produced 140.
It was while comparing this Daimler-Benz engine with the Rolls-Royce Merlin that I became interested in aero-engines and saw for the first time their prime importance in the entire history of aviation. From the Wright brothers right up to the present day, airframe designers have to wait upon engine manufacturers before completing their work on the drawing boards. I found it compelling from many points of view. The personal vendettas, stupidity, treachery and corruption in the contracts, the determination of governments and businessmen to distort progress made for a fascinating social history as well as a military one. It was a neglected aspect of aviation and I embarked upon a history of aero-engines; perhaps one day I will publish it.
Meanwhile, here is the story of the Battle of Britain – our Trafalgar – and I have told it with an overriding determination to stick to the truth. If it shatters some myths and flag-waving nonsense it is only to reveal a more inspiring truth of which we can be proud and grateful.
Len Deighton, 2013
Bismarck once asked Count Helmuth von Moltke whether he could guarantee victory in the coming war against Austria. Moltke replied, ‘Nothing is certain in war.’ War is indeed full of surprises and the Second World War had many, from the German breakthrough at Sedan in May 1940 to the dropping of the two American bombs on Japanese towns in August 1945. No action, however, was as surprising and unexpected as the aerial combats between the Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe in the summer of 1940. Imaginative novelists, and particularly H. G. Wells, had described future engagements between vast armadas of the air. Few of those who determined air strategy in practice believed that such forecasts had any reality.
The key to the story is that the air commanders before the Second World War had very little previous experience to draw on. The materials and methods of war are of course constantly changing. Generals acquire rifles, machine guns and tanks. Admirals acquire bigger battleships and submarines. But they have some idea from earlier wars of the problems that are likely to face them. The air commanders had no such resource. The war in the air of the First World War had been largely a matter of dog-fights between individual aircraft. The few bombing raids had caused terror and little effective damage. Those who determined air strategy after the war had to proceed by dogma alone, a dogma that was little more than guesswork.
The dogma was simple: ‘The bomber will always get through.’ General Giulio Douhet said this in Italy; Billy Mitchell said it in the United States. Both were detached theorists. It was more important that Lord Trenchard said it in England, for Trenchard was Chief of Air Staff for ten years, from 1919 to 1929. Trenchard was determined to have an independent air force, and the only way for it to be more than an auxiliary of the army and navy was to have a strategy of its own. This strategy was independent bombing. The air commanders practised this strategy successfully. The British bombed defenceless villages in Iraq; the Italians bombed defenceless villages in Abyssinia; the Germans bombed defenceless villages in Spain; the Japanese bombed defenceless cities in China.
But was there no defence? The air chiefs answered unanimously: none. The only answer was to possess an even stronger bomber force than the enemy with which to destroy his bases and his industrial resources. The British, thanks to Trenchard, accepted this doctrine wholeheartedly. They calculated the strength of the largest air force in Europe and made this their yardstick, just as British Admirals had made the German navy their yardstick before the First World War. In the early days the French air force provided the yardstick, though it is difficult to believe that there was ever a serious chance of a war between France and Great Britain. In the 1930s the German Luftwaffe became the obvious rival. The British Air Staff clamoured for more bombers and, when the RAF slipped behind, declared that Great Britain was in imminent danger. Everything, it seemed, turned on the bomber race.
In December 1937 there was a revolution in British air policy. It was sensational though little regarded. The year before, Sir Thomas Inskip had been made Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence. He was an unimpressive figure whose appointment had been dismissed as the most surprising since Caligula made his horse a consul. But Inskip had a clear lawyer’s mind. He recognised that the British were losing the bomber race with Germany. Then he proceeded to the striking conclusion that it was not necessary for them to win it. For while the Germans aimed at a short war and therefore wanted a knock-out blow, the British merely needed to survive until blockade and perhaps the aid of allies brought victory in a long war. In his own words, ‘The role of our Air Force is not an early knock-out blow … but to prevent the Germans from knocking us out.’