Ulrich Steinhilper, flying a Bf109, was one of many pilots who, between spasms of intense fear and excitement, was struck by the beauty of the spectacle they created: over London one September day, he gloried in ‘the pure azure-blue of the sky, with the sun dimmed by the sinister smoke penetrating to extreme height; this interwoven and cross-hatched by the con trails of fighters locked in their life-and-death struggles. In among this, the burning balloons and the few parachutes in splendid and incongruous isolation.’ The Luftwaffe’s 15 September onslaught was unaccompanied by the usual feints and diversions, so that Fighter Command was in no doubt about the focus of the threat, and could throw everything into meeting it. Squadrons were scrambled to meet the raiders in pairs, intercepting as far forward as Canterbury, while the Duxford ‘big wing’ engaged over east London. That afternoon, the Luftwaffe’s second attack also met strong defending fighter forces; in all, sixty German aircraft were shot down – though the RAF claimed 185. Between 7 and 15 September, the Luftwaffe lost 175 planes, far more than German factories built.
The assault remained incoherent: the attackers had begun by seeking to destroy the RAF’s defensive capability, then, before achieving this, switched to attacking morale and industrial targets. Their relatively light bombers carried loads which hurt the British, but lacked sufficient weight to strike fatal blows against a complex modern industrial society. The RAF did not destroy the Luftwaffe, which was beyond its powers. But its pilots denied the Germans dominance of the Channel and southern England, while imposing unacceptable losses. Fighter Command’s continued existence as a fighting force sufficed to frustrate Goering’s purposes. Throughout the battle, British factories produced single-engined fighters faster than those of Germany, a vital industrial achievement. Fighter Command lost a total of 544 men – about one in five of all British pilots who flew in the battle – while 801 Bomber Command aircrew were killed and a further two hundred taken prisoner; but the Luftwaffe lost a disastrous 2,698 highly skilled airmen.
Churchill’s personal contribution was to convince his people, over the heads of some of their ruling caste, that their struggle was noble, necessary – and now also successful. The Battle of Britain exalted their spirit in a fashion that enabled them to transcend the logic of their continuing strategic weakness. ‘Our airmen have had a gruelling time, but each day that passes the more magnificently they seem to carry on the fight,’ wrote an elderly backbench Tory MP, Cuthbert Headlam, on 20 September. ‘It is odd to see how much we owe to so small a number of young men – here are millions of us doing nothing while the battle is being decided over our heads by a chosen band of warriors drawn from here, there and everywhere…They must be a superb body of men…one would like to know the difference in material strength of our RAF and the Luftwaffe: some day presumably we shall know – and then, more than ever, I expect, we shall salute the gallant men who are now doing such untold service for their country.’
Britain’s people endured the nation’s ordeal with some fortitude. Those who lived outside conurbations were spared from Luftwaffe attack, but fear of invasion was almost universal. If Churchill was committed to fight to the last, he was also brutally realistic about the implications of possible failure and defeat. Brigadier Charles Hudson attended a senior officers’ conference in York in July which was addressed by Anthony Eden as secretary for war. Eden told his audience that he had been instructed by the prime minister to take soundings about the army’s morale. He proposed to ask each general in turn whether, as Hudson recorded, ‘the troops under our command could be counted on to continue the fight in all circumstances…There was almost an audible gasp all round the table.’ Eden intensified the astonishment when he said that ‘a moment might come when the Government would have to make, at short notice, a terrible decision. That point when…it would be definitely unwise to throw in, in a futile attempt to save a hopeless situation, badly armed men against an enemy firmly lodged in England.’ He asked how troops might respond to an order to embark at a northern port for Canada, abandoning their families.
Hudson wrote: ‘In dead silence one after another was asked the question.’ The almost unanimous response was that most regular officers, NCOs and unmarried men would accept such an order. However, among conscripts and married men, ‘the very great majority…would insist either on fighting it out in England…or on [staying behind to take] their chance with their families whatever the consequences might be’. In other words, senior officers of the British Army believed that, in the face of imminent defeat, many of their men would make the same choice as had French soldiers – to give in, rather than accept the uncertainties and miseries of continuing the struggle in exile. Hudson concluded: ‘We left the conference room in a very chastened mood.’ Neither he nor most of his colleagues had contemplated the prospect that fighting on to the end might mean doing so from a foreign country, with Britain vanquished. Churchill accepted such a contingency; but in this, as in much else, Britain’s prime minister was willing to contemplate extremities of sacrifice from which many of his fellow countrymen flinched.
Hitler might have attempted an invasion of Britain if the Luftwaffe had secured control of the airspace over the Channel and southern England. As it was, however, instinctively wary of the sea and of an unnecessary strategic gamble, he took few practical steps to advance German preparations, beyond massing barges in the Channel ports. Churchill exploited the threat more effectively than did the prospective invaders, mobilising every citizen to the common purpose of resisting the enemy if they landed. Signposts and place names were removed from crossroads and stations, beaches wired, over-age and under-age men recruited to local ‘Home Guard’ units and provided with simple weapons. Churchill deliberately and even cynically sustained the spectre of invasion until 1942, fearing that if the British people were allowed to suppose the national crisis had passed, their natural lassitude would reassert itself.
Uncertainty about German intentions persisted through that summer and into autumn. Among the population at large, fear was mingled with a muddled and excited anticipation, all the keener because the prospect of fighting Germans in the fields and villages of England seemed so unreal. One aristocratic housewife injected some of her hoarded stockpile of Canadian maple syrup with rat poison, destined for German occupiers. To the dismay of her family, however, after some weeks she forgot which tins had been treated, and was obliged to deny the delicacy to her disappointed children. Wiltshire farmer Arthur Street caught something of the pantomime element in people’s behaviour, in an account of his own workers’ and neighbours’ conduct on 7 September, when a warning was transmitted to the Home Guard that German landings were imminent:
The Sedgebury Wallop platoon was on the job that night, and marched seventeen bewildered civilians to the local police station because they had forgotten their identity cards. But at 0700 the farmer in Walter Pocock woke up, and he suggested to his shepherd that he might abandon soldiering for shepherding for half an hour. ‘You’ll be wanting to see your sheep, but take your rifle and ammo,’ he advised. ‘The fold’s only ten minutes walk away, and I’ll send for you the moment anything happens.’ ‘I ’low me sheep’ll be all right eet awhile,’ reported Shep. ‘The day’s fold were pitched eesterday, an’ although young Arthur be but fifteen, I’ve a-trained ’im proper. Any road, I bain’t gwaine till the “All Clear” be sounded.’ At about 11 o’clock, when the word came through that the real or imaginary threat of invasion had passed, grumbling was rife. ‘Bain’t ’em reely comin’, sir?’ asked Tom Spicer wistfully. ‘’Fraid not, Spicer,’ replied Walter. ‘Jist wot I thought,’ growled Fred Bunce the blacksmith. ‘There bain’t no dependence to be put in they Germans.’
Those Wiltshire rustics enjoyed a luxury denied to the peoples of continental Europe: they could mock their enemies, because they were spared from the ghastly reality of meeting them: on 17 September Hitler gave the order indefinitely to postpone Operation Sealion, the Wehrmacht’s plan to invade Britain. The British people and the pilots of Fighter Command saw only a slow, gradual shift during October from massed daylight air attacks to night raids. Between 10 July and 31 October, the Germans lost 1,294 aircraft, the British 788. Hitler had abandoned hopes of occupying Britain in 1940, and also of destroying Fighter Command. He committed his air force instead to a protracted assault on Britain’s cities which was intended to break the will of the population. The Luftwaffe chose as primary targets aircraft factories, together with London’s docks and infrastructure.