Churchill did not take the threat of invasion seriously. On 10 July he told the War Cabinet to disregard Sea-lion. ‘… it would be a most hazardous and suicidal operation,’ he said. It is in the light of this that one must see Churchill’s boldness in sending tanks to Egypt in the summer of 1940. It also explains why he backed up Beaverbrook, the new Minister of Aircraft Production, when he poached personnel and commandeered property that built more fighters but caused delays and shortages in other war industries.
At this stage of the war, any German invasion – seaborne or airborne – would have been cut to pieces. British experiments with setting the sea ablaze were fearsome, and Bomber Command were secretly training their squadrons in the use of poison gas. A cover story about spraying beaches to destroy vermin had been prepared for release should the Germans object to this form of warfare. RAF Medical Officers assigned to the poison gas units were being fortified with copious draughts of ‘captured’ champagne.
All this has encouraged some to suggest that there was no real danger of invasion in 1940, and conclude that Fighter Command did not fight a decisive battle. This is a specious argument. Had the Luftwaffe eliminated Fighter Command, its bombers could have knocked out all the other dangers one by one. Given the sort of command of the air that the Luftwaffe had achieved in Poland in only three days, German bombers, guided by radio beams, could have destroyed everything from Whitehall to the units of the Home Fleet. There would have been no insurmountable problem for invasion fleets and airborne units if the air was entirely German.
The Douhet Theories
Like many high-ranking airmen, and manufacturers of bombing aircraft, Göring subscribed to the theories of General Giulio Douhet, an Italian who believed that armies and navies were best employed as defensive forces while bomber fleets conquered the enemy. Just before he died in 1930, General Douhet wrote a futuristic story called ‘The War of 19 –’. Often quoted but seldom read, Douhet’s words had such profound effects upon the German and the RAF High Commands that they are worth examining. Written in the documentary manner of H. G. Wells, Douhet’s story described how an ‘Independent German Air Force’ fought great aerial battles against the Belgian and French air units. ‘There was no doubt that the enemy’s purpose was to make the mobilisation and concentration of the Allied armies as difficult as possible,’ said Douhet’s imaginative fiction. The Allies replied with ‘night-bombing brigades’ that attacked German cities with explosives, incendiaries and poison gas.
Douhet’s fiction continues with the Independent German Air Force dropping leaflets telling the citizens of Namur, Soissons, Châlons and Troyes that their cities are to be obliterated, and that Paris and Brussels will go the same way unless they sue for peace. The tale ends when those towns are obliterated, and the governments do sue for peace. It was the pressure that civilians under air bombardment would put upon their own government that formed the basis of Douhet’s theories. At the end of his story he writes:
Impressed by the terrible effects of the bombings and the sight of the enemy planes flying freely and unopposed in their own sky, though they cursed the barbarous methods of the enemy, they could not help feeling bitter against their own aeronautical authorities who had not taken enough protective measures against such an eventuality.
Douhet believed that any nation devoting a large part of its air force to air defence, was risking conquest by a nation that spent everything on bombing fleets. Totally disregarding all the advantages that the defence enjoys in any form of warfare, Douhet smoothly concluded that ‘No one can command his own sky if he does not command his adversary’s sky.’
The German Army Air Service’s tactics in the First World War had already proved that this was nonsense, but Douhet provided abundant quotes for ambitious bomber theorists. Such men, in Germany, France, Britain and the USA, had long since decided that in war the importance of an air force (and its commanders) would be judged by the amount of damage done to the enemy, not by skill in defence. Douhet was important because he reinforced illusions about the effectiveness of the bomber and reduced still further the influence of the fighter pilots.
Although he had been a fighter pilot, Hermann Göring found Douhet’s ideas easy to accept. He was not sympathetic to the complex technical devices which had converted air warfare from armed barnstorming to crude science. Like many of his contemporaries, he found it convenient to stick to von Richthofen’s simplistic dictum that shooting down enemy planes was ‘the only important thing’ and that ‘everything else is nonsense’. And Göring’s Luftwaffe was dedicated to the offensive, designed for close co-operation with the invading German armies. It lacked long-range bombers, but – argued its leaders – what did that matter if the invasions were so successful that you could leap-frog forward with your medium-range machines from each new lot of captured airfields. It seemed to make sense.
By 1940, some were already claiming that Göring had proved Douhet right. The capitulation of Poland and the Netherlands had followed quickly after the bombing of Warsaw and Rotterdam respectively. Even sceptics were beginning to believe that this was cause and effect. Certainly it seemed to provide Göring with a trump card. If his overall programme of air attacks against military targets in southern England failed, he had only to switch his whole attack to London itself and the British government would seek terms. Douhet said so, and history proved it.
Unfortunately for Göring there were, in Britain, some young flyers who had never read Douhet, and an elderly disbeliever named Dowding.
* The world’s first passenger-carrying airline service was operated by Zeppelin airships before the First World War.
* The Messerschmitt 109 and 110 designs were started when the company was named Bayerische Flugzeugwerke and thus were abbreviated Bf 109 and Bf 110. In July 1938 the company became Messerschmitt AG, so that the abbreviations for the later designs were Me 210, Me 410, Me 163, etc.
‘A difficult man, a self-opinionated man, a most determined man, and a man who knew, more than anybody, about all aspects of aerial warfare.’
– GEN. SIR FREDERICK PILE, GCB, DSO, MC (General Officer Commander in Chief Anti-Aircraft Command, 1939–45), of Dowding
It is difficult to imagine a man less like Hermann Göring than was Hugh Dowding. In 1914, already 32 years old, Dowding qualified as a pilot. His father heard about it and forbade him to fly because it was too dangerous. Hugh Dowding obeyed his father.
Both his parents came from the sort of upper-middle-class families that supplied senior men to the Church, India and the armed forces. His father, a kind and conscientious man, had founded a successful preparatory school in Scotland. There were four children, three boys and a girl.
As the eldest child of the school’s head-master, Hugh Dowding was expected to set an example of duty, manners, patriotism and industry. Like his father, he went to Winchester, a public school reputed to produce inscrutable intellectuals. Dowding’s subsequent career did little to change the Wykehamist reputation.
At Winchester he found that joining the Army Class was a way to avoid Greek verbs. Later Dowding said that he went into the army rather than learn Greek, but in 1899 – when he entered the Royal Military Academy – Queen Victoria’s scarlet-coated soldiers were just about to fight the Boers in South Africa. The British, after many years of widespread