Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain. Len Deighton

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СКАЧАТЬ Staff of the Condor Legion, who would soon command the Junkers Ju 87 Stuka units in the Battle of Britain.

      And so Galland found himself trapped into the role of ground-support air specialist. As the Bf 109s were shipped to Spain, Galland handed his command over to a young man who was to become his rival as the most famous fighter pilot in Germany – ‘Vati’ (‘Daddy’) Mölders. As Mölders began to use the monoplane fighters to win victories, Galland returned to Berlin and a job in the Air Ministry.

      In September 1937, as the Condor Legion fighter units near Santander, Spain, flew seven sorties a day against crumbling resistance, senior Luftwaffe officers paid an official visit to Britain. Milch and Udet were invited to inspect RAF Fighter Command at Hornchurch, a key airfield in the defences of London. The aircraft there were Gloster Gladiator biplanes which, like the Hawker Fury fighters also in service, were slower than the Luftwaffe’s bombers.

      There were virtually no monoplanes of any sort in RAF service at this time. The Hurricanes and Spitfires were suffering new delays caused by a modification to the nose that an engine improvement demanded. It is sometimes said that this was part of a nicely timed deception plan, for the RAF’s first Hurricanes reached 111 Squadron during the following month. Why such a provocative deception would have been desirable is not explained.

       The German Navy

      Although by tradition subordinate to the army as a fighting force, the German navy was independent of it in a way that the Luftwaffe was not. In the spring of 1940 the German navy fought a brilliant and daring campaign in Norwegian waters. This had to some extent been made possible by the navy’s B-Dienst cryptanalytic department which, by the time war began, was able to read even the most secret of the British Admiralty’s messages, having broken the codes and ciphers.

      In the spring of 1940 the German navy’s prestige was high. Its strategists demanded more steel for submarines and were preparing a surface fleet that, with Italian help, might control the Mediterranean by 1942.

      But the navy needed time to recover from the grave, but worthwhile, losses that the conquest of Norway had caused it. So the Admirals had little enthusiasm for hasty and dangerous invasion plans that would their hazard few remaining ships in the Straits of Dover.

      In Norway it had lost ten destroyers and three cruisers. The Scharnhorst and Gneisenau had been put out of action by torpedo hits. Of the three ‘pocket battleships’ with which Germany had entered the war, the Lützow had been damaged by torpedoes, the Admiral Scheer had engine trouble, and the Graf Spee had been scuttled after the naval action off Montevideo, Uruguay. The new battleships, Bismarck, Tirpitz, and the cruiser Prinz Eugen, would need until the following year to train their crews and work up to combat readiness.

      To cover the Sea-lion invasion, face the Royal Navy’s Home Fleet, motor torpedo boats, coastal batteries, submarines, minefields, and the combined air units of the Fleet Air Arm and the RAF, the Germans had only one heavy cruiser, Hipper, two light cruisers, half-a-dozen destroyers and some U-boats.

      No wonder that the German navy had sent motorised naval commandos with the panzer armies that invaded France, as part of an attempt to seize French warships. But the French sailed away. Even the incomplete battleship Jean Bart had escaped just before the Germans got to St Nazaire.

      Churchill, afraid the Germans would still be able to barter armistice terms for the warships they badly needed, ordered the Royal Navy to persuade the French crews to sail beyond German reach or scuttle. In July at Oran in French North Africa units of the French navy came under the gunfire and bombs of the Royal Navy. The blood of 1,300 French sailors spattered all over the British, for two or three generations.

      Sea power still decided the fate of nations. In the USA nothing worried Roosevelt and his advisers more than the threat to their eastern seaboard that would come if Germany controlled the Royal Navy’s ships. All American decisions were based on this fear, and Churchill tried unsuccessfully to play on it.

       Operation Sea-lion

      Undoubtedly Hitler – and most of his advisers – would have preferred a negotiated peace with Britain after France fell. Count Ciano, Mussolini’s son-in-law, wrote in his diary, ‘Hitler is now the gambler who has made a big scoop and would like to get up from the table risking nothing more.’

      So confident was Hitler that the game was over, and Britain had lost it, that he disbanded 15 divisions and put 25 divisions back to peacetime footing. But the British were gamblers too. They wanted double or nothing.

      By the middle of July, Hitler issued Directive No. 16. ‘Since England, in spite of her hopeless military situation, shows no signs of being ready to come to a compromise, I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England, and, if necessary, to carry it out.’ Many historians have italicised the final half-dozen words of that sentence, claiming that it shows he was never in earnest. A more powerful indication of the unreality of Directive No. 16 is its timetable: all preparations were to be ready by the middle of August.

      The Directive was so secret that it was sent only to the Commanders in Chief. But Göring passed it on to his Air Fleet commanders, and did so by radio. To put such a important message on the air was an unnecessary risk but the Germans had great confidence in their coding machines. At all levels of command, the Luftwaffe used the Enigma coding machine, at this time changing keys two or three times each day. The Enigma was a small battery-powered machine not unlike a portable typewriter. Rotors changed the cipher, and the receiving machine lit up each letter. This was then written down by one of the code clerks.

      When war began the British staged a big cloak-and-dagger operation to get their hands on an Enigma machine. This was hardly the intelligence triumph that recent claimants suggest, as the company making them had had virtually identical Enigmas on sale to all comers since 1923. Having left things rather late, British intelligence were now fiddling with their machine desperately trying to decode intercepted German messages. It was very much a hit-or-miss affair. (In spite of all the nonsense written about it, very few vital messages of this period were decoded, and it wasn’t until the ‘Colossus’ computer began its work in 1943 that there was a regular flow of information.) When reading about Enigma it must be remembered that armies and air fleets received orders by landline teleprinter. Radio communication was not reliable enough for the very long and very complex orders required in modern war. And the Germans – whose monitoring service was excellent – were well aware of the danger to security that radio presented. Only rarely, as with this foolish risk taken with Directive No. 16, did the Enigma intelligence pay such a dividend. It gave the British the German code word ‘Sea-lion’ and was a shot in the arm for the code-breakers. Some claim that this decoded message prompted Churchill to make his ‘fight on the beaches’ speech.

FIGURE 4. Seelöwe (Sea-lion)

      The German navy submitted an invasion plan that would have created a narrow sea-lane, protected on each side by minefields. This plan was compatible with the very small naval force still available after the Norwegian campaign. On the other hand it would call for concentration areas in the Pas de Calais that would become targets that even RAF Bomber Command would be able to hit.

      The German army envisaged landings all along the south coast. They wanted the speed and convenience of using the great ports and harbours of northern Europe, from Rotterdam and Antwerp to Le Havre and Cherbourg. This was particularly important СКАЧАТЬ