Date: 2024-05-18 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00016654 | |||||||||
History: WWII | |||||||||
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Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess | |||||||||
| Why didn’t the Luffwaffe continue targeting British airfields during the Battle of Britain, when doing so would have crippled the Royal Air Force (which was on its last legs)? How very strange, a non-science question I can answer with a fair degree of confidence. Other answers have already talked about the RAF being far from “on its last legs”, some supporting this with numbers. I’d just like to add that every measurable quantity I’ve ever read from a solid source shows the RAF at least holding ground with the number of operational aircraft available to the Luftwaffe slowly shrinking. I’ll give referenced evidence for this at the end of the answer for those who are interested. The reason I’m writing this answer is that I ran into a quotation from a researched book that speaks so directly to this question that I think it needs posting. The book in question is Alfred Price’s The Hardest Day, and a look at the bibliography and references shows that Price gets a lot of his key facts directly from the RAF and Luftwaffe documents of the time. Here is Price talking about the difficulties of destroying airfields by air attack alone in the Battle of Britain. Nor were attacks on the airfields particularly effective, even when they did hit those used by Fighter Command. During the action on 18 August the Luftwaffe mounted heavy attacks on two major Fighter Command airfields, Kenley and Biggin Hill. Kenley was put out of action for two hours; Biggin Hill was not out of action that day or any other, in spite of repeated attacks. Against airfields the Luftwaffe would employ forces of about fifty twin-engine bombers, carrying between 60 and 85 tons of bombs. In fact, as has been borne out during numerous later conflicts, many hundreds of tons of bombs are needed and attacks have to be repeated at frequent intervals, if airfields are to be kept out of action. It was a relatively simple matter to fill bomb craters and landing grounds with rubble and roll them flat; once this had been done the fighters could operate again. At fighter airfields most of the buildings were desirable rather than essential; if barracks and messes were hit, the men and women could be billeted in the surrounding towns and villages; if the hangars and workshops were hit engineering work could take place in the open in the blast pens (it was, after all, high summer). And even if , as a result of repeated heavy attacks, some of the fighter airfields in south-eastern England had to be abandoned there were literally scores of actual or potential landing grounds that could be used in their place. Almost any firm, flat piece of ground 700 yards long and 100 yards wide could have been used to operate Spitfires or Hurricanes. So the most the Luftwaffe could have achieved by a protracted offensive against Fighter Command airfields was to force the British squadrons to operate off improvised field landing grounds - which was exactly what a large part of the Luftwaffe was doing in France. (The Hardest Day, page 166) Price also talks about the difficulties of attacking British command and control. Nor did the radar stations or the system of fighter control represent an easy target for the Luftwaffe to attack. In each case the radar stations were small, pin-point targets, virtually impossible to hit except by dive-bombers or low-flying attackers; and during the action on 18 August both of the latter were shown to be vulnerable to fighter and gun defences. Not only were the radar stations difficult to hit, but when they were damaged equipment could be replaced quickly; rarely were stations out of action for more than a couple of days. Moreover, Fighter Command possessed a reserve of mobile radar sets which could be erected near stations knocked out, to fill gaps in the radar chain. Of the fighter control rooms, those at the Group Headquarters were deep underground and invulnerable. Some of the Sector operations buildings, like that at Tangmere, were in concrete bunkers; others, like those at Kenley or Biggin Hill, were in unhardened brick buildings. But in either case they were small pin-point targets, difficult to hit even if the Germans had known where they were - and they did not. Cutting the land lines which linked the various operations rooms with the fighter squadrons, the radar stations and the Observer Corps posts could and did slow the operation of the defences. But the buried cables were invisible from the air; when Sector operations buildings or land lines were damaged by bombing it was by stray bombs intended for other, more conspicuous targets. (The Hardest Day, pages 166 - 167) EDIT 28/4/2019 My thanks to Peter Long, who dug up a solid source that describes an attack that did knock out an important element of British command and control. At about 6pm on the 31st August the Luftwaffe put the sector control room at Biggin Hill out of action until the following morning. However, the British system was robust enough to cover for the temporary loss of the sector control room, thus reinforcing the central point being made. For more details on this attack see Peter’s comment. END EDIT Price also addresses the difficulties the German’s had in cutting off the British supply of replacement aircraft. Finally, as a means of reducing Fighter Command, the Luftwaffe could attack the factories which produced the British fighters. Production of the most important types was concentrated at eight centres: at Woolston, Itchen and Eastleigh near Southampton, and Castle Bromwich near Birmingham, producing Spitfires; and at Langley, Brooklands and Kingston in Surrey, and Brockworth near Gloucester, producing Hurricanes. Merlin engines for the two fighter types were built at the Rolls-Royce factories at Derby, Crewe and Glasgow. Of these plants, however, only the Supermarine factories round Southampton and the Hawker factories in Surrey were within range of the Messerschmitt 109 [the only first-rate single-engine German fighter]; and only large-scale escorted attacks, mounted by day, were accurate and powerful enough to destroy such targets without the raiders suffering sever losses. Later in the Battle of Britain, on 26 September, the Spitfire factories at Woolston and Itchen were hit and seriously damaged by the Luftwaffe during a heavy attack by day. Yet although the buildings were seriously damaged, few of the all-important machine tools and jigs inside suffered. Afterwards the production of components continued, in many cases under canvas, until the production facilities could be dispersed to thirty-five smaller factories located within a radius of 45 miles of Southampton; the move took six weeks to complete. Because many of the components were also built by sub-contractors, the loss in long-term output was remarkably small; probably it was no more than thirty aircraft, or less than a week’s production. Once production had been dispersed between a large number of small factories it became almost invulnerable to air attack (the same pattern would be repeated in Germany four years later, when aircraft production reached its highest levels at a time when the Allied air forces were mounting powerful attacks on the factories). The destruction of aircraft production facilities, though easy to state in theory, proved to be extremely difficult in practice. (The Hardest Day, page 167) As these quotations show the Lufwaffe faced formidable difficulties in destroying British airfields, command and control and aircraft production. They had used the tactic of surprise attacks on airfields to destroy planes on the ground during their conquest of France, and would successfully do so again during their invasion of Russia. However the superb British command and control system (designed by Dowding) generally made this impractical for the Battle of Britain, Fighter Command inevitably had its planes in the air by the time the attackers arrived. A classic example of this is the attack by the 9th Staffel of Bomber Geschwader 76 on the 18th of August. The 9 Dorniers managed to fly low enough to avoid detection by British radar but were spotted by some Royal Navy patrol boats and then tracked by the Observer Corp as they passed over land. The result was that the staffel had lost the element of surprise for their attack on Kenley airfield, no British planes were on the ground and the Germans met heavy anti-aircraft fire and then an attack by the Hurricanes of No.111 squadron. The Germans dropped their bombs and returned home but thanks to their reception at Kenley and attacks on the returning (and often damaged) aircraft they paid a heavy price, only 5 of the 9 aircraft made it back to base and all of these were damaged, 2 having had at least one crewmember killed or fatally wounded. (Description and statistics of the Kenley raid from The Hardest Day, various pages) So the bottom line seems to have been that Luftwaffe’s only hope for victory was to destroy British fighters in the air faster than they could be replaced. The Germans certainly had some success in shooting down British fighters, particularly with the formidable Messerschmitt 109, but it wasn’t enough. Here’s historian Max Hastings summarising some relevant figures: Between 8 and 23 August, the RAF lost 204 aircraft, but during that month 476 new fighters were built, and many more repaired. The Luftwaffe lost 397, of which 181 were fighters, while only 313 Bf109s and Bf110s were produced by German factories. Fighter Command lost 104 pilots killed in the middle fortnight of August, against 623 Luftwaffe aircrew dead or captured. (All Hell Let Loose, page 87) Of course the Germans didn’t give up immediately, in fact they pressed on for a while. The reason they did so is summarised by Hastings in the quotation below Both air forces wildly overestimated the damage they inflicted on each other, but the Germans’ intelligence failure was more serious, because it sustained their delusion that they were winning. Fighter Command’s stations were targeted by forty Luftwaffe raids during August and early September, yet only two - Manston and Lympne on the Kent coast - were put out of action for more than a few hours, and the radar receivers were largely spared from attention. By late August the Luftwaffe believed Fighter Command’s first-line strength had been halved, to three hundred aircraft. In reality, however, Dowding still deployed around twice that number. (All Hell Let Loose, page 87) Price supports this with a German Intelligence report on Fighter Command’s strength (which he attaches in full) issued on the 17th August. In it the Germans estimate Fighter Command’s losses as 373 spitfires, 180 Hurricanes, 9 Curtisses and 12 Defiants (a total of 574 aircraft) destroyed between 1st July and 15th August. The Germans then add another 196 due to “crash-landings, landings damaged beyond repair, accidents etc.” to arrive at a total of 770 British fighters. Estimated production is given as 270 to 300 new fighters built. (Figures from The Hardest Day, page 192) Price then evaluates the accuracy of this Intelligence estimate. He first mentions that the Curtiss Hawk fighters the German report referred to weren’t even used by the RAF (though they had been used by the French Air Force). He then goes on to say: In fact, between 1 July and the evening of 15 August, wastage in Fighter Command had amounted to only 318 Spitfires, Hurricanes and Defiants, less than half the German estimate; and the factories had produced about 720 aircraft of these types, well over twice as many as Schmid’s officers had calculated. (The Hardest Day, page 192) Price then goes on to give a tally of battle-ready British fighters as 855 as of the 17th August. This is broadly consistent with the statement from Hastings quoted above but a little higher. Part of the discrepancy is due to the fact that Hastings is presumably just talking Spitfires and Hurricanes (undoubtedly the best British fighters at this time) while Price also includes Defiants and other aircraft. Fortunately Price gives a squadron by squadron breakdown of British strength on the 17th of August as an appendix in his book. Adding up the numbers myself I’m getting 276 operational Spitfires and 512 operational Hurricanes (not including Spitfires and Hurricanes assigned to training units or in maintenance units at the time), these figures are consistent with Hastings. So that’s the bottom line. The actual question asked is about why the Germans changed their tactics from daylight bombing of RAF or RAF related targets (or what were believed to be anyway) to night time bombing of London and other cities (the Blitz). The answer is that at some point the Germans realised their Intelligence about Fighter Command was wrong and their current tactics were not working. As to exactly when and how the Germans realised this I’ll leave it to a better historian | |||||||||