[parsig9]

To claim that Germany failed to invade in 1940 because of what was done by the brave and skilled young men of Fighter Command is hogwash.

The Joint Services Command Staff College is teaching air marshalls, generals, and admirals of the future that the Royal Navy not the Air Ministry, and certainly not Fighter Command saved the Empire. I have always argued that w/o air cover the RN would have been doomed but experts dissagree. See what you think of this

Pie in the Sky?

As Battle of Britain Day approaches Brian James has been finding out why some of today’s leading military historians argue that it was not the RAF but the Royal Navy that saved Britain in 1940.

On Sunday, September 17th, Britain will once again remember the epic struggle of Fighter Command in the Second World War at a service of thanksgiving and rededication in Westminster Abbey before a congregation of airmen past and present. Like the great flypast of three hundred airplanes last September, the event will encourage Britons everywhere to recall how a handful of heroes saved these islands from invasion. But is this true – or the perpetuation of a glorious myth?


It is not mere revisionist history that puts this question, and indeed offers the suggestion that it would be at least equally fitting if, on this Battle of Britain Day, the Royal Navy were to send its ships in procession along our coasts – for it was the navy, not the RAF, that prevented a German invasion in 1940. This is the contention of three senior military historians at the Joint Services Command Staff College. Together they run the High Command course that teaches the past to the air marshals, generals and admirals of the future. What today’s senior officers learn of Britain’s military history they learn from this trio – and some of what they may be told goes against many popular beliefs.


In the words of Dr Andrew Gordon, head of maritime history:


I cheered like crazy at the film of the Battle of Britain, like everyone else. But it really is time to put away this enduring myth. To claim that Germany failed to invade in 1940 because of what was done by the phenomenally brave and skilled young men of Fighter Command is hogwash. The Germans stayed away because while the Royal Navy existed they had not a hope in hell of capturing these islands. The navy had ships in sufficient numbers to have overwhelmed any invasion fleet – destroyers’ speed alone would have swamped the barges by their wash, hardly a need for guns.


It could perhaps be argued that Andrew Gordon looks back to the past from a sailor’s perspective. Yet Dr Christina Goulter, the air warfare historian, supports his argument.


While it would be wrong to deny the contribution of Fighter Command, I agree largely with Andrew’s perspective that it was the navy that held the Germans from invading. As the German general Jodl put it, so long as the British navy existed, an invasion would be to send ‘my troops into a mincing machine’.


They had first to get past the RN. They simply hadn’t the warships to do so. Then they’d need to think of the threat from our own air power. When Churchill talked of ‘the Few’ he meant all the RAF. It was not just Fighter Command, but other elements, the bombers and especially Coastal Command. They monitored the German build-up in France, they tracked German capital ships, and they sunk 366 Germans merchant ships. Their bravery and persistence was costly – they had a chop rate [deaths in action] of nearly 50 per cent. So I take a holistic approach – it was all of the RAF, not just the fighter pilots, involved in that huge effort.


This is powerful testimony by expert witnesses. Yet it is doubtful if it will change the popular perception of 1940. Few conflicts have been better documented – even the engine number of every airplane that flew is recorded. Generations of historians have examined the records and re-clothed the events in better documented facts. Yet many still prefer to believe that in the course of that summer a few hundred outnumbered young men so outfought a superior enemy as solely to prevent a certain invasion of Britain. Almost none of which is true.


That myth even survived what an airman, Wing-Commander H. R. Allen, DFC, a Spitfire pilot with 66 Squadron, wrote in 1975. ‘Sadly we arrive at the conclusion that the Battle of Britain has been glorified to the point of hyperbole by historians… the omnipotence of the air situation greatly exaggerated… and the importance of… command of the sea… overlooked.’ ‘For writing that, his name became mud in air force circles,’ says Dr Gordon. As Dr Goulter remarks:


This is an extremely sensitive subject, even today. The Battle of Britain was a formative experience for the RAF – like Waterloo for the army, Trafalgar for the navy, a sacrosanct event. That is why there is more than a modicum of hostility to any suggestion of re-examining this history. The single-seater fighter pilots of today see themselves as inheriting the mantle of the Few; they especially do get a bit twitchy.


Dr Gordon’s position challenges many long-accepted facts about the non-invasion, for example the claim that the navy could not have protected Britain had the Luftwaffe ruled the air. In his view ‘The navy’s rock-solid conviction was that fast-moving ships at sea, able to manoeuvre, were pretty safe from air attack.’


But weren’t ships lost at Dunkirk?


We lost six destroyers and had a cruiser damaged. But they were virtually stationary, picking up troops. A better example is Norway – where despite constant air attack the navy suffered no significant loss. There was damage from shock, from splinters. Nothing more. Because ships were free to move and fight back.


People forget that no capital ship had ever been sunk by aircraft at this time. The US air force staged a 1920s bomber demonstration. Against old German warships moored, unmanned, with no anti-aircraft guns, no damage control. Even so it took three waves of bombers to sink these sitting ducks. Tackling the big ships of the RN in 1940 would have been a very different task. Especially as the Germans could no more than dent our capital ships – they had no armour-piercing bombs. They’d had no reason for such weapons.


Yet HMS Prince of Wales and HMS Repulse, big ships, were sunk from the air off Malaya in December 1940. ‘Sunk by the Japanese who did have armour-piercing bombs. And anti-shipping skills among their fliers beyond any in the world. Not until Fliegerkorp X was made ready for the attack on Crete did Germans even begin to practise attacking an enemy at sea.’


But wasn’t the Bismarck cornered from the air by British forces? ‘It was slowed by a brave – but lucky – torpedo of the Fleet Air Arm. But the Germans simply did not have such similarly trained torpedo crews – the Luftwaffe was a strike force designed to support an army on the ground.’


What about the suggestion that German minefields would have created a cordon across the Dover Straits to prevent RN interference with the invasion fleet? Gordon rejoins: ‘A minefield, laid by whom?’ The British in 1940 had fifty-two minesweepers, plus sixteen minesweeping trawlers in home waters. The Germans had just four minelayers with their western fleet.


The disparity between the navies was huge: as with destroyers – we had thirty-six close by, as many more escorting convoys which could have been on station in two days. They had perhaps eight in total: we had five capital ships in home waters; they had none available – Graf Spee, sunk; Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, damaged by torpedoes, the Hipper, by ramming: the Bismarck, still under construction.


Anyway, in an emergency, the Royal Navy steams straight through minefields as they did when pursuing the Scharnhorst. They have a drill, following line astern – ‘each ship can sweep one mine’ is the rather grim joke.’



So even if German aircraft had placed a minefield?


The navy would have steamed straight through. Can you imagine the RN’s targets? An invasion fleet of Rhine barges, moving at about two knots over the water, with a freeboard of a few feet…an absolute field day for our navy. So that was the nightmare for the German navy. They knew it just couldn’t happen.


So if the Germans were neither capable nor prepared to tackle the Royal Navy, then why even contemplate invasion?


Perhaps they didn’t. What you need to remember – and this gets rid of another great myth – Hitler had no plans for a long, total war. He hadn’t prepared his economy for it, or made plans for it. He had a script for the short, brutal fight he had in Western Europe. He reached the last page of that script on the coast at Dunkirk. ‘Show over, now the fat lady sings.’ And, according to that script, Britain was supposed, at this point, to be reasonable – do a deal. It was only when Churchill said no deal that Hitler had to come up with a new game plan.


Andrew Gordon says that the German navy had already done all the planning back in 1939, and had utterly rejected the whole notion of an invasion. ‘I am not saying that no Germans in a first wave would have got ashore. But how to supply and reinforce them? It would take twelve days to get a second wave of invaders across the channel. By then the Royal Navy would have run riot.’


The third member of the JSCSC academic team, Professor Gary Sheffield, is its leading land warfare historian. What does he think?


I go along largely with Andrew’s scenario. I am more certain than he that some Germans would have got ashore. But how long they could have stayed is a different matter. It depends when we are talking about. In May 1940 our forces were in a pretty bad state. An enemy landing there would have been hard to pin down. By September things had changed dramatically: the army had 500 anti-tank guns compared with 170 earlier; 350 medium tanks and 500 light tanks compared with 80 and 170.


But even in the early weeks of invasion threat, we had just enough force with the remnants of the BEF to have delayed German troops. An outer ‘crust’, including the Home Guard which would buy time by the day, the hour, until the Navy arrived.


The Home Guard? But surely…


Another myth we might dispose of. Dad’s Army…and knives tied to broomsticks. In fact the average age of the Home Guard was around thirty-five. And about half these men had served in World War One. Once you had trained and fought in a modern war, you don’t forget everything you learned. They were poorly armed at first, but once 500,000 rifles arrived from North America in July, they would have had a key part in delaying German troops. In fact it is almost impossible to come up with a creditable scenario in which a German invasion could have sustained itself so long as the navy existed.


Andrew Gordon says that by September 1940 the German army – which ‘didn’t have a clue how you scale up the technique they used for river-crossings to tackle swift tidal waters’ – now had an excuse, like the navy, to blame the Luftwaffe. It had failed to deliver on Goering’s boast. ‘No great defeat in the air for the RAF?…ah ha! Therefore, sorry, no invasion.’


Why did Hitler go through the motions of assembling barge-fleets and so on? ‘To try to make Churchill be reasonable. Hitler would have offered very easy terms rather than let the fight go on.’ Did Churchill truly believe invasion was possible? ‘He was fairly frank in his books. Part of his defiance was a hook to draw the Americans in. Part was hype to keep the British public behind him. And hype to keep the trade unions quiet – the last six months in 1940 was the only time in WW2 that Churchill had no trouble with trade unions.’


Some historians have always tried to explode the myths surrounding the Battle of Britain, particularly that the RAF was outnumbered. In a detailed account of events (Battle of Britain Day, September 15th, 1940, 1999) Alfred Price pointed out that on that day the RAF twice put around 250 fighters into the air – and still used less than half its available strength, against a Germany that used every fighter it possessed. The losses that day – 56 German (compared with the 185 claimed at the time) against 29 RAF – convinced the Luftwaffe it was not winning. In 1990 Clive Ponting showed that while Britain had 644 fighters against Germany’s 725 at the beginning of the battle, by October superior British production methods had changed the balance in Britain’s favour. But what of the fliers? 30 per cent of our trained pilots, Ponting claimed, were tied down in desk jobs throughout the conflict.


Then why did the myth of outnumbered heroes and a nation about to be swamped take such hold – and resist amendment? Social historian Angus Calder has one answer:


My sister lived through 1940 and she knows that every single day was sunny – no matter what meteorological records say. We had a need for heroes in 1940, the process of myth-building was absolutely necessary – myths are facts which circumstances needed to create. At that time they enabled Britain to feel stronger than it was – producing the men who stopped the Nazis in their tracks. So who now wants to know that the Luftwaffe lost fewer men in fighter aircraft than did the RAF? If it was necessary in 1940 to believe in our military heroes, later it became doubly necessary as our colonies fell away.



Why does only part of the RAF takes a bow each September? Richard Simpson, curator at the RAF Museum, says ‘That by ‘the Few’, Churchill meant all the RAF is not in doubt; the perception that it was all down to Fighter Command is simply erroneous. However, for fighter pilots it was a clear-cut and clean victory, one without a moral dimension, one all could subscribe to. But mention the huge courage and bigger sacrifice of Bomber Command…and how long before someone mentions Hamburg, or Dresden?’



Historian Richard Overy confirms this:



The battle was a defining moment of the country’s wartime experience – like Stalingrad for Russians. It has taken on a life of its own. In 1940, the total acceptance of the story’s simple broad-brush strokes was very necessary. Facts juggled to present the picture in the most simplistic terms, a caricature. And this has proved very difficult to dent. There has been critical writing about some of the “facts” for more than sixty years, but the public have no interest vested in beginning to disbelieve. Perhaps, in the 50s and 60s, with the loss of empire, and clear evidence that Britain was no longer a world power, they had a vested interest in keeping the myth alive.



Who now remembers, asks Professor Overy, that Churchill’s famous speech about ‘the Few’, on August 20th, ‘had about six lines devoted to Fighter Command, and twenty-two lines to Bomber Command?’



Surely, it comes to this: that the epic Fighter Command air battle that we acknowledged again this month was simply a marvellously heroic thing of itself, and has no need to be tricked out in the colours of a false strategic importance? Andrew Gordon answers this way: ‘The RAF’s was a substitute victory – a substitute for the certain victory over Sealion, had the Germans been mad enough to attempt invasion.’



· Brian James is an award-winning Fleet Street journalist now concentrating on military history


From History Today Magazine and online at www.historytoday.com

[PH-LKK]

Don't have time to read the whole thing right now, but I will say this: Germany was facing an integrated package, part of which consisted of the RN and part of which consisted of the RAF. Take away either one of those elements (as the Germans were attempting to do in its assault on RAF facilities), and the likelihood of a successful crossing changes. The RAF couldn't have "saved" England without the existence of the RN. And the RN couldn't have "saved" England without the survival (and success) of the RAF. The Battle of Midway demonstrated beyond anyone's doubt that a relatively small air defense could effectively neutralize a massive seaborne invasion force. Recall that there remained a very real fear that the D-Day landing might fail if the Luftwaffe was not effectively shut out of Normandy, even if we could be sure to keep the German navy away from the beaches.

Still, I think it's just silly to think that either can take more credit than the other.

[djjeffhall]

Parsig,
Hey there.

You do know this is going to cause some folks to go ballistic? Despite it's valid points, it's the equivalent of disgracing a Koran to a Muslim.

Thanks for sharing the article.

[Canucklehead]

Yes, the article may have the capacity to cause some, shall we say "Unrest"? If you are incensed with what you have read, be sure to remember that they are only opinions. Please be measured and thoughtful in your responses. You know the handle? Don't fly off it!

I'll admit at first I was tempted to write a scathing response, but I realized that these people are entitled to their opinions, just as I am entitled to mine, and you, yours.

[parsig9]

Originally Posted by djjeffhall

Parsig,
Hey there.

You do know this is going to cause some folks to go ballistic?

I know...won't it be fun to watch!


A few things I question:

1. What would the Navy do w/o air cover?
2. Though the LW may not have had, at the time, armor piercing bombs, don't you think they could have and would have developed them and a quality divebomber once they had secured air superiority?
3. With control of the air, surely the U-boats of the KM could have caused some seriuos damage. Was the CC supposed to put up Sunderlands w/o fighter support?


Ok, somebody elses turn...

[bsmith13]

In spite of the fact that the british military insists that they aren't being revisionist, I smell revisionism.

In this article, they are analyzing "what-if" scenarios. Whether he erred in his judgment or not, Hitler felt that Air Supremacy must be achieved before any battle with the Royal Navy was precipitated. The Luftwaffe failed to achieve the needed air supremacy; Hitler postponed the invasion. No record exists of whether Hitler felt the Royal Navy was an impediment to Operation Sea Lion, but the destruction of the RAF was a stated prerequisite. Whether the RN would have factored into his plans is moot.

We shall never know what would have happened, though we can guess. However, history is supposed to be about what happened, not what would most likely have happened.

The other nonsense they spout is about the RAF not being outnumbered. These three historians try to portray the inequity in numbers of airframes. Any serious historian knows that it was a matter of pilots. Fighter Command was unquestionably strained nearly to the breaking point, with barely trained pilots going into combat with less than 10 hours of flight time in combat types. The Luftwaffe figures are harder to pin down, but there was no such personnel crisis documented regarding the Battle of Britain.

[Iroquois]

Parsig how are those Tigers going to do tonight.......


It had taken both to hold off the Germans from invasion......
Many of the battles in the Pacific showed that.

[Captain Eddie]

Originally Posted by Canucklehead

Yes, the article may have the capacity to cause some, shall we say "Unrest"? If you are incensed with what you have read, be sure to remember that they are only opinions. Please be measured and thoughtful in your responses. You know the handle? Don't fly off it!

I'll admit at first I was tempted to write a scathing response, but I realized that these people are entitled to their opinions, just as I am entitled to mine, and you, yours.

Of COURSE they are entitled to their opinions...as long as they agree with ours!

But seriously, I'd agree with PH-LKK. Both the Royal Navy and the Air Force were important. Hitler, rightly or wrongly, just felt he needed to get rid of the Air Force to be able to invade. And no one will convince me he never had any real intention of invading.

I have my doubts about the Navy alone being able to ward off the invasion, but they may have some valid points on this. But, we will really never know, as that is mere speculation.

Also, bsmith13 is certainly correct on calling their stating that the RAF was not outnumbered nonsense. The Luftwaffe had far more aircraft and pilots to bring to the battle than the RAF had in fighter pilots and planes to ward them off. Especially pilots, as the planes available to battle improved over time under Lord Beaverbrook.

[Captain Eddie]

Ps to Parsig-thanks for posting, always good to have some clean, lively discussion!

[Hornchurch]

Originally Posted by Iroquois

It had taken both to hold off the Germans from invasion......
Many of the battles in the Pacific showed that.

Sorry to disagree with your above quotes Iroquois, but my country's navy were never put to that ultimate 'invasion' test in W.W.II.

Moreover, the Pacific battles were in a different league + with many different circumstances to what the M.o.D/Whitehall chiefs faced in Aug/Sept '40.

In peacetime, now, using slow Ro/Ro Cross-Channel ferries, you can drive your 38 Tonne Articulated Lorry (Rig) from England to the French coast (unloading) in 90 minutes, yes, 90 minutes.
I've done it countless times personally.
If, (big if, here) the Nazi's had invaded our coastline, they would have been somewhat faster (or at least that fast) in disgorging their troops/38t's/Mk II's/III's/Protze's etc, probably at night.

The Royal Navy had too many instances where there was one foul-up after another - Courageous, Glorious, Royal Oak, Hood, Prince of Wales, Repulse & Barham - all Capital ships SUNK.... (just a few that spring to my mind, without consulting books or other reference sources - there are more).
Even the S.S. Lancastria - a seldom remarked on event (black day) in British military history, that cost around 4 - 5,000 + British troops lives in one go (1940 - sunk by Ju 87's).
The R.N. had great difficulty looking after itself, let alone anyone else, in a (then) rapid technologically changing world of warfare, that saw Battleships/Skuas & Swordfish become obsolete overnight, along with the Admiralty's pompous attitudes towards what Air-power could acheive.

Taranto excepted, there were more foul-up's in store......like the R.N.'s inability to deal with the famed Channel dash - 3 German capital ships (+ others) in broad daylight, from Brest - to Northern Germany, a massive & fruitless embarassment.
And that was in '42 when the threat had receeded.

Again in '44 - Exercise Tiger - 800 plus U.S. casualties, mainly thanks to the inadaqucies of the R.N.

The 'revisionist' fools that served (stirred) up that Staff College junk are full of B.S.

The Battle of Britain was the most important battle/outcome for this land since 1066.
Indisputable fact is that the Royal Navy played a VERY minimal part (a 'bit' player, an 'extra', an 'also ran').

The R.A.F. & it's environs were what made the difference - any other opinion is pure bunk.