The air battles over Dunkirk had provided a foretaste of
what too had suffered heavy losses there as well as in the preceding and
subsequent battles over the continent. Now there was considerable preliminary
skirmishing as the German government faced the implications of at least some
continuation of hostilities, reorganized and reorientated the Luftwaffe toward
operations primarily against England rather than France, and began to test the
British defenses. The Commander-in-Chief of the German air force, Hermann
Goring, was confident that his planes could crush the Royal Air Force in about
five weeks; most of the German air force high command shared these optimistic
expectations. The formations, ground support system, and the aircraft industry
of Britain would all be attacked.
In the event, British defenses were sorely tried but
successful. In preliminary skirmishes during June, July, and the first weeks of
August, both sides suffered heavy losses. When the Germans stepped up the pace
in mid-August, losses on both sides increased; but the British were more
successful in replacing their losses, in part because British fighter
production was by this time higher than Germany's. It was, in any case,
becoming evident that the British were indeed holding on and that the attacks
were not even close to their aim. The concentration of Luftwaffe attacks on the
airport and radar control facilities inflicted great damage and strained the
resources of Fighter Command, but in the battle of attrition that was
developing, the British were at the very least holding their own.
At the end of August, the Germans changed their air
strategy. It had originally been their intention to wait with a massive terror
bombing of London until the invasion was to be launched. What slight evidence
we have suggests that Hitler originally thought of a "Rotterdam"-type
operation which would cause the people of London to flee the city and block the
roads just as German troops were about to land. When a large number of German
airplanes bombed London on August 24, the British replied with attacks on
Berlin. Though on a small scale, the British air raid, and the ones which
followed when the weather allowed, led Hitler to order mass bombing of London
to begin forthwith. Always sensitive to attitudes on the home front—given his
belief in the stab-in-the-back as reality, not legend—he announced that London
would be destroyed. Early in September, the Luftwaffe shifted from attacking
the sector stations of the Royal Air Force to a massive series of attacks on
London.
The attacks on the British capital and other cities, though
causing great damage and numerous casualties, exposed the Luftwaffe to great
losses while allowing the RAF to rebuild its support system. When, in response
to the heavy losses in daylight raids the Germans shifted to night bombing,
their losses dropped, but so did their effectiveness. The British fighter
defenses had held in daytime and though they were at that time essentially
ineffective at night, this made no difference to the prospect of invasion which
would have had to come in daylight. Only if the British public broke could such
air raids accomplish their main objective. The panic Berlin expected did not
occur. In the face of a resolute British public—buoyed up by then by the
obvious inability of the Germans to launch an invasion—the Blitz, as it was
called, failed. Rallied by a united government, the people suffered but held
firm. A few in the government, but certainly not the public, knew that British
air power was being assisted by the first important decripts of German air
force machine code messages, decodes which also helped them understand and
begin to counter the new German beacon system designed to help the bombers find
target cities.
The British government had begun to work out its offensive
projects for winning the war long before it became obvious in the fall of 1940
that their defense against the German onslaught would be successful. As
previously described, it would combine a massive bombing of a blockaded
German-occupied Europe with efforts to stir up revolts against Nazi rule until
the whole system came crashing down. There was here an analysis based on a
British version of the German stab-in-the-back legend; Germany had been
throttled, not defeated in World War I, and the resistance forces might now
play the part originally to have been played by the French army: to hold and
wear down the Germans until bombing, blockade and revolts brought them down
without the massive armies the British did not have. Whether or not such a
strategy would in fact have been effective will never be known, but the
decisions made in London to implement it had their impact on the course and
nature of the War.
Recognition of the fact that Britain by herself could never
field the size of army needed to defeat the German army was behind the
development of the British strategy and the allocation of resources to its
implementation. The Special Operations Executive, the SOE, was organized in the
summer of 1940 in order, as Churchill put it, "to set Europe ablaze."
In the following years, it sent agents into occupied Europe, attempted to
arrange arms deliveries to resistance forces, and in every other way tried to
make life difficult for the German occupiers. Local revolts were expected to
increase over time; and eventually the disruption created by bombing, revolts,
and the impact of blockade would make it possible for small British units to
assist the conquered people of Europe in regaining their independence. British
faith in the possibilities of European resistance organizations seems
preposterously exaggerated in retrospect, but few then realized how solid a
hold the Germans would acquire.
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