London is Bombed. Chapter Two: 1,300 Planes Launched on London
Göring bragged that his airfleet covered more square miles than London itself and would devastate the city. It was a tactical success wrapped in a strategic error, if the people could endure it.
This Episode: As the summer of 1940 went on and Adolf Hitler worried over what was to be done with England and its truculent Prime Minister, his attention was constantly drawn away from that issue to the way his three great “allies” — Franco, Mussolini, and Stalin — were engaging in truculence of their own. If he were not so distracted, he might have understood that Göting’s destruction of Hugh Dowding’s landing fields, and of Lord Beaverbrook’s airplane factories, had England’s Fighter Command on the verge of collapse. But as it happened, he sent Göring’s Luftwaffe to London with all his bombers and opened an attack of “target terror” that would change everything. Everything.
This Chapter: On September 7, Göring gathered his staff for a champagne lunch on the promontory of Cap Blanc Nez overlooking the Channel just outside Calais. The White Cliffs of Dover were near enough to see. He boasted that if the three-layered air fleet that would launch on his command was assembled in only one layer it would “spread over a greater area than the city of London itself! Helpless London!” When Hugh Dowding’s radar picked it up and passed the data to Fighter Command Headquarters, the women who plotted the size of inbound attacks on the control tables at the sector stations were overwhelmed. It was so dense that eight of its planes went down from in-air collisions. Flames rose a thousand feet as the Luftwaffe entered the Thames and destroyed the docks and arsenals and fuel tanks that lined the shore of the river, and closed on the great city just ahead.
Contents: Here are the five chapters of “London is Bombed” from “Seeking the Hinge” with their dates of publication.
Chapter One: Hitler’s “Allies,” Churchill’s Defenses Defy Führer. Monday, April 28
Chapter Two: 1,300 Planes Launched on London. Tuesday, April 29
Chapter Three: In the Words of the Pilots. Wednesday, April 30.
Chapter Four: Revenge! Thursday, May 1.
Chapter Five: Consequences. Friday, May 2.
Chapter Two: 1,300 Planes Launched on London
Reading time: thirteen minutes
In the first week of September, the breakers of the Enigma Codes at Bletchley Park outside London intercepted signals and conversations indicating an invasion was imminent. That confirmed overflight photography of massive numbers of ships and troops assembling at the Channel ports in France and Belgium. For months the bells of England’s churches had gone silent with the advisory that they would not ring again until an invasion was occurring. The ringing of the bells would be triggered by the code word “Cromwell” distributed from the War Ministry. Churchill was nearly alone among his advisers in his belief that the island would not be invaded, but did nothing to discourage the readiness that the rumors and predictions made possible. It suited his purposes for the army, and for the people themselves, to remain tensed for the invasion he did not expect.
September 7, 1940 was a lovely Saturday in the south of England. It was balmy for the season — London reached a high of 64° — and the high cloud cover of the morning gave way as the day progressed to a scattering at 15,000 feet. The Royal Family was in Buckingham Palace and Churchill and his family of Clementine, Mary, and Pamela, seven months pregnant, were in the Prime Minister’s weekend estate at Chequers, forty miles to the northwest. There was a pond on the grounds and Winston and Pamela went to it after breakfast to feed the ducks. He carried a pail of grain for the ducks and a closed tin of worms if any fish showed themselves.
She said, “You don’t like to walk, do you?”
“I most certainly do. I love to walk.”
“No, I mean take a walk.”
“Oh, you mean just take a stroll for exercise. No. I’m not a hiker. I like to walk from one place to another for the purpose of getting there, but I don’t care much for walking for walking’s sake.”
They came to a spot where the land made a grassy bench with just enough room for their feet at the water’s edge. He scattered the grain in a wide spray on the grass and on the pond’s surface and a family of ducks came to it and fed.
She said, “Are you worried?”
“In my own way. I don’t fret, but I am deeply concerned.”
“How do you cope with it?”
“With work. I busy myself. In more tranquil times I would paint, as you know, but it has been some time since I had the time for that. Now I just do what seems to be next from quite a lot of options and move it to the next place. Then go to the next thing.”
“Do you sleep well?”
“Like a newborn baby. And I nap. Often I will just lean back in my chair, elevate my feet to an ottoman, and drift off for a few minutes. And once each day I will take to my bed, put on a mask, and sleep for an hour or more, though not much more these days. I fall asleep as if on command.”
“Do you dream?”
“Of distant things. Of meeting Clementine. Of losing Marigold and my mother. Of battles fought on horseback. I love when those come. I always win.”
“Do you believe we will win?”
He took a long time, a very long time she thought, to answer. He said, “Yes, I do. But my belief is tempered by the reality of our circumstances, which place us at very great disadvantages in many respects. Still, I am convinced that we are a people of superior social fiber and spiritual strength to theirs. The effect of that is not measurable, but it is no less real for its absence of tangibility. Lately, I find myself often in a state of low-boiling anger for the world my grandson will be born into. We owe him, all of them, so much more and we have failed at providing it.”
“It may be a granddaughter.”
“No, it will be a grandson. I am owed that much by the fates. Not that it matters much in any sense that should trouble you. I will love her as much as him, and you of course not a scintilla less, but I believe it will be a boy for the same reasons that I believe that we will win. Because in spite of all we have done, and not done, to bring us to these deplorable deficits, I believe the long and heavy pendulum has reached its extremity and is poised to return, inexorably, in the direction of our reward.”
After the ducks were fed Winston returned to London, leaving the family at Chequers. He was nursing an apprehensive notion about the day. On the way to Ten Downing Street, he stopped at Fighter Command Headquarters at Bentley Priory, just outside London, to get briefed by Air Marshal Hugh Dowding. Winston had no reason to be any more concerned this day than any other, though that still left room for a great deal of concern. Bentley Priory was simply on the way to his office. Dowding believed a major strike was coming, that it would be delivered on his landing fields and on Beaverbrook’s factories and that it might be terminal to his prospects for maintaining an effective defense.
The women of the WAAF at Fighter Command HQ were having a quiet morning, many enjoying a second “cuppa” in the pleasant sunshine. Even at their leisure they kept their headphones around their necks. At 8:30 the quiet at the sector station at Wittering, well north of London, was interrupted by a blip. It appeared to be a single plane and three of the sector’s aircraft, their pilots sent there the previous day for a rest, went aloft. One of them struggled with a balky engine, the mechanics’ work not entirely done, and turned back, but the other two rose to the indicated altitude of 28,000 feet and spotted the narrow fuselage of a twin-engine Dornier. They attacked and it returned fire. The Dornier turned and headed for the coast of the North Sea in the direction of Holland. The Spitfire pilots were instructed not to be drawn over the sea so they forced their opportunity and attacked in earnest. The German plane exploded in a fireball just as it crossed the border with the sea and plunged in many pieces to the water. The Spitfires returned to base. Dowding had the report of that incident to pass along to the Prime Minister, but he said he couldn’t see it in a wider perspective. Churchill went on his way.
Approaching noon in France, Göring and Kesselring, in the company of aides, assembled for lunch on the picnic grounds of Cap Blanc Nez, just outside Calais. It was the French side of the Channel’s narrowest reach. Tables were set with white linen and sandwiches were served with French champagne. They were early for the attack that was organizing at airbases from Ostend in the south of Belgium to Le Havre in France, well south of Calais. For the amusement of his guests, Kesselring sent a half-dozen pairs of Messerschmitt 109s across the Channel as the lazy afternoon went on. They were instructed to approach the British coast at Dover, but not enter it, in the hope that Spitfires or Hurricanes could be lured out to sea for a dogfight. British fighters rose in response to the approaching Messerschmitts on each occasion and fire was exchanged from a distance. During one of the encounters a Spitfire took a smoking hit that forced it to leave the area and head back to its station. Otherwise, the British did not take the bait. The planes simply circled from safe distances. The onlookers lowered their binoculars, raised their champagne flutes in toasts to English cowardice, and laughed.
At FCHQ, Dowding wondered about the odd activity. He maintained an around-the-clock service at Wrotham in Kent where teams fluent in German intercepted conversations. They had recently noticed a pattern of German pilots discussing climate conditions at map coordinates that matched closely to the next attacks. But the activity over the Channel at Dover didn’t fit with that, and the intrusion at Wittering didn’t fit with anything. At 1:30 he got word of many bombers emerging from hangars and assembling at airbases across the Channel, and of many amphibious vessels arriving at ports. The Channel was calm that day, and meteorologists had predicted that the weather, the tides, and the moon through the next three or four days would provide conditions that the War Ministry judged to be favorable for an invasion. Dowding issued Air Alert #1, bringing the Command to stand-by readiness, including the cancellation of leaves and the recall of all pilots.
At that signal, the map of southeastern England, encompassing London, was displayed on the huge tables in the Pits in the Operations Rooms at FCHQ and at the sector stations. Six women, Plotters, prowled the tables’ perimeters receiving instructions from Tellers on the mezzanine. In trays at the tables’ edges were interlocking markers of different shapes, colors, sizes, and lettering. Four markers would be assembled by the Plotters into a single unit that would indicate the number of aircraft, along with their altitude, direction, and type. The markers would be placed on the table in their designated grid positions and, as the event unfolded, be moved accordingly by long-handled rakes with a flat face. The message each marker carried was subject to change.
At 3:40 a vast Luftwaffe armada rose over France to altitudes from 15,000 to 25,000 feet. As the fleet passed over the heads of Göring and his cronies at their beach picnic, Kesselring said, “This is the greatest moment of our lives!” The fat man said, “To date most certainly, but not to come.”
The attack was first recognized by the radar station at Foreness on the Ramsgate promontory north of Dover. The information was passed on to the sector stations and to FCHQ where Dowding and Vice Marshal Keith Park took seats in the front row of the balcony overlooking the Pit. Command decisions were now reposed with the Sector Commanders who had as much information as Dowding and Park at HQ. Tellers received the details to the moment and directed their Plotter Partners in the Pit to assemble and display table markers. Invariably as the air war had been waged those last weeks, the German fleets would split as they approached the English coast. That separation into various battle sectors typically triggered the decisions of squadron scrambling. But this day the great armada did not divide, and its growing size made it near to impossible for the Plotters to keep the display current.
One thousand three hundred German planes were crossing the Channel. Half carried bombs and half were armed guardians of the bombers. The guardians, Messerschmitt 109s and 110s, had fuel limitations that would keep them aloft for only ninety minutes or so. As they passed over Calais, Göring told his attending lackeys the fleet was twenty miles wide and twice that deep. He said — shouting had become necessary — “That means our fleet is spread over a greater area than the city of London itself! Helpless London!” As the fleet was layered, fighters above bombers above fighters above bombers, that would mean it might be twice or more the size of London given its full due. But Göring was almost certainly lying. Lying was second nature to the Nazis, the higher in the High Command they went the more easily they lied. It didn’t matter. It was a sky full of airplanes, an irresistible force. That was enough.
Göring had a surprise wrapped within his surprise. He had come to understand how the English radar stations were able to detect changes in the direction of his fleet and send instantaneous corresponding signals to fighters aloft. The shortened response time this created was a tactical liability that, this day, he would attempt to disrupt. His plan was to vary from conventional flight paths once they had crossed the English coast. The German squadron groups would peel away from the main body in what would appear to be the direction of factories and landing fields that, like a tortured prisoner, had been battered so often they stiffened for more of the same. But this day the Luftwaffe flights would divert to a new direction, and another, with an ultimate goal of attacking London from all sides and at staged times. An attacking wave would deliver its load, turn away for its return to France, and make space for another wave arriving from another direction. The sheer size of Göring’s fleet would mask the many misdirection ploys executed within it.
And there were the bombs. German mechanical ingenuity, a talent so certified across centuries that it suggested genetic superiority, had been merged with Nazi sadism to produce new ordnance whose terrifying effects would be dropped on London through the bellies of the Heinkels, Junkers, and Dorniers. Some were incendiary. Weighing only a few pounds they would arrive by the airborne dozens and settle on rooftops where they would ignite, burning at temperatures of two thousand degrees with all the illumination that suggests, deadly little lamps, useful after dark as targets and extinguishable only at great peril. Others, much larger, descended by parachute, landing softly so they wouldn’t explode until either their pre-set timing mechanisms set them off or they were tampered with. There were cluster bombs that looked like anonymous tin cans until they went bang and erupted in a spray of screaming shrapnel that would kill anyone within fifty feet, a circle of death from a can a child might kick, as many did. Some whistled as they descended; that was all. They exploded, of course, but their inventive feature was the announcement of their imminent arrival. That had to make them laugh back at the lab. Others that would miss the city’s solidities and land in the Thames would respond to their watery graves by slowly rising to the surface where they would become mines, so as not to waste their explosive charges. And many, many, many others just fell from the sky and exploded as they landed, uncomplicated catastrophes.
British fighters began their ascent as the size of the German fleet was detected. Göring’s main force proceeded up the Thames opening the attack while the diversionary tactic of others confused the British as to their primary intention. One large formation peeled off in the direction of the northeast coast of Essex and Suffolk. Another went southwest to the Guildford area, bypassing airfields at Biggin Hill and Kenley. Others criss-crossed in apparent randomness. In the intricacies, four mid-air collisions resulted in eight planes lost, but that brought no favors to the places where their pieces landed.
Dowding and Park picked up fragmentary reports of the damage as the main body of the Luftwaffe made its way up the Thames. They heard that the arsenal and munitions factory at Woolwich on the south bank across from the Isle of Dogs had taken a series of hits and was gone in gunpowder-fueled flames that rose a thousand feet. They looked at each other in impotent disbelief. All their forces were engaged with an enemy that was beyond their power to contain. Park remembered, “It was clear to us that it was burning all down the river. It was horrible to contemplate. But I said to Dowding, ‘Thank God for what they are doing,’ because I knew that the Nazis had switched their attack from the fighter stations thinking that they were knocked out. They weren't, but they were pretty groggy. In the midst of the horror, I knew it meant we would survive, knew that if this were their intention, we would reconstruct our forces and be able to retaliate. Fighter Command would come again another day.”