The air-policing duties that the R.A.F performed during the inter war years, in Iraq and at India’s north-west frontier, had provided a cadre of aircrew skilled in working with ground units. But when in 1939 the British Expeditionary Force went to France, the R.A.F provided only four army cooperation squadrons. (In the First World War, when the Royal Flying Corps was a part of the army, the same mileage of front had been allotted 20 squadrons.) The Westland Lysander, specifically designed to support the army, proved so inadequate in front-line use that, when the German assault started, it was withdrawn from operations.
“I went to France with a squadron of Lysanders, an Army Cooperation squadron,” said Flying Officer Christopher Foxley-Norris.
“We lost the lot twelve out of twelve. Some of the men were killed and others baled out and were rescued. But we finished up with no aircraft.”
At the start of the war Bomber Command’s Fairey Battle light bomber squadrons had been sent to France as a part of the “Advanced Air Striking Force’. For a few quiet days the Battles flew along the frontier unescorted, and then they were bounced by German fighters and after that two squadrons of Hurricane escorts were added to their force. As well as Hurricanes there were Gladiator biplane fighters in France, but no Spitfires, and the Spitfire was the only R.A.F fighter that could fight the Emil on equal terms.
During the Phoney War the Gladiator pilots of Nos 607 (County of Durham) and 615 (County of Surrey) squadrons discovered that, apart from being totally outclassed by enemy fighters, their lack of speed prevented them from even catching up with German bombers. Like many other R.A.F squadrons, these were units of the Auxiliary Air Force which before the war was manned almost exclusively by civilians who gave up their evenings and weekends to learn how to fly warplanes. The Gladiators survived little more than a week of the German offensive.
Casualties caused the two squadrons to combine, and, when a bombing raid destroyed their last fuel supplies, the remaining five or six aircraft were set on fire by the squadron personnel and they returned to England by ship.
There was no lack of valour shown by the R.A.F crews. When the Germans attacked westwards, the AASF went into action to bomb the advancing forces. On the early morning of 12 May nine Blenheim bombers flew to attack an armoured column near Tongeren. They encountered the constant air cover that the Germans provided to the advance, and only two Blenheims returned. With the two Blenheim squadrons decimated the more vulnerable Fairey Battles were sent into the fight. Only one aircraft returned after six volunteer crews bombed two bridges at Maastricht.
Although one bridge was hit, engineers had a pontoon bridge in position within 30 minutes. A German officer told one of the few surviving flyers:
You British are mad. We took the bridges early Friday morning. You gave us the whole of Friday and Saturday to build up our Flak entrenchments all around the bridge, and then on Sunday, when everything was ready, you came here with three planes and tried to blow the thing up.
Two days later the striking force committed every available plane to stem the German tide. Battles and Blenheims were sent to bomb the German crossings of the River Meuse at Sedan. They destroyed two pontoon bridges, and damaged two more, but pontoon bridges can be replaced quickly. About 60 per cent of the attacking aircraft were shot down by fighters or by well positioned Flak. It was the worst percentage loss the R.A.F ever suffered in any comparable operation.
There is little doubt that news of this disaster played a part in the war cabinet’s reluctance to send more squadrons over to France.
Up until the start of the Battle of Britain, the Luftwaffe’s role as a close-support weapon assisting the army to blitzkrieg victories seemed entirely vindicated. What point was there in having a strategic air force when nations could be totally defeated in short sharp tactical wars?
And yet this role called for sudden ruthless violence. In Guernica in Spain, the Luftwaffe showed no remorse for the civilian casualties that must result from bombing towns. In Warsaw and Rotterdam the German bombers left a great many dead and mangled people in the smouldering rubble.
The Rotterdam bombing provides a good example of that grey area in which war becomes terrorism. The Dutch defending army was moving to wipe out German paratroops at Overschie, north of the city. The advancing Germans were anxious to press on to relieve the paratroops, but that could not be achieved without getting into Rotterdam. When they received a surrender ultimatum, the Dutch defenders played for time by arguing about the message, which bore no name, rank or signature of the German commander. They asked for this to be rectified, which required an extension of the deadline. Negotiations were not made easier by the fact that Dutch time was 20 minutes ahead of Greenwich Mean Time. The outcome was that the land attack was halted but part of the air attack was not stopped in time. The centre of Rotterdam was razed. Some historians have called it a deliberate act of terror.
At the Rotterdam bombing one eyewitness wrote: “I can categorically state that incendiaries were used, that the inner city was completely without any military strength, that a kilometer away from the river front, houses and entire streets were ablaze within minutes of the bombardment.”
Yet it has to be added that the town was defended, however lightly, and at the Nuremberg Trials the bombing was judged to be militarily justified. On the other hand, can anything done in pursuit of the brutal invasion of a friendly neutral country be justified? Such questions will not be settled easily.
Although the Luftwaffe had been designed for short sharp campaigns, these were following one after the other in quick succession, so that there was no respite in the air war. The soldiers could stop, rest and regroup, but they still needed air cover while they did it. The airmen were no longer finding things so easy, and they suffered heavy casualties during the campaign in France and the Low Countries. On 10 May, the first day of the attack, 47 bombers were lost as well as 25 fighters and a number of transport planes. It was as bad as any day of losses in the Battle of Britain. The following day another 22 bombers, 8 Stukas and 10 fighters were lost.
During May and June 1,129 Luftwaffe aircraft were shot down on operations and another 216 became victims of accidents. Hundreds more were damaged beyond repair. The human casualties reflect these figures.
And most of these flyers were experienced men very difficult to replace.
The spectacular conquest of France, Belgium and Holland and rout of the British Expeditionary Force had taken the Germans six weeks and cost them 27,074 dead. Apologists for the French debacle explained that the Germans had crushing superiority in tanks and aircraft. It was not true of tanks, but the value of the French air force is harder to assess.
The French aircraft industry during the 1930s was a chaos of muddle and corruption. In January 1938 an energetic new air minister, Guy La Chambre, found himself dealing with a collection of small factories spread across the whole country. Only one of them was equipped for mass-production. He bought American aircraft and called for a construction programme that would build 200 planes a month. It was slow in starting, but by June 1940 the Dewoitine D.520 – a fine fighter, equal to the Spitfire or the Messerschmitt Bf 109 was coming off the production lines at one every hour.
General Joseph Vuillemin, chief of the French air force, claimed that in the 1940 fighting he had been outnumbered five to one. Many of his planes were obsolete but in the matter of quantity the French were Germany’s equal. The two German Air Fleets in action totalled 2,670 aircraft of which about 1,000 were fighters. The French air force had 3,289 modern aircraft available. Of these 2,122 were fighters. This does not take into account aircraft of the Royal Air Force or the air forces of Belgium or Holland.
Some French squadrons fought ferociously, but as the bombing started many French aircraft were flown out of the danger zone and parked at training fields and civil airports without any records being kept. One eyewitness reported 200 aircraft on Tours airfield, most of them fighters. When the fighting was over, 4,200 French military aircraft were in the unoccupied zone. Some were old and useless but 1,700 were judged suitable for front-line service. The Italian Control Commission in North Africa discovered 2,648 modern French aircraft there. Seven hundred of these were fighters, many were new. Whatever one makes of all these figures, the French flyers were certainly not outnumbered five to one.
In Poland, in Scandinavia and in western Europe the Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter plane, the Junkers Ju 87 dive-bomber and the Ju 52 proved essential to the German victories. The Ju 52 three engined transport had shone particularly brightly. Most of them were flown by Lufthansa crews who knew the civil routes. As reservists called to service they dropped paratroops and landed on airfields, beaches and wide roads sometimes amid the battle. Fighter squadrons used these aircraft to move their personnel and equipment, leapfrogging forward from airfield to airfield. The army used them too, and in the race across northern France the Ju 52s had rushed 2,000 army technicians to Charleville to set up a tank repair facility.
In Holland the Luftwaffe lost about a third of the 1,000 aircraft deployed. Most of these fell prey to Dutch anti-aircraft guns. The way in which paratroops were dropped from 400 feet made the transport planes easy targets. Of the 430 “Tante Jus used in the Netherlands, some 220 were shot down and two transport formations were subsequently disbanded. However the Dutch did not set fire to or otherwise destroy the wrecks. After the fighting ended 53 of the Junkers were repaired and another 47 were cannibalized for spare parts. Such figures show how difficult it can be to quantify success and failure in battle.
Dunkirk: Operation “Dynamo’
It was in the sky above the Dunkirk beaches that the Luftwaffe began to prove inadequate. Goring had suggested that his Stukas be let loose upon the besieged remnants of an army that was being taken home by a motley collection of boats and ships. But to protect the Dunkirk evacuation the R.A.F sent Spitfires, previously restricted to operations over Britain. At first the R.A.F pilots were dismayed at the German tactics, but they learned quickly, as Spitfire ace Robert Stanford Tuck related:
We were flying over the beaches in formations which were much too tight . The Germans were flying much looser formations. They bounced us in our very first encounter over Dunkirk. We lost a pilot .. . He went down in flames. The next patrol that same day we lost our squadron leader, a flight commander and one or two others .. . I found myself squadron commander. I said to myself and all the boys, “This is enough. Tomorrow we’re flying open formation in pairs.”
The Luftwaffe at this time had only one single-seat fighter, the Emil, which with its blunt rectangular wings was easy to recognize. To cover the evacuation there were Spitfires and Hurricanes, Defiants with their rotating turret behind the pilot, and Blackburn Skuas of the Fleet Air Arm. Misidentifications were not unknown. In the words of one naval flyer:
806 squadron with Skuas and Rocs was called in to assist in patrolling the Dunkirk beaches on 27th May during the evacuation. A section of three Skuas was attacked out of the sun at about 0700 hours by a Spitfire squadron. Two Skuas were shot down into the sea off Dover resulting in the loss of a friend of mine and injuries to two others.
The remaining Skua, piloted by Sub-Lieutenant Hogg R. N. managed to get down into Manston with his aircraft riddled with bullets, and his air gunner badly injured. The sequel to this story was that Hogg retrieved his parachute, the only piece of his equipment which was still intact, and travelled back by train to our base airfield in his flying clothing complete with packed parachute. He was approached at Victoria Station by military police for being an enemy parachutist. Only eighteen at the time he had a pronounced stutter when he became excited. At his subsequent questioning at London Headquarters by an immaculately dressed Guards Officer, he managed to splutter out his indignant explanation to be greeted by the reply, “After all, old boy, you must remember there is a war on!” Young Hogg who was quite fearless went on to gain great distinction in naval air combat operations in the Mediterranean, where he gained a D. S. C. and Bar before being killed sadly, and I believe unnecessarily, in a normal flying accident.
Despite the captured forward fighter airfields, the Luftwaffe bombers were based in Germany and no closer to the Dunkirk beaches than were the R.A.F flying out of home bases across the Channel.
German bombers less mobile than their fighter squadrons could not be moved as easily as the fighter units. The R.A.F fighters tried to get between the bombers and their targets. As one R.A.F fighter pilot explained:
Our function was to get in the way of the German aircraft. It was no good patrolling over the evacuation beach if you were hoping to save the people underneath you. You had to be twenty miles further off to get in the way of the attackers before they reached the beaches.
Such tactics meant that the soldiers on the beach saw little of the defensive fighting that the R.A.F provided, and a great many survivors came back from the beaches complaining that the R.A.F had done little for them. On 31 May Flight Lieutenant R. D. G. Wight, a Hurricane pilot of 213 squadron, who was later to be killed fighting in the Battle of Britain, wrote to his mother:
If anyone says anything to you in the future about the inefficiency of the R.A.F – I believe the BEF troops were booing the R.A.F in Dover the other day tell them from me we only wish we could do more. But without aircraft we can do no more than we have done that is, our best, and that’s fifty times better than the German best, though they are fighting under the most advantageous conditions. So don’t worry, we are going to win this war even if we have only one aeroplane and one pilot left the Boche could produce the whole Luftwaffe and you would see the one pilot and the one aeroplane go into combat.
The fierce British air cover dismayed the Germans. Fliegerkorps II’s war diary told of more aircraft lost on 27 May than in the previous ten days of fighting. The R.A.F flew 2,739 fighter sorties over Dunkirk, 651 bomber sorties directly concerned with the BEF’s evacuation and 171 reconnaissance sorties. On the whole front in the nine days from 26 May to 3 June the R.A.F lost 177 aircraft against the Luftwaffe’s
