The communications web held together well under the strain of attack. Sector operations rooms were out of commission on only three occasions, though the supplementary emergency operations rooms, constructed above ground some distance from each sector station, proved inadequate as replacements. They were too cramped to house all the necessary personnel and the paraphernalia of plot tables and radio equipment; they lacked sufficient telephone landlines to operate as an integral part of the system. Radar stations emerged with remarkably little damage. The attack on Dunkirk RDF (in north Kent) destroyed two huts but inflicted no serious damage on the transmitter. The Dover station suffered slight damage to the aerial towers. At Rye, on the Sussex coast, all the huts were destroyed on the morning of 12 August, but the transmitting and receiving blocks were unscathed and operations restarted by noon. At Ventnor on the Isle of Wight all buildings were destroyed in two attacks on 12 and 16 August.16
If German commanders had realized sooner the role that radar played in the system, attacks might have been pressed more persistently. But because it was assumed that Fighter Command fought a decentralized battle, with squadrons tied to the radio range of their individual stations, attacks on radar were not given a high priority. They were, in any case, difficult targets to destroy completely, even more so once the Junkers Ju 87B dive-bombers were withdrawn from battle on 18 August to avoid further high losses and conserve them for the invasion. German commanders were also lulled into a false sense of security by the reports of heavy losses inflicted on the RAF in the second half of August. At the end of the month, German Air Intelligence estimated that the RAF had lost 50 per cent of its fighter force since 8 August, against a loss of only 12 per cent of the German fighter force: 791 British aircraft against 169 German. In early September, Goering was informed that Fighter Command had been reduced at one stage to a mere 100 serviceable fighters after the attacks on airfields.17
The real picture was remarkably different. On 23 August, Fighter Command actually had an operational strength of 672, with 228 Spitfires and Hurricanes ready in storage depots; on 1 September there were 701 operational aircraft and on 6 September the figure was 738, with 256 in stores ready for immediate despatch.18 The losses suffered were understandably higher in late August, but the RAF daily casualty records show cumulative losses of only 444 between 6 August and 2 September, 410 of them Spitfires and Hurricanes.19 German records of fighter losses show at least 443 for the slightly shorter period from 8 August to 31 August, with total aircraft losses during the same period standing at a little under 900.20 Both sides made extravagant claims about the losses inflicted on the other, largely because of double counting by pilots who could not tell clearly in the aerial mêlée who had shot an aircraft down. Yet by an odd statistical coincidence, fighter losses on the two sides were almost exactly the same in August. An evident gap opened up between the German commanders’ perception of the battle and the reality facing German pilots as they engaged daily against a numerous and deadly enemy.
The assault on Fighter Command posed greater problems with the British supply of pilots. During August the casualty rate rose to 22 per cent of pilot strength, a higher rate of loss than could be made good from the Operational Training Units, which by August were turning out 320 pilots a month. A system of reinforcement was developed which gave 11 Group access to the pilots in other fighter groups. So-called ‘A’ squadrons were kept at full strength (20 trained pilots) and all assigned to Park’s group; ‘B’ squadrons were kept at near full strength and assigned to other key group sectors; ‘C’ squadrons were set up in 12 and 13 Groups, composed of only five or six trained pilots, whose job it was to prepare the intake of operational trainees for combat in the south-east.21 The rotation system allowed some respite to the hard-pressed front-line pilots, though it did throw into the heart of the battle less experienced crew, whose survival rates and kill ratios were lower.
These men were Churchill’s ‘few’. In a speech to Parliament on 20 August he repeated a sentence that he had been heard to mutter to himself a few days earlier as he returned by car from Park’s headquarters at Uxbridge: ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’ For all its subsequent reputation, the speech had, according to one of Churchill’s private secretaries, ‘less oratory than usual’. For much of the time ‘the speech seemed to drag’ in front of an audience made languid in the heat of an unaccustomed August sitting.22 Churchill devoted only a small part of his speech to the air battle, which focused on problems in the African war against Italy; nor did he single out Britain’s fighter pilots for praise. Fighter Command got six lines, but Bomber Command got twenty-one: ‘On no part of the Royal Air Force,’ Churchill continued, ‘does the weight of the war fall more heavily than on the daylight bombers who will play an invaluable part in the case of invasion…’23
On the Fighter Command stations Churchill’s remark was soon turned into a joke about mess bills. The journalists who dared the trip to these southern airfields were rewarded with scenes that have remained etched in the popular memory of the battle. ‘You knew,’ wrote Virginia Cowles, looking back a year later, ‘the fate of civilization was being decided fifteen thousand feet above your head in a world of sun, wind and sky.’ Aircraft could be seen ‘falling earthwards, a mass of flames, leaving as their last testament a smudge of black against the sky’. The pilots appeared like overgrown children, ‘little boys with blonde hair and pink cheeks, who looked as though they ought to be in school’.24 German crewmen evoked the same sentiments. When the MP Harold Nicolson saw two German Air Force prisoners at Tonbridge Station guarded by three soldiers with fixed bayonets, he thought them ‘tiny little boys’. The other passengers treated them with a shy respect.25
The toll on the men who flew the aircraft was severe. The persistent, daily combat was physically draining and nerve-racking. Captured German prisoners at the end of August were said to show signs of ‘nervous strain and cracking morale’, and ‘nervous exhaustion’. In his memoirs the German fighter commander Adolf Galland described the gradual demoralization of the German fighter force from the strain on minds and limbs compounded with the lack of any clear sign of operational success.26 They at least did not suffer the indignity of being machine-gunned as they parachuted to earth. British fighter pilots were regarded as combatants as they floated down because they could be back in a cockpit within hours; German pilots could only become prisoners-of-war. Dowding in his ‘Despatch’ deplored the practice, but confirmed that it accorded, in his view, with the laws of war.27