The strain on Fighter Command crew was evident to their commanders. In August, Dowding ordered a period of twenty-four hours’ rest for each pilot every week (which explained at least in part the gap between numbers available and the numbers actually flying that so enraged Churchill). In 11 Group efforts were made to repair the damage suffered by men swept round on a carousel of noise, danger and fear. Pilots were sent away to distant billets to get a night of uninterrupted sleep. More games and physical exercises were introduced. The Treasury, after much argument, finally agreed that the cost of electric lighting for airfield squash courts would be met from the public purse on the grounds, robustly argued by the Air Ministry, that a good game of squash produced a better pilot. Less energetic games were denied the public subsidy, and pilots had to pay for the lights in billiard halls out of their own pockets. Park thoughtfully arranged for airfields to be visited by string bands ‘in order to remove some of the drabness of the present war’.28
By the beginning of September the toll was telling on both sides. Park reported to Dowding that, between 28 August and 5 September, the cumulative impact of the pounding received by airfields had had ‘a serious effect on the fighting efficiency of the fighter squadrons’, which could be met only by improvisation. Yet the RAF withstood the assault far better than any other air force attacked by German aircraft. The system of reinforcement was not ideal, but it provided an adequate pool of reserves, while the supply of aircraft was maintained steadily. The three airfields temporarily put out of commission had not been intended to stand in the defensive front line. They were used for the battle in France, but their proximity to the coast made them less satisfactory as defensive stations. Dowding had under his command a network of stations and satellite fields which would have kept a substantial force in contact with the attacking formations even had the forward airfields been put permanently out of action. Only a carefully directed scheme of sabotage could have disrupted the network of communications, which was limited as much by technical snags and human error as it was by the work of the enemy. Dowding commented on Park’s report by pointing out that his Group had survived 40 attacks on 13 airfields, and had briefly lost the use of only three.29 The loss rate of men and machines was as high in September when the attacks on airfields were abandoned.
At the height of this dour campaign of attrition came an intervention from Hitler which is always said to have saved Fighter Command and turned the battle. In a speech on 4 September Hitler announced that the German Air Force was to switch the main weight of attack on to British cities. London was singled out as the chief target and from 7 September, when the first mass daylight raid was launched on the capital, the German effort was concentrated on bombing the city by day and night. The respite afforded Fighter Command, so it is argued, allowed it to revive and to inflict insupportable losses on the German air fleets. The reason usually given for the sharp change in air strategy is the attack on Berlin by Bomber Command on the night of 25/26 August. Hitler was said to be so incensed by violation of the German capital that he suspended the attack on the RAF in order to unleash annihilating retaliatory blows against London; vengeance attacks made little strategic sense, and German strategy thereafter was doomed to failure.
The issues that led to the third phase of the battle were more complex than this. The central problem for Hitler and the military leadership was still to find a way to bring Britain quickly to the point where invasion could be carried out with a reasonable prospect of success. Barring invasion, there remained the hope that air attacks would prove so unendurable that the British government would at last bow to public pressure and accept the peace refused earlier in the summer. The disappointing results of the early wave of attacks in mid-August had already prompted Hitler to take stock. ‘The collapse of England in the year 1940,’ he told staff at his headquarters on 20 August, ‘is under present circumstances no longer to be reckoned on.’30 Nevertheless he did not cancel Sealion, nor rein back the air assault, in the hope that the situation might suddenly improve. Instead the air force moved on to the next stage of the campaign planned in July.
By late August the German Air Force commanders assumed from the intelligence they were fed that Fighter Command was a spent force. Their instructions were now to bring the rest of the country progressively under attack, starting with industrial, military and transport targets in and around major urban centres in preparation for the invasion. Heavy bomb attacks on Bristol, Liverpool, Birmingham and other Midland cities at night preceded the attacks on London. On 2 September Goering ordered the systematic destruction of selected targets in London in line with the wider aim to reduce military capability and the will to resist. On 5 September Hitler directed the air fleets to begin a general campaign against urban targets and enemy morale, including London. With this directive, according to a lecture given in Berlin later in the war, ‘economic war from the air could be embarked upon with full fury, and the morale of the civilian population subjected at the same time to a heavy strain’.31 The decision to launch attacks on London rested with Hitler, but all the preparation was in place long before. When Hitler did authorize the attack to begin, it was not a simple case of matching terror with terror, even though the first instructions to the air fleets described the operation as ‘Vengeance attacks’. Hitler insisted that only war-essential targets should be attacked, and rejected the idea of inducing ‘mass panic’ through deliberate attacks on civilian areas.32 The raids on Berlin may have affected the timing of the decision, but even this is doubtful. At most they allowed German leaders what Goebbels described as an ‘alibi’: British airmen were presented in German propaganda as military terrorists, while German operations were presented as a legitimate attack on targets broadly defined as essential for war.33
Such a distinction is still sometimes drawn sixty years later. It is an entirely false one. The two air forces operated under almost identical instructions to hit military and economic targets whenever conditions allowed. Neither air force was permitted to mount terror attacks for the sake of pure terror. The British War Cabinet issued a directive to Bomber Command early in June 1940 instructing bomber crews over Germany to attack only when a target was clearly identified, and to seek out an alternative target in case the first was obscured. If no contact was made with the target, aircraft were expected to bring their bombs back. On moonless nights aircraft could attack ‘identifiable targets in the centres of industrial activity’. With an eye to publicity (or perhaps a future war crimes trial?), the authors of the directive observed that the new requirements ‘will show up quite well on the record if ever the time comes when belligerents have to produce their instructions to bombers’.34 German airmen were also told to bomb only when they had good visual contact with the target, and to bring their bombs back if they did not. Lecture notes found on a German POW revealed detailed instructions to avoid residential districts (unless jettisoning bombs!). German airmen were told that ‘on moonless nights’ London could be attacked because it offered ‘a large target area’ in which something of value might be hit.35
The problem both air forces faced was the impossibility of attacking single military targets with existing air technology without spreading destruction over a wide circle around them. This explains why both sides believed that the other was conducting a terror campaign against civilian morale. By mid-September Park was telling Dowding that the Germans had abandoned ‘all pretence of attacking military objectives’ in favour of ‘“browning” the huge London target’.36 Goebbels invited foreign newsmen on grisly tours of bombed schools, churches and hospitals. But even he could see that journalists would not be taken in entirely by counterclaims that German aeroplanes only attacked military targets, and was even prepared to admit that it was ‘impossible to avoid civilian damage’.37 In an age long before smart weapons, accuracy to within a mile at night could be considered aerial sharp-shooting. Bombers were under constant threat of attack by fighters; they were shot at by anti-aircraft guns and trapped in cones of searchlight beams; they flew in poor daytime weather, they flew in the dark. What would now be described by the cynical euphemism ‘collateral damage’ was unavoidable, and German aircraft began to inflict civilian casualties from the moment they attacked the British mainland in June.