By late September the initial panics had died down; small thanks, perhaps, to Langdon-Davies. ‘Morale in general continues good,’ ran the Home Intelligence weekly report. This was attributed in official circles either to the fact that ‘the more depressed have evacuated themselves’, or to the discovery that air raids ‘are not so terrible once you have got used to them’.57 It owed something to the fact that the threat of German invasion was now palpably receding. Rumours of invasion had surfaced throughout the summer and autumn, most of them in areas very remote from the south coast. The military authorities were themselves exposed to regular invasion scares from a variety of intelligence sources. The Joint Intelligence Committee reported early in July that full-scale invasion could be expected at any time from the middle of the month, but the chiefs of staff took the view that invasion would only come after the air battle, and no further alert was issued until early September when photographic reconnaissance and isolated items of Enigma information suggested the concentration of German forces opposite the south coast. On 7 September the codeword CROMWELL was issued to prepare all home-based forces for immediate action.58
The Air Ministry had provided a key numbered 1–3 for different states of readiness (1 = attack improbable, 2 = attack probable, 3 = attack imminent); on 27 August the key was suddenly reversed to make 1 the more dangerous option. On 7 September code 1 was activated for an invasion ‘likely to occur in the next twelve hours’. Some stations failed to get the alert at all; others still used the old 1 – 3 code.59 Even if the alert had been properly managed, Fighter Command was entirely absorbed by the air defence battle, and would have been severely pressed to fight off invasion at the same time. The weekend of 14 – 15 September was popularly regarded as ‘Invasion Weekend’ because of the conjunction of favourable tides and a full moon. On the south coast the fields and farmyards filled with troops ordered to sleep with their boots on. When nothing happened, alert no. 2 was issued, only for ‘invasion imminent’ to be reinstated on 22 September. Only on 25 October was no. 3 introduced permanently, by which time fragments of intelligence from Europe indicated that invasion was no longer likely.
During October and November, bombing replaced invasion as the chief public concern. ‘There is neither fear nor expectation of invasion,’ ran the Home Intelligence report for the third week of October. After two months of bombing there was evidence of a strong desire to restore some sense of normality in cities where bombing occurred only seldom, and where damage was less than at first feared. Even in London, where there were 24 attacks in September, and an attack every night during October, the maintenance of daily life was a key to survival and a weapon against demoralization. The familiar images of workers and shoppers picking their way through bomb debris each morning is mute testimony to the efforts made to reassert the rhythms of ordinary life. The Daily Express ran a campaign under the caption ‘Don’t be a Bomb Bore’. When the Ministry of Information began to compile lists of ‘Questions the Public Are Asking’ in October, the newsletters were full of mundane inquiries: ‘Are animals allowed in shelters?’; ‘Are people liable to pay rent and rates if their houses are made uninhabitable?’; was there compensation for the loss of ‘false teeth, spectacles, gas masks…?’60
There was little evidence of widespread hatred of the enemy, however understandable it might have been. Violence erupted briefly against Italian premises in London in June when Italy entered the war (one Italian grocery, the Spaghetti House, hastily changed its name to British Food Shop).61 Home Intelligence found that public calls for bombing reprisals were directed against Italy as much as Germany. There was surprisingly slender evidence of sustained Germanophobia. The call for reprisals died down in October, but was more marked in areas where there had been no bombing. The Ministry of Information observed in November that populations that had not experienced raids ‘seem more prone to exaggeration and self-pity than others who have been badly bombed’. In one opinion poll carried out in the north-east, only 58 per cent favoured bombing reprisals against Germany. Earlier in the summer the Ministry had begun an orchestrated campaign to ‘stir up the people’s more primitive instincts’. Some uncertainty prevailed about how to do this, and the propagandists were left with the unhelpful conclusion that it was ‘merely sufficient to impress the people that they were in fact angry’. The campaign was quietly dropped.62
The transfer to night bombing in September altered the nature of the aerial battlefield once again. Fighter Command was responsible for the night-fighter force, made up predominantly of Blenheims and Beaufighters, but in the absence of adequate aerial radar to find bombers in the dark, contact with night raiders was largely accidental. At night the anti-aircraft defences were the main line of defence. When concentrated attacks began on London, guns were brought in from other parts of Britain to provide a more satisfactory barrage. Anti-aircraft batteries claimed 337 aircraft destroyed from July to September, but of those only 104 were at night, when it was estimated that a barrage used up to ten times as many shells per aircraft as visual firing.63 The reality was that aircraft were very difficult to shoot down at night from the air or from the ground until the advent of new detection equipment. German air fleets found that half their casualties from October onwards were caused by accidents resulting from poor weather conditions and ice.
By day the bomber force gradually disappeared. It was substituted by large formations of fighters, a small group converted to a fighter-bomber role with the addition of one 250 kg bomb, and an escort of between 200 and 300 combat fighters. The shift had two purposes. First, fighter bombers could keep up the pressure on the urban population by regular small-scale attacks which strained already jangled nerves; second, the fighter sweeps were intended to engage Fighter Command in a steady war of attrition to try to complete the process of wearing down the fighter force begun in July. The strategy made sense only in the light of the persistent misrepresentations of Fighter Command strength by German Air Intelligence, which continued to assert that the enemy was down to its last 200–300 aircraft and that British aircraft production was falling sharply under the hail of bombs. In October, 253 of the nuisance raids were mounted; in November, 235.64 Aircraft flew at altitudes well above 20,000 feet, where the Me 109 was at an advantage thanks to its two-stage engine supercharger. At such heights the slow ascent from RAF airfields to meet the enemy proved a grave handicap and loss ratios began to favour the attacker.
Fighter Command switched tactics once more. Standing patrols of high-flying Spitfires were used to reconnoitre incoming fighter sweeps. On sighting the enemy, other fighter squadrons patrolling at lower altitudes flew up to battle stations. Air fighting at high altitude brought new difficulties. British aircraft did not have pressurized cabins and the hood was prone to leak at altitude, inducing terrible cramps for the unfortunate pilot. Fighting at high altitude was more physically draining, particularly for RAF squadron commanders whose average age was almost thirty. Losses in October totalled 146 Hurricanes and Spitfires; German air fleets lost 365 aircraft, of which a high proportion were bombers subject to increasingly hazardous flying in the late autumn nights.65 Nevertheless the loss of pilots in Fighter Command was down to only 10 per cent of the force in October, and in November losses of both aircraft and pilots fell to a new low point as the daylight air battle died away as falteringly and inconclusively as it had started.