Battle of Britain - 80yrs Ago This Summer - Discussion Thread
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Sorry to quote myself but I will expand on that.
The German strategy was confused from the outset. In Goering's very first Directive he set out two completely different objectives, to cut Britain's overseas supplies (and destroy existing stocks) and to destroy the RAF. Siege or decision? Neither.
The Luftflotten themselves were commanded by very competent officers, Kesselring, Sperrle and in Norway Stumpff. The Directive did call for coordination between the air fleets, but after that it was left to the individual commanders to plan and conduct the campaign themselves. At a meeting convened by Goering at the Hague on 1st August the various commands put forward their various and disparate plans. Bungay described the results of this meeting as 'a confusion of banalities' and that it was. The confusion was not the result of Luftwaffe planning, it was the result of the requirements laid down by the OKW and Goering's failure to create a unified planning process.
We might say today that the various commands within the Luftwaffe which would carry out the campaign against Britain were never on the same page. For example, Sperrle thought that the RAF could be defeated almost as a side show to attacks on British ports and supplies, but then Goering excluded Britain's southern ports from target lists in case they might be needed in an invasion, something his directives at this time never mentioned. Kesselring wanted to attack London directly and destroy the RAF's fighter forces as they were compelled to defend the capital. Goering more or less sided with Sperrle. Kesselring and Sperrle did agree that the bomber forces should be conserved until after the RAF had been decisively defeated by fighter action, this time it was Goering who disagreed. etc., etc. etc.
The closest they came to a plan on August 1 was vaguely implemented following 'Adlertag'. It was a plan to destroy the RAF. The Luftwaffe was to open with small raids of mixed fighters and bombers, followed by massed fighters ten to fifteen minutes later which would shoot down the British fighters flushed up by the first raids. This would be followed by a large bomber formation, escorted by Bf 110s, just in case the British had anything left. The plan for 'Adlertag' makes that for Sealion look like a work of military genius.
First, it was developed by the Luftwaffe in isolation. It was not even developed by the Luftwaffe as a whole, but by individual units putting forward what amounted to wish lists. The Luftflotte commanders never sat down in a room with their Corps commanders and intelligence staffs to thrash out an agreement on tactics and targets.
Second, is the lack of a clear objective mentioned above. The RAF, or was it just Fighter Command? was to be destroyed, but target lists also included and excluded, from time to time, ports, supplies, the merchant navy, the Royal Navy, transport infrastructure, the aircraft industry and wider defence industry. This is Bungay's 'confusion of banalities' made real.
Third, there was no clear plan as to how the RAF was to be defeated. The entire German plan was predicated on the fallacy that if the RAF fighters could be forced up to fight, then they would be shot down. The Luftwaffe also had to do this while retaining enough strength for later operations. Head of Luftwaffe Intelligence estimated British fighter strength at 675, to his own 725. So by its own estimates, if the Luftwaffe could achieve a 1:1 exchange ratio it would eliminate itself from the campaign and future operations. It had to achieve an exchange ratio of better than 2:1, and nobody seems to have considered this unlikely, or even difficult.
Finally, there was the opposition, a coordinated air defence system, largely commanded by the men who had developed it and had spent the last ten to fifteen years planning how to oppose and defeat an enemy air assault on Britain. They did have a plan and it would have a significant effect on the third point (above).
There lies the problem. When do you look at your pilots claims and say "I don't believe you"? If they report an airfield is destroyed why do you tell them to attack it again? If you want the RAF to meet you in the air, why attack their RADAR? If a raid is not intercepted is that really not intercepted or have the RAF withdrawn all defence to London? The two most important statistics, aircraft production and pilots lost couldn't be known in Germany at the time.
Again, an intelligence failure touched on earlier by Nuuuman.
As for attacking radar, the Germans knew that it was detecting their aircraft, they just had no idea how that information was analysed and acted upon, which is hardly surprising, given how they were doing it themselves in 1940. However, they would have been happy to catch the RAF on the ground, particularly in the third phase of their so called plan.
I would just say the Dowding looked at 12 Group claims and said 'I don't believe you', just not exactly in those words.
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buffnut453
Captain
It doesn't take years to develop a plan. In reality, you plan within the time available. Obviously, more time to plan typically results in a better output but it's entirely feasible to do a solid effort in just a few weeks.
The hiatus after the fall of France provided ample time for the Luftwaffe to develop a solid plan. They didn't/couldn't because the objective wasn't clearly defined and kept changing over time. That approach is a recipe for disaster.
Only if you consider crossing the channel to be a big river crossing, you not only need a plan you need a lot of special equipment and lots of practice and training, look at the allies efforts before D-Day.
buffnut453
Captain
I'm not talking about Operation Sealion. I'm talking about the Luftwaffe plan to neutralize the fighter defences around London to pressure a change of government. Planning for what I describe can easily be done in a few weeks.
To put pressure on the government there has to be some threat of invasion.
I think the issue goes deeper. If you read this Radar Pages Home page. The Chain Home system was based on primitive technologies, but by linking the stations together and using various "dodges" they were able to get a lot of information about range height speed and numbers that probably wouldn't be obvious to someone just picking up signals offshore. From the same pages "Much has been written, and rightly so, of the 'Daventry Experiment' of 1935. Few people will know of an equally important experiment which took place between 1936 and 1937. At the instigation of Henry Tizard, with typical foresight, a series of trials was carried out to establish an operational procedure for interception of hostile aircraft by control from the ground." How much were the LW aware that chain home could not only detect an incoming raid but vector an interception? I cant really find anything.
The Germans must have been aware that Chain Home would give a range and bearing, and altitude would have been assumed as it was a fairly straightforward problem to solve (you can see the dipoles at different heights on the receiving masts in decent pictures and any German engineer could have worked out what they were for). Chain Home never gave reliable information on numbers, which was very much down to the interpretive skills of the operators, and never gave any information on type.
The Germans knew that the British fighters were controlled from the ground, but had no idea of the overall integration of the system across not just 11 Group, but Fighter Command as a whole. The prevalent German belief seems to have been that each squadron was individually and independently controlled on the basis of information received by its controller, as was their way in some pre-war exercises. This also meant that each squadron was tied to its home airfield. They had no idea that the information from an entire radar system and other sources was being input, processed (filtered in the parlance of the day) and disseminated from Headquarters, to Group and then Sector level. They did not understand the structure of the system, so even if they had known which aerodromes housed the sector stations, they would not have understood their significance, that this was where the squadrons they were fighting were ultimately controlled from.
It's worth a very brief re-cap of how the system worked. Information from Chain Home (with the exception of the most northerly stations) went to Fighter Command HQ at Bentley Priory where it, and any other information was 'filtered' and represented in the operations room on one of the map tables so familiar from a certain famous movie. This was then sent to the relevant Groups, for example Park at 11 Group in his operations room at Uxbridge. Here more information, from the Observer Corps was added, direct from 'tellers' in the Observer Corps groups in his area. This was plotted on the 11 Group map table. Park also had information on the state of his squadrons, position, and even the levels of fuel and oxygen in those airborne. It was the group controllers that issued the orders to sector controllers as to which squadrons should be ordered off. Once airborne they were controlled from the ground by their sector controller and ordered to pre-determined patrol lines or directly vectored to an incoming raid. Squadrons from different sectors, operating together always remained under their own sector control. Once contact was made with the enemy squadron commanders took control and no further attempts were made to contact the squadrons from the ground until they reported that the action was over. This was all completely unknown to the Germans.
The Germans knew that the radar masts formed part of an early warning system, indeed Martini urged Goering to destroy them before launching a major strike against Fighter Command's airfields. Like so much of the Luftwaffe campaign the result was half hearted and inconsistent. On 12 August 5 stations were damaged, Ventnor was put off air for a considerable period, but there were no continuous or even systematic attacks on the chain. The same can be said of the sector stations. Several were bombed and damaged, but again, the Luftwaffe did not persist in these attacks, allowing repair and recovery (Park was censured for using Army personnel to do this).
FalkeEins
Senior Airman
....you have to wonder how much of a role 'ULTRA' played in the 'early warning system', it never seems to be mentioned in the context of the BoB. The major Luftwaffe strike operations must have required a certain amount of pre-planning and thus communications, giving the code-breakers more time to identify targets and coordinate defenders. I don't know, but I can't believe it was all down to radar, so even had the Germans succeeded in destroying the masts, a certain amount of target intelligence was always going to be available especially after the change in strategy..
ULTRA intelligence was used in the form of briefs to relevant commands. Of course, it was never identified as ULTRA, usually it was 'a reliable source' or some similar wording.
I don't think that it usually gave precise information on impending raids that might be tactically useful, but it did reveal German intentions. The Battle of Britain Then and Now includes some examples of these briefs.
Like this.
Obviously this would be useful for avoiding the aircraft being caught on the ground, not so much for intercepting the raid.
It wasn't just this source either, signals intelligence more widely helped to build up a picture of the Luftwaffe's strength, dispositions and intentions. If, for example, the British could establish that a number of 'stuka' formations were moving to airfields along the French Channel coast, they could be reasonably sure they were not moving there for a holiday.
Edit: There is some confusion about the role that ULTRA intelligence played in the Battle, because it is true that Dowding did not know of its existence until October 16th 1940 when he was added to the list of people that were made aware of Enigma's existence. Just because someone was not aware of the source of intelligence does not mean that they cannot act upon that intelligence when it is provided for them. Some very well regarded and important historians seem to have overlooked this most basic fact in their attempts to prove or disprove what Dowding may or may not have known in the summer of 1940. It is also important to understand that although the Luftwaffe's use of Enigma was the most unprofessional and prone to lazy operational expedients which severely compromised its security, it was never routinely read. Sometimes it took hours to decrypt a message into the probable plaintext, sometimes it took days, making it tactically useless, and often it wasn't broken at all.
I don't think that it usually gave precise information on impending raids that might be tactically useful, but it did reveal German intentions. The Battle of Britain Then and Now includes some examples of these briefs.
Like this.
Obviously this would be useful for avoiding the aircraft being caught on the ground, not so much for intercepting the raid.
It wasn't just this source either, signals intelligence more widely helped to build up a picture of the Luftwaffe's strength, dispositions and intentions. If, for example, the British could establish that a number of 'stuka' formations were moving to airfields along the French Channel coast, they could be reasonably sure they were not moving there for a holiday.
Edit: There is some confusion about the role that ULTRA intelligence played in the Battle, because it is true that Dowding did not know of its existence until October 16th 1940 when he was added to the list of people that were made aware of Enigma's existence. Just because someone was not aware of the source of intelligence does not mean that they cannot act upon that intelligence when it is provided for them. Some very well regarded and important historians seem to have overlooked this most basic fact in their attempts to prove or disprove what Dowding may or may not have known in the summer of 1940. It is also important to understand that although the Luftwaffe's use of Enigma was the most unprofessional and prone to lazy operational expedients which severely compromised its security, it was never routinely read. Sometimes it took hours to decrypt a message into the probable plaintext, sometimes it took days, making it tactically useless, and often it wasn't broken at all.
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Peter Gunn
Master Sergeant
Kudos to you guys on a great debate and especially for keeping it civil, agreeing to disagree without any evident malice is refreshing to say the least, I knew there was a reason I enjoyed this place.
I guess my question is did the higher ups of the LW have any plan for replenishment of lost A/C and crew? I mean they couldn't have bought totally the Aryan Supremacy thing could they? Did they expect to just sweep the RAF from the sky? Because that was so easily accomplished ~24 years earlier in a different war. I note the 675 to 725 RAF v. LW fighter strength, that's not much of an edge, did they not consider what the toll would be on their own forces and replenishment of same?
To me, Operation Sea Lion was Bat Sh!t Crazyville, but Aldertag sounds like a sh!t show from beginning to end, so upon reflection, maybe therein lies my answer.
I suppose in retrospect, neither the Germans nor the Japanese had much of a pilot training program compared to the likes the U.S. or Great Britain.
Sorry, guess I'm rambling, I skipped breakfast, that's my excuse, I'll show myself out.
I guess my question is did the higher ups of the LW have any plan for replenishment of lost A/C and crew? I mean they couldn't have bought totally the Aryan Supremacy thing could they? Did they expect to just sweep the RAF from the sky? Because that was so easily accomplished ~24 years earlier in a different war. I note the 675 to 725 RAF v. LW fighter strength, that's not much of an edge, did they not consider what the toll would be on their own forces and replenishment of same?
To me, Operation Sea Lion was Bat Sh!t Crazyville, but Aldertag sounds like a sh!t show from beginning to end, so upon reflection, maybe therein lies my answer.
I suppose in retrospect, neither the Germans nor the Japanese had much of a pilot training program compared to the likes the U.S. or Great Britain.
Sorry, guess I'm rambling, I skipped breakfast, that's my excuse, I'll show myself out.
michaelmaltby
Colonel
".... much of a pilot training program"
Both prewar Germany and Japan had superior pilot training .... gliders in Germany from flight 'clubs' .... acrobatics and swordsmanship for the IJN pilots, IIRC.
Neither country had the resources or interior, safe, airspace to conduct 'assembly line' pilot training, which BTW, got started in the Commonwealth (CTP) well before Deceber 7, 1941.
Both prewar Germany and Japan had superior pilot training .... gliders in Germany from flight 'clubs' .... acrobatics and swordsmanship for the IJN pilots, IIRC.
Neither country had the resources or interior, safe, airspace to conduct 'assembly line' pilot training, which BTW, got started in the Commonwealth (CTP) well before Deceber 7, 1941.
Unfortunately, that does seem to have been a widely held assumption at all levels. This persisted even after the war. Kesselring wrote in his memoirs
"Our difficulty was not to bring down enemy fighters - in Galland, Molders, Oesau, Balthasar etc., we had real aces, while the huge figures of aircraft shot down are further proof - but to get the enemy to fight."
That a man like Kesselring was still labouring under this delusion after the war is an indication of how rooted it was in the German psyche.
Osterkamp calculated that in order to protect the invasion beaches he would need two complete Geschwader (almost 150 aircraft) over the beach head at all times. By his maths this would require a strength of 12 Geschwader, almost 900 aircraft, more than the Luftwaffe started the Battle with. This implied that they could not sustain any net losses at all. This meant that a gross attrition rate of about 10% per month, say 75 aircraft, was the maximum acceptable. He further calculated that within these constraints and in order to reduce Fighter Command's strength by 50% the Luftwaffe fighters would have to achieve an exchange rate of 5:1. This was in fact the target he set JG 51 when it took up its position on the Channel coast in early July. He ordered his pilots only to attack when a tactical advantage assured them of success with minimal risk. At least Osterkamp had bothered to do the sums. The problem was that the Luftwaffe could never shoot down something like 100 British fighters a week without taking risks. If the British lost 100 fighters in five weeks, to the Germans 20, achieving a 5:1 exchange rate, they would still be able to fight over the beaches and the Luftwaffe would have failed. Essentially, the German plan was dependent on the British committing large numbers of fighters to large air battles, allowing themselves to be bounced and shot down by the Luftwaffe's aces in their Bf 109s. Unsurprisingly, the British did not oblige.
I don't know how much value there is in the memoirs of defeated leaders, some seem to want to re run the battle. Kesselring was aware of his pilots claims, if they were correct then the RAF had been defeated, but they weren't. He was also aware of LW losses which means the RAF were fighting, just not how he wanted them to. An attrition rate of 75 per month is 2.5 per day. If you try to keep 150 Bf 109s above Kent from sunrise to sunset in all weathers you would probably lose 2.5 per day without any enemy involvement at all.
It was an impossible task for the Luftwaffe. Not all its leaders thought it was possible. After the 5 (6? dodgy memory) August meeting at Karinhalle to finalise the 'Adler' plan, Stumpff returned to Norway and Luftflotte 5 and told his senior officers that the so called plan would not work, that they would lose men and machines, but that they had to get on with it.
German belief in success was reinforced by their experiences in the Channel fighting in late June, July and early August. They destroyed 87 British fighters for the loss of 54 of their own. While this was a ratio of 1.6:1 we have to factor in the 3:1 overclaiming rate typical of both sides. Now the Luftwaffe believed it was achieving Osterkamp's magical 5:1 exchange rate, when it clearly was not. If we factor in ALL aircraft, the Luftwaffe lost at least 172 aircraft (plus 79 damaged) to the RAF's 115 (plus 106 damaged). This, in miniature, is the story of the Battle.
The German plan was nearly as crazy as Sealion. Almost nothing was known about how the British defence system worked, the nature of targets or the British industry's output. It was weather dependent. If bad weather grounded aircraft for any period, the British won by default. Two Luftflotten with fighters, dive bomber, bomber and 'zerstorer' units were spread between Denmark and Brittany with a third in Norway. There was no central plan. They were all responsible for setting their own targets and all had different ideas about what was important. Fighter and bomber units could not talk to each other. The Luftwaffe's serviceability rate was already poor, and falling as it operated from improvised fields.
The German 'plan' amounted to flying aircraft over England, dropping some bombs to annoy the British and then shooting down any fighters that came up to attempt to stop them.
What could possibly go wrong?
A well organised, fierce and determined defence for a start, something the Germans seem to have barely considered.
If anyone swallowed it, it was Churchill. Not the myth of Aryan supremacy but a huge respect for the German military and industry. His ancestor John Churchill fought with the Germans at Blenheim (Hochfeld) and he himself understood from his time as minister for munitions in WW1 knew what was involved in an industrial age war. The LW lost 285 aircraft in Poland, 260 in Norway and 1,428 in France Belgium. with similar numbers damaged. Throughout the battle British s/e fighter production was at least twice that of Germany. In front line strength the LW lost about as many Bf110s as it started with but produced enough to replace them. The problem was really with two engined bombers, not only are they easier to hit but they have more engines, crew and "stuff" than a 109. so they are more easily rendered unseviceable.
Peter Gunn
Master Sergeant
Great post, very informative, especially for someone like me that realizes how little I know.
The quote by Kesselring is just soooo... man I don't even know the word to use. I can see his point though, yes, it was probably a real bitch to get either RAF Fighter Command to come up and fight, or the 8th AF to come over the continent for a donnybrook. Wow, just wow.
I also found the part: "He ordered his pilots only to attack when a tactical advantage assured them of success with minimal risk.", well, if you're doing that wouldn't the RAF be building strength on the many days you're not knocking them out of the sky? I mean, am I devoting more thought to this than they were? (OK that was a humorous rhetorical question BTW).
Did not the British out produce the Germans in replacement aircraft during the Battle? Herr Kesselring is either actively disingenuous or just totally delusional, knowing the Nazi psyche I think a bit of both is probably not out of the realm of reality.
buffnut453
Captain
Steve,
Thanks for posting this. I now think I understand the source of our disagreement which centres on how much Germany could know about how the UK air defence system operated. As I posted a while ago, I entirely agree that Germany had no way of knowing how Sector and Group controllers integrated data from the Chain Home system. The communication linkages typically used landline telephone which could not be intercepted so, other than espionage, there was no means of gathering that information.
My point, though, is that you don't need to know how a system operates in order to disrupt that system. To use a simple example, I have only a rudimentary understanding of computers. How memory, CPU and display functions interact and the messages involved are completely unknown to me. However, I do know that if I smash my monitor, it effectively turns my computer into an electric-powered paperweight. The same is true for any system-of-systems. If you can identify any visible/detectable vulnerability, the operation of that system can be disrupted.
In the case of the UK air defence system, apart from the actual control structure and process and specific locations of Sector/Group C2 nodes, pretty much all other parts of the system-of-systems was detectable using technology and processes of the day. It's clear that Martini had a pretty good idea of the function and purpose of the Chain Home radar systems. Frankly, he didn't need to know how the radar data was processed because, without RDF, the UK's defences would be severely degraded. Aerial reconnaissance can readily identify which airfields are being used by fighter aircraft...and aerial reconnaissance becomes much easier if RDF is neutralized.
So much of this comes down to a lack of a clear plan for how to take down Fighter Command. Despite the recommendations of senior leaders like Martini, there simply was no coherent, sensible plan. I entirely agree with one of your other posts that much of Luftwaffe "planning" seems to be based on the "assume and hope" principle.
Cheers,
Mark
