The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

Throughout August and September, and on into the winter months, the German Air Force flew numerous, daily Störangriffe, small raids by day and night intended to lure the RAF into battle, to destroy individual military-economic targets, to trigger the air-raid alarm system, and to induce tiredness and despondency in the population. In August 1940 there were four major raids, employing hundreds of bomber aircraft, but 1,062 smaller raids spread out over the country, the largest number of the whole campaign.⁷⁵ The city of Hull, for example, was subjected to six small night raids between 20 June and 6 September, which between them destroyed only 17 houses and badly damaged a further 47, but kept the population in a state of perpetual alert.⁷⁶ Some of these raids were scarcely opposed by Fighter Command, at night almost none. In addition the German Air Force mounted Zerstörerangriffe (destroyer attacks) against key armaments and port installations, using larger numbers of heavy fighters or dive-bombers, as well as armed reconnaissance flights. For the war at sea, a number of specialized units dropped mines in coastal waters and estuaries. In August 1940 only 328 were dropped, but over the following three months 2,766.⁷⁷ There were also plans to attack RAF bomber bases north of London once air superiority was achieved – Operation ‘Luftparade’ – but the failure to dominate Fighter Command postponed the attempt. Only Driffield airfield in Yorkshire was severely hit by aircraft of Air Fleet 5 flying from Norway. The sheer range of targets and attack categories was an exhausting schedule for German air units and it was this, as much as the damage inflicted by Fighter Command, that by early September created a steady attrition of the force and growing strain on the pilots. Later in the war German appraisal of the campaign suggested that the air force had simply been asked to do too much, a view that is difficult to contest. Kesselring in his memoirs dismissed the strategy as ‘muddle headed’.

The systematic assault on Fighter Command during the last two weeks of August 1940 was nevertheless the chief priority, and the great majority of German combat aircraft were assigned to the task. The counter-air campaign replicated the strategy adopted in Poland and the Western campaign. Waves of bombers and dive-bombers were to attack key airfields, installations and stores while fighter aircraft destroyed enemy fighter opposition. Between 12 August and 6 September a total of 53 major attacks were directed at RAF targets, the heaviest occurring between 24 August and 6 September. The German Air Force High Command presumed that the outcome of the campaign would also follow the pattern of previous successes, and early reports from the fighting suggested there was no reason to think otherwise. The German assumption that the RAF suffered declining figures of supply, falling pilot numbers and a crude dependence on local air control encouraged a pervasive optimism. The major raid on the Fighter Command station at Biggin Hill in Kent on 18 August was celebrated as a symbolic German triumph. Pilots were invited to give their accounts of the raid for use in air force propaganda. For many of them this attack was the first major raid they had undertaken against an English target; they returned with smug reports of feeble British defences:

As the machines landed back again after exactly three hours, I saw all the ground personnel standing by the runway. The men worried about us, only wanted to know if all their ‘birds’ had returned unharmed. But we scrambled out of the machines, went over to them, shook them by the hand. ‘Young men, that was nothing at all, we had imagined a quite different defence.’ Is that all England can offer? Or is the English air force already so weakened?⁷⁸

Another confirmed that anti-aircraft fire and enemy fighters had been invisible; the target airfields showed a sea of flames, shattered buildings, destroyed runways. ‘The German pilots shook their heads,’ the account concluded. ‘Has it gone so quickly? Is England already finished?’ Biggin Hill, ran a third account, ‘completely destroyed… wiped out of existence’.⁷⁹ In reality, Biggin Hill remained operational almost every day of the battle, its staff and pilots dispersed in nearby villages, an emergency operations room set up in a local shop, its aircraft carefully camouflaged.