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    The Battle of Britain: Luftwaffe Blitz
    The Battle of Britain: Luftwaffe Blitz
    The Battle of Britain: Luftwaffe Blitz
    Ebook270 pages2 hours

    The Battle of Britain: Luftwaffe Blitz

    By Philip Kaplan

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    About this ebook

    This new collection of archive imagery from Philip Kaplan offers a gripping, graphic view of the routine repeated each day and night, from the summer of 1940 through to the following spring, by the German bomber crews bringing their deadly cargoes to Britain. Through mainly German archival photos, it profiles airmen on their French bases and in the skies over England; the aircraft they flew, fought and sometimes died in; their leaders; their targets and results; the R.A.F pilots and aircraft that stood in opposition to the German forces, and the losses experienced on both sides. The images, from the Bundesarchiv and other German and British photographic sources, vividly convey a real sense of events as they played out, as do the compelling first-hand accounts from a host of participants on both sides, eyewitnesses to one of the most brutal sustained bombardments of the Second World War.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateAug 14, 2013
    ISBN9781473829657
    The Battle of Britain: Luftwaffe Blitz
    Author

    Philip Kaplan

    Author/historian/designer/photographer Philip Kaplan has written and co-authored forty-seven books on aviation, military and naval subjects. His previous books include: One Last Look, The Few, Little Friends, Round the Clock, Wolfpack, Convoy, Fighter Pilot, Bombers, Fly Navy, Run Silent, Chariots of Fire, Legend and, for Pen and Sword, Big Wings, Two-Man Air Force, Night and Day Bomber Offensive, Mustang The Inspiration, Rolling Thunder, Behind the Wire, Grey Wolves, Naval Air, and Sailor. He is married to the novelist Margaret Mayhew.

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      Book preview

      The Battle of Britain - Philip Kaplan

      The navigator and pilot of a Heinkel He 111 bomber attacking a target in England during the Battle of Britain.

      In The Beginning

      A lot of people over the years have tried to invade Britain, including the Romans in 55 BC. Later came the Vikings and the Danes. The Normans managed it successfully in 1066, but the attempt in 1588 by the King of Spain and his famous Spanish armada ended badly for him when his warships were defeated by Sir Francis Drake. Napoleon had a notion along those lines but was never able to assemble the necessary forces for such an undertaking.

      Much of the modern history of Britain before 1940 revolved around her Royal Navy and how, for more than a thousand years, that navy had roamed the seas protecting the island nation. Her heroic admirals, Drake, Nelson and others had mostly triumphed over those who came by sea, engaging and shoving them back to their homelands, firmly defeated and pondering their failed efforts.

      above and below: British, French and Belgian soldiers rarely saw the Spitfire Mk 1s and the Bf 109s of the Geman Luftwaffe high in the grey skies over Dunkirk in late May of 1940. It was the first encounter of the German pilots with the Mk 1 and they were shocked to find they were being both out-turned and out-climbed by their British opponents. Here, the main fire burning in the port, and wrecked cars and boats on the Dunkirk beach.

      Then, in the summer of 1940, the German nation, fresh from her relatively easy conquest of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Belgium, Norway, the Netherlands, and France, confidently sent the Luftwaffe, her large and powerful air force, to clear the air over England and the English Channel in preparation for her own invasion attempt.

      After the end of the First World War; the victorious Allies had punished their former enemy with a treaty executed at Versailles, a treaty put together over six months and signed on 28 June 1919 following the negotiations of that Paris Peace Conference. Among the most significant and controversial measures of the treaty were those compelling the Germans to accept responsibility for causing that war, to completely disarm, to make substantial territorial concessions, and to pay very heavy war reparations to the Allied countries that had opposed them in the war, a sum equivalent in 2013 to £284 billion. Noted economists of the time, including John Maynard Keynes, saw that last requirement as excessively harsh and unproductive. Those in leadership roles in Britain and the United States were inclined to be convinced by Keynes argument; the French, however, were not. A major intent of the treaty conference was the permanent pacification of Germany, along with the punishment dished out by the reparations element. These were key factors leading to the Second World War only twenty years later:

      The negotiations leading to the Versailles Treaty had been organized to exclude the defeated Germany, Austria and Hungary, as well as Russia, which had negotiated a separate peace with Germany at the end of the war in 1918. Even the negotiators, the United Kingdom, the United States, France, Italy, and Japan, admitted that the resulting treaty was harsh and punitive. The large delegations from each of these victor nations became so unwieldy that both Japan and Italy elected to exit the meetings, leaving only the representatives of Britain’s David Lloyd George, France’s Georges Clemenceau, and the U.S. President, Woodrow Wilson, to slowly hammer out what has come to be known as the unhappy compromise.

      At Versailles, the French expressed their position when Clemenceau said to Wilson, America is far away, protected by the ocean. Not even Napoleon himself could touch England. You [the United States and Britain] are both sheltered. We are not. He referred to the fact that only France among them possessed a land border with Germany, and stated that the French wanted to take their border to the Rhine or failing that, to create a buffer state in the Rhineland. The most the others would agree to was the de-militarization of the Rhineland, a mandate over the Saar, and the promises of Britain and the U.S. to support France in the event of a new aggression by Germany. As Keynes described the French position: … it was the policy of France to set the clock back and undo what, since 1870, the progress of Germany had accomplished. By loss of territory and other measures her population was to be curtailed; but chiefly the economic system, upon which she depended for her new strength, the vast fabric built upon iron, coal, and transport must be destroyed. If France could seize, even in part, what Germany was compelled to drop, the inequality of strength between the two rivals for European hegemony might be remedied for generations.

      Of the Big Three allies, France had suffered the greatest loss of life in the war as well as immense damage and Clemenceau was utterly determined to achieve the payment of massive reparations by the Germans. To some extent he had the support in that demand of the British Prime Minister Lloyd George, but the Briton also favoured the restoration of Germany to make her a strong trading partner and thus he worried about the effect of the payment of those reparations on the British economy. Like the French, he was also concerned about the preservation of his empire. In the end he worked to increase the size of the reparations Germany had to pay, by couching that negotiation in terms of compensation for the great number of Allied war widows and orphans and the many men whose war injuries now prevented them from being able to work and earn a living.

      Woodrow Wilson brought a liberal perspective to the talks. His agenda included free trade and self-determination for the Germans, rebuilding the German economy, and, of greatest importance to the United States, the creation of a powerful League of Nations to keep the future peace. Wilson disagreed with the British and French harsh position on Germany, but was outvoted by them.

      Among the key clauses of the treaty was that dealing with arms limitation. "In order to render possible the initiation of a general limitation of the armaments of all nations, Germany undertakes strictly to observe the military, naval, and air clauses which follow.

      "German armed forces will number no more than 100,000 troops, and conscription will be abolished.

      "Enlisted men will be retained for at least twelve years; officers to be retained for at least twenty-five years.

      "German naval forces will be limited to 15,000 men, six battleships (no more than 10,000 tons displacement each, six cruisers (no more than 6,000 tons displacement each), twelve destroyers (no more than 800 tons displacement each), and twelve torpedo boats (no more than 200 tons displacement each). No submarines are to be included.

      "The import and export of weapons is prohibited.

      Reichsmarschal Hermann Goering in France prior to the start of the Battle of Britain; below: Generaloberst Hans Jeschonnek; bottom: Generalfeldmarschal Albert Kesselring.

      "Poison gas, armed aircraft, tanks and armoured cars are prohibited.

      "Blockades on ships are prohibited.

      "Restrictions on the manufacture of machine-guns (e.g. the Maxim machine-gun) and rifles (e.g. the Gewehr 98 rifle).

      Under reparations in the main article of the treaty, Article 231 laid the blame on Germany for the war and established the reparations that she must pay the Allies, the aforementioned equivalent sum in 2013 of £284 billion. Those reparations would be paid partially in currency and partially in the form of steel, coal, agricultural products, and intellectual property. The Allies agreed to minimize the amount of currency in the reparations in order to hold down the resulting effects of hyper-inflation which would in turn reduce the reparation income to the French and British.

      One of the British representatives at the Versailles Treaty conference, James Ramsey MacDonald, who would later become the first Labour Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, remarked after the conference that France’s policy in the proceedings had been greedy and vindictive. A widely held view in France, on the other hand, as expressed by Major General Ferdinand Foch was that, if anything, the restrictions of the treaty on the Germans were too lenient: This is not Peace. It is an Armistice for twenty years.

      Heinkel He 111s in France in 1940; below: Bombing the Thame-shaven oil storage tank farm.

      In late April 1919, a German delegation headed by the Foreign Minister Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau went to Versailles where they were presented with the conditions that had been established by the victorious Allies. On reading them, his response to Lloyd George, Clemenceau and Wilson was: We know the full brunt of hate that confronts us here. You demand from us to confess we were the only guilty party of war; such a confession in my mouth would be a lie. The German government protested the demands it saw as unfair and a violation of honour. Prominent Germans across the political spectrum attacked the treaty—especially the provision blaming Germany for starting the war.

      In Germany itself, blame was broadly levelled at those perceived as opposing German nationalism, instigating unrest, or profiteering. The failure of the final German campaign of the war, the Spring Offensive, was blamed on industrial strike action in the German armaments industry during the offensive, which limited the supply of materiél to the front-line troops.

      With the early payment of the reparations by the German government, the German economy was gripped by hyper-inflation and, as conditions in Germany worsened, a range of violations or treaty provision avoidances began. These included the dissolution of the German General Staff in 1919, a cover for the creation of the German Truppenamt, a military organization established to rewrite the German doctrinal and training materials, incorporating the lessons of the First World War: In the 1930s the German government responded to what it declared to be the Allies’ own violation of the Versailles Treaty in failing to initiate required military limitations on themselves. The Germans announced that they would cease adhering to the treaty’s military limitations. Then came the accession to power in Germany by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists, who violated the treaty by instituting compulsory military conscription in March 1935. Two months later, the British withdrew from the treaty and signed a new Anglo-German Naval Agreement. In March 1936, another German violation of the treaty occurred when they reoccupied the demilitarized zone in the Rhineland. In March 1938, they annexed Austria. In September, with the cooperation and approval of Britain, France and Italy, the Germans again violated the treaty when they annexed the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia … in March 1939, their annexation of the remainder of Czechoslovakia, and on 1 September the German army and air force launched an invasion of Poland, which began the Second World War.

      above: Generalfeldmarschal Erhard Milch who was given the title Air Inspector General and placed in charge of aircraft production for the Luftwaffe; below: Luftwaffe armourers preparing to load a bomb on a French airfield.

      The pilot of a Messerschmitt Bf 110 is assisted by his ground crew before a raid on England in August 1940.

      Joachim von Ribbontrop greeting Btitish Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938.

      above: Factory assembly of Heinkel He 111 bombers in 1939; below: Production of Dornier Do 17 bombers.

      Preparation

      In the company of his boss, the new Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, Hermann Goering, who would in several years command a new German Air Force in the Battle of Britain, addressed a jubilant crowd in Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse: My German comrades, January 30th, 1933, will enter German history as the day on which the nation, after fourteen years of torture, need, deformation, and shame, has found its way back to itself… the future will bring everything for which the Feuhrer and his movement… have fought… in spite of all reverses and disappointments …

      From that moment in the German capitol, Goering devoted himself to the goal of developing for the nation a new and powerful air force capable of being a decisive factor in a European war. Goering had long been a disciple of the philosophy of Italian General Guilio Douhet and his theories of total air warfare. Douhet had been a key proponent of strategic bombing in aerial warfare and was among the earliest advocates of the creation of a separate air arm commanded by airmen rather than ground commanders. After being imprisoned in Italy for one year for having criticized the Italian military leaders in the First World War, he was released, exonerated and promoted to the rank of general in 1921. In that same year he completed and published his highly influential treatise on strategic bombing, The Command of the Air, a work that greatly impressed Goering.

      In fact, it took much more than Goering alone to design and build the Luftwaffe. He had the guidance of General Hans von Seekt, who, as a member of the German peace delegation after the First World War had early exposure to the vengeance dished out by the Allies in the Versailles Treaty conditions. Seekt was determined that Germany would not adhere to those conditions and his assistance, coupled with the thoughts

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