Abstract
The events of late 1940 have been commemorated decennially in Britain almost from the moment that the Merlin engines of Spitfires and Hurricanes were cooling down on Fighter Command airfields towards the end of October of that year. The British Air Ministry’s best-selling and highly influential 3D pamphlet The Battle of Britain had after all appeared within six months of its officially defined ending, thus quickly heroizing The Few. This in turn also laid the foundations for a now extensive and substantial historiography running to many hundreds of books on all aspects of both the Battle but also the wider political context within which Britain decided to fight on in late May 1940, the Dunkirk evacuation making possible – and credible – Britain’s determination to keep fighting.
A key part of this narrative, RAF Fighter Command’s impressive and heroic resistance, has now passed into legend, British popular memory celebrating The Few’s achievement in forcing Hitler to rethink his plans for Operation Sea Lion, his planned invasion of England. Whilst ‘revisionist’ histories have sought to play down the invasion threat – principally because of the Royal Navy’s often-overlooked overwhelming superiority – many books about both the Battle and 1940 as a year of crisis are clear that disaster was only narrowly averted in mid-September 1940, thus allowing Britain to remain in the war.
The two books under review offer different perspectives on these decisive events, both published to broadly coincide with the 75th anniversary of the Battle. Non-British authors wrote both books: Bergström is Swedish, and Kelly is American, and in this sense, they adopt a broader view not framed by British historiography alone. Kelly’s broad chronological sweep from 1918 to 1940 confirms how, despite the tragedy of the First World War, Britain again found itself at war, and subsequently fighting the Battle of Britain, whilst Bergström focuses specifically upon the late 1940 air war over Britain itself.
Christer Bergström, who in addition to drawing upon British sources also includes German material (as did James Holland in his 2010 The Battle of Britain (Corgi)), seeks to revisit the Battle and challenge some accepted views. His The Battle of Britain, however, offers a conventional assessment of the air war of late 1940. Bergström’s chronological account begins in early July and continues until 28 November (many British accounts favour 10 July to 31 October 1940, the officially defined Battle dates). Adopting a broadly day-by-day approach, this mirrors Francis Mason’s 1969 Battle Over Britain (McWhirter Twins), to whom the author pays keen tribute. These dates also allow for the inclusion of disastrous Italian air force attacks which lacked any strategic value, and led to high losses as Regio Aeronautica biplane fighters and obsolescent bombers were confronted by battle-hardened RAF squadrons during November.
The narrative style focuses on those aircrew directly engaged in air combat, their reminiscences conveyed through log-books, squadron records, or interviews, but also the senior commanders and their management of the events as they unfolded. For instance, Bergström contends that Goering was not the incompetent head of the Luftwaffe as is often supposed, and that victory during the Battle was relinquished by poor strategic decisions (and air intelligence), rather than the quality of men, machines, and tactics. He further argues that the Me110, an often-derided, twin-engine, two-seater fighter, had the potential to inflict significant damage in a ground-attack role, but was instead squandered when used to defend bombers. Against nimbler RAF fighters it was vulnerable, though did give a better account of itself than is often supposed, and according to the author’s analysis, had a better ‘kill-ratio’ than the Me109 single-seat fighter. In sum, the author argues that the Luftwaffe might have won the Battle had it developed and followed a clear strategic vision, one which focused from the outset on key London airfields and aircraft factories, rather than frittering away its resources on widespread targets of limited strategic value. However, such a view rather ignores the primacy of air intelligence and its impact upon these decisions by senior Luftwaffe commanders. As the Battle progressed, it was widely believed that Fighter Command had been largely decimated, in which instance the switch to attacking London (the Blitz) made perhaps more sense in seeking to bring Britain to the negotiating table.
On the British side, Bergström affirms that Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park as the head of 11 Group was the key senior commander, whose decisions yielded the best results, a view widely accepted by Battle scholars. The author is also keen to argue that it was indeed The Few who decided matters, and therefore, principally their victory. More broadly, and perhaps soberingly, Bergström argues that total RAF losses were in fact higher than those of the Luftwaffe when fighter, Bomber, and Coastal Command aircraft were included. Each new author researching this subject arrives at differing views about the numbers of aircraft lost on both sides, one consistent theme being that RAF Bomber and Coastal Command losses are often left out, even though raids on airfields, barge concentrations, and other strategic targets were a part of Britain’s waging of war during late 1940. In strict statistical terms, whilst the RAF and Luftwaffe were broadly comparable in overall losses, Britain was building many more aircraft to replace those lost. Although not considered in any detail, Bomber Command’s contribution to the Battle is noted, including attacks on airfields, invasion barge concentrations, and strategic targets. This aspect of the Battle receives little attention in older histories, reflecting a trend begun in 1941 with the Air Ministry omission of bomber attacks in its pamphlet.
This book’s key strength is in its day-by-day account of the Battle as it unfolded, the experiences of aircrew and commanders woven throughout the narrative. Lavishly illustrated with many hitherto unpublished photographs, two maps, and lengthy endnotes, Bergström joins previous authors in giving a sense of the drama of the Battle from the air perspective, the focus principally on the air fighting itself, and in highlighting some aspects which have tended to be accepted without challenge. The book is less strong on the broader context of the Battle, including an assessment of the prospects for Operation Sea Lion’s success. Implicit within the narrative is an assumption that, if launched, it would have succeeded had RAF Fighter Command yielded air superiority on 15 September 1940. As with more traditional accounts of the Battle, the Royal Navy is largely absent from his account, or the impact its threatening presence had on Hitler’s decisions during mid-September 1940.
The circumstances leading eventually to the Battle of Britain are explored by John Kelly in his Never Surrender. His narrative begins at the end of the First World War. Adopting a ‘narrative’ style, through a combination of government papers, memoirs, diaries, newspaper reports, and secondary sources, Kelly reconstructs these events, capturing the views of private individuals but also politicians. Kelly offers a broad and well-paced sweep through the Versailles Treaty, Stanley Baldwin’s complacency about rearmament, Chamberlain’s attempts at appeasement, and the slow, steady build up to the Second World War, culminating in the invasion of Poland.
Thereafter, his chronological narrative considers the European perspective, including the Finnish war, the Phoney War, the Wehrmacht’s attack on Western Europe in May 1940, Churchill’s ascent as Prime Minister, the Dunkirk evacuation of the BEF, and the fall of France. Kelly’s coverage of the latter’s political crises is particularly poignant and reinforces Churchill’s undoubted sense of grief at the collapse of his beloved France. Also of interest is the part focusing upon US Ambassador Joe Kennedy’s views of Britain’s prospects, and how he conveyed these to Roosevelt, the former’s well-known pessimism perhaps jarring with British readers, but more welcome to the American isolationists determined not to become embroiled in a second European war. The American perspective is therefore a valuable one, reminding British readers that perspectives can shift when events are viewed through a wider optic, not calibrated by sometimes narrow, individual national histories.
Curiously, whilst Churchill is projected through the title as a central element of Kelly’s book, the wartime Prime Minister is rather absent in the first half of his narrative. However, once Churchill is appointed to the Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty at the outbreak of war, his ambition and determination begins to dominate, the ‘Norway debacle’ in April 1940 an example of his nimble-footedness when under pressure, but also his ability at the same time both to accept responsibility as a member of the War Cabinet, whilst also distancing himself from its (his) catastrophic decisions. None of these are new examples of Churchill’s political deftness, but Kelly manages to cast events in a well-paced, absorbing, and informative style which never drags. Lord Halifax, too, features strongly at key points where decisions about whether to fight on, or seek a peace deal, periodically arise. Churchill scrupulously avoided direct confrontation that might lead to him being ousted as prime minister by Tory MPs, amongst whom he was widely disliked.
It is in this resolve – and his accompanying public oratory – that Churchill’s most significant contribution at this time to Britain’s continuing in the war was reflected. Whereas Halifax thought it reasonable to seek a mediated peace involving either Mussolini, or neutral parties, Churchill – as far as available government documents show – was against any such moves. Whilst Kelly provides a quite gripping account of these tense meetings, other authors have explored these in more depth, and provided a fuller sense of these proceedings including Martin Gilbert, John Lukacs, and Robin Prior, amongst others.
The book concludes with an overview of the Battle of Britain, its key dates and developments explored in the final chapter. Whereas Bergström’s volume is clear that The Few’s dogged resistance led to the cancellation of the potent threat posed by Operation Sea Lion, Kelly confirms that Hitler was far more focused on invading Russia than Britain. This view has been espoused for many years, Hitler undoubtedly adopting a ‘wait and see’ approach to Britain in the hope that a peace settlement could be agreed without the need for an invasion, once the British recognized that they could not prevail. Not explored in any detail, Kelly’s approach does provide a rather different context within which to view the Battle, and does not automatically link The Few’s undoubted heroism with an abandoned invasion.
Kelly draws extensively upon a wide range of sources which area detailed to the book’s end, each reference confirming the key part of the sentence in the text to which it relates. There is no separate bibliography. The volume is illustrated with a range of black-and-white images, many familiar. Maps showing the development of the war during 1940 would have eased geographical comprehension. Never Surrender’s key strength is its readability, rather than in providing fresh perspectives on the events leading up to and including 1940 in the sense of historical scholarship. This is not intended as a criticism. Its narrative style draws upon an extensive range of sources which both enliven and offer extra dimensions to events oft-covered in earlier accounts, and in this sense, it offers a valuable, engaging introduction to 1940 as a year of pivotal significance. The other key factor which shines throughout is the critical importance of effective leadership, and how fragile morale can be when exposed to corrosive defeatism, in its absence.