Battle of Britain in the Words of Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding
Part 1 - The Battle
From the Editor
The following text is a transcript of the Despatch on the conduct
of the Battle of Britain submitted by Air Chief Marshal Dowding to the Air
Ministry in August 1941. The text is not an exact copy of the original
document; Dowding's despatch had been kept in a rather official form and was
seemingly a product of an era when documents, however large, were dictated to typists, without
the benefit of easy overview and post-editing that we enjoy today.
Inevitably, the narrative of the original is interrupted by many digressions and repetitions
occur here and there throughout
the document. For this reason I found it beneficial to make a few editorial changes to
facilitate better understanding of the material.
Thus, sections of the text have been repositioned in the text to keep the logic
of the narrative. Secondly, some paragraphs without direct relevance to
the conduct of the operations or Dowding's reasoning have been omitted.
Thirdly, captions have been added and some clarifications (always clearly
marked as my additions) inserted. Lastly, paragraph numbering and
capitalizations, which are typical of the 1940s style of writing but do not
add to modern readers' perception of the text, have been removed.
Changes of this kind are normal procedures
in publishing and are frequently being applied without being
mentioned. However, I felt compelled to clarify this as Dowding's despatch
is a historical document of significant value. I believe that the result of
these humble efforts is a report which is true to the intent and content of
his original message and the one which will should be interesting to a broad
group of readers.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh C. T. Dowding [Crown Copyright]
Preamble
I have been instructed by the Air Council to write a despatch on the Air Fighting of last Autumn, which has become known as the Battle of Britain. The conditions are a little unusual - because, firstly, the Battle ended many months ago, secondly, a popular account of the fighting has already been written and published, and, thirdly, recommendations for Mention in Despatches have already been submitted.
I have endeavoured, therefore, to write a report which will, I hope, be of historical interest, and which will, in any case, contain the results of more than four years' experience of the Fighter Command in peace and war.
Defining the Battle of Britain
In giving an account of the Battle of Britain it is perhaps advisable to begin by a definition of my conception of the meaning of the phrase. The Battle may be said to have started when the Germans had disposed of the French resistance in the Summer of 1940, and turned their attention to this country.
The essence of their Strategy was so to weaken our fighter defences that their air arm should be able to give adequate support to an attempted invasion of the British Isles. Experiences in Holland and Belgium had shown what they could do with armoured forces operating in conjunction with an air arm which had substantially achieved the command of the air.
This air supremacy was doubly necessary to them in attacking England because the bulk of their troops and war material must necessarily be conveyed by sea, and, in order to achieve success, they must be capable of giving air protection to the passage and the landing of troops and material.
The destruction or paralysis of the Fighter Command was therefore an essential prerequisite to the invasion of these Islands.
Their immediate objectives might be convoys, radio-location stations, fighter aerodromes, seaports, aircraft factories, or London itself. Always the underlying object was to bring the Fighter Command continuously to battle, and to weaken its material resources and intelligence facilities.
Night attacks by heavy bombers were continuous throughout the operations, and, although they persisted and increased in intensity as day bombing became more and more expensive, they had an essentially different purpose, and the Battle of Britain may be said to have ended when the fighter and fighter-bomber raids died down.
It is difficult to fix the exact date on which the Battle of Britain can be said to have begun. Operations of various kinds merged into one another almost insensibly, and there are grounds for choosing the date of the 8th August, on which was made the first attack in force against laid objectives in this country, as the beginning of the Battle.
On the other hand, the heavy attacks made against our Channel convoys probably constituted, in fact, the beginning of the German offensive; because the weight and scale of the attack indicates that the primary object was rather to bring our Fighters to battle than to destroy the hulls and cargoes of the small ships engaged in the coastal trade.
While we were fighting in Belgium and France, we suffered the disadvantage that even the temporary stoppage of an engine involved the loss of pilot and aircraft, whereas, in similar circumstances, the German pilot might be fighting again the same day, and his aircraft be airborne again in a matter of hours. In fighting over England these considerations were reversed, and the moral and material disadvantages of fighting over enemy country may well have determined the Germans to open the attack with a phase of fighting in which the advantages were more evenly balanced. I have therefore, somewhat arbitrarily, chosen the events of the 10th July as the opening of the Battle. Although many attacks had previously been made on convoys, and even on land objectives such as Portland, the 10th July saw the employment by the Germans of the first really big formation (70 aircraft) intended primarily to bring our fighter defence to battle on a large scale.
Fighter Command Attrition in Norway and France
[According to this definition, at the beginning of the Battle of Britain - ed.] I had 59 squadrons in various stages of efficiency. Many of them were still suffering from the effects of the fighting in Holland and Flanders, at Dunkerque, and during the subsequent operations in France. Others were in process of formation and training. But, if the lessons of the Battle are to be correctly appreciated, due consideration must be given to the factors leading up to the situation existing when it began. Leaving out of account peacetime preparations and training, the Battle of Britain began for me in the Autumn of 1939.
The first major problem arose during the discussion of the question of sending fighter squadrons to France. The decisive factor was that of supply. Our output at the beginning of the war was about 2 Hurricanes and 2 Spitfires per day; and, although there were hopes of increasing Hurricane production, there was then no hope that Spitfire production would be materially increased for about a year. It is true that certain optimistic estimates had been made, but there were reasons to believe that these could not be implemented. At that time, we in England were out of range of German Fighters, and I had good hopes that unescorted bomb raids on this country could be met and defeated with a very small loss in Fighters; but there could be no illusions concerning the wastage which would occur if we came up against the German Fighters in France.
I therefore regarded with some apprehension the general policy of sending Home Defence fighter units to France; but, as it was clear that such an attitude was politically untenable, I wrote on the 16th September, 1939, a letter to the Air Ministry. In this letter I pointed out that the Air Staff Estimate of the number of Fighter squadrons necessary for the defence of this country was 52, and that on the outbreak of war I had the equivalent of 34 (allowing for the fact that some Auxiliary squadrons were only partially trained and equipped).
I wanted 12 new squadrons, but asked that eight should be raised immediately, and made proposals for their location and employment. In a letter dated the 21st September the Air Ministry regretted that the most they could do towards meeting my requirements was to form 2 new squadrons and 2 operational training units. I was invited to a meeting of the Air Council on the 26th September.
On the 25th September, 1939 I wrote expressing my disappointment and asking for a reconsideration. As a result of this letter, the Air Council meeting, and a further meeting under the chairmanship of the Deputy Chief of Air Staff, the Air Ministry wrote on the 9th October sanctioning the immediate formation of 8 new squadrons, though 6 of these could be formed initially only as half-squadrons owing to shortage of resources. This correspondence is too lengthy to reproduce here, but it deals also with my apprehensions concerning Hurricane wastage in France, which were realised in the Spring of 1940. It also dealt with an estimate worked out by the Air Ministry Organisation Staff that after 3 months of fighting we might expect the fighter strength to have been reduced to 26 squadrons.
In October, 1939, the Air Ministry further reconsidered their policy, and ordered the formation of 10 additional fighter squadrons, 4 of which were destined for the Coastal Command.
In January, 1940, the Northern flank of our continuous defence organisation was on the Forth, and the South-Western flank was at Tangmere in Sussex, with the exception of an isolated station at Filton for the local defence of Bristol and the mouth of the Severn. On the 2nd and 4th February I wrote two letters pointing out these limitations, and asking for an extension of aerodrome facilities, intelligence cover and communications.
On the 9th February I was told that a paper was in preparation, and that I would be given an opportunity to remark on the proposals at a later stage.
On the 6th March I received the paper referred to and forwarded my comments on the 23rd March.
On the 8th May I received a letter saying that a reply had been delayed. The proposals were now approved, and decisions would shortly be taken.
This delay was presumably unavoidable, but the result was that the organisation and development of the defences of the South and West of England were very incomplete when they were called upon to withstand the attacks which the German occupation of French aerodromes made possible.
The fighting in Norway has only an indirect bearing on this paper. Certain useful tactical lessons were gained, particularly with regard to deflection shooting, and I trust that the story of the epic fight of No. 263 Squadron under Squadron Leader J. W. Donaldson, D.S.O., near Andalsnes, may not be lost to history.
The outcome, as it affects this account, was the virtual loss of 2 squadrons in the sinking of the aircraft carrier Glorious after the evacuation of Narvik.
Next came the invasion of Holland, and the call to send fighters to the assistance of the Dutch. The distance to Rotterdam was about the extreme range of the single-seater fighter, which therefore operated under the disadvantage of having a very, brief potential combat-time, followed by the necessity of a long sea crossing on the homeward way. The Blenheims, of course, had the necessary endurance, but they had not been designed as fighters, and their use against day fighters proved costly in comparison with the limited success which they attained.
The Defiants were used here for the first time, and, although they proved very effective against unescorted bombers, they, too, suffered heavy casualties when they encountered fighters in strength. As the result of this experience I formed the opinion that the Blenheims should be kept exclusively for night fighting, if possible, while I retained an open mind about the Defiants pending some experience of short-range fighting.
Then began the fighting in Belgium and Northern France, and at once my fears about the incidence of wastage in this type of fighting began to be realised.
At the beginning of April, 1940, there were 6 fighter squadrons in France. Then 4 more complete squadrons were sent when the fighting began. Then [again - ed.] on the 13th May 32 pilots and aircraft were sent - say the equivalent of 2 squadrons.
Almost immediately afterwards 8 half-squadrons were sent. This was done under the impression that the loss of 8 half- squadrons would affect me less than that of 4 entire squadrons, because it was supposed that they should be able to rebuild on the nuclei left behind. But this assumption was incorrect because I had neither the time nor the personnel available for purposes of reconstruction, and the remaining half-squadrons had to be amalgamated into Composite Units with a resulting disorganisation and loss of efficiency. At this time, too, I was ordered to withdraw trained pilots from squadrons and to send them overseas as reinforcements.
I had now lost the equivalent of 16 squadrons, and in addition 4 squadrons were sent to fight in France during the day and to return to English bases in the evening.
Other pilots were withdrawn from the Command through the system by which the Air Ministry dealt direct with Groups on questions of personnel.
It must be remembered that during this period the Home Defence squadrons were not idle, but that Hurricane squadrons were participating in the fighting to a considerable extent, 4 squadrons daily left South-East England with orders, to carry out an offensive patrol, to land and refuel in France or Belgium, and to carry out a second sortie before returning to England.
Hitherto I had succeeded generally in keeping the Spitfire squadrons out of the continental fighting. The reason for this, as stated above, was that the supply situation was so bad that they could not have maintained their existence in face of the aircraft casualty rate experienced in France: between the 8th May and the 18th May 250 Hurricanes were lost.
When the Dunkerque fighting began, however, I could no longer maintain this policy, and the Spitfires had to take their share in the fighting.
Spitfires of No. 611 RAuxAF Squadron photographed in Digby, Autumn 1939. Dowding's decision of not deploying the Spitfires into France was based on supply rather than tactical considerations: the production rate for the Spitfire was still too slow to support the rapid attrition rate inevitable with overseas deployment. Spitfires first entered combat in May 1940 over Dunkirk. [Crown Copyright]
When the Dunkerque evacuation was complete I had only 3 day-fighting squadrons which had not been engaged in continental fighting, and 12 squadrons were in the line for the second time after having been withdrawn to rest and re-form.
All this time, it must be remembered, the attack on this country had not begun; with a few accidental exceptions no bomb had been dropped on our soil. I was responsible for the Air Defence of Great Britain, and I saw my resources slipping away like sand in an hour-glass. The pressure for more and more assistance to France was relentless and inexorable. In the latter part of May, 1940, I sought and obtained permission to appear in person before the War Cabinet and to state my case. I was accorded a courteous and sympathetic hearing, and to my inexpressible relief my arguments prevailed and it was decided to send no more fighter reinforcements to France except to cover the final evacuation.
I know what it must have cost the Cabinet to reach this decision, but I am profoundly convinced that this was one of the great turning points of the war.
Another decision, of perhaps equal importance, was taken at about this time. I refer to the appointment of Lord Beaverbrook to the post of Minister of Aircraft Production. The effect of this appointment can only be described as magical, and thereafter the supply situation improved to such a degree that the heavy aircraft wastage which was later incurred during the Battle of Britain ceased to be the primary danger, its place being taken by the difficulty of producing trained fighter pilots in adequate numbers.
After the evacuation from Dunkerque the pressure on the Fighter Command became less intense, but it by no means disappeared. Hard fighting took place along the coast from Calais to Le Havre to cover the successive evacuations from that coast. Then the centre of gravity shifted to Cherbourg and its neighbourhood, and the Battle of Britain followed on without any appreciable opportunity to rest and re-form the units which had borne the brunt of the fighting.
The fall of Belgium and France had increased the danger to the South and West of England, and had necessitated a considerable modification of the original arrangements when bombing attacks could start only from German soil.
As has been explained above, few squadrons were fresh and intact when the Battle began. No sufficient respite has been granted since the conclusion of the Dunkerque fighting to rest the squadrons which had not left the Fighter Command, and to rebuild those which had undergone the ordeal of fighting from aerodromes in northern France. These last had been driven from aerodrome to aerodrome, able only to aim at self-preservation from almost continuous attack by bombers and fighters; they were desperately weary and had lost the greater part of their equipment, since aircraft which were unserviceable only from slight defects had to be abandoned.
Phases in the Battle of Britain
Any attempt to describe the events of the Battle day by day would make this despatch unduly long and would prevent the reader from obtaining a comprehensive picture of the events. I have therefore decided to show the main features of each day's fighting in an appendix on which our own and the Germans' aircraft casualties will be shown graphically. I shall then be able to deal with the progress of the Battle by phases, thus avoiding the tedious and confusing method of day-to-day description.
I find it impossible to adhere to a description of the fighting phase by phase. The Enemy's strategical, as well as his tactical moves had to be met from day to day as they occurred, and I give an account of my problems and the lessons to be derived from them roughly in the order of their incidence.
The Battle may be said to have divided itself broadly into 4 Phases:
- First, the attack on convoys and Coastal objectives, such as ports, coastal aerodromes and radio-location stations.
- Second, the attack of Inland fighter aerodromes.
- Third, the attack on London.
- Fourth, the fighter-bomber stage, where the target was of importance quite subsidiary to the main object of drawing our fighters into the air and engaging them in circumstances as disadvantageous to us as possible.
These phases indicated only general tendencies; they overlapped and were not mutually exclusive.
Attack on Convoys and Coastal Objectives
The amount of physical damage done to convoys during the first phase was not excessive. About five ships (I think) were actually sunk by bombing, others were damaged, and convoys were scattered on occasion. It was, of course, much easier to protect the convoys if they kept as close as possible to the English Coast, but one convoy at least was routed so as to pass close to Cherbourg, and suffered accordingly. Later, it was arranged that convoys should traverse the most dangerous and exposed stretches by night, and convoys steaming in daylight either had direct protection by fighter escorts, or else had escorts at readiness prepared to leave the ground directly danger threatened.
I may perhaps mention the question of the long range guns which were mounted along the coast of France near Cap Gris-Nez. They were within range of our coastal aerodromes, which they occasionally subjected to a desultory shelling. Their main targets, however, were Dover and the Convoys passing through the straits. So far as I am aware, neither they nor the guns which we installed as, counter measures, had any great influence on the air fighting, but they did of course make it impossible for any of our warships to approach the French coast in clear weather, and might have had an important effect if it had been possible for the Germans to launch an invading army.
Attack on Fighter Aerodromes
Three of the radio-location stations in the south of England suffered rather severe damage and casualties. No station was permanently put out of action, and the worst damage was repaired in about a month, though the station was working at reduced efficiency in about half that time. The operating personnel, and particularly the women, behaved with great courage under threat of attack and actual bombardment.
As regards aerodromes, Manston was the worst sufferer at this stage. It, Hawkinge and Lympne were the three advanced grounds on which we relied for filling up tanks when a maximum range was required for operations over France. They were so heavily attacked with bombs and machine guns that they were temporarily abandoned. This is not to say that they could not have been used if the need had been urgent, but, for interception at or about our own coastline, aerodromes and satellites farther inland were quite effective.
Heavy damage was done to buildings, but these were mostly non-essential, because aircraft were kept dispersed in the open, and the number of men and women employed was not large in comparison with the number at a station which was the headquarters of a sector.
Works personnel, permanent and temporary, and detachments of Royal Engineers were employed in filling up the craters on the aerodromes. Experience at this stage showed that neither the personnel nor the material provided were adequate to effect repairs with the necessary speed, and the strength and mobility of the repair parties was increased. Stocks of hard-core rubble had been collected at fighter aerodromes before the war.
It may be convenient here to continue the subject of damage to fighter stations other than those attacked in the first phase.
Casualties to personnel were slight, except in cases where a direct hit was made on a shelter trench. The trenches commonly in use were lined with concrete and were roofed and covered with earth; but they gave no protection against a direct hit, and, in the nature of things, they had to-be within a short distance of the hangars and offices.
Only non-essential personnel took coyer; aircraft crews and the staff of the Operations Room remained at their posts. The morale of the men and women of ground crews and staffs was high and remained so throughout.
At Kenley and at Biggin Hill direct hits were sustained on shelter trenches, at the latter place by a bomb of 500 kg or more. The trench and its 40 occupants were annihilated.
Wooden hangars were generally set on fire by a bombing attack, and everything in them destroyed.
Steel, brick and concrete hangars, on the other hand, stood up well against attack, though, of course, acres of glass were broken. Hangars were generally empty or nearly so, and those aircraft which were destroyed in hangars were generally under repair or major inspection which made it necessary to work under cover.
It must, nevertheless, be definitely recorded that the damage done to fighter aerodromes, and to their communications and ground organisation, was serious, and has been generally underestimated. Luckily, the Germans did not realise the success of their efforts, and shifted their objectives before the cumulative effect of the damage had become apparent to them.
Damage to aerodrome surface was not a major difficulty. It was possible for the Germans to put one or two aerodromes like Mansion and Hawkinge out of action for a time, but we had so many satellite aerodromes and landing grounds available that it was quite impossible for the Germans to damage seriously a number of aerodromes sufficient to cause more than temporary inconvenience.
This is an important point, because, in mobile warfare, fighter aerodromes cannot be hastily improvised in broken country, and the number of aerodromes actually or potentially available is a primary factor in the appreciation of a situation.
Sector Operations Rooms were protected by high earth embankments, so that they were immune from everything except a direct hit, and, as a matter of fact, no direct hit by a heavy bomb was obtained on any Operations Room. Communications were, however, considerably interrupted, and I must here pay a tribute to the foresight of Air Vice-Marshal E. L. Gossage, C.B., C.V.O., D.S.O., M.C., who commanded No. 11 Group during the first eight months of the war. At his suggestion, stand-by Operations Rooms were constructed at a distance of two or three miles from Sector Headquarters, and a move was made to these when serious attacks on fighter aerodromes began. They were somewhat inconvenient makeshifts, and some loss of efficiency in interception resulted from their use. Work was put in hand immediately on more permanent and fully-equipped Operations Rooms conveniently remote from Sector Headquarters; these though in no way bomb-proof, were outside the radius of anything aimed at the Sector Aerodrome, and owed they immunity to inconspicuousness. Most of these were finished by October 1940.
Aerodrome defence against parachute troops, or threat of more serious ground attack, was an important and a difficult problem, because Home Defence troops were few and were needed on the Beaches, and the majority of troops rescued from Dunkerque were disorganised and unarmed. The Commander-in-Chief, Home Forces, did, however, make troops available in small numbers for the more important aerodromes and armoured vehicles were extemporised. The difficulty was enhanced by a comparatively recent decision of the Air Ministry to disarm the rank and file of the Royal Air Force. The decision was reversed, but it was some time before rifles could be provided and men trained in their use.
The slender resources of the Anti-Aircraft Command were strained to provide guns for the defence of the most important fighter and bomber aerodromes. High altitude and Bofors guns were provided up to the limit considered practicable, and the effort was reinforced by the use of Royal Air Force detachments with Lewis guns and some hundreds of 20 mm cannon which were not immediately required for use in aircraft
A type of small rocket was also installed at many aerodromes. These were arranged in lines along the perimeter, and could be fired up to a height of something under 1,000 feet in the face of low-flying attack. They carried a small bomb on the end of a wire. Some limited success was claimed during a low flying attack at Kenley, and they probably had some moral effect when their existence became known to the enemy. They were, of course, capable of physical effect only against very low horizontal attacks.
The main safeguard for aircraft against air attack was dispersal. Some experiments on Salisbury Plain in the Summer of 1938 had shown that dispersal alone, without any form of splinter-proof protection, afforded a reasonable safeguard against the forms of attack practised by our own Bomber Command at the time. Thirty unserviceable fighters were disposed in a rough ring of about 1,000 yards diameter, and the Bomber Command attacked them for the inside of a week with every missile between a 500-pound bomb and an incendiary bullet, and without any kind of opposition. The result was substantially: 3 aircraft destroyed, 1 damaged beyond repair, 11 seriously damaged but repairable, and the rest slightly damaged or untouched.
I therefore asked that small splinter-proof pens for single aircraft should be provided at all fighter aerodromes. This was not approved, but I was offered pens for groups of three. I had to agree to this, because it was linked up with the provision of all-weather runways which I had been insistently demanding for two years, and it was imperatively necessary that work on the runways should not be held up by further discussion about pens. I think that the 3-aircraft pens were too big. They had a large open face to the front and a concrete area, of the size of two tennis courts, which made an ideal surface for the bursting of direct-action bombs. Eventually, splinter-proof partitions were made inside, the pens, and till then some aircraft were parked in the open. Losses at dispersal points were not serious; the worst in my recollection was 5 aircraft destroyed or seriously damaged in one attack. Small portable tents were provided which could be erected over the centre portion of an aeroplane, leaving the tail and wing-tips exposed. These protected the most important parts and enabled ground crews to work in bad weather.
Many of the targets attacked during the first two phases of the Battle were of little military importance, and had but slight effect on our war effort. Exceptions to this were day attacks carried out on the Spitfire works at Southampton and the sheds at Brooklands where some of our Hurricanes were assembled and tested. Both these attacks had some effect on output, which would have been serious but for the anticipatory measures taken by Lord Beaverbrook.
The Third Phase - Attack on London
About the end of the second phase, the problems of keeping units up to strength and of relieving them when exhausted began to assume formidable proportions. It was no new experience, because the drain of units and pilots to France, coupled with the Dunkerque fighting, had created similar problems in the spring.
The comparative relaxation in the intensity of the fighting in June and July had afforded a little respite, but units had only partially recovered and were neither fresh nor up to strength when the fighting again became intense.
The most critical stage of the Battle occurred in the third phase. On the 15th September the Germans delivered their maximum effort, when our guns and fighters together accounted for 185 aircraft. Heavy pressure was kept up till the 27th September, but, by the end of the month, it became apparent that the Germans could no longer face the bomber wastage which they had sustained, and the operations entered upon their fourth phase, in which a proportion of enemy fighters themselves acted as bombers.
The famous photo of Heinkel He 111 over South-East London, more precisely
Rotherhithe on the south bank of the Thames. The prominent three docks on
the Isle of Dogs are visible to the right. The docks were frequently
subjected to German bombing both during the Battle and the subsequent night
Blitz.
[Crown Copyright]
The Fourth Phase - Fighter-Bomber Attacks
In the fourth phase of the Battle the Germans used a proportion of fighters acting as bombers. After the policy of "crashing through" with heavy bomber formations had been abandoned owing to the shattering losses incurred, large fighter formations were sent over, a proportion of the fighters being adapted to carry bombs, in order that the attacks might not be ignorable.
This last phase was perhaps the most difficult to deal with tactically. Although the actual damage caused by bombs was comparatively trivial, was aimed primarily at a further whittling down of our fighter strength, and, of all the methods adopted by the Germans, it was the most difficult to counter. Apart from the previous difficulty of determining which formations meant business, and which were feints, we had to discover which formations carried bombs and which did not.
To meet this difficulty, Air Vice-Marshal Park devised the plan of using single Spitfires, flying at maximum height, to act as reconnaissance aircraft and to report their observations immediately by R/T.
A special Flight was organised for this purpose, and. it was later recommended that the Spitfires should be employed in pairs, for reasons of security, and that the flight should become a Squadron. A special R/T receiving set was erected at Group Headquarters so that reports might be obtained without any delay in transmission from the Sector receiving station. There is reason to believe that the Germans also adopted a system of using high-flying He 113s as scouts. Their information concerning our movements was transmitted to the ground and relayed to their bombers in the air.
In the fourth phase, the apparent ratio of losses in our favour dropped appreciably. I say "apparent" because, in fighting at extreme altitudes, fighters often could not see their victims crash, and the percentage reported as Certainly Destroyed was unfairly depressed. Our own casualties, nevertheless, were such that the C-category squadrons, which I was hoping to build up to operational strength again, remained in their condition of semi-effectiveness.
Serious as were our difficulties, however, those of the enemy were worse, and by the end of October the Germans abandoned their attempts to wear down the Fighter Command, and the country was delivered from the threat of immediate invasion.
Battle of Britain - Conclusion
The indomitable courage of the fighter pilots and the skill of their leaders brought us through the crises, and the morale of the Germans eventually cracked because of the stupendous losses which they sustained.
Before beginning an account of the Battle, I must refer briefly to the publication entitled The Battle of Britain, issued by the Air Ministry. This, if I may say so, is an admirable account of the Battle for public consumption, and I am indebted to it, as well as to the book Fighter Command, by Wing Commander A. B: Austin, for help in the compilation of this despatch. There is very little which I should have wished to alter, even if circumstances had permitted my seeing it before publication (I was absent in America at the time), but there is a points to which I should like to draw attention. I quote from page 33: "What the Luftwaffe failed to do was to destroy the fighter squadrons of the Royal Air Force, which were, indeed, stronger at the end of the battle than at the beginning." (The italics are mine.)
This statement, even if intended only for popular consumption, tends to lead to an attitude of complacency which may be very dangerous in the future. Whatever the study of paper returns may have shown, the fact is that the situation was critical in the extreme. Pilots had to be withdrawn from the Bomber and Coastal Commands and from the Fleet Air Arm and flung into the Battle after hasty preparation. The majority of the squadrons had been reduced to the status of training units, and were fit only for operations against unescorted bombers. The remainder were battling daily against heavy odds.