“England is invincible”: How the Luftwaffe misplaced the Battle of Britain

What’s most necessary to watch about his breakdown, nevertheless, is that it occurred when the Luftwaffe was truly in its most profitable part of the aerial marketing campaign towards the RAF. Waller’s psychological anguish, then, starkly demonstrates that army success and heightened morale don’t essentially go hand in hand. It additionally demonstrates that we must be cautious about imposing British views on the Luftwaffe’s mentality through the Battle of Britain.

The enemy’s flaws

Stating that the German air power was not as indefatigable as it’s typically offered is definitely to not downplay the monumental achievement of the RAF’s ‘Few’ in denying the required air supremacy and build-up of invasion barges for the Wehrmacht to invade Britain in Operation Sealion. Quite the opposite, to put on the aggressors all the way down to their final nerve is testimony to the hellacious combat that the RAF put up through the marketing campaign.

But, if we’re to recount faithfully why the Battle of Britain unfolded because it did, we should pinpoint how the Luftwaffe’s inside doubts and weaknesses quickly conspired to erode its seemingly unflappable combating spirit. Completely fleshing out the Luftwaffe’s hopes and hangups permits us to remodel its historic position within the RAF’s ‘Best Hour’ from a cartoonish antagonist to a multidimensional, flawed but formidable opponent. This makes it much more outstanding and essential that the RAF managed to repel its aerial onslaught.

Temper of jubilation

In the course of the spring and early summer time of 1940, Nazi Germany had captured Norway, Denmark, the Low International locations and France. With a lot of Europe sunken underneath the swastika, the Luftwaffe’s basic temper was considered one of jubilation. But, for so long as Britain remained within the battle, the Germans had been unable to bask of their continental victories.

The Luftwaffe had began to ponder clearing the English Channel for an invasion, however they primarily hoped that Britain could possibly be pressured into suing for peace by throttling its important transport strains and maritime belongings. Thus, on 2 July 1940, Hermann Göring directed Wolfram von Richthofen’s VIII Air Corps to start attacking “Channel sea site visitors”. The primary part of the Battle of Britain – the Channel Battle – was now underneath means.

The German fighter pilot Günther Rall wrote optimistically of needing “a number of extra days, and the strait shall be impassable. Then a vital prerequisite for the invasion shall be created.”

But Adolf Galland, who was extra skilled than Rall, famous how “the German pilots thought that the [Nazi] propaganda about England being unprepared was improper. It aggravated us. We discovered the English nicely ready. Not a simple job. We weren’t hopeful of victory.” He added that “many pilots feared the water – the small, soiled water. All Channel Flyers felt this. I emphasise: the ‘Shite Kanal’ did as a lot injury to our morale because the English fighters.”

As a Luftwaffe Soldat hooked up to an airfield operations firm wrote on 20 July 1940, “We’ve got an enormous victory behind us, however the largest combat continues to be forward of us. We don’t have earth beneath us, however water – that’s extra harmful. We hope for the perfect and want to return to our properties as victorious troopers.”

“The ‘Shite Kanal’ did as a lot injury to our morale because the English fighters,” mentioned one Luftwaffe pilot

British radar, too, was rattling the Luftwaffe. The German fighter pilot Hans-Ekkehard Bob famous of a sortie gone improper over Britain in late July 1940 that “it was incomprehensible how this [Spitfire] formation may attain us within the rear with none sight in such a very good assault place.

“Later,” he continued, “we learnt that the British had been at the moment already within the possession of a form of radar that might lead precisely in top and route.”

The RAF integrated radar into the extremely subtle ‘Dowding System’. Spearheaded by Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the system included radar transmitters, receivers and stations as a part of Chain House and Chain House Low, the latter of which was optimised for detecting incoming Luftwaffe plane at decrease altitudes. This not solely gave the RAF an advance warning of as much as 20 minutes because the Luftwaffe handed over the Channel, however it additionally constituted an enormous blow to the German airmen who feared developing as a blip on British radar.

Within the face of this rising army resistance, Göring instigated Operation Eagle Assault, which was devised to sock the knockout blow to Britain. RAF flying models, floor installations (together with radar), provide organisations, and the British plane trade would all come underneath intense assault on this subsequent part of the Battle of Britain.

Göring had made Adolf Hitler the slightly lofty promise that the RAF could possibly be subdued inside 5 weeks – spanning from 8 August to fifteen September – forward of the amphibious Wehrmacht invasion on ‘Sealion Day’. After a bout of patchy climate, the Eagle Assault was lastly earmarked to start on 13 August 1940, codenamed Adlertag (‘Eagle Day’). But, that very same day, a junior physician with the Luftwaffe bomber wing KG 2 wrote a most forlorn letter to his spouse:

“Right here in France, we’re all slowly going loopy. If we don’t get relieved within the autumn, I feel virtually all of our males shall be nervous and exhausted. What has been requested of us for years is an excessive amount of. God grant us that the final stroke of violence succeeds. As a health care provider, I see how issues are with us. Individuals collect their final power to win. The previous few days have introduced us some horrible experiences. We’ve got misplaced many courageous and constant comrades and are immensely unhappy.”

The junior physician’s observations recommend that the Luftwaffe was in a far worse psychological state early into the marketing campaign than is commonly acknowledged. So as to add to the operational pressure, the morning of Adlertag opened with catastrophe for the Luftwaffe. A number of unescorted bomber models didn’t obtain Göring’s early postponement order because of the poor climate, as their radio crystals had not been up to date to be suitable with the fighter models’ communication system.

Because the climate cleared up within the afternoon, the Luftwaffe went on to launch 1,485 sorties, hitting RAF Detling and Eastchurch particularly onerous. Nonetheless, with a lot of the German bomber crews hanging on the improper targets, Adlertag exacted too heavy a value for what was achieved. The Luftwaffe misplaced 42 plane, together with 89 pilots and aircrew killed or captured – 13 per cent of its hanging power. On 15 August, Göring rapidly organised a employees convention to dissect the air power’s errors.

On this similar day, the Germans suffered their heaviest losses of the battle up to now – a day they dubbed ‘Black Thursday’ and the RAF hailed ‘The Best Day’. Then, on 18 August 1940, got here ‘The Hardest Day’, as a consequence of the truth that it noticed the best variety of mixed RAF and Luftwaffe plane losses in a single day. By late August, the Eagle Assault started to swing in favour of the Germans, who had managed to deliver the kill tallies on either side to a extra even ratio on its greatest days.

But, in a mirrored image of how their starvation for medals and victories may typically get the higher of them, a captured Leutnant and Oberleutnant had been overheard discussing in September 1940 how, “We underrated the English fighters. Lately everybody who wished a number of simple additions to his bag flew over, however they obtained a shock.”

By late August, Ulrich Steinhilper had turn into enormously disillusioned with this opportunism: “The image seemed grim. I used to be pondering we had been all combating to rid the sky of the RAF, and what was actually creating was that many people had been utilizing this battle as a stage upon which they may additional their very own careers and private scores, whereas apparently giving little consideration to the general ways or the losses of their males who had been behind them. There have been occasions when my morale took extreme knocks.”

The Blitz begins

Issues had been about to get much more sophisticated. On the evening of 24–25 August 1940, stray German bombs had been unintentionally dropped over civilian boroughs in East Ham and Bethnal Inexperienced. On 7 September, after the British prime minister Winston Churchill instantly greenlit a retaliatory blow from Bomber Command towards Berlin, an enraged Göring launched his first main strike towards the British capital.

The opening day of the Blitz killed 448 civilians and wounded 1,337 extra, marking the beginning of the marketing campaign’s longest part – one that might run till Could 1941. For some Luftwaffe personnel, the Blitz was seen as a pure escalation of the Luftschlacht um England.

One Soldat wrote confidently on 8 September 1940 that: “I’ve lots of work as of late. There isn’t a longer any ‘closing time’ in any respect. Sadly, I can’t write to you about our particular duties. However you should have already heard on the radio intimately concerning the intensive destruction in England and particularly in London attributable to our bombers. We’ll soften up the English. Our planes all returned from fight missions yesterday…”

Hans-Ekkehard Bob, then again, claimed that “so far as I may study, the RAF had accidentally bombed Berlin. The supreme command retaliated and ordered to bomb London. We, the fighter pilots, had been informed at the moment that strategic goals within the district of London had been attacked. The bombing of civilians was out of the query for us.”

Not all Luftwaffe airmen, nevertheless, shared Bob’s sentiments when it got here to attacking non-military targets. One captured Luftwaffe prisoner reportedly mentioned of bombing British hospitals: “Nicely, the persons are half useless anyway, and if the hospitals are bombed, no contemporary casualties could be admitted.” One other had tried to bomb Hyde Park as a result of “he knew there have been lots of air raid shelters there”.

In a bugged dialog between three captured fighter pilots from September 1940, one claimed that “England is invincible. That’s the mentality of the folks right here, and if each civilian defends his residence stubbornly, then it’s a tough matter.” His colleague replied: “They’ll merely be shot.” Thus, even the German fighter pilots – who are sometimes portrayed as a noble adversary to Fighter Command in British histories – had been hardly blind to the legal nature of the regime they had been combating for, nor the lethal repercussions of a Luftwaffe victory for Britain.

On 15 September 1940, the Luftwaffe launched a significant raid on London, Portsmouth and Southampton. Benefiting from the lull in assaults on RAF airfields through the Blitz, nevertheless, a revitalised Fighter Command shot down 56 German planes – two for each British fighter misplaced. The RAF would hail this present day as ‘Battle of Britain Day’; the Luftwaffe would keep in mind it as a catastrophe. The bomber pilot Otto Bechtle mentioned of his males’s losses that “the entire Gruppe was almost demoralised. It was a drunken celebration, weeping for comrades. The survivors sang: ‘The metal wings are flashing; the Tommy has given us a hiding.’”

The German fighter pilots had been hardly blind to the legal nature of the regime they had been combating for

This defiant counterattack surprised Hitler into suspending Sealion indefinitely on 17 September 1940. From July till the tip of October, the Germans misplaced round 1,887 plane of all kinds. The Luftwaffe’s nerves had been now so on edge that an unprecedented variety of 79 suicides and suicide makes an attempt was reached amongst its personnel between mid-September and October 1940. By 1941, the Luftwaffe surgeon-general even needed to problem a particular directive that handled the prevention of suicide inside the organisation.

The influence of losses

In direction of the tip of 1940, nevertheless, it was not simply the Luftwaffe’s psychological wellbeing that was struggling. The German air power’s lack of a correct reserve in comparison with that of the RAF meant that, because the senior Luftwaffe psychologist Dr Siegfried Gerathewohl put it, “even the completely unsuitable had been accepted for coaching”. Inexperienced and overzealous recruits posed a threat not simply to themselves, but in addition to their extra senior commanders. Oberst Johannes Fink, who was Kommodore of the bomber wing KG 2, witnessed the disconcerting mixture of operational naivety and night-time flying through the Blitz.

“On the best way again from London, I noticed the flight mechanic of a aircraft forward hearth wildly and shoot holes in his personal tail. In my plane, all of the crew had been wounded. No pilot in my plane – I flew the machine myself, had solely the observer/bomb aimer up entrance with me. All besides me had been wounded, principally splinters. I had a map in my hand – a bullet went by way of the map. After we obtained again to the airfield, the flight mechanic of the machine forward was excitedly pointing to all of the holes within the tail of his plane and saying what a slim escape he’d had: ‘Take a look at all of the hits we’ve had.’ I walked as much as him and mentioned: ‘That was you.’”

Extra alarming nonetheless for the Luftwaffe was the variety of airmen being misplaced in crashes within the darkness, in addition to these compelled to bale out over the English Channel through the perishing autumn and winter months. In November 1940, a British intelligence report documented that “a complete of 158 German air power personnel had been reported, as both PoW or useless, by this part. Of those, 54 had been dwelling and 104 useless, which is a substantial reversal of the proportions beforehand encountered.”

The Luftwaffe that headed into 1941 had been badly affected in each the amount of its plane and high quality of its aircrews

All through the Blitz, the Luftwaffe haemorrhaged an extra 600 bombers on high of its earlier losses in the principle Battle of Britain – leading to a complete of two,487 German plane misplaced throughout your complete Luftschlacht um England. Almost 2,000 members of its flying crews had been killed and an extra 2,600 had gone lacking throughout its full 10-month assault on Britain. Though the Luftwaffe’s bomber crews had succeeded in leaving scores of British cities in rubble, the nation’s general wartime manufacturing had not been enormously affected in return for the appreciable pressure of launching almost 30,000 sorties through the Blitz alone.

Some Luftwaffe veterans later tried to downplay the long-term detrimental results of the British marketing campaign on its operational power, with Walter Lehweß-Litzmann – who later turned the Kommodore of a Luftwaffe bomber wing – claiming that “the Luftwaffe was certainly not weakened because it moved east, as its superior preliminary effectiveness subsequently demonstrated. The crew losses over England had been offset by the fight expertise gained by the models and commanders, of which I used to be a member.”

In actuality, nevertheless, the Luftwaffe that headed into 1941 had been badly affected in each the amount of its plane and high quality of its aircrews.

The butterfly impact

The Germans knew {that a} failure to subdue the British in 1940–41 would now have detrimental repercussions for the battle within the Mediterranean and north Africa, with the Luftwaffe having been assigned to guard Common Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps in February 1941. And, with the Luftwaffe failing to interchange its earlier losses over Britain, the additional depletion of its operational bomber power through the six-month wrestle of ‘Barbarossa’ – the titanic invasion of the Soviet Union – was acutely felt. By the point that the USA entered the battle in December 1941, the Luftwaffe theoretically fielded solely 47 per cent of its meant bomber power. And, with roughly half of those plane truly being in fee, the Luftwaffe possessed simply 468 serviceable operational bombers by the primary week of December 1941.

The true significance of the Luftwaffe failing to knock the British out of the battle through the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, then, lies within the potent butterfly impact that this failure triggered. Its disappointing aerial marketing campaign over Britain could not have assured Nazi Germany’s eventual defeat, however the unfavourable final result had definitely robbed the Axis of having the ability to safe a swift, decisive and simple victory by 1941.

Thus, as Herbert Rieckhoff – previously the Geschwaderkommodore of the bomber wing KG 30 – later confirmed, “the primary blow from which [the Luftwaffe] by no means recovered got here within the late summer time of 1940, through the combat towards England. This was adopted by the Blitz towards England in 1940/41, during which it slowly continued to bleed out.”

Fighter Command, then, had not solely saved Britain from happening the darkest of timelines. It had additionally helped to put on down the German airmen’s sources and resolve. In doing so, it helped set an important precedent for the Luftwaffe’s persistent overexertion through the latter half of the Second World Conflict.

Victoria Taylor is an aviation historian. Her new guide, Eagle Days: Life and Demise for the Luftwaffe within the Battle of Britain, is out now, printed by Apollo

This column was first printed within the July 2025 problem of BBC History Magazine