Christer Bergstrom’s book The Battle of Britain: an Epic Conflict Revisited builds upon many hitherto unknown first-hand sources and facts. In this book, Bergström dispels many myths that still surround this epic battle. Here Christer Bergström describes some of them in brief.
Many of the myths regarding the Battle of Britain involve the commander of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring. According to the popular view, he was a totally incompetent commander, whose unfortunate decisions placed the Luftwaffe in an unnecessarily difficult position. However, the widespread image of him as a thoroughly incompetent Air Force Commander needs to be corrected.
Göring realized the benefits of new types of combat aviation, such as dive-bombers and long-range fighter escort. As one of the first Air Force commanders in the world he also took the initiative to create a specialized night fighter force. Early in the war, he ordered a couple of fighter units to begin night fighter experiments. The twin-engined Messerschmitt Bf 110 proved to be the aircraft best suited for this task, and in June 1940 Göring decided to redesign the fighter wing I./ZG 1 under Hauptmann Wolfgang Falck to become the first regular night fighter unit, NJG 1.
One of the main criticisms of Göring concerns the shifting of the Luftwaffe’s target emphasis from the ground installations of RAF Fighter Command to London on 7 September 1940. Göring has often received the blame for this, but a study of first-hand sources show that no one was more staunchly opposed to shifting the air offensive towards London than he!
This leads us to one mainly forgotten aspect of the Battle of Britain, namely the absolutely decisive contribution of the RAF’s bombers. In fact, had it not been for the British bombings of Berlin from late August 1940 and onward, the Battle of Britain might have ended in another way. The small-scale Berlin raids in 1940, carried out by a handful of bombers, with totally inadequate navigational equipment, have been regarded as more or less meaningless pinpricks. But this disregards the main object of warfare – to destroy the enemy’s fighting spirit. On 1 September 1940, American correspondent William Shirer (the USA was at that time still a neutral country) wrote in his diary in Berlin:
The main effect of a week of constant British night bombings has been to spread great disillusionment among the people here and sow doubt in their minds. One said to me today : “I’ll never believe another thing they say. If they’ve lied about the raids in the rest of Germany as they have about the ones on Berlin, then it must have been pretty bad there.”
The direct effect of these ‘pinprick’ raids was that Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to stop attacking RAF Fighter Command’s ground organization and instead start bombing London. It is commonly accepted that this was what saved Fighter Command from annihilation.
But RAF Bomber Command contributed to the victory in several other ways too. Through incessant nocturnal harassment raids, the RAF bombers disturbed the sleep of the German airmen, which – according to German reports – led to serious consequences. The RAF bombers also wrought a great deal of havoc among the barges that made up the German invasion fleet, and – not least – contributed to raise spirits among the hard-pressed British population.
This leads us to another common myth regarding the Battle of Britain, about the twin-engined German fighter plane Messerschmitt Bf 110. Beginning in early September 1940, some Bf 110 units were withdrawn from the English Channel to be used as night fighters. Sometimes this has been regarded as a ‘degradation’ of the Bf 110. In fact, under heavy pressure from Hitler and the German population to put an end to the night raids against Berlin and other German cities, Göring chose to use his very best fighter plane, the Bf 110.
This should come as a surprise to many, because a fairly common notion is that the Bf 110 didn’t suffice as a day fighter, it performed poorly in combat and it had to be assigned with fighter escorts of single-engined Bf 109s. However, none of this stands up to closer scrutiny.
The twin-engined, long-range fighter Bf 110 was the result of the wargames conducted under Göring’s supervision in the winter of 1933/1934. These showed that the by then prevailing view that ‘the bombers will always get through’ – the notion that regardless of intercepting fighters and air defence a sufficient number of bombers always would get through to their assigned targets, where they were expected to cause enormous damage – was incorrect. In the summer of 1934, the leadership of the still secret Luftwaffe presented a study that suggested what at that time was quite revolutionary – a twin-engined fighter, heavily armed with automatic cannons as well as machine guns, to protect the bombers against enemy fighter interception. The idea was to dispatch these twin-engined fighter aircraft in advance, at a high altitude over the intended bombing target area, to clear the air of enemy fighters before the bombers arrived.
In fact, when use in that way, the Messerschmitt 110 was quite successful. Actually, the Bf 110 appears to have had a better ratio of shot down enemy aircraft to own combat losses than any other fighter type during the Battle of Britain. The Luftwaffe’s most successful fighter wing in 1940 was Bf 110-equipped ZG 76, which on 2 September 1940 became the first Geschwader to reach the 500-victory mark. However, in most accounts of the Battle of Britain, the accomplishments of the Bf 110 have been nearly totally neglected, albeit owing in great deal to inaccessibility to sources on this aircraft. With such material at hand, it has been possible to draw a completely different picture of the Bf 110 during the Battle of Britain.
The ‘revisionist’ version, according to which the courage and efforts made by the RAF airmen is ‘exaggerated’ also does not hold stand. It is beyond any doubt that without the unparalleled courage and efforts by ‘The Few’, and the contribution given by the RAF bomber crews, the Battle of Britain would not have been won.
By Christer Bergström
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In The Battle of Britain: An Epic Conflict Revisited, Bergström explores and dispels many of the myths of the Battle of Britain, providing a fresh new perspective on the conflict as a whole. You can order your copy by clicking on the jacket below:
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