Читать книгу Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain - Len Deighton - Страница 8

I remember the daylight raids in the summer of 1940. Sometimes whole formations of German bombers slipped between the radar beams and evaded the RAF fighter squadrons. One such daytime air raid remains a vivid memory. There must have been fifty bombers and they were flying in a box formation. I was in Marylebone Road (my father was in charge of an air-raid medical post situated temporarily in the Western Ophthalmic Hospital). Everyone was looking up at the planes and much of the motor traffic had stopped. No one ran for cover but that may have been due to the shock of seeing the enemy so near, so resolute, so seemingly fearless. Their formation so perfect, like the ones my father had taken me to see at the Hendon air displays before the war.

Steadily the formation passed over to bomb north London. The motor traffic around me started up again, and life continued as if on a normal peacetime day. That’s how the war was during those early days after Hitler’s armies had smashed their way through Allied defences to occupy Belgium, France and Holland. Our morale was high. Winston Churchill was in Downing Street and there was a consensus that it was better to be without Continental obligations.

The daylight air battles of 1940 ended when September arrived. As the days shortened the German bomber fleets attacked at night. At daybreak each morning we emerged from the air-raid shelter and walked home past shattered buildings. On one such dreadful morning in Crawford Street, Marylebone, Mr Stabler’s newsagents corner shop from which I did my paper-round was just a tall pile of broken bricks. Mr Stabler was under them and dead. There would be no paper-round that morning or for any mornings to come. My parents hurried me along lest I was late for school. The night bombers came again and again; they came every night for three months. And for civilians in England the war had only just begun.

The Battle of Britain was undeniably a turning point in world history. I say ‘undeniably’, but there are quite a number of people who continue to debate that fact. Simplistic reasoning encourages such people to say that in the summer of 1940 the German Navy was in no shape to support an invasion, and that in any case the Germans had none of the specialist landing craft and weaponry that proved vital for the Anglo-American armies landing in Normandy four years later.

All that is true; but if the Germans had defeated Fighter Command the German Luftwaffe would have ranged over England with impunity. With command of the air the Germans could have come across the English Channel without hindrance. Britain’s army, shattered after the Dunkirk evacuation, bereft of its heavy equipment and still re-forming its regiments, would have been no match for the battle-hardened German armies that were now brimming with the self-confidence of victory after victory and raring to complete their conquest of Europe. As the old saying goes: ‘Without Trafalgar there would have been no Waterloo.’ The Battle of Britain was Trafalgar.

Writing this book was a project very dear to my heart. There was a time when I believed that history is self-rectifying. I believed that, no matter how distorted the accounts of news and current events, in the course of time a more truthful and useful consensus would emerge. Now I know better. In fact it is the myths and fabrications that endure and become each nation’s historical reference. With this in mind I was determined to write an account of the Battle that was as accurate as I could make it.

I had served in the RAF and, as a photographer, flown in Lancaster bombers and Mosquito fighters. Many of my friends were RAF men. I had written Bomber, a fictional but realistic account of an RAF air raid on Germany. During the research for Bomber the Royal Netherlands Air Force had most kindly let me spend time on their airfield at Deelen, which was little changed from when the Luftwaffe was there. By the kindness of good friends I was able to be one of the crew of a Heinkel He 111 that was flown to Germany. The gleaming black bomber was due to go into a museum and, for that reason, special permission had been granted for it to keep its Luftwaffe livery, even including the strenglich verboten swastika on the tail fin.

There were few pilots qualified and checked-out to fly an ancient Heinkel bomber from England to Germany. Our pilot let no one think that this task gave him any pleasure. Along with me the third member of the crew was a cheerful American. After a brief hello we climbed aboard to start our flight to Siegen, a tiny hill-top airfield about 50 miles east of Cologne. We were airborne, heading east at about 4,000 feet (no pressurized cabin so this was high enough), when the pilot asked if anyone had brought a map. Luckily I had a couple of maps that were given free to customers at Esso petrol stations. Dedicated to the needs of motorists, they were updated frequently. This was a time when in Belgium the autoroutes were still being built, starting with the clover-leaf interchanges. It was their bright concrete patterns that made it reasonably easy to see where we were. To do this comfortably I spread myself out in the bomb-aimer’s position. It was soon after settling in there that I heard the pilot call to the American and say that we were running out of fuel and would have to land somewhere soon. From my map reading I could see we were now nearing Antwerp, and any remaining doubts were removed as we approached the airport and saw ANTWERP painted in giant letters across the roof of a hanger.

I have no idea what flight plan had been prepared, but subsequent events showed clearly that the Belgians in the air-traffic control tower at Antwerp were unprepared for a Luftwaffe bomber, complete with sinister black crosses and a large swastika, circling the airfield and descending lower with each circuit. We landed without permission. They were, we gathered, angry. But the men on the petrol bowser were keen to do business and as soon as they understood our need for fuel they were climbing over the wings with nozzle in hand. It wasn’t as easy as it looked. Whatever kind of cap device the Luftwaffe had on their petrol tanks it did not reconcile readily with Belgian nozzles. But eventually the petrol flowed and one of the tanks was filled. I won’t describe the scene that followed as the Belgian bowser men demanded cash payment. Our pilot shrugged, the American said he had no money, and when it seemed that we were all going to be interned or imprisoned or merely beat about the head, I offered them my American Express card. In the absence of any alternative, and the petrol already aboard, they took it. It was only after we were back in the air that the American discovered that we had never been short of petrol. There was a switch above the pilot’s head which, when one tank was empty, transferred fuel to the other tank.

This unscheduled landing had delayed our arrival at Siegen by over two hours but I was amazed to see at least a thousand spectators still waiting there in the drizzling rain to greet us. As we stepped from the bomber one-time ‘General of Fighters’ Adolf Galland, the most famous of all German ace pilots, together with a group of veteran flyers, greeted us with gratitude; as if we were personally donating the Heinkel to them.

While we warmed up over coffee with the flyers in a tiny airport restaurant Galland said to me, ‘Is there anything we can do for you?’

It was a once-in-a-lifetime offer. I said, ‘I am trying to find a night-fighter veteran who flew Junkers Ju 88s against the RAF night bombers.’

‘Easy,’ said Galland and within thirty minutes I was in a light plane heading to Düsseldorf and an evening talking with ‘Fips’ Radusch, a famous Luftwaffe night-fighter ace.

I was lucky over the years to meet and correspond with combatants of all ranks on both sides of the war. As I talked to these men – aided immensely by my wife Ysabele’s linguistic skills, which enabled me to pass through doors that would otherwise have remained shut – it became clear even then that the egos of the victors had started to obscure historical fact. It was time to untwist the record. I was determined to write a history book unlike all the history books I had read – and I had read many – a book that dealt more in facts than in opinions.

So you will see I have given prime importance to the men and their machines. For example, it was Britain’s remarkable good fortune that Rolls-Royce had produced the Merlin engine. Fitted into Supermarine’s Spitfire airframe it became a weapon that was in every way the equal of the Messerschmitt Bf 109 that opposed it. The performance of the two aircraft was remarkably similar; range, horsepower, speed, ceiling and manœuverability. But while the Daimler Benz engine in the Messerschmitt was of 33.93-litres the superb Merlin had a capacity of only 26 litres. There were many elements at play in the Battle, but the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine was an incomparable masterpiece of engineering and a war-winner. Fitted into the Hawker Hurricane – a more primitive airframe but far more numerous in the Battle – it made a formidable fighter. Squadron fitters and riggers could often mend shot-up Hurricane airframes without sending them to the few overworked specialists who repaired the Spitfires. But there were other factors that can’t be ignored. In the crucial month of June 1940, while the British factories produced 446 fighters, the Messerschmitt factory at Augsburg produced 140.

It was while comparing this Daimler-Benz engine with the Rolls-Royce Merlin that I became interested in aero-engines and saw for the first time their prime importance in the entire history of aviation. From the Wright brothers right up to the present day, airframe designers have to wait upon engine manufacturers before completing their work on the drawing boards. I found it compelling from many points of view. The personal vendettas, stupidity, treachery and corruption in the contracts, the determination of governments and businessmen to distort progress made for a fascinating social history as well as a military one. It was a neglected aspect of aviation and I embarked upon a history of aero-engines; perhaps one day I will publish it.

Meanwhile, here is the story of the Battle of Britain – our Trafalgar – and I have told it with an overriding determination to stick to the truth. If it shatters some myths and flag-waving nonsense it is only to reveal a more inspiring truth of which we can be proud and grateful.

Len Deighton, 2013