Blog Them Out of the Stone Age

The Daily Torygraph carries a story that has been creating a lot of waves and which has also secured a certain amount of air time on the television news:

The Battle of Britain was not won by the RAF but by the Royal Navy, military historians have concluded, provoking outrage among the war’s surviving fighter pilots.

Challenging the “myth” that Spitfires and Hurricanes held off the German invaders in 1940, the monthly magazine History Today has concluded that it was the might of the Navy that stood between Britain and Nazi occupation.

The view is backed by three leading academics who are senior military historians at the Joint Service Command Staff College teaching the future admirals, generals and air marshals.

They contend that the sheer numbers of destroyers and battleships in the Channel would have obliterated any invasion fleet even if the RAF had lost the Battle of Britain.

The idea that a “handful of heroes saved these islands from invasion” was nothing more than a “perpetuation of a glorious myth,” the article suggests.

Extremely large amounts of horror and indignant bluster have been the overall response. This is understandable – and the fact that the story has tended to be couched as “The Navy won the Battle of Britain” is somewhat calculated to inflame, as well as not being strictly accurate.

However, perhaps more surprising is the fact that this seems to have generated so much angst when the thesis itself is both fairly old and widely accepted within the military-historical community. It is perhaps an indicator of both the persistence of popular narrative and the low quality of a lot of “popular” history in this area that so many people seem to be coming to it for the first time and not liking what they see.

There has long been a debate over whether, had the RAF failed, the Germans would have made an invasion attempt. Since the 1980s the notion that even with German air superiority the Royal Navy would have been strong enough in home waters has gained currency, although apparently it has not yet filtered through to the general public.

Of course one can accept this and still argue that the Luftwaffe would, sans RAF, have been strong enough to degrade the Royal Navy’s capabilities sufficiently to mount a successful invasion attempt. In this narrative the destruction of the RAF would therefore have simply been a precursor to the inevitable destruction of the Royal Navy.

However, I think it is fair to say that the weight of opinion is currently against this reading, especially allowing for the fact that only two or three destroyers with determined crews would be needed to steam hell-for-leather through the line of advancing German landing craft in order to send most of them to the bottom. It does not help that the argument tends to involve the deployment of crude parallels drawn from the Pacific campaign. Had the RAF collapsed the home fleet would, we are told, have been Pearl Harbored comprehensively. Had it managed to put to sea it would have learned the lesson the Prince of Wales and the Repulse learned regarding the advantages of air power over sea power.

Yellow-nosed bastards at 11 o’clock

Given that a debate over what are largely strategic issues can incite such extreme annoyance, it seems unlikely that the public at large are aware of the other debates that have been ongoing in recent decades that have steadily chipped away at the big picture regarding “The Few”’s overall performance. It is now fairly widely accepted that the RAF victory in the Battle of Britain was the result not of the noted skills of RAF pilotry and the superiority of the Spitfire but of a variety of more mundane factors including superior British aeroplane production capabilities, fawlty intelligence on both sides, poor German basing, geographical factors and perhaps most importantly the fact that Britain had, largely thanks to prudent pre-war investment and the personal advocacy of Hugh Dowding, the world’s first integrated air defence system (as part of which radar was a necessary but not a sufficient factor).

The gap between popular perception and academic/professional consensus is also cavernous on the issue of quality. Many of those complaining about the Telegraph article would doubtless be even more horrified to be presented with the notion not only that the Me109 was a superior aeroplane to the Spitfire (except in the very specific conditions in which the lion’s share of the Battle were fought, which tended to play to the Spit’s strengths while negating those of the Messerschmidt*) but that German tactical doctrine was also broadly better than that of Fighter Command and that, man for man, their pilots may have been more skilled.**

No Score Draw

Of course, the RAF does not have a monopoly on cherished myth. Those who are familiar with the current historiography on the Battle of Trafalgar will have been surprised at the continual assertions coinciding with the battle’s 200th anniversary, from the BBC news downwards, that had it not been for that titanic victory we would have faced prompt invasion and death by frog’s legs. Most naval historians will, in fact, tell you that it simply ain’t so.

The fact that it ain’t so doesn’t mean that Trafalgar wasn’t one of the greatest naval victories of all time. Nor is it an endorsement of Arthur Herman’s assertion that “So, in a sense, it had all been for nothing”. In fact the Royal Navy’s victory brought about a number of benefits, albeit not necessarily as glaring as a thwarted invasion. It gave the British a gargantuan psychological boost during a year in which their continental allies were driven from the field, their hawkish Prime Minister was in the final stages of terminal alcoholism and their monarch was undergoing one of his periods of being stark, staring bonkers. Furthermore, Trafalgar went a long way to denying the French the luxury of a fleet in being, thus freeing up large sections of the British fleet to operate away from home waters, drastically enhancing the British geostrategic position.

Similarly, the Battle of Britain was a very real victory, with a real impact. In a manner not dissimilar to 1805 it gave an immeasurable boost to the morale of the British people. Although we cannot know for certain, it is certainly not unreasonable to suggest that the difference between victory and merely not being successfully invaded may have been crucial in keeping the British Empire in the fight. I think it’s fair to say (feel free to make the case if you think otherwise) that the Battle also represented a crucial stage in terms of winning support for intervention among the American people. If you like going down that sort of road, it can also be argued that the bombing of London very much shaped how the war would evolve in terms of the Allied bomber offensives, though this is incidental to the argument. The point is not that it wasn’t a victory, so much as it is that the popular narrative of how the victory was won and what it meant is flawed.

For those who are interested, Correlli Barnett has an opinion piece up, arguing that there are laurels aplenty for all.

*The Luftwaffe suffered badly from the fact that its fighter component was forced to work at the limits of its operational range. In addition, due to the fact that much of the battle was fought either over British territory or near the British coast, British pilots who survived being shot down would usually be able to re-enter the fray, whereas downed German pilots were more likely to either be taken prisoner or drown in the sea.*** The fact that German pilots were ultimately compelled to offer close support to the bomber fleet negated the fact that the Messerschmidt was superior to the Spitfire at anything other than a relatively low altitude. It also meant that the German positioning tended to be unsuitable for speed-based attacks, instead forcing them into close dogfights where the superior turning capabilities of the British aeroplanes were able to come into play. It has been noted by a number of people – I believe including Wick Murray and Alan Millett (sorry, my books on the matter are in London) – that had the Germans either been able to fight at a higher altitude or had access to drop tanks, they quite probably would have won.

**Iconoclastic accounts that challenge cherished myths have been around for some time – perhaps most accessibly in the form of thriller writer Len Deighton’s 1977 work “Fighter”, but there is little doubt that in terms of denting popular perception the impact hasn’t been great.

***For those readers who are kinky on the whole ethics thing, this brings up an interesting case study. German pilots would often machinegun parachuting British airmen which, understandably, led to accusations of typical Hunnish beastliness. However, because downed German pilots were effectively hors de combat and RAF pilots were not, the argument existed that it was legitimate for Lutwaffe pilots to kill RAF men whose planes have been downed and not vice versa. When there was talk of war crimes charges against Luftwaffe personnel on this basis, the notion was dropped in large part due to the testimony of senior RAF officers that, had the positions been reversed, they would probably have acted in a similar manner.****

****Too many asterisks. Will try to alter the style a bit in future posts.