alliance in which England maintains its sea empire, while Germany as its equal partner takes first place on the continent and acquires new soil in the east.
From this conception Hitler never departed. When Churchill spurned his many peace offers, he felt a frustrated fury, which he vented on the Jews of Europe, since he felt that British Jewry was influencing Churchill’s irrational policy. Almost to the hour of his suicide, Hitler hoped that England would see the light and would come to the only sensible arrangement of the world that was possible, short of abandoning one half to Bolshevism, and the other half to the dollar-obsessed Americans — the outcome the world must now live with.
In these considerations lies the secret of the failure of Adlerangriff; of our arrival at the coast, facing panicky England, without an operational plan for ending the war; and of the persistently unreal air about the Sea Lion plan, which, after elaborate and costly preparations, never came off. In the last analysis, the set-piece invasion did not sail because Hitler had no heart for beating England, and somehow our armed forces sensed this.
The Air Battle
The battle went in several stages. The Luftwaffe first attempted to make the British fight over the Channel, by attacking shipping. When the RAF would not come out and fight for the ships, Goring bombed the fighter bases. This forced the British fighter planes into the air. After knocking them about pretty badly, Goring — pushed by Hitler because of unconscionable British bombing of our civilians — sent in his bombers in the great Valhalla waves against London and other major cities, hoping to cause the people to depose Churchill and make peace. Hitler’s July 19 speech, though perhaps a little blustery in language, had set forth very generous terms. But all was in vain, and the October rains and fogs closed gray curtains on the weary stalemate in the air. So ended the “Battle of Britain,” with honors even, and England badly battered but gallantly hanging on.
Most military writers still blame Goring for our “defeat” over England. But this falls into the trap of the Churchillian legend that the Luftwaffe was beaten. That Germany’s sparkling air force could do no better than fight a draw, I do, however, lay to Goring’s charge. Despotic political control of an armed force, here as in Case Yellow, again meant amateurism in the saddle.
Hermann Goring was a complicated mixture of good and bad qualities. He was clever and decisive, and before he sank into stuporous luxury, he had the brutality to enforce the hardest decisions. All this was to the good. But his vanity shut his mind to reason, and his obstinacy and greed crippled aircraft design and production. Until Speer came into the picture, the Luftwaffe was worse hit by bad management and supply on the ground than by any enemy in the air, include the Royal Air Force in 1940. Goring vetoed excellent designs for heavy bombers, and built a short-range air force as a ground support tool. Then in 1940 he threw the lightly built Luftwaffe into a strategic bombing mission beyond its capabilities, which nevertheless almost succeeded. As a ground support force, the Luftwaffe shone in Poland and France and in the opening attack on the Soviet Union. It fell off as our armies got further and further away from the air bases; but for quick knockout war on land, its achievements have yet to be surpassed.
In popular history — which is only Churchill’s wartime rhetoric, frozen into historical error — Hitler the raging tiger sprang first on Poland, then insensately turned and tore France to death, then reached his blood- dripping claws toward England and recoiled snarling from a terrible blow between the eyes from the RAF. Maddened, blinded, balked at the water’s edge, he turned from west to east and hurled himself against Russia to his doom.
In fact, from start to finish Hitler soberly and coolly — though with self-defeating amateurish mistakes in combat situations — flowed out the political goals laid down in
The Final Tragedy
These nagging results of British obduracy festered in Adolf Hitler’s spirit. He had in any case an unreasonable attitude toward the Jewish people. But the regrettable excesses which he at last permitted trace directly to this frustration in the west. A Germany allied with England — even with a benevolently neutral England — would never have drifted into those excesses. But our nation was beleaguered, cut off from civilization, and we became locked in a mortal combat with a primitive, giant Bolshevist country. Humane consideration went by the board. Behind the line, in conquered Poland and Russia, the neurotic extremists of the Nazi Party were free to give rein to their criminal tendencies. Hitler, enraged by the Churchillian opposition, was in no mood to stop them, as he could have with one word. When crossed, he was a formidable personality. This was the most important result of the “Battle of Britain.”
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: Roon’s discussion of the battle of Britain is unacceptable. It is not a Teutonic trait to admit defeat gracefully. I have read most of the important German military books on the war, and few of them manage to digest this bitter pill. But Roon’s far-fetched thesis that Winston Churchill’s stubbornness caused the murder of the European Jews may be the low point in all this literature of self-extenuation.
His figures on the airplanes involved in the battle are unreliable. To be sure, few statistics of the war are harder to pin down. Depending on the date one takes as the start, the original balance of forces differs. Thereafter the figures change week by week due to combat losses and replacements. The fog of war at the time was dense, and both commands remained with tangled records. Still, no official source I have read calls it an equal match, as Roon calmly does. His assertion that the attack was a “peacemaking gesture” is as ridiculous as his claim that the outcome was a draw. If there is ever another major war, I devoutly hope the United States armed forces will not fight such a “draw.”
“Popular history” has it right. Goring tried to get daylight mastery of the air, the two fighter commands slugged it out, and he failed; then he tried to bomb the civilian population into quitting, first by day and then by night, and failed. The British fighter pilots turned the much larger Luftwaffe back, and saved the world from the Germans. The sea invasion never came off because Hitler’s admirals and generals convinced him that the British would drown too many Germans on the way across, and in Churchill’s words, “knock on the head the rest who crawled ashore.” A navy remains a handy thing to have around when the going gets rough. I hope my countrymen will remember this.
There was no clear-cut moment of victory for the British. They really won when Sea Lion was called off, but this Hitler back-down was a secret. The Luftwaffe kept up heavy night raids on the cities, and this with the U-boat sinkings made the outlook for England darker and darker until Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. But the Luftwaffe never recovered from the Battle of Britain. This was one reason why the Germans failed to take Moscow in 1941. The blitzkrieg ran out of blitz in Russia because it had dropped too much of it on the fields of Kent and Surrey, and in the streets of London.
Chapter 31
Silvery fat barrage balloons, shining in the cloudless sky ahead of the plane before land came in view, gave the approach to the British Isles a carnival touch. The land looked very peaceful in the fine August weather. Automobiles and lorries crawled on narrow roads through rolling yellow-and-green patchwork fields marked off by dark hedgerows. Tiny sheep were grazing; farmers like little animated dolls were reaping corn. The plane passed over towns and cities clustered around gray spired cathedrals, and again over streams, woods, moors, and intensely
