In March 1941, Britain's Air Ministry published an official pamphlet about the 'Battle of Britain' (August to October 1940) that was an instant success, selling 300,000 copies in the first week. A subsequent revised edition with maps and photographs sold in the millions.
But if that battle was crucial, the next phase of the German bombing campaign in the autumn and winter of 1940-41 was even harder for our defenders. As the author of the work below says:
The few of 1941 were fewer still and... the second victory was even more narrowly won than the first.
Commissioned in 1944 to write a pamphlet on the 'night Battle of Britain', provisionally titled 'The Night Interception Battle', the writer gives a frank, clear and detailed account of the organisational and technological challenges involved in tackling German planes that had switched to high-altitude flying at night, where they thought they would be virtually undetectable.
Events overtook this publication, a historical record in which various parties had an interest. By the time the last additions and amendments had been made, the German forces in Western Europe were just about to surrender; and so it has remained in the files of the Public Records Office ever since. Nevertheless, we should never forget, as Wellington said of Waterloo, how much of a 'd*mn close-run thing' the Night Battle was.
Like Hilary Saunders, who wrote the 'Battle of Britain' pamphlet for HMSO, the author of this one was to remain anonymous; he had written it as an official assignment and so it was not part of his personal oeuvre. World-famous for his other work, here he shall remain nameless; but a wonderfully illuminating and readable work it is, as this first chapter shows. The remainder will be serialised daily here on Substack.
Technical and historical comments will be gratefully received - the topics it covers are so wide-ranging that this text may serve as a skeleton to be fleshed out by additional information from knowledgeable amateurs and experts.
Please pass this on to others -it’s not available to buy!
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IMPORTANT NOTICE
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/
The text below is a transcript from images supplied by the Public Records Office of a document, reference code AIR 20/4870. It is Crown Copyright but licenced as above.
This is from the last draft version as amended on 6 May 1945.
IF YOU ARE USING OR SHARING THIS DOCUMENT PLEASE ENSURE THAT YOU INCLUDE THE ABOVE STATEMENT
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Pamphlet on
THE NIGHT INTERCEPTION BATTLE
1940 - 1941
CHAPTER I
On a summer night in 1940 a Blenheim pilot is patrolling somewhere above the New Forest, at a height of 11,000 feet. South-west of him there is a concentration of searchlights. He is ordered by his controller to investigate it. He flies toward it and into it, but can see nothing. He is relying on the searchlights to illuminate an enemy aircraft, if an enemy aircraft is there. Presently he makes a right hand turn and flies into the concentration from another direction, from the north, and then he sees what he has been looking for. There is an enemy aircraft flying at approximately his own height, and on the same course, about three quarters of a mile ahead. He opens up and gives chase. It seems quite easy to catch him. He keeps his speed well up towards the maximum and chases the enemy for forty or fifty miles. The enemy is running away and the Blenheim is running after him. But soon it is obvious that the enemy is just a little faster than the Blenheim, and that the Blenheim will never catch him.
A month or two later a man Is crawling along on his belly in a ditch, somewhere just inland from the eastern coast of Kent. Things are bad with him. His post - he is a member of the Royal Observer Corps - has been put out of action. The aerodrome nearby has been blitzed. He has a message and there is no way of communicating it except by word of mouth. Bombs are falling all about him and there is nothing for it but to crawl along the ditch, on his belly, and get the message through. It is not only a point of honour to do, this but a point of necessity. The Observer Corps work night and day, plotting everything that flies, from a Lancaster even sometimes to a bird, and its plots and reports must go through, however bad things are.
Two months later something worse is happening. Coventry is burning. It is, up to that time, perhaps the most concentrated blitz in history. In the middle of the city is a Royal Observer Corps Centre and the bombs and fires, as the night goes on, isolate it completely. It cannot be relieved. Its operations table is a mad congestion of aircraft plots. They are all enemy aircraft. The telephone lines, when they are not out of action, are saturated. “If you do not send fighters soon” somebody telephones, “there will be nothing of Coventry left.” The Royal Observer Corps keeps its isolated centre alive all night; in the morning there is something of Coventry left: but there are no fighters. Things are bad indeed.
Things in fact are very bad, The Blenheim is a good machine but not fast enough; the Royal Observer Corps, without which the air defences of the country are blind and deaf, is crawling on its belly in ditches, or is isolated in ruined cities by rings of fire. To the call for night fighters there is no answer. And the winter, with its long hours of darkness, has hardly begun.
But a few months later something else is happening. A young Flight Lieutenant and his sergeant air-gunner are patrolling near Liverpool. They are only two of many. The barrage at Liverpool is 10,000 feet. They fly above it, and soon they observe, at “9 o’clock below”, what they themselves call an ugly silhouette: a JU.88. They immediately go into attack, diving below and away from the target. This dive puts them into a position quite different from that of the Blenheim in the earlier report - they find themselves 3000 feet ahead of the target, and about 1000 feet below. The pilot then pulls the nose of his aircraft up, applying left bank and right rudder, so that he skids gently in towards the bomber, at the same time climbing to a position about 150 yards below. At this point, as the bomber overtakes him and as he himself is about 200 yards to starboard, he gives the order to open fire. The effect is disastrous. The burst of only 2 seconds hits the Junkers starboard engine and sets It on fire. The top rear-gunner of the Junkers then decides to open fire in return. The bursts are short. They go over the head of the fighter, as if the gunner is unable sufficiently to depress his guns and bring them to bear. The fighter cannot allow this, and instantly replies with a 1½ second burst that causes the burning engine to flame still more. The enemy now appears to be losing speed, and again the fighter pilot is able to go ahead of him and below him, so that his gunner can fire into the cockpit. As he does so the enemy is also firing, now from his front guns, which however are instantly silenced by another burst of 1½ seconds. From this moment there is in fact no reply from the enemy. He dives steeply, is enveloped by thick white cloud. The fighter follows him down, through the cloud and at last, breaking through it, sees far below him, on the seashore of the Lancashire coast, a torch of fire.
So now there are fighters. They are fast enough; they are crafty enough; and they are deadly enough. The blitzes of the winter went unanswered by fighters; but not the blitzes of the Spring.
Finally, a month or two later, something else is happening. It is recorded in a formal and restrained entry, by a squadron intelligence officer, in his records. “A squadron smoking party was held to celebrate the 50 enemy aircraft that the squadron has destroyed with the present machinery. Some 400 airmen took a glass of beer or two with the C.O. and an informal concert was given by members of the squadron.”
Between the Blenheim that is outpaced by its enemy and the squadron that modestly records “taking a glass of beer or two with the C.O.” there lies one of the grimmest - perhaps for the people of Britain - the very grimmest - episodes of the war.
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By the end of October 1940 the first great air campaign of history, as distinct from an air battle, was over. The first Battle of Britain had been won by the defenders.
This campaign, fought on unequal terms and with almost everything physically in favour of the attacking forces, was remarkable for several things. It was remarkable as being the largest military operation, since the Cromwellian Revolution, in which the behaviour of the combatants could be watched by the people of the British Isles. The drums of Trafalgar, Mafeking and the Crimea had demanded, at home, some use of imagination. It had been a long time since a great sea battle had been seen from the British shore. But in the summer of 1940 a great air campaign was fought out over southern and eastern England in full view of any farm labourer in his hay-field, any child going to school, any housewife hanging out her washing, any veteran of another war sitting by his village cross In the sun. Perhaps for the first time in British history, the British hardly needed to be told how the battle was going. By simply lifting their eyes and shading them against the sun, they could see for themselves.
The campaign was secondarily remarkable, not only as a defeat of German arms but as a defeat of German propaganda. In war there are two obvious types of propaganda. The first is the propaganda of exaggeration. Its policy is short-termed; its object is immediately to disrupt its enemy’s morale. Some of its successes have been most notable against the most logical of peoples. The second is the propaganda of plain facts. Its policy is long-termed; its object is to inculcate and stiffen confidence in its own people regardless of the shock and pain of facts, so that the truth will be known as the truth and accepted accordingly. Its final test is time. That time may be years; or, as in the Battle of Britain, a few days.
During the Battle of Britain the Germans consistently employed the first type of propaganda; the British did their best to employ the second. In consequence, to neutral observers, and especially to American observers, who were watching the battle with something more than distant interest, the published claims of the two sides produced some remarkable discrepancies. To the very reasonable fear, expressed by a high British Cabinet Minister, that these discrepancies might arouse in American minds the fear that the Germans and not the British were telling the truth, there was a simple reply. It was given by Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the Cin-C. Fighter Command of that day.
“You have not long to wait for the truth,” he said in effect. “If the German claims are correct the Germans will be in London by the week-end.”
To that there was no answer but time; and time gave its answer in a few days. If, indeed, the German claims of British losses in the battle had been correct it was clear that the R.A.F. was a far larger force than even the Air Council believed, or that anyway all of it, half way through the battle, had been destroyed.
But the fact is that the Germans did not reach London, the R.A.F. was not destroyed; and by the end of October the Luftwaffe had virtually given up its large-scale day campaign. A military force that does not achieve its object easily becomes the victim of its own propaganda. Thus if the R.A.F. had been destroyed over and over again by the Germans as the Germans so often claimed, it was very strange (as it was later to be strange in Russia) that the Luftwaffe had to continue fighting it and finally give up fighting it without having achieved any permanent military success. So the method of propaganda by exaggeration was defeated, and the method of propaganda by truth, as far as the truth about losses can have been ascertained in the full heat of battle, was justified. Whatever the final truth about British and German losses in the Battle of Britain maybe - and it is well to remember that we shall never know it until the official history of both sides are compiled after the war - two facts were certain. The battle was lost by the attackers; and before the end of it, by October, a new battle had begun.
It has been said of the Battle of Britain that “what the Luftwaffe failed to do was to destroy the fighter squadrons of the R.A.F., which were indeed stronger at the end of the battle than at the beginning.” Now the story of the night attacks will be better understood and the full force of its dangers better appreciated if we face the fact that this statement is not true. The plain fact is that the fighter squadrons of the R.A.F. were not stronger. “Whatever paper returns may have shown” said the C-in-C., “the fact is that the situation was critical in the extreme”. He went on to tell how critical. He told how pilots from other commands - from Coastal and Bomber Squadrons - had to be withdrawn and posted to Fighter Command, to be flung into the battle after the hastiest of preparation. Before the end of the battle, he went on to say, “the majority of squadrons had been reduced to training units, and were fit only for operations against unescorted bombers. The remainder were battling daily against heavy odds. The situation by the end of October was one therefore that did not show in paper returns; it was simply that we were exhausted”.
This, considering the high heat of battle, was only natural. But it meant that we finished the day battle with one great difficulty that could not be solved by science or skill or decisions from the highest authority. Too many of our finest pilots were dead, wounded or in need of rest. These men could not fly into a new arena. True, the night war had already begun, and certain night-fighter squadrons, small in numbers, had been fighting in it. But the strain of the day battle had imposed a great burden not only on action pilots, but on station commanders, staff officers, equipment organisations and perhaps especially on the personnel - women as well as men - of operations rooms. Many of these were young W.A.A.F. telephonists and radiolocation operators who were literally fighting in the front line, under fire. If the night war had suddenly begun to intensify, assuming the furious character of the day war, it might have been very hard for these staffs to have kept working at new pressure. “I had long been apprehensive,” the C.-in-C declared “of the effect of night attacks……….. and of the efficacy of our defence measures”.
The C.-in-C. was well justified in this apprehension, as we shall see, though in fact the first night-attacks of the war had not gone badly for us. The first night attack of any seriousness had been made in June 1940 and the result, to us, seemed good. Enemy aircraft had been well picked up, well held, and well illuminated by searchlights. Six were shot down. The defence - relying it must be remembered on methods that has not changed much since the last war - seemed right. But the Germans, in flying at heights of between 8 and 12,000 feet, quickly realised their mistake. They never repeated it. From that time they flew at heights - the newest and fastest bombers were to attack at as high as 27,000 feet, at great speeds - against which neither searchlights nor any of the many other tried methods were found to be fully effective. The problem not only remained. The success in June 1940, by showing the enemy his mistake, had intensified it more clearly than the worst kind of failure.
This problem was simple, terrifyingly simple, in its demands. It will be restated again and again in this book - a problem that racked the best scientific brains of the country, that caused the very greatest anxiety to the Prime Minister himself, that seemed at one time so difficult and elusive of solution that those who worked on it found themselves in a desperate race against time. The problem was to find some system by which night fighters could make interceptions against unilluminated bombers in darkness. Instead of putting a fighter a distance of four to five miles away from its target, we now had to find means of putting it within one or two hundred yards. This was more than a problem. In comparison with night fighting conditions of the last war, when a pilot leaned out of his open cockpit and simply used his eyes and, perhaps buy some lucky chance saw a Zeppelin in the sky, it was a revolution.
For the eight months between October 1940 and May 1941 this, then, was our problem. Its existence had of course been realised before, and work on its solution had been going on long before war began. Its final solution, if war had never begun, might have taken ten years. The dreadful and desperate necessity of the winter of 1940-41 forced us to solve it in six months or perhaps perish. Both the problem and the alternative to the problem had the same clear and terrifying simplicity.
We are going to see, now, how this problem was the crux of another battle, and how, because the problem was solved, though not entirely because of that, the battle was won. It is the first example in history of a sustained battle by an armed air force attacking the people and cities of a nation by night. It brings the citizen - the child and the grandfather, the mother and the father, the sick and the active - right into the front line of fire. And we shall understand it better, and think of it as more dynamic and impressive, if we not only remember that “the few” of 1940 were really few, but that “the few” of 1941 were fewer still and that the second victory was even more narrowly won than the first.