Battle of Britian

Sorry if this has been mentioned before but I had not realized this problem until I read Robinson´s "Invasion 1940".

Also from

Spitfire on my tail || kuro5hin.org

Steinhilper was the communications officer for his gruppe, and has some interesting insights into the Luftwaffe´s radio communications. Bombers and fighters used incompatible systems and could not communicate with each other at all during a flight. The radios they did use were crude and unreliable. It's generally accepted that the radio problems were a significant handicap for the Luftwaffe.


Also it is certain for German fighters it was never possible to talk to ground control, or the fighters and bombers to communicate with Air Sea Rescue Units.

Radio discipline was often sadly lacking. During combat, so many German pilots were talking that "the frequency would be swamped and all that could be heard was a high-pitched whistling as the receivers became overwhelmed."

Two years passed before the Luftwaffe´s air-to-air and ground-to-air radio communications finally caught up with the rest of the war. " Operationally speaking", Heinz Knoke told in his diary in June 1942, " it will now be possible for our fighters to be located and directed by ground control at all times." Something that Fighter Command was doing competently in 1940.

Also some fault is put on the "Spaniards", the Luftwaffe pilots who had served in Condor legion.:

Steinhilper came to the conclusion that, because the Condor Legion was clandestine, it had avoided using radio in case the transmissions betrayed its existence. Pilots communicated by hand signals or wing-wagging. Back in Germany the Spaniards disliked the whole idea of radio: It smacked of direction from the ground;they preferred the freedom of sky. After a Luftwaffe exercise which included an experiment with ground-to-air radio, Adolf Galland blamed Stenhilper´s unit for "bothering" his men : "...it would be best to throw out all these damned radios! We don´t need them. We didn´t need them in Spain and without them we could fly higher and faster!"

---------

The radio for RAF did not work perfectly though at all times:

RAF entered the war with the TR9D set. It had a limited range. When Sergeant Pilot Ginger Lacey took his hurricane to France, he found that above 15,000 feet his HF radio could receive only BBC;he made his first attack on an Me109 with the music of Jack Teagarden and his orchestra in his earphones.

 

Actually wondered if anyone had read before that the "Spaniards" or the Condor legion pilots might have caused problems to the Luftwaffe´s "efficiency" by their behaviour?

 

Also from Robinson´s "Invasion,1940"

General Josef "Beppo" Schmid was the least successful Head of Air Intelligence in any air force during WW2. He had a difficult job. Bad news was never welcome at Luftwaffe High Command. Göring always wanted solutions, not problems.After the war, Schmid recalled the opposition his department faced as Germany began to lose battles. " Unfavourable reports submitted by intelligence officers at the front were simply dismissed as inaccurate..."

Some of this influence may have infected Luftwaffe Intelligence as early as 1940.Certainly Beppo Schmid´s version of the air war was strong on optimism. In July he made a detailed survey of British Air Defences which failed to mention radar, and which described the enemy system as inflexible, with a surplus of pilots, an aircraft industry inferior to Germany´s and RAF´s leadership that was remote and out of touch.

On 7 August Schmid reinforced his "inflexibility" blunder. He reported that, as British fighters were controlled from the ground, " their forces are tied to their respective ground stations and are thereby restricted in mobility...Consequently the assembly of strong fighter forces at determined points and at short notice is not to be expected."

On 16 August Schmid told Göring that in the past two weeks his Luftwaffe had shot down 572 British fighters, and so the RAF had only about 300 fighters fit to fly;clearly, the end must be in sight. The reality was that Fighter Command still had over 700 fighters.

 

The Luftwaffe were NEVER going to win the BoB, EVER!!!!

As already pointed out above.


OJ

 

Well, another advantage that helped them in the sky was there tactics. Hurricanes attack the bombers while the spits fend off the Me-109's

 

A few points,



Even with a 'balanced' force of say 700 fighters each.

The RAF could put a Spitfire into the air 5 times a day, the LW about 2 or maybe 3.

The Spitfire could fight for 3 times as long as 109, in every encounter.

Ever german pilot that bailed out and survived, was a prisoner for the duration.

Every RAF pilot fought on the next or even the same, day.

A damaged 109 often ended up in the Channel. Or ran out of fuel over the Channel, same result, a wet or dead pilot.

A damaged Spitfire often landed and was repaired, 'Hawkers' repaired over 1000 'Hurricanes'.

The Brits were fighting for their very survival, the K****S were fighting for world domination and the extermination of civilisation.


OJ

 

..IMHO the importance of radar in the BoB has been over-estimated...
everyone seems to forget that we (the British) were reading German signals via ULTRA and it was this that enabled the RAF command to pick and chose when they would fight and husband their resources, especially during the opening exchanges....there are a lot of accounts on the German side complaining that the RAF never came up to fight..as for strategic bombing, turning against London was a ludicrous decision. London and its suburbs was/is a huge metropolis, over 1,000 sq miles (four or five times the size of Berlin).. you do the math ...100 Heinkels carrying 10 250 kg bombs, that's one measly bomb per square mile . Again there are accounts from German pilots who on overflying London for the first time, started to realise the enormity of the task facing them and the futility of what they were doing ...

...but I take your point in general...as a recent writer put it...the British were cooly professional during the Battle, the Germans bumbled about like amateurs..

 

According to Hinsley in the official history of British intelligence during the war, Ultra delivered almost no information of use during the BoB. The limited intercepts that were received usually took a few days to decode, by which time any tactical information was useless.

Dowding was not even cleared for Ultra until October 1940, by which time almost all the daylight fighting was over.

Hinsley is contradicted by Winterbotham, but bear in mind Winterbotham wrote his account before Ultra was declassified. He had to work entirely from memory without access to any of the original records.

The historical records bears out Hinsley's account, too.

On the 15th August, when the Luftwaffe made their first, and last, daylight attack on the north, the commander of 13 Group was on leave for the day, meaning the battle was conducted by his deputy. No squadrons were readied in advance, and indeed the raid wasn't picked up until quite late.

The best example is 7th September, though. On that day the Luftwaffe switched from attacking RAF airfields to mass bombing of London. Dowding and Park were at a scheduled meeting that morning where they discussed how to continue to defend airfields against German attacks they expected to continue for months. When the strategy changed that afternoon, Park's deputy was in command of 11 Group, and the German bombers had an almost free run in to London as the controllers kept fighters back to defend the airfields.

The RAF strategy all along was to ignore German fighters and only attack the bombers. Fighters roaming over the British countryside were more of a risk to themselves than Britain, it was only the bombers that could harm those on the ground.

The RAF tried where possible to ignore feints and fighter sweeps. In that they were aided by radar, which could often give an idea of aircraft type by speed and altitude, and the observer corps, who could usually identify aircraft types.

The RAF never deliberately ignored bombers, though. They always attempted to intercept raids containing bombers.

The original plan of the Luftwaffe was to attack London in force in daylight to suck the RAF fighters in to a massed battle, that the Luftwaffe would win. Their previous strategy of bombing airfields was resulting in continuous combats and massive casualties, not just to the fighters but the bombers as well.

Whilst attacking London didn't win them the battle, it didn't lose it either, and they were certainly not going to win without trying something different.

After that the Luftwaffe bombed because it was worth a try, and they didn't really have any other options.

 

Hey I got a quick question regarding this battle.

Would you not consider the bombing runs over Germany a part of this battle, since it deterred Luftwaffe fighters tiring them out. Also, changing Hitlers strategy to the bombing of London in response?

 

Not really.
While their longer range would have been useful in the later attacks on London, in the campaign against the RAF airfields in SE England they would have made no difference as range wasn't a problem for the Bf 109's in these attacks

 

the importance of radar is much overratednce the German aircraft had passed by the radar? The radar could not look back and the Germans could always change their direction.

 

Welcome to the forum. That is a good question. I would think that the first couple of bomb raids would not have had a response since without radar, the Germans did not know they were coming. I'm sure they transferred some fighter units to Germany to allow time to form up. So the pilots would not be pulling double duty

 

RAF Bomber Command was bombing, on a small scale military and industrial targets in the German Ruhr from the begining of the battle*.
It had little effect on German plans in the battle as the raids were at night, and the Bf 109 wasn't used as a night fighter at this time. The Luftwaffe did pull out some Me 110 units out of the battle for conversion to night fighter duties, but seeing that the Me 110 was a total failure in daylight over Britain this had no effect on the outcome

* The Luftwaffe also was engaged in night raids against military and industrial targets in Britain from the start of the battle as well, only London was off limits under Hitler's direct order

 

IMHO.

Radar.

Able to fight over their own land: A british pilot surviving being shot down usually flew to fight again. A trained Luftwaffe pilot became a POW.

The Channel and North Sea subtracts from combat range. The very short legs of the Me-109 often allowed the RAF unimpeded access to the bombers when the fuel warning lights came on in the 109 cockpits.

 

It's not really that radar is overrated but the ground observers were underrated or under credited. The British had a pretty well developed system for keeping track of raids once they were over Britain. The radar gave advanced warning and more time to get interceptors in the air.

 

Don't agree, like others who have also quoted this!

British radar enabled them to see a raid forming up over France, to judge what was its composition i.e. just fighters, was it a main raid or a feint. By tracking it the nearest squadrons could be scrambled, in order to intercept it before it got to its target.
At first the Lw couldn't understand it - why when they arrived over the south-east of England the RAF was invariably there to meet them! Though, they had a clue - as too many of their recon flights were intercepted and shot down.

 

Hello merlin,

let me put it this way - even without the British having had radar the Germans couldn't have won. They simply lacked the fighter aircraft suitable for an airbattle over England. Such as the Allies did over Germany until the introduction of the long range fighters.
A FW-190 in 1940 or realistically a He 112/100 would have been a different story if available in the needed numbers.
Numerically the Luftwaffe fighters also did not possess the needed figure to overcome the RAF - not to mention the almost total lack of replacements.

One of my uncle's was a He111 pilot and when they were ordered to attack the Soviet Union, many of his comrades looked very sceptical upon each other whilst reminding themselves of the disasterous replacement situation of aircrafts during the BoB.

Regards
Kruska

 

When I've seen a convincing argument about this it's usually been coupled to the observer corp (not sure if this is the right name) being under appreciated/rated. From what I understand they were the ones who continued to report in the location of German planes once they crossed into Britain itself. The intercepts were thus a function both of them and radar.

 

Here is a fine site devoted to the Chain Home System, and in the left column you can find the Chain Home Low, Extra Low sites and mobile radars as well.

See:

The Radar Pages - Chain Home

 

Good point and that's quite right - from the moment the LW aircraft crossed the coast, they were tracked by the Observer Corps, which at the time consisted of 30,000 volunteers across the UK.

They're often thought of in a sort of 'Dad's Army' caricature way but this is far from the truth. The OC were esssential in tracking formations and identifying the types of aircraft involved, and also spotting low-flying aircraft. Their reports were directed via OC HQ at Horsham to Fighter Command HQ at Bentley Priory, and local sector ops rooms were able to link directly to nearby OC units.

The Observer Corps played a vital part in the Battle of Britain.