213: Churchill and the Few

Description

Join us as we delve into the critical role of pilot experience in the Battle of Britain! This episode explores how the skills and bravery of foreign pilots, particularly those hailing from across the British Empire, were vital to the RAF’s success. From the pivotal dogfight scenarios between single-engine fighters to the impact of Winston Churchill’s leadership, we’ll uncover the stories behind the ‘Few’ and the extraordinary sacrifices made in the air during this crucial period of World War II. Listen now and discover why these pilots were so highly valued!

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Transcript

Summary

Hello everyone and welcome to the Battle Before Britain Part 5 - Churchill and the Few. This week a big thank you goes out to Christopher, Cody, Julian, and Snarky for choosing to support the podcast by becoming members. You can find out how you can support the podcast, or become a member, over at historyofthesecondworldwar.com/members. The last few episodes have focused on some of the technology that was put in place in the years before the Battle of Britain that would have an important impact on the overall course of the battle. This episode will shift focus completely to the human element of the fighting in the air during the battle. To quote one of the greatest fighter pilots of all time, “It’s not the plane; It’s the pilot.” a quote from Captain Pete Mitchel, who you may now as Maverick from the wonderful two part movie documentary Top Gun. But in all seriousness, the abilities and experience of the pilots were critical to the success and failure in any aerial combat during the war, but nowhere was that more important than in dogfights between single engine fighters. This episode will focus on the importance of pilot experience, and then how the Royal Air Force benefited from all of the foreign pilots that flooded into the country during the first 9 months of the Second World War. Then we will zoom in a bit to discuss the experiences of Canadian pilots during the battle, one of many groups from around the British empire that would participate in the battle. In the back half of the episode the man who would dub the fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force with their most famous collective name “The Few”, Winston Churchill. Churchill would come to power at the lowest ebb of the war for Britain, with defeat looming in France and very few successes during the war since September 1939. Then when he came to power he would immediately be put into a position to make critical decisions not just about how Britain would fight the war, but whether or not it would even remain in conflict with Germany. No pressure.

But before we discuss the actions of one man, lets focus on the actions of a few . When discussing the Second World War almost every discussion about a battle, campaign, and any other discussion of the conflict starts with numbers. This many aircraft, tanks, men, ships, numbers, numbers, numbers. There is a good reason for this, it is an easy short hand to communicate the relative strengths of the groups involved in the fighting and it does work on some level. However, there are a few areas of the fighting where just knowing the numbers does not tell even part of the story, and fighter combat during the war is one of these areas. Generally, having more of something is better, because just throwing bodies at a problem is at times a valid, albeit gruesome military strategy. But in fighter combat, if the pilots of the outnumbered group are more experienced and more skilled really they are just being presented with a target rich environment. Their experience made them not just more effective at surviving, but also at shooting down the enemy, and better at causing attrition among the other sides more experienced pilots. This bears out in the numbers, with only a very small number of pilots claiming the fast majority of the aerial victories during the battle. When looking at British Fighter Command, only about a 1/3 of all of the pilots even claimed to have shot down an enemy, and a reasonable percentage of those claims were not even accurate. Survival rates were also quite different between inexperienced and experienced pilots. The numbers here are a bit more fuzzy, and of course there is noise in the data due to essentially random chance, but a bunch of work was done on this problem by an American named Herbert Weiss in the 1960s. His numbers, which spanned a greater time period than the Battle of Britain so they are not just battle of Britain stats, was that during the Second world War, 90% of pilots had a 50:50 chance of even making it through their first combat encounter with an enemy fighter without being shot down. However, if the pilot could then somehow survive 5 engagements, their probability of surviving each one drastically increased. Instead, just a small core of pilots were the really dangerous ones, on both sides and the relative number of experienced pilots to inexperienced pilots would shift over the course of the battle. In the skies of Britain in the summer of 1940 there were two groups, and they were not RAF and Luftwaffe pilots but instead hunters and targets. The Luftwaffe would start off with more experience, with some of their pilots having been involved in fighting since the Spanish Civil War, while a far greater number had experienced combat sorties, and combat victories, over both Poland and France. The German fighter pilots had one very serious disadvantage though, they were fighting over enemy territory. If a German was shot down, and was fortunate enough to be able to bale out in time to survive, he would never fly for the Luftwaffe again. On the other hand British pilots were at times shot down multiple time and could be back in action just days later. This helped British pilots to move from the new, untried, pilot stage to the experienced pilot stage in greater numbers. Another major disadvantage for the Germans, and something that would wear on the Luftwaffe pilots more and more over the weeks and then months of the campaign, was the fact that they were not just fighting over enemy territory but also far from their bases. It took hours to fly from their bases in France to the real areas of conflict over Britain, and those hours, day after day, wore them down. Even the best pilot in the world gets tired, especially during periods when the Germans would launch multiple consecutive days of attacks. The RAF pilots experienced similar fatigue, with pilots flying a higher number of sorties but at a much shorter duration. On some days pilots were flying five sorties of around an hour, although that number was really just a peak number and most sorties were short and they certainly did not happen every day.

To offset some of the German advantage in experience the Royal Air Force was able to take advantage of a tremendous source of experienced and skilled pilots, pilots that had already faced the Germans in previous campaigns and had survived. These were the foreign pilots of nations like Czechoslovakia and Poland, who fled their countries and gave their services to the only air force that was still fighting, the Royal Air Force. The statistics of their aerial victories speak for themselves, with the leading two RAF aces from the battle being Sergeant Frantisek, from Czechoslovakia, with 17 victories and Flying Officer Urbanowicz, from Poland, with 15. In total around 20% of the pilots that would receive the Battle of Britain Award were not British by birth, with 583 foreigners receiving the award, 145 Polish, 126 New Zealanders, 98 Canadians, 88 from Czechoslovakia, 33 from Australia, 29 Belgians, 25 from South Africa, 13 from France, 10 Irish, and around 10 Americans. The Polish contingent is probably the most well known today, particularly the contributions of 303 Squadron which would have three times more victories than the typical British squadron while also suffering only about a 1/3 the casualties. The squadron overall would have a 14 to 1 claimed kills to actual losses ratio, fourth best in Fighter Command and they only really participated in the fighting starting at the end of August, months after the counting for that statistic started. Experience was the key reason for this, with many of the Polish pilots in particular having been flight or squadron leaders in the Polish Air Force in 1939. This meant that while 303 was just a normal RAF squadron on paper, it functioned as a kind of Polish National Team during the Battle of Britain, with some of the best Polish pilots making an appearance. They also had a bit of a tendency to ignore orders from less experienced British officers if those orders did not align with what they believed to be the best course of action, which was actually probably better in some cases. Hugh Dowding, the leader of Fighter Command, would later say that ‘had it not been for the magnificent material contributed by the Polish squadrons and their unsurpassed gallantry I hesitate to say that the outcome of the battle would have been the same.’ and he was not wrong. Of course, and unfortunately, the contributions of 303 are just one part of a much greater story of the Polish contributions to the Allied war effort during the war. This long and important contribution would have an unhappy ending, with many of those who fought for the Allies not even being allowed to go back to Poland due to their relationship with the Soviet Union after they captured Poland and with the creation of Communist government in Poland after the war. That is, of course, a much longer story for another day.

No matter how experienced the pilot was, or his nationality, eventually there would be some kind of problem or a mistake, or just a brilliant move by the enemy and their aircraft would be damaged. During all of the fighting it was pretty amazing just how many pilots managed to get out of their damaged aircraft in time . On both sides the pilots were not equipped with fire proof suits, which was a problem giving the fact that for the British right in front of the pilot and in the Bf-109 right under the pilot was around 85 gallons of aviation fuel. If it caught fire the pilot had very little time to get himself out of the aircraft as quickly as possible, with one British pilot recording that it was the general belief that they had about 8 seconds after a fire started. But even with this, the survival rates of fighter aircraft that were shot down was remarkably high, around 60 or 70% with most of them baling out but a few managing to nurse them to the ground although that strategy was highly dependent on the exact damage sustained by the aircraft. This was also a period before ejector seats, which are a critical part of modern fighter pilot procedures, and instead pilots of Hurricanes and Spitfires would just role their aircraft over, undo their straps and shove themselves downwards with the hope that they did not hit the tail. Another airmen were far less lucky, for example the gunners for Defiants were in a particularly bad spot because their escape hatch was not manually operated, it required electricity. One of the things that often did not work when an aircraft was damaged was its electrical system, and I am sure you can see the problem. Many British pilots, even with the risk and dangers involved, would end up surviving multiple bailouts of the course of the battle, with many of them not even making it more than a few weeks before their first trip to earth under their deployed parachute canopy.

Looking at all of the pilots that would fly with the RAF during the Battle of Britain one of groups that would make its presence known were pilots from around the British Commonwealth. These were volunteer pilots that had either been flying with the RAF before the start of the war, or who volunteered after the war had started in 1939. This was really part of a long term plan by the RAF to bolster the number of pilots available through the use of Commonwealth talent and manpower, for example the Royal Canadian Air Force and the RAF had aligned on training and aircraft in mid 1938 to allow an easier transition of Canadian pilots into either RAF squadrons or RCAF squadrons based overseas. Less than a month after the start of the war the other major benefit of the commonwealth could come into play when Prime Minister Chamberlain sent an official notice to the Canadian government, headed by Mackenzie King, asking Canada to host a pilot training program for the RAF. The Canadian government did agree to this program, and it would also bear most of the cost of the training program, contributing well over a third of the total costs, with the rest split between the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. The major benefit for holding these training schools in Canada was the fact that there was plenty of space, with 12 training schools set up for beginning instruction while 25 additional schools were created for more advanced training. Along with bearing more than their share of the cost, the training schools were seen as an important contribution that Canada could make to the war while also reducing the number of men that had to be sent overseas. Much like other parts of the then British Empire, Canada had contributed its fair share of blood to the battlefields of the Western Front during the First World War, and there were many who felt that such an overseas military commitment was not in Canada’s best interest in 1939. Canada would eventually make a very large contribution to overall Allied victory, and in fact these training agreement was the first step on the road to the RCAF being the fourth largest air force in the world in 1945. One of the concessions that King demanded though, was that all of the graduates of the Canadian flying schools, who originated in Canada had to be assigned to RCAF units when they were sent overseas, fully Canadian squadrons were seen as am important part of national pride. These new trainees would take time to be ready to be sent to Europe, and there were other ways that the Canadian airmen started contributing to war almost from the very beginning. The first official way was through the creation of the first all Canadian squadron No 242 in December 1939. This was really just a collection of Canadian airmen that had already been serving with the RAF before the war which were all brought together for the propaganda advantages of having an all Canadian squadron. However, the squadron would take some time to get going, primarily due to a lack of front line aircraft but would eventually be equipped with fighters and would be placed right in the heart of the Battle during the summer of 1940. The other way that Canadian pilots could make a quick contribution to the war, and fighting the Battle of Britain, was through individual volunteerism into the RAF. Many Canadian pilots, with their experience gained either through civilian or military flying, would choose this path. For example Johnny Kent would fly with the 303 Polish squadron as flight commander when it was formed in August 1940. He would help the Poles work through some of their adjustment period of joining the RAF which of course involved a serious language barrier but also more interesting issues like the fact that the throttle was reversed between British and Polish aircraft which I am sure took some time to get used to. Overall, the contribution of Canadian and international pilots was an interesting example, and one of the first that we have encountered in this series, of how even at the height of the Battle of Britain the people of Britain were far from being alone. Above their heads almost every day were men who were flying in deadly aerial combat with the Germans not because they were British, but because it was the right thing to do, oh and also they hated the Germans, a lot of very justifiable hatred of the Germans happening as well.

Last episode covered some of the aircraft that were used in the Battle of Britain, one of them being the Supermarine Spitfire one of the more famous symbols of the Battle of Britain. Another of those symbols was Winston Churchill. Churchill would become Prime Minister in the wake of the German invasion of France, but the process had started several days earlier and was caused by the absolute disaster that was the British government’s response to the invasion of Norway. This would be the topic of conversation in the Commons on May 7th and 8th, a series of conversations that would come to be known as the Norway Debate. Confidence in Chamberlain as Prime Minister was at an all time low after what had essentially been 9 months of either inaction or defeat in the war against Germany. This would cause Chamberlain to resign, and so a replacement had to be found. The choices for a replacement were somewhat limited, as it needed to be a person that could garner enough support in the Commons, and even act as a uniting figure between the various groups in British politics at the time. Other men were considered, for example Lord Halifax the Foreign Minister, but in the end the choice was made to put Winston Churchill in charge. A full biography of Mr. Churchill would be a long and winding affair, but importantly for our story he had once been a member of the Liberal party, before breaking with that party in 1924 to join the Conservatives, but then in the early 1930s he had largely wasted all of his political capital due to his stance on the India. During the debate about giving more autonomy to the people of India Churchill was long against any even suggestion of the matter, which cost him in the political arena. However, whatever he may have lost in influence in the early 1930s he gained back in 1939 due to his consistent warnings about the dangers that were posed by Germany and the new Nazi government. At the time these were also unpopular among British leaders, who were officially pursuing a policy of appeasement up until the absorbtion of Czechoslovakia into Germany in the spring of 1939. Then when the war started he was named First Lord of the Admiralty, a position with which he was well acquainted due to his stint in that same position before and during the First World War. He was a vigorous supporter of the Royal Navy, although his ideas were not always practical. He would be in that role, and have a position on the war cabinet until he was asked to be Prime Minister on May 10th, 1940, which you may remember was the exact same day that the German forces crashed into Western Europe.

Churchill is a man surrounded by myths and a certain mythos, he was and still is seen as a national hero in Britain. He would lead Britain through some very difficult years of the war, and even though he was not a dictator he would influence events all of the world, for good and for ill. But there were good things and bad things that came along with his leadership. Nobody should ever doubt his passion for the British Empire, his desire to see it maintained through and then after the war. But at the same time that passion was doused and steeped in an anglo-centric racism that was on display during the India debate but then also in his views on Japan. He was not intimidated by being a wartime leader, in fact it seems to have invigorated him, this was combined with an active imagination which caused him to push for constant action in search of victories. But this also made him a confident person, sometimes too confident, and he would often long argue for impractical and dangerous ideas because he believed his views would result in the surest way to a positive outcome. To quote General Dill, who would be the Chief of the Imperial General Staff during the first months of Churchill’s leadership: ‘I’m not sure that Winston isn’t the greatest menace. No-one seems to be able to control him. He is full of ideas, many brilliant, but most of them impracticable. He has such drive and personality that no-one seems able to stand up to him.’. He also presented a confident and bold picture to the British people, through speeches and public appearances, at a time when those actions had the greatest impact. But he would also become hesitant at times, especially when given time to think and reflect instead of just act. Many of these features were the opposite of what Chamberlain had been as Prime Minister, although he had other strengths, to quote the Godfather Chamberlain was not a wartime consigliere. Churchill was only a wartime consigliere, that is when he thrived and that is where his weaknesses could best by hidden by his strengths. Also, and I don’t really mean this as too much of an insult, but from many of the contemporary accounts of Churchill, he was kind of jerk, but in my time doing these two podcasts I think I have become convinced that to be a good wartime leader at the high levels of government or military, being a jerk is actually a positive rather than a negative. He was kind of a jerk, but exactly the kind of jerk that Britain needed during the summer of 1940.

But of course Churchill also did not go it alone in the government, and in fact he would be the leader of a broad coalition of British parties, including the Labour party whose inclusion was an important reason why Churchill was brought in and why he would stay in the role. Given how Churchill would fill the roll as Prime Minister, and his overall legacy around the Second World War it could be easy to assume that once he had the role of Prime Minister he was instantly a success and instantly secure in the position. In fact, the opposite was true, given his somewhat difficult relationship with many of the members of the Conservative party their support was far from assured. Many of them assumed that in a short time Churchill would be removed from the position so that a different leader could be nominated, maybe even just Chamberlain again. This would not be the case, but in the dark days of May and June 1940 when everything seemed to be falling apart, Churchill remaining as Prime Minister was never a sure thing. Which is part of why the specific composition of his War Cabinet, and his closest advisors, was so important. Chamberlain would remain in the government and on the War Council as Lord President of the Council, an appointment essentially required due to the continued support of Chamberlain by large parts of the ruling Conservative party. Halifax would retain his role as Foreign Secretary, again an important concession to the Conservative MPs who still controlled the majority of the Commons. However, for the other two seats on the War Council two labour party leaders would be brought in, Clement Attlee as Lord Privy Seal and Arthur Greenwood as a minister without portfolio. These two positions ensured the support of the Labour party, at least for some time. Among these men were wide differences in their viewpoints and their approach to fighting a war. These differences would become very clear almost immediately when Halifax and Churchill came down on different sides of conversations about whether or not to engage with Italy in the hopes that Mussolini could play a role in bringing together Britain, France, and Germany in some kind of peace negotiations. Those disagreements, and their outcomes, will be the topic for next episode.