215: Attrition Over France

Description

This episode delves into the intense strategic clashes during the Battle of Britain, focusing on the critical decisions made in late May and early June 1940 as Allied forces grappled with the deteriorating situation in France. It explores the tension between Air Chief Marshal Dowding’s warnings about keeping fighters in Britain and the urgent demands from French leaders and the BEF for more aircraft, highlighting the high stakes of resource allocation during a pivotal moment in the war. With insights into Churchill’s War Cabinet debates and the looming threat of invasion, the episode unpacks how these choices shaped the course of the conflict and the future of Britain’s defense.

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Summary

Hello everyone and welcome to History of the Second World War Episode 215 - The Battle Before Britain Pt. 7 - Attrition over France. This week a big thank you goes out to jihu, George, and Comrade Red for supporting the podcast by becoming members. Members get access to ad-free versions of all of the podcast’s episode plus special member only episodes roughly once a month. Head on over to historyofthesecondworldwar.com/members to find out more. While organizing the podcast episodes for both the Fall of France and the Battle of Britain episodes there was a major problem, really the stories end up intertwining near the end of May due to the defeats that both nations had suffered at the front. I made the decision to focus on events in France, which I do not necessarily regret, but it is important to remember that during the events of late May and early June, even as thoughts were beginning to turn to British plans in a post-France war, fighting in France was continuing. The balancing act between preparing for the defense of the home islands and meeting their obligations to their continental ally would occupy no small number of meetings, discussions, and memoranda in London during this time. Due to the mobility of their resources, the Royal Air Force was at the center of these discussions. Unlike ground forces, if a decision was made to send aircraft either over France or to base them in France that order could be executed in only a few hours. This created the scenario where help could quickly be sent to the continent, but it also meant that the losses that might be suffered by the Royal Air Force over France could balloon rapidly unless someone had an eye for the future. Unfortunately for the troops in France, several people did have their eyes to the future, including Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding who would be the leading voice for a policy of force conservation. His arguments, and their success, would have an important impact on limiting the commitments of British pilots and aircraft to the defense of France, even as the calls from the French government became ever more urgent that more assistance was needed.

Before the war the goal had been for Fighter Command to increase in size up to 57 squadrons, a number that was felt to provide sufficient fighters to both defend the home islands while also providing aircraft for the planned British Expeditionary Force. However, when the war started there were only 32 squadrons available, and only 21 of them were equipped with Hurricanes and Spitfires which meant it was only 21 squadrons that could really have a hope of matching up against German fighters. This number did increase during the Phoney War, and by May 1940 the number was up to 47. The number of effective aircraft then began to drop due to the fighting in France, while at the same time more squadrons would be sent to the continent in the early days of the offensive. And even those squadrons that were never permanently based in France would still fight over France, with a common practice being for fighter squadrons based on airbases in England to fly over to France for sorties during the day. 32 Squadron, based out of Biggin HIll near London was an example of a squadron that routinely participated in these activities. On May 17th 32 Squadron would start the day at Biggin Hill, then fly to Manston on the far eastern end of Kent before flying to France at Abbeville. Once in France they refueled and began a patrol around Lille before flying back to Abbeville, then doing another patrol and then finally flying back to Biggin Hill. This was one way to increase RAF fighter presence France without committing squadrons completely, as these over the channel missions could be increased or decreased on a daily basis if desired to control the risk to Fighter Command over France. But it was also very exhausting, one of the men who would fly those missions on May 17th was Pete Brothers, and he would describe the tempo of operations like this: ‘We’d go over at first light, refuel, operate in France, come back in the dark to Biggin Hill; get a meal; fall into bed and be woken up almost instantly because there wasn’t much darkness and we were off again. Dawn was beginning; there was just about enough daylight to see around.’. While there were benefits to this mission structure, it still put British fighters at risk over France, and Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, the head of Fighter Command, almost immediately began to raise concerns about the current wastage being experienced over France. In Dowding’s view, and it was a view widely shared, Fighter Command had been created to and expanded for the purpose of providing air defense over Britain, each fighter that was sent to France and lost was one that could not participate in its primary mission. And he was not exactly quiet about these views, discussing them at multiple War Cabinet and other leadership meetings as he advocated for not sending more aircraft to France. Churchill and the other British leaders had to weigh several different viewpoints though because while Dowding was advocating for keeping fighters in Britain, the leaders of the BEF in France and the French government were constantly asking for more. These calls only grew louder and more urgent in the days after the invasion as the situation at the front deteriorated rapidly and Allied aircraft losses began to mount. Discussions of invasion had already started among the British War Cabinet, which gave Dowding even more ammunition to use in this arguments. May 15th would be an important day, when it was decided by the War Cabinet to send an additional 4 fighter squadrons to France, with 2 more to possibly follow. Dowding was quite displeased at this development, and would write a letter to the Cabinet on the 16th: “I believe that, if an adequate fighter force is kept in this country, if the fleet remains in being, and if Home Forces are suitably organized to resist invasion, we should be able to carry on the war single-handed for some time. But,’ he warned, ‘if the Home Defence Force is drained away in desperate attempts to remedy the situation in France, defeat in France will involve the final, complete and irremediable defeat of this country.”. It is interesting to see the threat of invasion already playing a major role in arguments at this stage. As discussed in the episodes on the invasion of France, over the course of the last two weeks of May and then early June the answers to many French pleas for more aircraft would begin to be rejected by the British leaders. It was not that they wanted France to lose, but simply that they did not believe that a larger commitment, and ever greater losses, would save France. More commitments of valuable fighters would simply mean falling into the sunk cost fallacy. In total the RAF would lose over 900 aircraft during fighting over the Continent during the period of fighting in France, and they would also suffer over 1,500 casualties many of which were valuable pre-war trained aircrew that could not be easily replaced. The only good news was that fighter production had continued to increase over the months, but it seems to never be enough to keep up with attrition while also continuing to expand the number of fighters available.

With all the worry in London about the attrition experienced by the RAF, another major factor in the fighting in the months ahead would also be the losses experienced by the Luftwaffe during this period. It can be easy to view the Luftwaffe during this period of the war as some kind of impervious unstoppable steamroller as the Wehrmacht rolled over country after country, but the actual details were far different. The Luftwaffe was far from broken by the end of the fighting France, but they were certainly less capable at the end of the campaign then they had been at the beginning. Each of the campaigns that they participated in cost them aircraft, either destroyed or damaged, both in the air and on the ground. During operations in Poland 285 aircraft were destroyed, 279 damaged, which combined was about 1/5 of the total Luftwaffe aircraft involved in the campaign. Two important causes of attrition was accidental damage, either on the ground often in the form of fires, or accidents that would happen during flight. The other was the much higher rate of attrition that was experienced while flying close air support sorties over German ground troops. Attrition had always been expected with these operations but even against the relatively poorly equipped Polish troops the loss rates had been much higher than expected. Then during the Norwegian campaign another 260 aircraft were lost. Numbers would be built back up before the fighting started in France, but doing so required most of the output of the German aircraft industry at this time, with little ability to continue to expand the Luftwaffe’s size and capabilities. During this time the Luftwaffe was also at a disadvantage due to the type of operations that it planned to participate in the future, including the invasion of England. These operations would not just require fighters and bombers, but a whole host of supporting aircraft types that were required. This spread German productive capability over many different types at a time when their enemy, the British were beginning to focus very clearly on front line fighter numbers. As always there was also the problem of the availability of materials for aircraft production, which had been problematic before the war but had only gotten worse after the opening campaigns . The Luftwaffe was not the only service that was trying to make up for the attrition of earlier campaigns in the run up to the fighting in France, and the steel available to German manufacturers would become even more scarce. All of this then would get worse due to losses experienced in France which would be even higher than what they had suffered earlier in the war. The result of these competing demands was a production rate that fell far short of making good losses at the front. One of the ways that this would be compensated for was by pushing a greater percentage of the available aircraft into front line service. This had the effect of hollowing out the Luftwaffe, even before the Battle of Britain, as the number of reserver aircraft and spare parts dwindled in an attempt to keep the front line squadrons filled. Another effect of this change is that serviceability rates began to fall, as aircraft were kept at the front longer and experienced the inevitable damage and breakdowns from heavy use. Often the number of fighters and bombers are focused on, but just as important were supporting aircraft like the Ju-52, the Luftwaffe’s most numerous transport aircraft, and the one used by airborne troops. During their operations over the Netherlands and Belgium they had suffered heavy attrition and in May just 24 new aircraft would be produced. This meant that even if the Germans wanted to drop airborne troops over Britain, a lack of transport aircraft would make it difficult to stage the operation. Some of these production issues would be solved in the months and years that followed, but particularly during the first half of 1940 there was a real hesitancy to fully commit the German economy to war time production. This would have involved a heavy curtailment of civilian production, and a drop in the German standard of living for at least the near future, a sacrifice that Hitler in particular was not ready to make.

In London the topic of production numbers and efficiency were a major topic of discussion. During 1939 the Germans had outproduced the British in the air, but it was far closer than what it had been the year before. 1939 was also the last year until 1944 that the Germans produced more aircraft than the British. One of the men credited with this turnaround was Lord Beaverbrook who was appointed as the Minister of Aircraft Production in May 1940. Beaverbrook was the owner of the newspaper published that produced the Daily Express, a conservative newspaper that caused him to be quite close to the Conservative politicians before the war. He would be brought in to increase British aircraft production in any way possible. As with most such positions, while Beaverbrook did play his role as Minister well, and did oversee a massive increase in overall production, most of the decisions that made this possible had been made months and years before. Of course the people who had made those decisions were not at the head of one of the largest newspapers in the world, and were not nearly as good at self promotion as Beaverbrook. But Beaverbrook would still make important decisions and contributions. As is so often the case, once the problem of aircraft production began to be solved and then accelerated another problem was found, who was going to fly those things. Pilot numbers became the new bottleneck for the RAF during the summer of 1940, particularly before the heavy fighting July through October. During that time there would be a high rate of attrition among aircraft but far less among pilots, but before those actions as they were attempting to build up the number of available fighter squadrons finding enough pilots to fly all of the new aircraft was a problem. This was one of the reasons that the foreign born pilots that were covered a few episodes ago were important, they filled British aircraft which not only did not have experienced British pilots, but often did not have any pilots at all. Efforts were also made to ensure that anyone in the RAF that had flying experience was not being wasted, or supposedly wasted, on administration duties. Churchill was of the belief that there were many men in the RAF that could fly, but were instead assigned to other less critical duties. In August, while the fighting was raging he would say “The tendency of every station commander is naturally to keep as much in his hands as possible. The admirals do the same. Even when you have had a thorough search if you look around a few weeks later you will see more fat has gathered.”. But I am sure those same feelings were held even before the battles of the late summer. In their efforts to increase the size of their fighting force the British also had the very clear advantage that they knew where their priorities lay, not just in the RAF, but also in armament production as a whole. There were many different areas of the military that required resources, the Royal Navy needed more convoy escorts and every other type of ship. The British Army was trying to find a way to rebuild itself after losing so much equipment during the evacuations from France, where the units involved had lost most of their equipment larger than a machine gun. But above all of these problems was the needs of the RAF which would always be the first group to be called upon to fight against a German invasion attempt. By the time that the fighting started the available of front line fighters was not as different as total numbers might make it seem. In total aircraft the British fighters would be outnumbered over 4 to 1 in the early stages of the fighting, but that is not really a useful number because most of the German aircraft were bombers. Instead the British fighters were only outnumbered less than 2 to 1 in fighters, and only around 1.5 to 1 in single engine fighters that would prove to be most effective. And those numbers would actually get better for the British over time, after a few very challenging weeks at the start of the battle.