Case Studies in the Achievement of Air Superiority - Air Force ...

AIR SUPERIORITY
gressed, the British did not seem to have heard the same story and their
resistance never crumbled before the Germans gave up.
British Air Defense
On the British side, Park lost control of No. 11 Group on the 18th for
two hours, fortunately without drastic consequences, when telephone lines
were bombed and strafed. Part of the difficulty was the misuse of the system
and an inadequately trained staff, which was recruited straight from
civilian life to the units and not given a training program until after the
beginning of October 1940.16
On the 19th, Park ordered his controllers to keep the battle over land
as much as possible, so that any pilots who bailed out could be rescued. He
also tried to avoid losses by ordering his fighters not to attack enemy fighters.
At this time, Dowding had ordered Leigh-Mallory’s No. 12 Group, to
the north of No. 11, to patrol over No. 11’s airfields when all of the latter’s
squadrons were committed. This sowed the seeds of future ill will and led
immediately to a dispute over the “big wing” concept of mass squadron
format ions.
Park, in tactical command of operations in the southeastern sector, had
very little time to get his squadrons into the air. From the Pas de Calais to
the center of London is 90 miles, and at 300 miles per hour that distance
could be covered in 18 minutes. At 190 miles per hour it took the bombers
28% minutes. Me-109s were shackled to the speed of the bombers, which
meant that they used one hour’s fuel to go to London and return. For all
fighters in 1940, the rate of climb fell off above 12,000-15,000 feet. Park’s
fighters needed 6% minutes to climb to 15,000 feet and 10 minutes to reach
20,000 feet, plus time to maneuver, if possible, to attack with the sun at
their backs. With the delays while radar and ROC information was fed into
the filter room and absorbed by the controller, the margin of time was often
very narrow. Hurricanes and Spitfires were scrambled with specific roles:
the Hurricanes were to wade into the bombers and disrupt them, often
doing this by head-on attacks in formation, while Spitfires fended off the
top cover of escorting Me-109s.
To make the most of his bare1.y adequate warning time, Park had
learned to dispatch his squadrons singly to meet incoming raiders as
quickly as possible. Wing Commander Douglas Bader and AVM Leigh-Mallory
advocated forming up 3 squadrons to make massive kills. However,
out of 32 occasions when “big wings” formed, they found the enemy on a
mere 7; only once did they get to the incoming aircraft first, ahead of the
other defenders, and at that time they shot down 8 enemy aircraft, not the
57 claimed.I6 In his report of November 7, 1940, Park made very strong
comments about the performance of the big wings or “Balbos” (named after
130