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

BATTLE OF BRITAIN
canes would soon be exhausted, no matter where their bases were.70 The
War Cabinet sided with Dowding and refused the ten squadrons requested.
But the next day, the War Cabinet, believing that a lesser force might stave
off the defeat of France, agreed to send eight half-squadrons-another
thirty-two aircraft. That afternoon Churchill, then in Paris, asked for six
more Hurricane squadrons. For practical reasons, this request was not
granted in full. It prompted Dowding to write to the Minister of Defense
(Churchill) and to the Air Council, asking for their decision on the minimum
force that they believed could defend the United Kingdom if France
were defeated. He pointed out that if his forces were reduced below that
figure, then Great Britain would be allowing France to drag her down to
defeat. On May 19 and 20, Churchill and the Cabinet finally ruled in Dowding’s
favor: no more fighter squadrons should leave Great Britain. At the
same time, the situation in France proved so desperate that the squadrons
there were withdrawn to England, leaving only three with the Advanced
Air Striking Force.
Role of Intelligence
All of these moves took place only just in time for No. 11 Fighter
Group to organize the air cover for the beaches at Dunkirk, where Fighter
Command as such got its baptism of fire against major German formations.
The British did in fact know a great deal about the Luftwaffe from their
pre-war intelligence. However, because of their own orientation toward
grand-strategic bombing, the RAF failed to see the Luftwaffe as basically a
tactical air force attached to the German army for blitzkrieg purposes. The
RAF high command underestimated the Luftwaffe’s immediate battlefield
effectiveness as well as its lack of long-range hitting power when deprived
of the ground army to disrupt an opponent’s airfields. Fighter Command
had access to low-grade Luftwaffe signals intelligence and could decode
ordinary operational signals in pretty short order. However, it did not have
access to ULTRA, the intercepted top-secret German coded messages, in
anything approaching the magnitude that has been recently imagined.71
First, many of the German communications went by landline and could not
be intercepted. Second, what was passed over the air in ENIGMA codes had
to be broken into German and then translated, analyzed, and transmitted.
In the summer of 1940 this was still very much a hit-or-miss proposition.
While Dowding did get ULTRA as soon as it became available, almost nothing
that he received was of immediate use for each day’s countermoves,
except Goering’s signals from Karinhall. Much more important was
how he, his. staff, and his controllers judged the lessons of the previous
days’ activities, and how they reacted to what the radar and Observer
Corps reports indicated the enemy was preparing to do. Having just been
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