The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

of his plans over which he had worried so much mattered any longer. As a
result, he was easily persuaded by Heinrich Koppenberg, the Director-
General of Junkers, to downgrade the He 177 and make the Ju 88 the
principal German bomber instead. ‘All this planning,’ Udet told Göring,
following the fall of France, ‘is garbage.’
Udet’s lack of grip and urgency and the inability of the rest of the
Luftwaffe High Command to do anything about it meant that aircraft
production was now way below that of Britain. In June, 220 new fighters
were built and 344 bombers. In July, those figures would fall even lower.
Repair figures were worse. Just over a thousand Me 109s and just fifty-nine
Ju 88s would be repaired and back in the air during the whole of 1940.
The Luftwaffe still had vastly superior numbers of aircraft compared to
the RAF, but its might was not looking anything like as impressive as it had
on 9 May. It had lost around a third of its operational strength since then
and a fifth of its establishment strength. Its transport fleet had also not
recovered from the mauling it had suffered on that opening day of the
campaign – and neither would it when monthly production figures of the Ju
52 stood at just twenty-four in May. This was significant because without Ju
52s there could be no large parachute drops over England, and moving
groundcrews and other personnel took much longer when carried out by
road. And unlike Fighter Command, Luftflotten 2 and 3 had remained fully
engaged in the battle right up until the end in France, which had cut down
on the opportunities for rest and rebuilding. Siegfried Bethke, who had
returned to 2/JG 2 in the middle of June, had been glad to get back to flying
duties but the endless frenetic action and moving of airfields had taken its
toll. ‘We’re all very fatigué!’ he wrote in his diary as he waited on readiness
in his 109. ‘I am also about to fall asleep in my plane.’
On the first day of June, Dowding had had just 331 Spitfires and
Hurricanes, but by the last day of the month had 587 ready and serviceable,
with plenty more on their way. It still wasn’t enough, but it was a vast
improvement; the odds were getting better. More of a concern was the
shortage of experienced pilots. There were, admittedly, well over double the
number of pilots available for the number of aircraft, but Dowding was
worried that the rate at which new pilots were being trained was slower than
he had planned. This was largely due to the terrible winter, which had
severely hampered the amount of flying training that could be done. Worse