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

Two hundred yards away was HMS Victory, a ship which had not been
surrounded by so much smoke and dust since the Battle of Trafalgar almost
135 years before. Directly in front of Joe was a destroyer, whose guns were
now pumping away, as were other ack-ack guns. He watched an airman
floating down in his parachute and men from the destroyer were firing at
him. ‘I heard the skipper shouting at them to stop,’ says Joe, ‘but there were
still more shots.’
In just a few minutes, it was all over. The harbour was heavy with
smoke, dust and the stench of cordite. The harbour railway station had been
hit, the pier destroyed, a pontoon dock badly holed and fires were raging in
several buildings, but miraculously, no ship had been hit. Joe wandered
around, looking in wonder at the damage, and saw a dead German airman.
Whether it was the same man he had seen coming down or not, he wasn’t
sure, but the man was riddled with bullets. ‘It was sad,’ he says, ‘very sad.
There was no need to shoot him like that.’
That afternoon, more bombers were sent over to attack airfields. Lympne
was heavily attacked twice, and then, early in the afternoon, so too was
Manston, Walter Rubensdörffer’s Erpro 210 in action once again. Pitted
with craters, the grass airfield was put out of action for the rest of the day.
Workshops were also destroyed and two hangars damaged, although only
one person was killed. Hawkinge, further to the south on the Kent coast,
was also badly hit, with two hangars destroyed, but although equally riddled
with craters, the airfield remained just about usable. Dowding had pressed
hard for more concrete runways for Fighter Command, but there was one
huge advantage in sticking with grass: with plenty of work teams, craters
could be both easily and quickly refilled, not least because Dowding had
also arranged for each airfield to have plenty of supplies of hard-core and
rubble for just such a purpose before the war.
Despite their early confidence, by mid-afternoon General Martini was
picking up pulses from nearly all the British listening posts once more. In
fact, the transmitting and receiving blocks at Rye had been undamaged,
Pevensey was up and running again within a few hours, no major damage
had been caused at Dunkirk or Dover, and while Ventnor was badly hit and
completely out of action, impulses were sent out from a mobile transmitter
instead, not least to make the Germans believe it had been repaired. But
while Martini had accepted that the British DeTe devices would be harder to