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

40
Bombs on Berlin
HILDA MÜLLER MIGHT have loved dancing but second on her list of favourite
pastimes was going to the cinema. Barely a week went past without her
seeing a film, mostly stirring propaganda pieces. Beforehand, just as in
cinemas throughout Britain, news reports would be shown. In Berlin that
August, they would also repeatedly run a song, ‘Bomben auf England’, a
suitably stirring march, and accompanied by footage of Stukas diving down
on ships and Me 109s tearing over the white cliffs of southern England. The
march was undeniably catchy, relying on mass-chanted repetition of the
chorus and plenty of trumpets. ‘Comrade! Comrade! Get the enemy!’ it ran,
‘Bombs on England! Do you hear the engines singing? Get the enemy! In
your ears it is ringing! Get the enemy! Bombs! Bombs! Bombs on Eng-eland!’
It was played over the radio, too, full of crackly static, and over
public tannoys. ‘We used to add different refrains,’ says Hilda, ‘such as, we
are swimming to England and so on.’
Hilda thought it quite fun, but it grated on the nerves of those it sought
to glorify. ‘We pilots,’ wrote Dolfo Galland, ‘could not stand this song from
the very start.’ Naturally, it did not help that neither their situation nor their
mood was quite so relentlessly buoyant as the march. Dolfo had already
been feeling decidedly disgruntled with what he viewed as faulty tactics
when he and a number of other Gruppen commanders, as well as all senior
commanders, were summoned away from the front to attend Göring’s latest
conference. Flying to Berlin on 17 August, Dolfo found himself transported
to what seemed like a different world. The weather was beautiful and
Germany seemed swathed in peaceful serenity. In Berlin, everyone
appeared to be carrying on as normal. Interest in the war seemed to have
taken a nose-dive, which he found upsetting. No doubt the air battles over
Britain and the U-boat war did seem a million miles away to many – and
hardly like a proper war at all; it was the Continental mentality that wars
were fought on land by armies.
But as Dolfo saw civilians and soldiers swanning about enjoying the
summer sun, he wanted to shake them from their complacency. ‘Naturally,’