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

a very contented life near the Baltic coast in northern Pomerania. Ever an
optimist, he had been stunned by the outbreak of war. He had been
immediately called up, but although he had dreamed of joining fighters,
after a stint of instructing blind flying had been posted to KG 30 and had
flown his first operational sorties over France only in June.
He was under no illusions about what lay in store. ‘It is being said,’ he
jotted in his diary, ‘that the British are already on their last legs, but when
one hears what the operational pilots – and, in particular, bomber crews –
have to report, we’re obviously still a long way from victory. The losses
suffered by our bomber units must be terrible.’ Their new airfield was yet
another series of harvested fields at Chièvre near Mons, and for Peter his
first landing did not augur well, as touching down he had a blow-out in one
of his tyres and only narrowly avoided crashing his Ju 88. ‘Not the most
pleasant of arrivals,’ he noted.
Tommy Elmhirst had been promoted to Air Commodore and posted to
Fighter Command HQ at Bentley Priory, where he was to be one of three
men who were to keep a twenty-four-hour watch in the vast underground
Operations Room. There was not a moment’s relaxation whilst on watch
and this was exhausting work, with rotas of a straight eight-hour watch,
then sixteen, then a further eight, then a day off. Hugely impressed by the
calm, cool efficiency of the staff involved, he nonetheless found it an
alarming experience. It seemed to him that counters being shuffled around
the plotting table represented the highest stakes imaginable: the destruction
of Great Britain and her Empire.
His last task before leaving Air Intelligence had been to make an
assessment of how long the battle might continue. His figures for downed
German aircraft were inaccurate but they had a fairly clear understanding of
German production levels. He therefore predicted that if current German
fighter losses continued, the Luftwaffe would probably give up around the
third week of September. But at the beginning of the month, after the worst
week for Fighter Command since the battle began, this was of little
comfort. ‘The great query was, however,’ noted Tommy, ‘whether our
fighters could continue their present volume of effort and sustain their
present rate of losses for another three weeks.’
The seriousness of the situation was underlined to him on his arrival at
Bentley Priory. AVM Douglas Evill, Dowding’s deputy, thought their