The Battle of Britain from the German Side

There is no shortage of books on the Battle of Britain, but Victoria Taylor, a young British historian, promises readers something different: looking at the battle from the German side, and considering the pilots and other Luftwaffe personnel who fought the RAF. She has done an admirable researching for her book. She has read not just a large part of the histories and memoir literature in English and German, but scoured the archives as well—those of the Imperial War Museum in London, and records from Freiburg, Stuttgart and other collections.

Taylor begins her book with five chapters leading up to the Battle of Britain. These give a quick overview of the hidden beginnings of the Luftwaffe, the Condor Legion’s participation in the Spanish Civil War, and then, once World War II begins, its stunning, and low-cost, victories in Poland, Scandinavia, Holland, Belgium, and France. These chronicles are enlivened with quotes from German participants in the fighting, but it is disappointing that her coverage of each invasion is neither systematic nor thorough. Nor does she end the run-up to the first stages of the Battle of Britain with a complete tally of what the Luftwaffe had lost in these operations, something that would influence Hermann Göring’s decisions during the Battle.

Taylor spends the bulk of her book on the Battle of Britain itself.

There are pluses and minuses to her choices. On the plus side, she reminds readers of the RAF Bomber Command raids on German cities that had already begun, and the shocking consequences of these attacks for German civilians. She also adds many short quotes from German records and memoirs to show what Luftwaffe pilots and officials were thinking during the Battle. She adds short passages from German newspaper articles covering the Battle, as well as RAF attacks on Germany.

On the minus side of the ledger, Taylor neither provides a well-organized account of the Battle, nor do the quotations (she has translated them herself) add enough to her story. She does proceed through the Battle chronologically, from the initial attacks on shipping in the English Channel, through the attacks on Fighter Command airfields, the daylight raids on London, and then the switch to bombing at night which signified the end of the possibility of the Luftwaffe achieving air superiority.

Compared to Stephen Bungay’s The Most Dangerous Enemy (2010), Taylor’s approach is hit-or-miss. Readers wanting a detailed analysis of each phase of the Battle, and the reasons behind the decisions of both Fighter Command and Hermann Göring, will not find it here.

The quotes Taylor inserts, which do liven the text, are also problematic. For example, to give readers an idea of German public opinion, she quotes newspaper articles. Many of them come from the Baruther Anzeiger, the local paper from a small city south of Berlin. Taylor does not explain her choice of such an obscure source.

To Taylor’s credit, she does deal with two thorny issues: first, the British decision to target the German seaplanes clearly marked as rescue craft sent into the Channel to pick up aircrews who had ditched. The RAF simply shot them down whenever they encountered them. Second, the much larger issue of whether the men of the Luftwaffe were truly “Knights of the Sky,” rather than soldiers in the service of a genocidal Nazi regime. Many people have wanted to portray the pilots of both sides as fighting duels in a “clean” war removed from the ugliness below. This view appeals to many military history readers, and the veterans who sought rapprochement in the 1950s liked to see their former adversaries this way, too. But, in fact, the Luftwaffe was tasked with destroying the RAF so that the Wehrmacht could invade England, and had that happened, the consequences would have been ugly.

Taylor spends a couple of pages on the controversy over whether Luftwaffe personnel knew about the concentration camps, and the beginnings of the Holocaust in Poland. This is, however, an argument fairly well settled. Germans, civilians no less than members of the armed forces, knew what Hitler and company were doing, even in 1940. Ian Kershaw, in Hitler, the Germans, and the Final Solution (2009) is just one historian who has dealt with this question. To be fair, the RAF men in their bombers knew that they were killing German civilians, rather than attacking factories.

Taylor ends Eagle Days with a thoughtful conclusion, going over both whether the Battle was decisive for World War II, and reconsidering the ideas raised in her book.

---///---

Our Reviewer: Jonathan Beard is a retired freelance journalist who has devoted most of his life to reading military history. When he worked, he wrote and did research for British, American and Danish science magazines, and translated for an American news magazine. The first book he owned was Fletcher Pratt’s The Monitor and the Merrimac. Jonathan reviews regularly for the Michigan War Studies Review. His previous reviews here include Down the Warpath to the Cedars: Indians' First Battles in the Revolution, The Virtuous Wehrmacht: Crafting the Myth of the German Soldier on the Eastern Front, 1941-1944, Prevail Until the Bitter End: Germans in the Waning Days of World War II, Enemies Among Us, Battle of the Bulge, Then and Now, Mussolini’s War: Fascist Italy From Triumph to Collapse, Engineering in the Confederate Heartland, The Bletchley Park Codebreakers, Armada, Allied Air Attacks and Civilian Harm in Italy, The Collaborators, The Enigma Traitors, When Men Fell from the Sky, Midway: The Pacific War’s Most Famous Battle, When Men Fell from The Sky, The Lost Scientists of World War II, U.S. Battleships 1939–45, The Last Emperor of Mexico, Rain of Ruin: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and the Surrender of Japan, and Convair B-36 Peacemaker .

---///---

Note: Eagle Days is also available in e-editions.

StrategyPage reviews are published in cooperation with The New York Military Affairs Symposium

www.nymas.org