Review - The Most Dangerous Enemy

The Most Dangerous Enemy (2000)

Stephen Bungay's "The Most Dangerous Enemy" is the author's first book. Originally published in 2000, it's gotten reprinted several times already, the last time being 2010 when a newly illustrated edition was released. And when I say that this book is a veritable masterpiece, the praise is not premature. Indeed, as far as material specifically focussed on the "Battle of Britain" goes, I would say Bungay's book must very well be considered the new standard others will have to measure up against. This review has been written by also taking several very precise points made by the formidable poster IXJac on the Spacebattles forum.

Bungay asks a series of simple yet encompassing questions:

• Why was there a battle at all? - Hitler wanted to force Britain out of the war, preferably via negotiated peace.
• What were the real odds (not just bare numbers, but the impact of industry & logistics)? - The RAF was intrinsically better set-up and suited for the fight.
• How well were the resources actually deployed, coordinated, and - crucially - led? - Bumbling amateurism on the side of the Luftwaffe, professionalism and foresight on the RAF's side.
• Was there ever really a chance of invasion? - Given the performance shown, there was not. Bungay, however, makes it very clear that Germany very well had the aggregate means to stage one, as well as the very real chance to knock out Fighter Command for a suitable window of time.
• What was it like as a pilot new to combat? - A very low life expectancy, or at the very least, a high chance to get seriously injured.
• What were your odds if you were hit? - Depended on where you were hit, both geographically and on your aircraft.

I will start this review with something that nowadays is considered an offensive term, or at least, a slur. Bungay is a revisionist. To most people the term will mean something very different than what it actually denotes. When we hear it, we think of people who deny the Holocaust happened; who minimize Nazi crimes; who absolve Germany from all responsibility. It is one of the many cases where a word's meaning has been twisted to conform to a public narrative or an ideology. Those who take up that meaning and apply it to the great number of people who have been smeared with this brush usually have as little idea of its actual meaning as those who launch the smears, unveiling their own lack of knowledge. What a revisionist, by the very meaning of the word, actually does, is the basis of all science: to revise the narrative in the light of new information and data, to reinterpret events when links in a chain of actions appear or disappear. This is what Bungay does: he deconstructs the myth of the "Battle of Britain" and substitutes it with the truth, which may be less pittoresque but is no less impressive.

Dowding (left) & Douglas Bader

The English myth of the Battle of Britain is similar to stories about Sir Francis Drake and the Spanish Armada in 1588, when Drake preferred to finish a game of bowls before sailing out to rout the Spanish. In 1940, the myth created by Churchill is that "Never before has so much been owed by so many to so few." Like Dunkirk, the image was one of luck, pluck and mucking through the confusion, ineptness and amateurism. Bungay shows the triumph of British planning and readiness, the end result of a process going back to 1922, one fostered by such extraordinary men like Air Chief Marshall Hugh Dowding.

Bungay's analysis reveals that by the summer of 1940 RAF Fighter Command had built up the most modern and effective air defence network on Earth, with an understanding of all the elements necessary to conduct a long and successful campaign against a would-be invader. In particular Fighter Command's organisation into four regional groups, with squadrons rotated to rebuild and recover after spells of heavy fighting, was a modern and far-sighted policy. The RDF and Observer Corps network fed live information into a robust command and control system then able to rapidly assess the strength of the oncoming enemy and direct operations effectively. This model had its roots in the Great War defence of London and in its refined form was to prove lethal to the Luftwaffe in 1940. The Germans failed to appreciate the importance of the RDF (later called radar) stations, which being located on the coast made easy targets for precision bombing and never-carried-out commando raids. Bungay is not the first writer to identify these factors but he does bring fresh perspectives and a lot of detail. 

The German image, reinforced by quick and easy defeats of Poland and France, was that of an impregnable military machine guided by highly experienced professionals using superior technology with the rigorous discipline of well trained and effective troops. In contrast, the British were thought to be slightly dowdy country squires lucky enough to deny victory to the superb German military. Much of this legacy is based on the image of the Munich Agreement of 1938, which has ever since been used to describe English politicians as too weak to fight and too scared to rearm. 

Reality is quite different. Bungay explains the British victory was based on a superb plan of operations and aircraft development that began in earnest in 1936 and was rigorously carried out in 1940. Instead of being unprepared and underarmed, Britain was perhaps the world's best prepared and best armed nation in terms of air defense in the 1940s. The result was a decisive British victory which left the Luftwaffe not crippled, but in a state that made it impossible for such a structurally deficient organisation to ever fully rebound.

To summarize, the British fought the Battle of Britain with a Teutonic thoroughness for organization, planning, discipline and effort; they left little to chance, planned for the worst cases and didn't rely on luck. In short, the British behaved like Germans at their best, though these qualities were tempered and restrained by the civility of traditional English life. The Germans fought with a British thoroughness for bickering, personal petty disputes and trusting in an ability to muddle through. With personal feuds running wild, the climate of divide-and-rule fostered by the national socialists within the Luftwaffe administrative structure - the young Luftwaffe unarguably being the most Nazi-influenced branch of the Wehrmacht -, cronyism and a staggering lack of strategic planning and coordination it is hardly an accident that two of the top German commanders committed suicide as a result of the internal wrangling and bitterness within the Luftwaffe high command (Jeschonnek and Udet). Though given their disastrous input, it would have been a boost for the German war machine had the two of them died before the Second World War ever started...

The German inconsistence in the way they chose their targets certainly helped the RAF win the Battle of Britain, too. They attacked the ports, the shipping, the airfields, some factories - all piecemeal, all without an apparent strategy behind it. Worse, it seems that whenever they were actually getting a hang on what they were doing, they stopped and went on to do the next best thing. One of the great, indeed, staggering facts of the German attack is that they knew what Chain Home was good for, but kept it largely unmolested! 

The Luftwaffe was optimized for a short war, but the RAF had all the infrastructure and planning for a long war. In a war of attrition against the RAF the Luftwaffe - for all its initial size and strength - was eventually, almost inevitably, doomed to lose. The fact that Park and Dowding were far superior commanders to Kesselring and Goering and approached the battle with a brilliant, methodical and almost unbeatable plan while the Germans dove in with only ad hoc plans and wishful thinking only made this mismatch worse.

Something also not often mentioned but brought to the light of the day in Bungay's work is the fact that the fighter squadrons and aces of the Luftwaffe stuck to the glory-hunting idea of aerial combat of the Great War, very often to the detriment of their units' combat effectiveness, risking (and constantly losing) the lives of their wingmen. Fighter Command's squadrons, on the other hand, largely fought as teams. There is also the factors of force generation and preservation. The RAF always kept a cadre of experienced pilots in reserve to train new pilots and take over newly raised squadrons. This served them well and over the course of the war allowed the RAF to continue steadily gaining strength despite routinely taking apalling losses. Dowding had designed the system to be capable of taking 30% losses to total strength each month and still continue fighting indefinitely. This required keeping a large number of the valuable flight and squadron leaders out of battle no matter what the demands of the front.

The Germans on the other hand threw all their best pilots into battle and kept them there, only grudgingly withdrawing a few when the needs of training became glaringly apparent. As a result the Luftwaffe bled itself dry without creating a cadre of replacements and was never able to fully reconstitute its losses. It's top aces racked up incredible kill tallies, but when they were gone the Luftwaffe had little left but rookies to face the hardened veterans of the allied air forces.

Park and Dowding vs Kesselring and Göring

Park's strategy was to get at the bombers early and often, to exhaust the escorts and break up the formations as far away from target as possible. This could only be accomplished while airfields in 11 Group were occupied. As the "big wing" attacks on the raids on London show, the RAF actually suffered heavier proportional losses when it failed to break up the German forces early, and inflicted less overall damage, while allowing more bombers to get to target. Park would never have abandoned the 11 Group airfields were it not a dire necessity. It never became so, and he never seriously considered withdrawal, correctly believing he was mauling the Germans worse than they him.

What Park realized, and others failed to grasp, even after the Battle, was that actual numbers at the point of contact didn't matter a great deal in air combat. He determined that individual squadrons of fighters scrambling as quickly as possible, then attacking the bombers as they arrived, making one pass, and then diving away were more effective than waiting for a larger formation to mass up. The earlier the bombers were attacked, the greater their overall losses, and the more disrupted the escorts and formation became as it approached target. Further, the larger the battle, paradoxically the lower the overall kills - pilots were too busy evading the scores of aircraft to line up their guns.

So rather than wait for 10 squadrons to form up and attack late, Park would throw 10 squadrons in as soon they became available, one after the other. Though outnumbered when they attacked, radar meant each squadron had the positional advantage and could attack when it chose. Against a much larger formation they could easily locate the enemy while being harder to see themselves, and make their attacks and get clear before the Germans could respond. At best the escorting 109s had fleeting opportunities to shoot down the attackers, and if the Messerschmitts chased then they would be out of position to intercept the next squadron... and the next and the next.

Park's interception tactics were counter-intuitive but pure brilliance. Along with Dowding he rates as one of the greatest air force commanders ever, and Bungay goes so far as to rate him as "the greatest fighter commander in the short history of air warfare." Park's stellar performance over southern England was no fluke. In the July of 1942 while his successors at Fighter Command were failing in their sweeps over France he was transferred from his post at Training Command to the hard pressed air defenses of Malta for a rematch against his old foe Kesselring. Within a fortnight Park had completely turned the tables, giving his pilots new aggressive interception tactics and changing a hard pressed British holding action into a bloody German rout. He would go on to lead air campaigns over Italy and Southeast Asia, and would never lose a battle - nor indeed ever come close to losing one.

The Strategic/Tactical pairing of Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding and Air Vice Marshal Kieth Park should be considered one of the more fortuitous in the history of warfare. Both men were perfect for the jobs they filled in the critical days of the summer of 1940 and together they formed an unbeatable team against which the the arrogant tyrant Göring and the gifted amateur Kesselring had no answer. 

Coda

Bungay also lays out a scenario where, by adopting more innovative and realistic tactics the Luftwaffe could have achieved its immediate objectives of air superiority over southern England, mostly as an indictment against the atrocious strategy of the Luftwaffe and to show that with some imagination they could have done much much better than they did. However, had they had a good plan they had all the necessary tools to bring 11 Group to its knees. They just didn't employ them properly. Commando raids by Fallschirmjäger landed by S-boat on the radar stations; low level fighter-bomber raids by Me Bf 110s on the airfields; medium bomber attacks on the aircraft factories; and 109s pouncing on now blinded RAF fighter squadrons once the radar was down. Bungay points out that Park was a brilliant Commander, and even then he might still have won, but it would have been much much closer. 

Problems

The only one I can see is the comparatively narrow focus on the RAF alone and on those few months in 1940 where the battle raged in earnest. However, Bungay never postulates that his goal was producing a conclusive description of all of the battle around Britain, and as such the focus he puts on his work is an advantage, not a disadvantage.

Final Verdict: 5/5 for being the new standard on the history of the struggle between Luftwaffe and RAF for Great Britain in 1940.