TIME: Almanac of the 20th Century

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<text> <title> (1940s) Churchill & England </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1940s Highlights </history> <link 08057> <link 08058> <link 08104> <link 00034> <link 00072><link 00075><article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> Churchill & The Battle of Britain </hdr> <body> [The British, under their new Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, braced themselves for what must surely be Hitler's next step, the invasion of Britain.] (July 1, 1940) "The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned upon us. Hitler knows he must break us in this island or lose the war...Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire last for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'" To the danger and duty thus described by Prime Minister Winston Churchill, some 2,650,000 British males, variously armed and accoutered and closely deployed in an area about the size of Wyoming, last week stood up expectantly. August 15 is the date set by Adolf Hitler for Britain's complete defeat, but no invasion by ground forces seemed likely to come until Germany's air forces had "softened up" the country by sustained, concentrated bombardment. Only the first phase of the Battle of Britain began last week. (July 22, 1940) The storm of death which Adolf Hitler promised Great Britain so increased in violence last week that its full blast was expected hourly. From a tentative nocturnal patter, the rain of German air bombs swelled to widespread showers by day then to fierce successive cloudbursts at all hours, delivered not only by lofty level-flight bombers but by scores of Stukas which dived shrieking to demoralize men on the ground, machine-gunning people and cattle indiscriminately. Iron censorship and brave British disdain concealed the true extent of damages and loss of life, but both rose inevitably as the official daily tallies of shot-down German raiders rose from a half-dozen to a dozen, then to a score. (August 5, 1940) Instead of trying to knock out the Royal Air Force before attempting anything else, Germany had another plan: blow out the lifelines. Raiding squadrons of bombers, sometimes 80 and 100 strong, escorted by fighters, had already struck time & again at Devonport, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Brighton, Newhaven, Dover, especially hard at the bustling docks of the Thames Estuary. Swarms of Stukas dived on every passing merchantman, sinking ten out of 21 vessels in a single convoy of small ships guarded only by trawlers due to a growing shortage of destroyers. Messerschmitt fighters accompanying Nazi bombers to Britain started carrying one medium-sized bomb apiece. Everything that flew over Britain now had something to leave there. The Germans' "new tactic," said Telegrafo, had a simple aim: "Starving the British." (August 26, 1940) There has never before been an air battle such as was fought last week in the sky over Britain. First a wave of German bombers would come over, escorted by more than their own number of fighters, ranged in tiers above them to engage as many British fighters as possible before succeeding bomber waves arrived. The British fighters on "standing patrol" along the Channel met them on two levels, one force to shoot down bombers, one to fight fighters. Often, as the British engaged the Germans, a second and third wave of bombers appeared and more British fighters would rise to attack them. Hitler had set himself to beat Britain to its knees. The German mass air attacks stepped up their pace and announced a "special" armada of some 750 planes, steered by crack pilots, to make the first actual attempt on great sprawling London. This armada split, half aiming at the London docks and Woolwich Arsenal on the east, the other half aiming at munitions stores on the city's southwestern edge. They hit the suburbs, killed and maimed an unannounced number of civilians, did small military damage. Captive balloons and a terrific anti-aircraft barrage walled them away from London's heart. (September 9, 1940) Chief new development of the Battle of Britain's fourth active week was the institution of regular night raids on the two warring capitals, London and Berlin. The British had expected this. The Germans had not. Sharp was the surprise of Berliners, who had been told for a year by their High Command that no enemy attack would ever reach their midst, to hear bombs exploding and see fires raging within a few blocks of the Wilhelmstrasse. (September 16, 1940) Relentlessly last week and this the planes came--Stukas, Jaguars, "flying pencils," "Jitterschmitts"--the whole array, not once a day but almost incessantly. They came from the different angles, feinting at other targets, then sheering in on the city; at different heights and different speeds; in waves, but on staggered schedules to confuse the defense. It could not be said that Londoners received these raids with classic calm. First they were scared, then they were black angry. They gaped as the first planes screamed down the sky like giant auto brakes, but soon the people realized that this was different from previous air shows, and scuttled. Bombs sought some of them out in their shelters, caught some after the all-clear. In the glow of fires the city took on a fantastic medieval appearance. The squeezed lanes of the City looked like the streets of a canton in the dark ages. The Tower seemed to be a feudal castle. Centuries were obliterated, time whirled in the heads of victims. The wheeling searchlights, the constant roar and intermittent thud, the unreality of pain--all the punctuation of confusion gave the people sensations of losing consciousness, of going under ether for some life-or-death operation. [The Luftwaffe suffered huge losses of men and planes in the mass bombings; 1,389 planes were shot down. But Britain's margin was very thin; she lost 790 planes. By autumn the daylight raids had dwindled, but bombing soon resumed in a new and safe mode: night-time runs against cities.] (November 25, 1940) It was a bright moonlight night. Wave after wave of heavy-laden bombers passed northwest to Coventry. All night they kept at it until they had dropped over 500 tons of high explosive, 30 tons of incendiaries on the old city where Lady Godiva once rode naked to protest against high taxes. Conventry, "Britain's Detroit"--a city of 200,000 on the southern edge of the Midlands--became one solid, seething mass of fire. Not just the motor and airplane factories on the outskirts, but then entire heart of the city, square miles of workmen's homes in long neat rows; block upon block of shops and banks and pubs and offices; lovely old St. Michael's cathedral--all fell under the most concentrated rain of destruction yet loosed from the skies by mankind. In the morning, what had been a thriving city was a smoldering pile of rubble where dazed, stunned survivors wandered aimlessly, and rescue parties from other cities scrabbled in the ruins to dig out hundreds buried dead and alive. [Coventry's Gothic cathedral was left a bombed-out shell as a permanent testament to Luftwaffe destruction. But night bombing, too, gradually fell off. The reason was soon clear, though little was allowed to be published about the secret weapon that had turned the tide: radar.] (March 10, 1941) Last December, as London lay almost helpless under Nazi air attacks by night, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh ("Stuffy") Dowding predicted with mysterious confidence. "Night bombing will be greatly reduced by spring." Since then repeated reports have come from England of Nazi raiders brought down in full darkness. Last week a clue to this amazing prediction and promise of fulfillment was provided by the U.S. Patent Office. It granted to Joseph Lyman of Huntington, N.Y. a patent for a machine which uses radio beams to locate a plane in darkness or fog, plot its course through the skies on an indicator like a television screen. Antiaircraft fire can thus be directed, it is thought, with even more accuracy than in present daylight firing. </body> </article> </text>