The day after the meeting on the Berghof, Hitler signed Directive No. 17, intensifying the air-war and sea-war against Britain as the basis for her ‘final subjugation’. He explicitly — underscoring the sentence in the Directive — reserved for himself a decision on the use of terror bombing.164 The offensive was set to begin four days later, but was postponed until the 8th. It was again postponed on account of the weather conditions until the 13th.165 From then on, the German fighters sought to sweep the Royal Air Force from the skies. Wave after wave of attacks on the airfields of southern England was launched. Spitfires, Hurricanes and Messerschmitts wheeled, arched, dived, and strafed each other in the dramatic and heroic dogfights on which Britain’s survival at this point depended. The early optimistic results announced in Berlin soon proved highly misleading.166 The task was beyond the Luftwaffe. At first by the skin of their teeth the young British pilots held out, then gradually won the ascendancy. Despite Hitler’s orders that he alone was to decide on terror-bombing, 100 planes of the Luftwaffe acting, it seems, under a loosely worded directive from Göring issued on 2 August, had attacked London’s East End on the night of 24 August. As retaliation, the RAF carried out the first British bombing raids on Berlin the following night.167 Ineffective though they were, they came as a shock to the people of Berlin. Göring had once joked that should British planes ever reach Germany, his name was not Hermann Göring, but Hermann Meier. From now on, caustic Berlin tongues dubbed him ‘Herr Meier’.168
Hitler regarded the bombing of Berlin as a disgrace.169 As usual, his reaction was to threaten massive retaliation. ‘We’ll wipe out their cities! We’ll put an end to the work of these night pirates,’170 he fumed at a speech in the Sportpalast on 4 September. He spoke with Göring about undertaking the revenge. From 7 September the nightly bombing of London began.171 It was the turn of the citizens of Britain’s capital to experience night after night the terror from the skies. The shift to terror-bombing marked a move away from the idea of the landing which Hitler had never whole-heartedly favoured. Persuaded by Göring, he now thought for a while that Britain could be bombed to the conference-table without German troops having to undertake the perilous landing.172 But, dreadful though the ‘Blitz’ was, the Luftwaffe was simply not powerful enough to bomb Britain to submission. The chief of the Luftwaffe’s Operational Staff (Luftwaffenführungstab), General Otto Hoffmann von Waldau, stated almost a month after the high-point of the ‘Battle of Britain’ that an air-fleet four times the size would have been needed to force Britain to its knees.173
Between 10 and 13 September there were signs that Hitler had gone utterly cold on the idea of a landing.174 On 14 September he then told his commanders that the conditions for ‘Operation Sealion’ — the operational plan to attack Great Britain — had not been attained. The military chiefs themselves did not believe that a landing in England at that stage could be successfully carried out.175 ‘I had the impression at this discussion,’ wrote Nicolaus von Below many years later, ‘that Hitler had given up hope of a successful invasion of England the following spring. In autumn 1940 the great unknown, the fairly improvised crossing over the sea, frightened him. He was unsure.’176
Meanwhile, the dogfights over southern England and the Channel coast intensified during the first fortnight in September, reaching a climacteric on Sunday, the 15th. The Wehrmacht admitted 182 planes lost in that fortnight, forty-three on the 15th alone.177 The horrors of the ‘Blitz’ would continue for months to be inflicted upon British cities — among the worst devastation the bombing of Coventry on the night of 14 November, as the German onslaught switched to the industrial belt of the Midlands to strike at more manageable targets than London.178 But the ‘Battle of Britain’ was over. Hitler had never been convinced that the German air-offensive would successfully lay the basis for the invasion of which he was in any case so sceptical. On 17 September he ordered the indefinite postponement — though, for psychological reasons, not the cancellation — of ‘Operation Sealion’.179
