Roy Jenkins’ biography of Churchill is sometimes dull but more often of interest. He digresses, something of which I approve, to relate his own experiences.
For example, in 1940 when he stayed with his parents in Monmouthshire he spent more time in their air-raid shelter (“four or five hours most nights”) than wherever he was living for the rest of the war. If I may digress, my mother, living in London in the Blitz, decided to stay in her comfortable bed in preference to a sleepless night in a shelter. Roy’s assessment of the Battle of Britain I found specially interesting.
” As an example of the fog of battle, the British constantly exaggerated the preponderance of the German resources in planes and pilots, and, as a sort of unintentional offset, their own success, both absolutely and relatively, in destroying German raiders. The figures on aircraft availability are peculiarly difficult to disentangle, both because of the complication between front-line and reserve strengths and because the Germans deployed a lot of bombers against first airfields and then London, whereas the British bomber force was engaged against more distant targets, and therefore not part of the Battle as such. What however does seem to have been the case is that in mid-August the British had 1,032 fighters available, whereas the Germans had marginally fewer at 1,011. Furthermore the number of available British pilots was 1,400 with several hundred fewer on the German side. This was in contrast with some British intelligence estimates which put the total number of pilots in Germany at 16,000, with at least 7,300 (including bomber pilots) deployed in Luftwaffe operational units.
On Sunday, 15 September, which was the culmination of the daytime fighter battles, the British official claim, broadcast that night, was that 185 German aircraft had been destroyed, for a British loss of forty. In fact the German losses were sixty (thirty-four bombers and twenty-six fighters), with another twenty bombers seriously damaged, but able to get back to base. In general the 60/40 ratio, or even 50/50, for the attackers against the defenders was much nearer to the truth than the 4-5-to-1 claim seriously advanced, and believed by Churchill, or at least his very sober-minded private secretary, John Martin. The motive was not deliberate deceit, although Churchill was very mocking of the Germans when they made exaggerated claims, but a certain understandable tendency to wishful thinking, underpinned by many fighter pilots reporting the same victim as one of their near companions, with double or treble counting being a natural result.
Even more exaggerated was the German view of the damage they were inflicting upon Fighter Command and the general British strength. On 16 September, Göring announced that Fighter Command had been reduced to 177 aircraft. In fact it then had an operational strength of 656, with a strong flow of additional planes in reserve or in the pipeline. The battles of that summer never reduced the strength of Fighter Command or of the RAF generally. This was partly due to the success of Beaverbrook in his first months as Minister of Aircraft Production. He inherited a favourable upward swing, but his ruthless improvisation considerably fortified this. The so-called Harrogate Programme of January 1940 provided for a year’s output of 3,602 fighters (very precise). The total achieved was 4,283, which meant that nearly 352 fighters a month were forthcoming over the crucial summer and autumn months. The German output was barely a half of that.”
Churchill, Roy Jenkins, 2001.