Berlin Diary: XLV

October, 1940 in Berlin...the Tripartite Pact has just been signed, and Shirer is about to make a momentous personal decision, and speculates as to why the German invasion of Britain didn't come off..

Excerpt from Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941, by William L. Shirer.  Copyright by the author, 1940,1941.  Published by Alfred A. Knopf, June 20, 1941

Berlin, October 3, 1940

"Tipped off that Hitler and Mussolini are to pull a surprise meeting at the Brenner tomorrow.  Hitler has already quit Berlin amidst the usual secrecy.  We are not allowed to report it, as Hitler's movements are considered military secrets.  (Himmler keeps the Führer's standard flying above the Chancellery nowadays evne when the great man is absent, so that no one will know.)  I did manage to slip in a concluding sentence in my broadcast tongith about a "news development of special interest" being scheduled for tomorrow.  

Berlin, October 4, 1940

The meeting today in the Brenner took place shortly before noon today.  The official communique gave no information on the talk except that Keitel was present.  The Foreign Office warned us not to speculate.  

It would be reasonable to conclude, I think, that there must have been differences between the two Axis powers so fundamental that Hitler deemed it advisable to see the Duce personally.  For in the last month Ribbentrop has been to Rome, and Ciano has been here, so that there has been no lack of contact btween the nominal directors of foreign policy.  The best guess here is that Mussolini is sore because the Germans apparently have abandoned the idea of invading Britain this fall, leaving him holding the bag with his offensive in the Egyptian desert, where is army, now seventy-five or a hundred miles within the desert, must transport all its own water overland.  Obviously Ribbentrop failed to appease the Italians, so it was necessary for Hitler to do it.  It would be wishful thinking, though, to conclude that today's meeting was only negative.  Obviousy further war plans were gone over and perhaps a decision made to tackle the British Empire seriously at its waistline, by a drive on Egypt and the Suez Canal.  It may be that Germany agreed to establish military bases in the Balkans to help this drive.  One German plan much talked about here is an offensive through Turkey to the Near East.  

Berlin, October 5, 1940

The German newspapers make amusing reading today with their reports of the Brenner meeting.  They rave for columns about its world-shaking importance, but offer not the slightest information to their readers as to why.  They give no information whatsoever.  But in the present totalitarian atmosphere, where words have lost all meaning, anything becomes true merely because the controlled press says so.  I received one trustworthy report today that the Brenner meeting was rather stormy, with Mussolini doing some real lusty shouting.  The Utalians here put out a story, probably apocryphal, but indicative of the Italo-German amity.  They say the Duce asked the Führer yesterday why he had given up his plan to invade Britain.  Hitler swallowed and then dodged an answer by posing a question of his own:

"Why haven't you, Duce, been able to take a little place like Malta?  I am very disappointed about that."

The Italians here say Mussolini screwed up his face and said: "Führer, don't forget that Malta is an island too."

The fifth week of German's great air offensive against Britain began today.  And the Germans are in a great state of mind because the British won't admit they're licked.  They cannot repress their rage against Churchill for still holding out hopes of victory to his people, instead of lying down and surrendering, as have all of Hitler's opponents up to date.  The Germans cannot understand a people with character and guts.  

Berlin, October 7, 1940

A characteristic Nazi journalistic fake.  The press quotes Knickerbocker, whom it dubs "the American world liar," as having told Portuguese journalists in Lisbon that he fled London beause it was no longer possible to lvie there.  Knowing Knick, I know this is pure invention.  

Berlin, October 8, 1940

Lunch with the Greek Minister and Mme Rangabe.  Their daughter, Elmina, whom we used to see a lot with Martha Dodd and who has a dark, Balkan beauty, was present.  The Minister very glum, his valuables packed, and fearing an Italian invasion any day.  He clings to a slim hope that Hitler will save Greece because of what he calls the Fuhrer's "admiration for the glories of Athens."

Though I do not broadcast to America until a quarter to two in the morning, I have to be at the Rundfunk at twn p.m., since it is theoretically impossible for the British bombers to be over the city by then.  When they do come, the Germans halt all transportation, not even permitting you to walk in the streets.  That means that if I am caught elsewhere by an alarm, there is no broadcast.  Last night I was helping celebrate the departure home of "Butch" Leverich, Second Secretary of the Embassy, at a party given by the Heaths when ten o'clock came.  It was a great temptation to stay on.  All present were certain the British would not come over.  I left, however, got hopelessly lost in the black-out somewhere south of the Wittenbergplatz, but eventually got my bearings and steered my Ford through the inky night to the Rundfunk As I turned off the motor, the sirens screamed, and before I could reach the building, the anti-aircraft shrapnel was falling all around like hail.  The British attack lasted until four a.m. and was the most intensive yet.  Once again the railroad tracks north of the Lehter and Stettiner stations were torn up by bombs.  One young German woman I know owes her life to the fact that she missed her suburban train by about twenty feet.  She caught a second one fifteen minutes later, but it did not run very far.  The first had been hit square on by a British bomb and blown to pieces, fifteen passengers perishing!

The German press harps so much on the Luftwaffe attacks on Britain being reprisals for the sort of thing we received last night that the public is already nauseated by the term---and Germans take a lot of nauseating.  The story around town is that the average Berliner when he buys his ten-pfennig evening paper now says to the newsboy: "Give me ten pfennigs' worth of reprisals."  It's interesting, by the way, how few people buy the evening newspapers.  Get on a subway or a bus during the evening rush hour.  Not one German in ten is reading a newspaper.  Slow-thinking and long-suffering though they are, they are beginning to be aware, I think, that their newspapers give them little news, and that little so doctored by propaganda that it is difficult to recognize.  Radio news is no better and of late I have noticed more than one German shut off a news broadcast after a couple of minutes with that expressive Berlin exclamation: "Oh, Quatsch!"  which is stronger than "Oh, nonsense!"  "Rubbish" is probably a better translation.  

Berlin, October 15, 1940

I have pretty well made up my mind about some personal matters.  For some time I've been getting information from military circles that Hitler is making ready to go into Spain in order to get Gibraltar---whether Franco, who is helpless, likes it or not.  That will cut off the last avenue of escape for my family in Geneva.  Theonly way you can get to America now from Europe is through Switzerland, unoccupied France, Spain and Portugal to Lisbon, the one remaining port on the Continent from which you can get a boat or a plane to New York.  If things come to the worst, I can always get out by way of Russia and Siberia, but that is no adventure for a child of two.  This winter, the Germans, to show their power to discipline the sturdy, democratic Swiss, are refusing to send Switzerland even the small amount of coal necessary for the Swiss people to heat their homes.  The Germans are also allowing very little food into Switzerland, for the same shabby reason.  Life in Switzerland this winter will be hard.  Though Tess would rather stay, she had agreed to go home at the end of the month.  

I shall follow in December.  I think my usefulness here is about over.  Until recently, despite the censorship, I think I've been able to do an honest job of reporting from Germany.  But it has become increasingly difficult and at present it has become almost impossible.  The new instructions of both the military and the political censors are that they cannot allow me to say anything which might create an unfavourable impresson for Nazi Germany in the United States.  Moreover, the new restrictions about reporting air attacks force to you either to give a completely false picture of them or to omit mention of them altogether.  I usually do the latter, but it is almost dishonest as the former.  In short, youu can no longer report the war or conditions in Germany as they are.  You cannot call the Nazis "Nazis" or an invasion an "invasion."  You are reduced to rebroadcasting the official communiques, which are lies, and which an automaton can do.  Even the more intelligent and decent of my censors ask me, in confidence, why I stay.  I have not the slightest interest in remaining under these circumstances.  With my deep, burning hatred of all that Nazism stands for, it has never been pleasant working and living here.  But that was secondary as long as there was a job to do.  No one's personal life in Europe counts any more, and I have had none since the war began.  Bit now there is not even a job to do---not from here.  

Zurich, October 18, 1940

A wonderful thing, that relief you always feel the minute you get out of Germany.  Flew down from Berlin this afternoon.  From Munich to Zurich we had a Douglas plane flown by Swiss pilots, and off to the left the whole time the gorgeous panorama of the Alps, the peaks and high ranges already deep in snow.  When the sun started to set, the snow turned pink, a magnificent shade.  A half-hour out of Munich two German fighter planes pursued us, the rooky pilots using us to practise diving on.  Three or four times, swooping down on us, they nearly touched our wings.  I began to perspire, but there was nothing to do about it.  They had parachutes; we didn't.  

Soon a thick cloud belt began to blanket the country under us, and I wondered a bit about getting down through it to the Zurich airport, surrounded as it is by high hills.  Finally we plunged into the clouds.  We soon appeared to be lost, for the pilot, after circling about for five minutes, climbed above the clouds again and turned back towards Munich.  Then another plunge, this time a deep one, and suddenly it was dark and the thought that we were probably going to make an emergency landing in Germany depressed me, for a few minutes before, I had felt free of the Reich at last.  Now we were diving at a steep angle.  The pilot signalled to adjust the safety belt.  I gripped the seat hard.  And then out of the darkness the red fog light of a landing-field, and the familiar roof-tops, and the city lights sparkling---this could be no cityof blacked-out Germany, this could only be Zurich---and in a minute we were on hard ground.  The pilot had made a perfect blind landing in the fog.  

I sit here in the Bahnhof waiting for my Geneva train, the Dole red wine good, the free people of Switzerland bustling through the hall a sight worth seeing, feeling a release and yet sad at te farewell that must be said in Geneva next week, and the realization that still another home we tried to make will be broken up.  

Geneva, October 23, 1940

Tess and Eileen got off at dawn this morning on a Swiss bus that will take them in two days and nights of hard driving across unoccupied France to Barcelona, from where they can get a train to Madrid and Lisbon, and from Lisbon a boat for home.  There are no trains across France yet.  By bus is the only way, and I suppose we were lucky, because there are more than a thousand refugees here waiting to get on the two buses that ply once a week to Spain.  They could carry little luggage, and we must store our belongings here for the duration.  The American Express would not dispatch its bus today because of word that floods in the Pyrenees had washed out the roads between France and Spain, but our company said it hoped to get through, a hope I share.  Tess carried food and water for herself and the child, as there are no provisions to be had en route in France.  The child was happy with excitement as the bus pulled away and I was glad she was too young to notice or fel the tragedy in that car-load of human beings, most of whom were German Jews, who were nervous and jittery almost to a point of hysteria, for they were afraid that the French might make them get off and turn them over to Himmler's tortures, or that the Spaniards would not let them through.*  If they could get to Lisbon they would be safe, but Lisbon was far.  

Betty Sargent tells me Robert Dell has died in America---that grand old man of liberal English jounrlaism whose love of justice, decency, peace, democracy, life, good talk, good food, good wine and beautiful women was scarcely equalled by that of any man I know.  I shall miss him.  

*Most of them were turned back at the Spanish frontier.  

Berlin, October 24, 1940

A sad, gloomy trip with Joe {Harsch} up from Geneva this afternoon.  I gazed heavy-hearted through the window of the train at the Swiss, Lake Geneva, the mountains, Mont Blanc, the green hills and the marble palace of the League that perished.  

Munich, October 25, 1940

Blind-landed in a thick fog and the authorities would not let us continue our flight to Berlin because of the lack of visibility.  Am taking the night train.  All the restaurants, cafes and beer halls here packed tonight with lusty Bavarians.  Notice they've completely stopped saying: "Heil Hitler!"

Berlin, October 27, 1940

Ed Hartrich off in a couple of days for home and I shall leave early in December.  Harry Flannery is arriving from St. Louis to take over.  

Berlin, October 28, 1940

Today we've had a classic example of how a Fascist dictator suppresses news it feels might easily shock its people.  This morning the Italian army marched into Greece.  This morning, too, Hilter popped up in Florence and saw Mussolini about this latest act of Fascist aggression.  The Berlin newspapers have great headlines aboutthe meeting in Florence.  But they do not carry a single line about the Italian invasion of Greece.  My spies report that Goebbels has asked for a couple of days to prepare German public opinion for the news.  

No word from Tess since she left Geneva.  With the present chaos in unoccupied France and Spain, anything can happen.  

Berlin, October 29, 1940

Twenty-four hours after Italy's wanton aggression against Greece, the German people are still deprived of news by their rulers.  Not a line in the morning papers or the noon papers.  But Goebbels is carefully preparing his public for the news.  This morning he had the press publish the text of the outrageous Italian ultimatum to the Greek government.  It was almost an exact copy of the ultimatum which the Germans sent to Denmark and Norway, and later to Holland and Belgium.  But the German public may have wondered what happened after the ultimatum, since it expired yesterday morning.  

LATER.---The news was finally served the German people in the p.m. editions in the form of the text of today's Italian war communique.  That was all.  But there were nauseating editorials in the local press condeming Greece for not having understood the "new order" and for having plotted with the British against Italy.  The moral cesspool in which German editors now splash was fairly well illustrated by their offerings today.  After several years of it I still find it exasperating.  Also today, the usual Goebbels fakes.  For example, one saying that the Greeks disdained even to answr the ultimatum, though the truth is that they did.  They rejected it.

There is certainly no enthusiasm among the people her for the latest gangster step of the Axis.  German military people, always contemptous of the Italians, tell me Greece will be no walk-way for Mussolini's legions.  The mountainous terrain is difficult for motorized units to operate in and moreover, they say, the Greesk have the best mountain artillery in Europe.  General Metaxas, the Premier, and quite a few Greek officers have been trained at Potsdam, the Germans tell me.  

Berlin, October 31, 1940

The story is that Hitler rushed from France, where he had seen Franco and Petain (the Führer greatly impressed by the French marshal, but not by Franco, say the party boys), to Florence to stop Mussolini from going into Greece.  He arrived four hours too late, and by the time he saw Mussolini there was no turning back.  The fact is that Hitler thinks he can take the Balkans without a fight.  He does not want a war there for two reasons: first, it disrupts the already inadequate transportation facilities which are needed now to bring food and raw materials from the Balkans to Germany; secondly, it forces him to spread still further his forces, which now must hold a line stretching for more than a thousand miles from Narkvik to Hendaye in the west, and on the east the long frontier with Russia, where he keeps a minimum of thirty-five divisions and one whole air fleet.  Hitler is reported furious at his junior Axis partner for jumping the gun.  

With winter upon us, it is now obvious that ther ewill be no German attempt to invade Britain this fall.  Why has the invasion not been attempted?  What has happened ot the grand lines of Hitler's strategy?  Why no final victory, no triumphant peace, by now?  We know that at the beginning of last June he felt certain of them by summer's end.  His certainty inspired the armed forces and the entire German people with the same sure feeling.  He and they had no doubts about it.  Were not the stands erected and painted, and decorated with shining Swastika eagles and black-and-silver iron crosses for the great Victory Parade through the Brandenburger Tor?  Early last August they were ready.

What, in truth, went wrong?

We do not yet know the entire answer.  Some things we can piece together.  

In the first place, Hitler hesitated and his hesitation may well prove to have been a blunder as colossal as the indecision of the German High Command before Paris in 1914, marking a turning-point in the war that none of us can yet grasp, though it is manifestly too early yet to say so.  The French army was liquidated by June 18, when Petain asked for an armistice.  Many who follwed the German army into France expected Hitler to turn immediately and strike at Britain while the iron was hot, while the magic spell of invincibility was still woven round him and his magnificent military machine.  The British, Hitler knew, were reeling from titanic blows just struck them.  They had lost their ally, France.  They were just receiving home the demoralized remnants of their Continental expeditionary force, whose costly, irreplaceable arms and equipment had been abandoned on the beach at Dunkirk.  They had no longer a great organized, equipped land army.  Their shore defences were pitiful.  Their all-powerful navy could not fight in great force in the narrow waters of the English Channel, over which Goring's bombers and Messerschmitts, operating from bases in sight of the sea, now had control.  

This was the situation when Hitler strode into the little clearing of Compiégne Forest on June 21 to dictate a harsh armistice to France.  I recall now---though the fact did not make any impression on me at the time---that at Compiégne there seemed to be no hurry on the part of the German military to finish with Britain.  Piecing together today---long after the event---stray bits of conversation picked up here and there in Compiegne and Paris, I think the word had come down from Hitler that an invasion of Britain, though it must be quickly and thoroughly prepared, would never be necessary.  Churchill would accept the kind of peace which the little Austrian was mulling over in his mind.  It would be a Nazi peace, it would bar Great Britain from the continent of Europe at long last; it might be merely an armistice, a breathing-spell during which Germany could consoldiate such an overwhelmng strength on the mainland that Britain in the end would have to bow to the Nazi conqueror without a fight---but it would be a face-saving peace for Churchill.  And he would accept it.  I believe Hitler really thought he would.  And his certainty delayed and slackened the work which was necessary to prepare a devastating invasion force---the construction and concentration of barges, pontoons, shipping, and a thousand kinds of equipment.  

{LATER. 1941.---The breathing-spell migh talso be used to settle accounts with Russia.  Some observers in Berlin were convinced at the end of June that Hitler was sincerely anxious to conclude peace with Britain (on his own terms, of course) so that he could turn on the Soviet Union---always his long-term objective.  Hitler, they believed, felt sure the British would understand this.  Had not Chamberlain's policy been to encourage the German military machine to turn east against Russia?  The fact that during the last days of June and throughout the first three weeks of July one German division after another was recalled from France and hurriedly transported to what the Germans usually referred to as the "Russian Front" would seem to bear this out.  But it is by no means certain.  Russia, Hitler believed, was weak.  Russia could wait.  What was important was getting Great Britain out of the way.  Yet his mind seemed full of puzzling contradictions.  He realized very clearly that German hegemony on the Continent, not to mention a foothold in Africa, could never be safely maintained as long as Britain held command of the seas and possessed a growing air force.  But Hitler must have known that Britain, batterd and groggy though she was by what had happened in France and the Low Countries, would never accept a peace which would rob her of her sea power or curtail her increasing strength in the air.  Yet this was the only kind of peace he could afford to offer her.  The evidence seems conclusive, however, that he was confident that Churchill preferred this manner of peace to facing a German invasion.}

It may well be that Hitler expected Churchill to make the first move for peace.  Didn't an Englishamn know when he was beaten?  Hitler would be patient and wait and let the realization sink into his thick British head.  

He waited a month.  All through the lovely last week of June and the first three weeks of July he waited.  In Berlin we heard rumours that contact had been made between Berlin and London at Stockholm and that peace was being talked, but we never had any confirmatiopn of them and in all probability there was nothing to them.  

On July 19 Hitler spoke out at the Reichstag.  He publicly offered Britain peace, though concealing his terms.  But the very fact that he devoted most of the session to promoting his leading generals to be field-marshals, as though the victorious war were in truth over, indicated that he still felt certain that Churchill would bid for peace.  

The Luftwaffe had been established on the North Sea and the Channel for more than a month, but German planes had refrained from any serious attacks on the land of Britain.  Hitler was holding it back.

I think the prompt and sweeping reaction in England to his "offer of peace" came as a shock to him.  He was not prepared for such a quick and unequivocal rejection.  I think he hesitated until the end of July---twelve days---before he accepted that rejection as Churchill's final answer.  By then a month and a half of precious time had been largely lost.

There is reason to believe that most of the generals of the High Command, especially General von Brauchitsch, commander-in-chief of the army, and General Halder, chief of the General Staff, maintained grave doubts as to the chances of success of an invasion of Britain by a land army, particularly by the end of July, when the British, they kenw, had to some extent recovered from the blows of May and June.  The naval problem involved seemed to have baffled them, for one thing.  And though Goring, it is reliably reported, assured them he could knock out the RAF in a fortnight, as he had destroyed the Polish air force in three days, they seem to have had some doubts on this score too----doubts that in the end proved fully justified.

Throughout July the Germans had been gathering barges and pontoons in the canals, rivers, and harbours along the French, Belgian, and Dutch coasts and assembling shipping at Bremen, Hamburg, Kiel, and various ports in Denmark and Norway.  A common sight on the new highways in western Germany wa sthat of Diesel-motored barges taken from as far away as the Danube being hauled on rollers towards the west coast.  Workshops and garages all over the Reich were put to work on small armoured, self-propelling pontoons which could carry a tank or a heavy gun or a company of troops in a calm sea but not in a rough one, over the Channel.  Behind Calais and Boulogne on August 16 I saw a few of them.  

On the night of August 5, as noted elsewhere in this journal, Hitler had a long conference in the Chancellery with his chief military advisers.  Present were Goring, Admiral von Raeder, Brauchitsch, Keitel and General Jodl, the last member of Hilter's own separate military staff and extremely influential in the army since the beginning of the offenseive in the west.  It is likely that Hitler at this meeting made his decision to attempt the invasion as soon as possible and went over the final plans with the chiefs of the three armed forces.  

What were those plans?  Probably we shall never know.  But from what little has leaked out, I think we can deduce the grand lines of strategy decided upon.  It was cautious and it was classical.  A great air offensive against the British air force would be launched on or about August 13.  The RAF would be wiped out by September 1.  And then with complete mastery of the air over the Channel so as to prevent the British navy from concentrating, and over England to smash the defending British artillery, the invasion would be launched.  The main force would cross the Channel in barges, pontoons and small boats.  Other ships, protected by planes, would set out from Bremen, Hamburg, and the Norwegian ports to make landings in Scotland, but this would be only a secondary move and one that would depend upon the action of the British navy in these waters.  Another small expedition of ships from Brest would take Ireland.  And of course there would be parachute action on a large scal to demoralize the English and Irish in the rear.  

The army would not move until the Royal Air Force had been annihilated.  On this being accomplished depended the whole setting-in-action of the plans for the actual invasion.  Goring promised its speed accomplishment.  But like many a German before him, he made a grave miscalcuation about the British character and therefore British strategy.  Goring, I think it is now clear, based his confidence on a very simple calculation.  He had four times as many planes as the British.  No matter how good English planes and pilots were----and he had a healthy respect for both---he had only to attack in superior numbers, and even if he lost as many planes as the enemy, in the end he would still have a substantial air fleet, and the British would have none.  And there was little likelihood of losing as many planes as your opponent if you always attacked with more planes than he had.  

What Göring and all the other Germas were incapable of grasping was that the British were prepared to see their cities bombed and destroyed before they woudl risk all  their planes in a few great air battles to defend them.  To the British this was mere common sense and the only tactic that could save them.  To the German military mind it was incomprehensible.  It it primarily due to this error in judgment, so typically German, I'm convinced, that the plan to invade Britian this year had to be abandoned.  

To destroy the British air foce Göring had to get it off the ground.  But try as he did---and whne I was on the Channel in the middle of August he was sending as many as a thousand planes a day across the Channel to lure the British into the air---he never succeeded.  The British kept most of their planes in reserve.  Their cities, for a while, suffered as a result.  But the RAF remained intact.  And as long as it did, the German land army massed on the coast would not move.  

Why, many Germans here have asked, could not the Luftwaffe destroy the RAF on the ground?  The air forces of Poland, Holland, Belgium and France had largely been wiped out by the Germans demolishing their planes on the airfields beofre they had a chance to take off.  The Luftwaffe's own answer is ubdoubtedly true.  German airmen tell me that the British simply scattered theri planes on a thousand far-flung fields.  No air force in the world, with any opposition at all, could hunt them out in sufficient numbers to destroy any sizable portion of Britain's available planes.  

There is another aspect of Göring's failure whichs is not so clear to us here in Berlin.  He tried for a month---from the Middle of August to the middle of September---to destroy the air arm of Brtitain's defence.  This attempt was made in daylight attacks, for you cannot a destroy a nation's air force at night.  But by the third week of September the great daylight raids had ceased.  I note that in my broadcast of the night of Septemeber 23 I wrote: "It now seems clear form a perusal of the German reports that German's big air attacks on Britain---unlike a month ago---now take place at night, not during the day.  The High Command today calls the day flights 'armed reconnaissance'; the night raids 'reprisal attacks.'"  The military censor did not like the paragraph and only allowed me to use it after I had softened it down by writing that large-scale attacks of the the Luftwaffe "are recently more at night," which was bad English but did not prevent the idea from being put across.  

At first thought there seems to be some contradiction between our belief here that the British preferred to see their cities bombed rather than risk too many of their planes in the air at any one time to drive off the Germans----between that and the fact that in the short space of a month the RAF obviously took such a toll of German planes that Göring had to abandon his grandiose daylight attacks.  And this contradiction has bothered most of the neutral air attaches here, who, like the rest of us, have access to only the German side of the picture.  

Probably it is no contradiction at all.  From what German airmen themselves have told me, I think the truth is that while the British have never risked more than a small portion of their avialable fighters on any one day, they did send up enough to destroy more German bombers per day than Göring could afford to lose.  For he was using them in large mass formations, more as a snare to get the British fighters off the ground so that his Messerschmitts coudl wipe out Britain's fighter defence more than for mere bombing.  And here British air tactics played an important role.  The Germans tell me that the British fighter squadrons had strict orders to avoid combat with German fighters whenever possible.  Instead they were instructed to dart in on the bombers, knock off as many of the cumbersome machines as they could, and then steal away before the German fighters could engage them.  These tactics led many a german Messerschmitt pilot to complain that the British Spitfire and Hurrican pilots were cowards, that they fled whenever they saw a German fighter.  I suspect now the German pilots understand that the British were not being cowardly, but merely smart.  Knowing they were outnumbered, that the German aim was to destroy their entire fighter force and that Britain was lost when her last fighters were destroyed, the British adopted the only strategy which would save them.  They went after the German bombers, which are set-ups for a pursuit ship, and avoided the Messerschmitts.  After all, the Messerschmitts carried no bombs which would destroy England.  On at least three separate days, during the latter part of August and the first days of September, British fighters shot down some 175 to 200 German planes, mostly bombers, and crippled probably half as many more.  These were blows which made the Luftwaffe momentarily groggy and which it could not indefinitely sustain despite its numerical superiority, because the British were losing only a third or a fourth as many planes, though, to be sure, they were mostly fighters.  

There was another factor.  As most of the air battles took place over England, the British were saving at least half of the pilots whose machines were shot down.  They were able to bail out and come down safely by parachute.  But every time a German plane was shot down, its occupants, though they might save their lives with parachutes, were lost to the Luftwaffe for the duration of the war.  In the case of bombers, this meant a loss of four highly trained men with each plane brought down.  

And so the first fortnight in September came and went, and still the Germans could not destroy the British air force and, as a consequence, wrest complete superiority in the air over England.  And the great Nazi land army waited, cooling its heels behind the cliffs at Boulogne and Calais and along the canals behind the sea.  It was not left entirely unmolested.  At night, as I have described from personal experience earlier in this journal, British bombers came over, blasting away at the ports and canals and the beaches where the barges were being assembled and loaded.  The German High Command has maintained absolute silence about this little chapter in the war.  What losses in men and materials were sustained by these insistent British air attacks is not known.  I can get no authoritatitve information on the subject.  But from what I saw of these bombings myself and from what I've been told by German airmen, I think it highly improbable that the German army was ever able to assemble in the ports of Boulogne, Calais, Dunkirk and Ostend, or on the beaches, enough barges or ships to launch an invasion in the forece that would have been necessary.  Whether it is every seriously attempted to do so is also doubtful.  

The stories emanating from France that an actual full-fledged invasion of Britain was attempted in the middle of September and repulsed by the British also seem to be without foundation on the basis of what we know here.  In the first place, the British, whose morale was probably none too high at this time, would certainly have let the news out if they had actually repulsed an all-out German attempt to invade England.  Publication of the news would not only hae had an electrifying effect on British public opinion and that of the rest of Europe but would have been of immeasurable value in rallying help from America.  Washington in August, I'm told, had almost given Britain up as a lost and was in a state of jitters for few the British navy would fall into Hitler's hands and thus place the American eastern seaboard in great danger.  Also, the British would have had little trouble through short-wave broadcasts in German and the dropping of pamphlets in letting the German people know that Hitler's great bid for the conquest of Britain had failed.  The psychological effect in Germany would have been crushing.  

What probably happened, so far as we can learn here, is that the Germans in early September attemtped a fairly extensive invasion rehearsal.  They put barges and ships to sea, the weather turned against them, light British naval forces and planes caught them, set a number of barges on fire, and caused a considerable number of casualties.  The unusual number of hospital trains full of men suffering from burns would bear out this version, though we have no other concrete information to go on.  

Perhaps the British have already put out information that makes this account of why the invasion attept never came off superfluous.  I note it down as the sum of our information here in Berlin, which is little enough.  The only time the Germans give out information is when they are winning, or have won.  They have not mentioned their submarine losses, for instance, for nearly a year."