Even for the exacting, sometimes impossible, task of escorting the 1940 bomber fleets, the Bf 110 was not a complete failure. The 110's turning circle was very wide, and its acceleration poor, but its speed of 336 mph[5] was very nearly as fast as a Spitfire, and much faster than any Hurricane.[6]

Comparisons — the Men

The Germans had no shortage of pilots and air crews. For years pilots had been coming from the training schools at the rate of 800 per month, and a high proportion of German crews had flown under combat conditions in Spain, Poland, and France. Their tactics were tried and tested and their flying skills incomparably better than those of the RAF squadrons.

Göring had ensured that his Luftwaffe would attract a very high standard of recruit. To this purpose he arranged that the pay, uniforms, and conditions were excellent.

C. G. Grey, an English visitor to the pre-war Luftwaffe unit at Gatow-Kadow, "was taken into a big Mess with an attractive bar, a reading room and a silence room for writing and I remarked that their officers were lucky to have such comfort." But this was the Mess for the transport drivers. Taken to the Officers' Mess, he found it "more like a luxury hotel than any kind of military establishment. It was comfortable as though intended for the use of civilized people, whereas, as I wrote at the time, every [Royal] Air Force Mess that I had been in looked as if it had been designed and equipped by the Sanitary Section of the Prisons Board." The sleeping accommodation was not big barracks and huge dormitories but small bedrooms for three, four, or five airmen. Each was decorated with soft furnishings, framed pictures, and cut flowers in vases.

And Göring arranged that when an airman's service expired there were jobs open in civil aviation, which Göring also controlled. Government loans were available. While the relationship between officers and men in the RAF was excellent, C. G. Grey who had been so impressed with the standards of the German accommodation made a special point of the 'comradeship' that existed between all ranks of German airmen. There was a clear-cut line between officers and men but "the line was not a barrier." Grey's opinions are worth recording for three reasons: he was an expert observer, with no sympathy for Nazism, and was writing while the war was still being fought!

As might be expected, German flying training was very thorough. Pilots posted to bomber squadrons usually arrived having had about 250 hours' flying experience, including lots of night flying and another 50 hours of simulated blind-flying in the Link trainer. And at the specialist school, the pilots would have been flying the type of aircraft that they would have at the squadrons, and with the same crews.

The emphasis was on the bomber force, and it was not the pilot who captained the aircraft, it was the observer. Such captains were trained to do the job of every member of the crew, including the pilot's. The captain had usually done about 150 flying hours as a pilot, as well as being skilled in navigation, radio, gunnery, and bomb-aiming.

When war began, all training was shortened and simplified. During 1940 more and more captains were put into the pilot's seat. Such men were given a special 'double badge' and provided a cadre of skilled men quite beyond those of any other air force. It was these exceptional flyers that became casualties and prisoners during 1940. No wonder then that so many of the Luftwaffe's survivors looked back to 1940 as the turning point in its fortunes. All the air forces of the belligerents changed as they brought in conscripts to dilute the professionals, but for the USAAF and the RAF the training became more realistic and in some ways much better than it had been in peacetime. For the Germans it would only get worse.

As war began the RAF were getting only 200 pilots each month from the training schools, and the quality of training was low. As late as December 1939, one fully operational fighter squadron had to borrow a Harvard training plane when four pilots arrived from the training school having never flown a monoplane. Soon afterwards a new Commanding Officer arrived and admitted he had never flown a monoplane either.

In the spring of 1940, Squadron Leader Johnny Kent, a Canadian regular officer and RAF test pilot, managed to get a posting to an operational squadron. He described his brief course at the Operational Training Unit in stark terms. He fired the eight guns of his Hurricane at a ground target set up in the Dee Estuary. After a half-second burst, all his eight guns failed to fire. When he returned cursing jammed guns, he was told that he had used up all the bullets they could spare. Kent said "many of the new boys never fired their guns at all until they went into action for the first time." There was virtually no instruction or practice in air-firing at all. Hardly any of Kent's instructors had been on operations and one had not served on a squadron for over three years.

The peacetime RAF concentrated upon the sort of tight formation flying that was a feature of the air displays. Gunnery was the most neglected aspect of the fighter squadrons' work. To say that RAF fighter pilots were inferior in marksmanship to the Luftwaffe crews is misleading. Few RAF fighter pilots had had sufficient gunnery experience to know what their skills might be.

By the spring of 1940 the weaknesses of the Auxiliary Air Force scheme were becoming evident. Not only were the AAF pilots considerably older than the average, but these men had grown up in the same neighbourhoods and these squadrons had the special intimacy of a happy club. (Inevitably one compares the 'Pals Battalions' of the First World War in which men who joined the army together remained together.)

To such communities death comes as a terrible blow. The icy reserve that the veteran uses to protect himself against grief was not available to the men of the AAF. By the end of July before the Battle of Britain really began 609 Squadron had lost seven of its original twelve pilots (plus two of its replacements). Even highly professional military formations cannot endure those kind of losses.

And it was becoming evident that only very exceptional men could continue to function as fighter pilots after the age of thirty. This eliminated more AAF flyers, although they were valuable additions to Training Command. Aware of the lowering of morale, Fighter Command began assigning tough Regulars to the squadrons. Soon all that remained of the Auxiliary Air Force were squadron badges and memories.

Comparisons — the Commanders

The Luftwaffe, hitherto a tactical supplement to the blitzkrieg, a force that had taken orders from the army, was about to take upon itself a strategic role. Moreover, it was asked to create a strategy, and then to translate that strategy into day-to-day tactical objectives for its bombers and fighters. The experience of its staff officers was not equal to this task.

As Keith Park left his job as Dowding's Chief of Staff to become Commander of 11 Group, so Albert Kesselring moved into his office in occupied Brussels and deployed Air Fleet 2 for the coming battle. So far there had been no conferences, no staff studies, and no close co-operation with Sperrle, commanding neighbouring Air Fleet 3. When, on 30 June, Göring issued his general directive, it talked of cutting Britain off from its supplies, and of destroying the RAF, but in fact it was little more than a legal authorization for the money that Kesselring and Sperrle were now spending on the captured air bases.

One of the great successes of the Luftwaffe's operations in May and June had been the way the Junkers Ju 52 transport planes had moved personnel and equipment forward to the newly occupied airfields. The Luftwaffe Signals Service used the Junkers aircraft as flying radio stations and direction-finding units. This had been a vital, but little publicized, part of the victories but now the confusion of that leapfrogging of bases had to be sorted out. Phone and Telex networks were being laid, hangars built, runways lengthened; spare parts, ammunition, bombs, and all the complexities of the air war required suitable buildings, as did the men.