Andy Saunders - Luftwaffe Bombers in the Battle of Britain: Rare Photographs from Wartime Archives

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

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Copyright Andy Saunders, 2014

ISBN 978-1-78303-024-8

eISBN 9781473837539

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T he photographs contained in this volume are largely from the private archive of images I have collected of Luftwaffe aircraft downed in Britain during the period 19391945. However, a great many friends and colleagues have assisted me in my quest for such photographs, or otherwise provided additional information. In no particular order of merit, I would like to thank:

Peter Cornwell, Steve Hall, Chris Goss, Dennis Knight, Winston Ramsey, Phillipa Hodgkiss, Alfred Price and Martin Mace.

In addition, I must mention two other fellow researchers who are no longer with us but whose work added considerably to our sum of knowledge relating to the recovery of aircraft wrecks in wartime Britain. They are my late friend Pat Burgess, and a colleague of many years, Peter Foote. Pat had been a prodigious collector of information relating to the county of Sussex, the area in which much of the activity described in this book took place. Peter Foote had been equally industrious in recording the minutiae of events during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz across Britain since the late 1940s and his tireless research work has left a legacy of unequalled information. Had he not recorded some of these events before it was too late to find the evidence then our knowledge of that period would be much the poorer. In many cases, he put considerable historical detail and context to photographs that would otherwise have been a rather less informative record of the momentous events they depicted.

Lastly, I feel I should mention the late Kenneth Watkins. Ken was a collector of Luftwaffe aircraft crash photographs and after his death I was fortunate to be able to acquire his large collection. Kens photographs complemented and added to those already in my own archive but I was able to extensively draw upon that resource in compiling this book.

In addition, I must extend my thanks to any other individuals and organisations who may have assisted me in over forty years of research and whom I may have inadvertently overlooked. My thanks to you all.

T he story of the Battle of Britain is well known and recorded in very considerable detail in countless books on the subject. It is not my intention to re-tell that story here. In this volume we will take a pictorial look at the cost to the Luftwaffe bomber force of waging war against the British Isles during the summer of 1940.

What we now know as the Battle of Britain was fought between 10 July and 31 October 1940, although those were artificial dates created post-war by the Air Ministry and were set as being the official period during which the major part of that campaign was fought. However, and in order to set the scene, I have looked briefly at the run-up to the commencement of battle proper but have then examined pictorially each month from July to October 1940. Whilst the cut-off date for the cessation of the battle is officially 31 October 1940, this was not the cessation of German air attacks against Britain. Far from it. It was only the end of the official period of the Battle of Britain. Then the German air assault melded and changed from the mainly daylight campaign, into the day and night blitz, and then to the blitz by night only, followed later in the war by tip-and-run attacks and various periods of other raids employing a variety of tactics, aircraft and weapons. So, whilst this particular volume looks at Luftwaffe bomber actions and their related losses during the Battle of Britain there will be other follow-up titles by the same author in this series and these will cover all other elements and periods of Luftwaffe attacks on Britain, right up until the cessation of hostilities.

The photographs used in this work are drawn from my private archive and provide a fair representation of the losses sustained in terms of aircraft type and geographic location. The majority of action during the Battle of Britain was across the south of England, predominantly in Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, Essex and London, and it is therefore inevitable that the picture content reflects a geographic bias towards the Home County region. However, where photographs are to hand of losses in other parts of the British Isles, a conscious effort has been made to include them.

For the most part, the pictures used in this book were taken by official photographers working for regional and national newspapers or by photo agencies and their contracted photographers. Some were taken by photographers working for the RAF or the Air Ministry. In many cases, the organisations concerned are long defunct, but the images taken by or for such organisations have been collected and preserved across many years by enthusiasts, researchers and historians. Some of the photographs used are from the original official prints, others are from illegally-taken pictures by civilians or military personnel it being contrary to the Control of Photography Order 1939 for unauthorised persons to take photographs of military subjects. Quite apart from the wartime shortages of film and materials, private photographers faced the danger that if they took their films to chemists or photographic stores, the subject matter might be reported to the Police. Additionally, some photographs used here are from the collections of Luftwaffe participants in the Battle of Britain. In many cases, the photographs will not have been widely seen, if at all, before publication in this volume.

It is true to say that for the first time in modern history the British public were exposed during the Second World War to the frontline realities of war and it was inevitable that photographers would seize upon the opportunity to record the myriad scenes that unfolded. Mostly, photographers were on the spot some while after the initial drama of an enemy aircraft crash, although the scenes they recorded were often powerful and certainly historically important. Without a doubt, the Battle of Britain has become very much a part of the British psyche fact, fiction, folklore and legend. Here, though, we see the recorded fact of contemporary scenes photographed during that epic summer of 1940. Whilst much that has been written or recorded of the Battle of Britain is subject to debate, discussion, revisionism or even the creation and debunking of myths and misconceptions, there is one simple inescapable fact: the camera never lies. This, then, is a photographic glimpse of the Luftwaffe bomber force during the Battle of Britain, some of the losses the force sustained during the campaign, and some of the faces of the men themselves.