"Eagle Days - Life and death for the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain" by Victoria Taylor - a review [edit: 27/10/25]

 

I've got hold of a copy of the book. I didn't really want to read it  - the publisher's dreadful 'hype' was rather off-putting, almost 'belittling' of all the authors that have gone before (in the words of one Battle of Britain expert..) and I instinctively knew that I wasn't going to like it. But I'm enjoying it - sort of. She can write. As some have pointed out, the author - Victoria Taylor - is a 'professional' historian so be warned, this is not just another re-telling of the Battle of Britain. But then nor is it what it claims to be. The first 90 pages or so cover the Westfeldzug (campaign in the West) while by page 260 the author has already moved on to cover the night 'Blitz' while chapter 15 'Dante's Inferno' takes us into 1941, R.V. Jones and X-Verfahren territory. A fairly well-trodden path. This, according to the author, is the Battle of Britain petering out on the German side, with the propaganda emphasis increasingly focusing on the forthcoming war against Bolshevism as a means of distracting attention from the failure of the Luftwaffe over England!

The publisher has made all sorts of claims for this work - revelatory, deeply researched, the Luftwaffe 'with the varnish stripped away'.. You can probably guess what's coming. 

The book according to its author is not about the 'cartoonish' Luftwaffe that we are apparently all familiar with, presumably from the movie 'The Battle of Britain' - which Taylor actually spends a couple of pages psycho-analysing. Briefly put, it would appear that nowadays we all think of the men of the Luftwaffe as being mostly 'honourable opponents' and 'worthy foes' - who suffered and died as did our own brave RAF heroes. This is largely the influence of people like Galland and movies like 'The Battle of Britain'. 

The reality - according to Taylor - is that in some instances the men of the Luftwaffe were hard-bitten Nazis, some of whom relished anti-semitic violence; '..the chivalrous fighter pilots did not cancel out the small pool of ruthless killers who already lurked in all branches of the Luftwaffe by the summer of 1940..' 

Some Luftwaffe men such as Lehweß-Litzmann  - former Kommodore of KG 3 who went over to the Soviets and held key positions in the post-war East German (DDR) state airline Interflug - flew his first sorties over England during late 1940 and had already been disgusted at the treatment meted out to Jews and civilians and not just in Poland. The author goes so far as to state that '[..] the German 'knights of the air' should not be detached from the crimes that the regime committed..' The problem here of course is that the Battle of Britain was not the 'ideological' war that characterised the fighting in the East, although according to Taylor it very much was....in fact page 325 is an account of a Luftwaffe pilot roped into a bit of mass-killing - pre-Battle of Britain. Perhaps shocking to the general reader, although apparently not a new account by any means. The 'problem' here of course is that this has little to do with the Battle of Britain as such..although the author strives hard to show us that it does.

So what is Victoria Taylor's goal in compiling this book in the way that she has?  Apparently to 'remind' us that the Luftwaffe crews were not brave 'ordinary men'  - the myth of 'just like us' - but ideologically driven and intent on furthering a tyrannical dictator's ambitions of conquest. The lengthy chapters covering the fighting in Poland, Noway and France don't so much set the stage for the Battle of Britain as ram home what 'nasty' people the German Wehrmacht actually were. 

Unfortunately for the reader looking for a 're-telling' of the Battle of Britain from the German side - which is after all what the title is selling - the author's attempts to drive home this point leads her to wander way 'off subject' in places; from medical experiments on political prisoners to the beginnings of mass murder etc etc. Taylor's book is not an 'unbiased' account of the Battle of Britain as per the title - according to Taylor the German term 'Luftschlacht um England' (lit. 'air assault against England') covers the period after France and all the way to Barbarossa. Just for good measure she includes an account from a Luftwaffe bombing raid that took place in 1944! By now the reader is starting to wonder whether the author ever managed to point out the 'distinction' to the publisher because the blurb - indeed the jacket text - quite clearly states 'Battle of Britain'. But Taylor's account only partly focuses on key engagements during the period July-September 1940 and there is, for example, no assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the combatants for the period in question. As Ben Dunnell pointed out in his (largely complimentary) review, this is not a 'who shot down who' book - it certainly does not focus on the 'hyper-minutiae' of the battle as the author rather disparagingly puts it. But some of this 'focus' might well have seen the author avoid some of the factual errors that crop up in her account. There are lengthy digressions that take in the 'views' of the German media - heavily controlled by the Propaganda Ministry so I'm struggling to understand the value of these - and personal accounts from the home front that have little or no connection to the Battle of Britain. Thinking about the author's 'goal' in writing the book the way she did, it is evident she gives no-one on the German side the chance to present their mostly well-known (post-war) accounts or even lets those directly involved speak (for the most part) preferring period diaries and letters from interested 'bystanders'..

Victoria Taylor is a 'new' young 'professional' historian, too young to have interviewed any veterans on the German side. Some 'amateurs' have been researching and writing about the Luftwaffe and interviewing veterans for many years. Taylor - and her publisher - seem wholly unaware of some areas of research and of some of the experienced authors out there in the Luftwaffe enthusiast fraternity. How can you write a book about the Battle of Britain without referencing Erik Mombeek's history of Jagdgeschwader 2? Or quoting from Jules Meimberg's memoir? And while a few of her passages are based on Bungay and Goss, there are far more footnotes referencing those well-known Battle of Britain 'specialists' Dildy and Crickmore. None acknowledging the work of John Vasco for example. As a result her book is far too 'lop-sided'.  But then I guess you can ignore the 'historiography' of the battle if you want to focus on medical experiments carried out on Jews and prisoners for the benefit of German airmen - post-Battle of Britain! (p332-333). And 'depart' from the 'myth' of the clean Luftwaffe. The author claims at one point to have 're-written' the Luftwaffe back into the Battle of Britain, which is ludicrous. At best, 70% of this book pertains to the title, the rest is discourse to prove the point being rather clumsily made. And, as another commentator has suggested, regardless of Taylor's credentials, her book could well have been more accurately entitled 'A random essay about the early years of WWII, including brief mentions of the Battle of Britain'. In fact while the publisher would never have gone for it, many of the criticisms about Taylor's work - and there have been plenty as a quick read through some of the reviews on Amazon reveal - might easily have been deflected with this more 'accurate' title. 

Also on this blog;

Lehweß-Litzmann - the Kommodore who changed sides

'To defeat the Few' by Dildy and Crickmore

II./JG 3 over Canterbury on 26 August 1940

" At 11.30am on Monday August 26, 1940, a large raid, including 12 Dornier Do 17’s and 40 Heinkel He 111’s, escorted by over 80 Messerschmitt Bf 109’s and Messerschmitt Bf 110’s approached Dover. While around 70 Hurricanes and Spitfires fought the Heinkels and their escorts, from Dungeness to Maidstone, the Boulton Paul Defiants of No.264 Squadron were directed alone onto the Do 17s, in the vicinity of Herne Bay. As they attacked the bombers from below, the Bf 109s immediately dived to protect the Do 17s..." (Hawkinge Battle of Britain museum FB page)

Among the Me 109 escorts over the coasts of north Kent was II./JG 3. Uffz Willy Finke of 4. Staffel JG 3 pressed home an attack on a Defiant but was spotted by P/O Kenneth Marston of No.56 Sqd. Marston opened up from close range (70 yards) sending Finke's Me 109 E-4 down. Finke crashed on the Chislet Marshes, south of Grays Farm near Reculver at around 12:30. In fact Finke was Marston's second Emil that morning - he had already also shot down Uffz. Fritz Buchner of 6./JG 3. Most sources have Buchner coming down in the sea (see below). Posted missing over the Thames estuary on 26 August 1940, Buchner's fate was only confirmed 44 years later when his Emil was excavated at Westgate on the north Kent coast..

"..During 1984, this crash site was the subject of a major excavation. The main wreckage was discovered at a considerable depth (between 35 and 40ft) and within the compacted tail section and cockpit were found the remains of the pilot. Evidence from the excavation, in the form of Uffz. collar tabs found on the uniform, an embroidered handkerchief with the initials "FB", a lucky charm and serial plates indicating the identity of the aircraft, seemed to provide compelling proof that the pilot was Unteroffizier Fritz Buchner, who had been officially listed as missing 44 years previously. However, it took a further two years for British and German authorities to agree on his identity. He was finally laid to rest, in the presence of surviving members of his family, with full military honours in the German War Cemetery at Cannock Chase on the 8th May, 1987.."   (dunkirk1940.org)

 Now that certain relics of Buchner's E-1 have been given to my local museum I was asked if I knew anything about his machine. The quick answer was not a lot! The loss listing does not reveal much about his Bf 109 aside from the variant and Werknummer. No Kennung given. Extract from the now-digitised Bundesarchiv "GQM Verluste und Unfälle" file RL 2- III/1574-75 covering the period Jun 40-Jan 41. See line 11. (Click to view full screen)

From the Breuer/Waiss " Heinz Sannemann -Ein Jagdfliegerleben in Berichten, Dokumenten, Fotos" (Helios, 2018)

 " Flug 924 am 26.08.1940. Start mit Bf 109 um 12:25 Uhr in Wierre au Bois. Landung um 13:50 Uhr in Wierre au Bois, 'Begleitung Do 17 Sauterborg, Defiant abgeschossen.."

On 26 August 1940, II./JG 3 were up from Wierre au Bois (12 km south-west of Boulogne on the Channel coast) to escort bombers raiding London. Gruppe TO Lt. Heinz Sannemann flying as Rottenflieger to the Kommandeur recorded in his 'Gefechtsbericht' that he shot an RAF fighter off the tail of his Kommandeur as the latter was downing a Defiant. It was Sannemann's second victory claim. A trail of white smoke streamed out behind the British fighter as it dove away heading back over the Kent coast. In a letter to his wife sent the next day, Sannemann wrote;

" Gestern haben wir über der Themsemündung eine Mords-Luftschlacht gehabt. Berstende Maschinen, Rauchsäulen und Fallschirme über Fallschirme!. Es is schon schoen, nur die armen Bomber sind dabei zu bedauern. Die müssten alle das EK I haben. Wir waren schon wieder in unserem Wigwam!  " 

.." Yesterday we had a hell of an air battle over the Thames estuary. Exploding machines, columns of smoke and parachutes upon parachutes! Everything's fine now, but the poor bombers are having a hard time. They must have all earned the EK I. We were already back in our wigwam!.."  (pilots accomodation 'Villa Wigwam' in Le Touquet that Sannemann shared with von Werra, until 5 September of course..)

After the chaos of the clash over the north Kent coast/Canterbury area that morning Sannemann spent the afternoon paddling a dinghy in the canal in Le Touquet and swimming with Simba the lion cub. Pfundig! ..just great!

Julius Meimberg (JG2 ace) and Gerhard Baeker - a German view of the Battle of Britain

In an interview published in the British 'Observer' newspaper in the year 2000 prior to the commemorations of the 60th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, two Luftwaffe pilots who fought over England shoot down what the Germans refer to as the Battle of Britain 'myth'. In a recent thread over on the TOCH forum I was surprised to realise that this 'German' view of the Battle of Britain is not more widely known - probably because it is rather at odds with the accepted view. This piece should be read in conjunction with my earlier blog post on the Battle of Britain here Luftschlacht über England - the significance of the German defeat during the Battle of Britain
I have to say that I don't entirely share the views of the two pilots as related below, that firstly the Luftwaffe wasn't defeated and secondly that the mere presence of the Royal Navy prevented Hitler from proceeding with an invasion. And while Hitler's failure to achieve air supremacy over Britain - which he used as a pretext for postponing invasion - probably didn't alter the outcome of the war, it certainly did eventually allow the Western powers to prevent the entire European mainland from being over-run by the Soviets.


"...Sixty years after the duel in the skies, German veterans in Berlin say that its importance is exaggerated. German fighter pilots, famously seen off during the Battle of Britain, will not be commemorating their dead this year for a simple reason: they believe the British are talking up an 'insignificant' clash in the skies that did not alter the course of the war. Ahead of the sixtieth anniversary of the famous dogfights between Spitfires and Messerschmitts, German pilots are still engaged in fighting talk over the events of 1940 that Winston Churchill declared the victory of 'the few' British pilots on behalf of 'the many' in a battle that saved Britain from becoming part of the German empire.

At 83, Julius Meimberg is typical. He can remember almost every detail of a war in which he flew more than 250 missions as a fighter pilot, including dozens over Britain.

'It's all exaggerated,' he said. 'Churchill succeeded in creating this myth that so few did so much for so many. When you look at how we fought against the Americans later, the Battle of Britain was very little in comparison.'

There will be no official commemoration of the Battle of Britain in Germany, and the few surviving pilots who fought on the German side see no reason to mark the anniversary. Even if they did, Meimberg believes that none of today's generation of Germans would take any notice or express any interest in their wartime adventures.

'Nobody's interested in that here. There's nothing here, they're even getting rid of the memorial rooms for squadrons. You won't see a single swastika there, for example, because a whole period has been wiped out, even though it's part of their history. I think it's a very bad thing to try to undo history,' he said.

Meimberg was a 23-year-old lieutenant in Jagdgeschwader 2 'Richthofen' when he started flying up to four missions a day over Britain. He admits that he seldom thought about his opponents on the British side as people: they were simply targets.

'The people who were inside them [the fighter aircraft] were the same as us, except that they spoke English and we spoke German. We only saw the aircraft. I find that a bit difficult to understand today. We didn't see the people, only the aircraft. We fought aircraft against aircraft. We were fighting for our Fatherland and they for their England. It was like sportsmen - there were good and bad ones,' he said.

Gerhard Baeker was 25 when he flew his first bombing missions over England and he too regards the British preoccupation with the Battle of Britain as disproportionate. Like Meimberg, the former pilot who took part in the bombing of Coventry remembers August and September 1940 as just one incident in a long war.

'For me, the battle lasted from August 1940 until July 1941. What they call the Battle of Britain in England was just August and September.

'But for us it was only starting. England had declared war on us. We didn't want a war with England. We had the Russians at our backs.

'The Hitler-Stalin pact was an unnatural pact. We always hoped that England would give way and recognise that the Russians wanted to effect their world revolution - which was proven to be the case after the war,' he said.

Baeker dismisses as absurd the suggestion that the RAF prevented a German invasion of Britain by depriving the Luftwaffe of air supremacy. He argues that the German armed forces, which had only been fully reconstituted in 1935, could never have secured a bridgehead or defeated the Royal Navy.

Meimberg agrees that the Battle of Britain did not prevent a German invasion, but he claims that, if Germany had attempted to occupy Britain, the operation would have succeeded.

'The Germans could have occupied England afterwards. It was diplomacy that prevented that. It seems to me that the English led the Germans by the nose by showing a willingness to make peace but in reality playing for time. I saw the British at Dunkirk and I know they could not withstand an invasion,' he said.

Meimberg received serious burns and a number of broken bones during his service as a fighter pilot, but he says that the struggle to survive after the war was more difficult than anything he experienced in battle.

Unlike their counterparts in Britain, men like Meimberg and Baeker are at best forgotten and at worst reviled in their own country. A few tiny organisations, such as the German Fighter Pilots' Association, struggle to keep their traditions alive and to take care of veterans who find themselves in difficult circumstances.

But the German public has little time for the defeated soldiers of a war that brought shame and destruction to their nation.

'War is not the continuation of politics by other means, war is the utter failure of politics and politicians. We're described as Hitler's soldiers, but it is a totally false view that we were ideologised,' said Meimberg......"

Luftschlacht über England - did the RAF win the Battle of Britain ?

..Having been mauled over France, the Luftwaffe's early forays over England in late July 1940 can be seen as no more than an attempt to exert some 'political' pressure on those who might have been prepared to sue for peace in the UK. Göring hadn't got the potential to do anything else after sustaining losses over France amounting to over 1,000 aircraft and trained crews according to which source you care to read.

The latest 'official' score for 'la chasse' (the French fighter arm) according to the Service Historique de la Défense or SHD is around 650 Luftwaffe aircraft shot down during the Westfeldzug (campaign in the West). Aircrew losses may have been as high as 3,000 men according to some sources. Infrastructure along the Channel coast had largely been wrecked. Hence the two month 'pause' before setting out to subdue England in earnest.

In fact, the Luftwaffe high command went on to delude themselves as to their actual strength for most of the summer. The stunning success of the Blitzkrieg in the West had belied the fact that on the opening day – May 10 – Germany had lost a staggering 352 aircraft, its single worst day by a massive margin all that summer. To put that into some perspective, their costliest day during the Battle of Britain was August 18, when they lost 67 aircraft. On September 15, now known to us as Battle of Britain Day, they lost 61.

They also suffered a large number of losses at the hands of Fighter Command over Dunkirk, where the short-comings of the Stuka – its inability to hit successfully moving targets such as ships and its vulnerability when coming out of a dive – first came to the fore. This was a major problem because dive-bombing had become the focus of all future bomber development, yet in a trice, the inherent weaknesses of the strategy had been made all too clear.

In the immediate aftermath of Dunkirk, Britain was on its knees. At the time German war machine was effectively "unbeatable" and people - on both sides of the Channel - had visions of thousands of German paratroopers landing, being quickly supported by thousands of troops and tanks from an invasion fleet. So yes, depending on whom you talked too and when, invasion had to be a very real option for the Germans. Some pour scorn on the tenor of some of Churchill's speeches, but when he said (in so many words) that Hitler knew that he must defeat Britain or lose the war, he was absolutely right. The US had to enter the war sooner or later and Hitler had to take the British out of the equation. So the British were simply expected to sue for peace at this stage, a process that could no doubt be aided by a 'demonstration de force'; harassing shipping in the Channel, sending a few hundred bombers & fighters over now & again and drawing up loads of barges where they could be photographed.


However looking back from a distance of nearly 70 years, we can see, as Adam Tooze, that Germany was economically weak both in production & resources. The pause of some two months at the conclusion of the French campaign enabled the Luftwaffe to make good material losses. If Hitler was able to over-run militarily weak neighbours, when it came to crossing the Channel , " the basic preconditions for the defeat of Britain were never met ". The task of assembling both the naval & aerial forces necessary to subdue the British were simply beyond Germany's industrial resources. After all look how long it took for the powerful US and her allies to build up sufficient strength to undertake the relatively unopposed landings in Normandy. And Fighter Command finished the battle stronger than it had started it. Follow that logic then the fact that invasion never occurred has nothing to do with the presence of the RN or not as some would like to maintain.


Look a little more closely at what the Jagdwaffe managed during the Battle of Britain ; (this from Prien in his Jagdfliegerverbände volume dealing with the BoB) the average Jagdflieger flew no more than 50 sorties during an 85 day period from 8 August to 31 October, contacting the enemy on only around 20 of these; for around 20 days at the supposed height of the Battle there were no German aircraft at all in the skies of England and when the bombers turned on London in September the 1,000 Luftwaffe aircraft of the British ‘official’ history were never more than 400. On only two occasions (7 & 15 September) could the Luftwaffe put more than 300 bombers in the air and on nearly 20 days of the ‘battle’ the Luftwaffe flew less than 200 sorties. How on earth could they have been hoping to subdue a metropolis the size of London - over 1,000 sq kilometres in area even in 1940. A couple of HE bombs per sq mile is all the Luftwaffe could hope to manage. This is all pretty minor league stuff especially in comparison with the later air battles over the Reich. And it was so unsuccessful that the Germans had to switch from a day assault to night bombing.

Many Luftwaffe fighter pilots believed their tactics were all wrong. All too often they had been expected to escort bomber formations, which meant flying at the speed of the bombers too. This in turn meant forgoing one of the Messerschmitt 109’s major advantages – its speed. The Me 109E was the superior of the Spitfire Mk I and Hurricane in terms of speed of climb and dive, and had vastly superior fire-power. Used correctly, they might have beaten Fighter Command in spite of the Luftwaffe’s many failings, and yet this advantage was uselessly thrown away. The fighter pilots felt this keenly and unsurprisingly morale began to drop dramatically. “By ordering us to fly as close escorts,” noted Günther Rall, “our Gruppe was effectively offered up on a plate to the most efficient and determined aerial opponents the Luftwaffe has yet come against.”

As the summer wore on these factors all contributed to mounting cases of what was becoming termed Kanalkrankheit – Channel Sickness – better known now as combat fatigue. “Although most of us were still not outwardly showing major signs of nerves,” noted Ulrich Steinhilper at the end of August, “arguments were becoming more frequent, tempers frayed quicker…The strain of unrelenting front-line flying was beginning to show.”

As September gave way to October and still there seemed to be as many British fighters in the skies as ever, the Luftwaffe’s troubles grew progressively worse.

There were now more than 700 British single-engine fighters, but the Luftwaffe was down to around 300. Worse, more and more pilots were not returning home. The strain on those still flying was becoming acute.

KG4's Hajo Herrmann had already flown extensively in Spain before the war, then over Poland, Norway and throughout the summer. By October, he had clocked up 90 combat missions, more than most British bomber pilots would be expected to fly during the entire war. In the middle of the month he had just completed four consecutive nights of missions over London and was about to take off on yet another when his airfield was attacked by British bombers. The blast from one explosion caused him to slew his plane and crash. Although he survived, he was in a coma for three days. When he eventually came to he noticed a Knight’s Cross medal on his bedside table, and asked where it had come from.

“Don’t you know?” he was told. “The Reichsmarschall awarded it to you personally three days ago.”

Herrmann could remember nothing. Looking at it, he burst into tears.

On October 16, Siegfried Bethke reflected on the general situation in his diary. He now realised that destroying the RAF in a few days, as Göring was still claiming, was a fool’s dream. “The English seems to be putting up with things quite well,” he jotted then added, “Important things did not happen.”

Bethke was lucky – he would be one of very few pilots to survive the war unscathed. Ulrich Steinhilper, on the other hand, was shot down over England at the end of October, by which time he was mentally and physically completely exhausted.

“There is no doubt in my mind,” he says, “that the RAF broke the back and the spirit of the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain.”

In reality, however, it was not just the RAF, heroically though they undoubtedly fought, but the Luftwaffe itself that had caused the damage.

This in no way diminishes the achievements of the RAF. In Churchill's high flown rhetoric the clash between the Luftwaffe and the RAF took on a decisive turning-point in the war because he realised what lay in store once the US were able to park their bomber & fighter fleets off continental European shores. Therein lies the prime importance of the Battle of Britain and the RAF's 'victory' in the air.