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Goring himself watched from the heights of France's Cape Gris-Nez as the first armada of 300 bombers and 650 escorting fighters set out for London on Sept. 7. They concentrated on the densely populated East End and the Thames docks -- killing some 300 civilians and seriously injuring 1,300 -- and when it ended Goring telephoned his wife to say "London is in flames." Nor was London the only target. The Luftwaffe subsequently pounded Liverpool, Birmingham, Coventry, Bristol.
Just as Hitler had thought that Britain would give up after the fall of France, he now thought that nightly bombing would make the English rise in revolt against Churchill's pursuit of the war. (It was a miscalculation that the Allies were to repeat in their subsequent bombing of German cities.) Londoners instead took pride in their ability to endure the blitz, to spend long hours in the subway bomb shelters, to put out the fires and go on with their lives. "I saw many flags flying from staffs," Edward R. Murrow reported to America one night over CBS radio. "No one told these people to put out the flag. They simply feel like flying the Union Jack . . . No flag up there was white."
The R.A.F. not only shot down many of the German bombers but also kept smashing the German invasion fleet being assembled in France. On one September night 84 barges were hit. Hitler was finally convinced. On Sept. 17 he formally decided "to postpone Sea Lion indefinitely." But the Battle of Britain went on. Between July and November, the Germans lost 1,733 aircraft, the British 915. Though the blitz continued until the following spring, costing about 30,000 lives in London alone, the essential result was that for the first time, Hitler's military power had been beaten back.
If the German navy was unable to achieve an invasion of England, though, it seriously threatened to starve the embattled island by cutting its lifelines to the west. Britain needed to import by sea nearly a million tons of supplies every week -- food and fuel as well as weapons. For this it required the services of some 3,000 merchant ships, and in this summer of 1940, Admiral Karl Donitz's submarine fleet not only acquired access to the Atlantic at the captured French naval base in Lorient but also started a lethal new tactic known as wolf packs. Instead of one lone U-boat sniping at an Allied convoy, three or more subs would attack simultaneously from different directions. On the night of Sept. 21, for example, a wolf pack attacked a convoy of 41 ships and sank twelve; the following month, in two successive nights, wolf packs torpedoed 32 out of 84 ships -- without any German losses. "The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war," Churchill wrote later, "was the U-boat peril."
There had never been any period of "phony war" during what came to be known as the Battle of the Atlantic. Though Donitz's undersea fleet was small -- his 56 U-boats in 1939 included only 22 large oceangoing craft -- the submarines not only torpedoed without warning but also seeded Britain's sea- lanes with thousands of magnetic mines. In the first four months of the war, the Germans sank 215 ships (748,000 tons); by the following spring the toll was 460. One sub even slipped into the supposedly impregnable Scottish base at Scapa Flow and torpedoed the battleship Royal Oak, with a loss of 833 lives.