No we don't; we have a source dated a full month after the mid-August raids discussing the Air Ministry's workers and level of preparation, a source that actually CONFIRMS exactly what Overy said.
Oh dear...here's the quote with my comments in brackets.
"The attack on Lympne on 13 August [it was 12 August] was particularly heavy, with 400 bombs falling on the landing ground alone [yes, but there were two attacks and only the second did any real damage to the landing ground and even there it was operational for the purpose it was intended on the following day]. Repairs were slow [so slow that it was operational for the purpose it was used for the next day] because construction workers had been sent to Manston to help with the attacks of the previous day [there was no attack on Manston the previous day, so no reason to send workers from Lympne to Manston]. The Air Ministry sent 100 of its own building workers to help, and 150 men were found from firms in the surrounding district [to Lympne? Or Manston? When? Are these the ones sent the previous day - 11 August - to Manston to repair damage that hadn't occurred?]. When Lympne was attacked once more, on August 15, the local men [so the 150 men that went to Manston to repair damage that hadn't occurred returned to Lympne?] were so upset that they left, with only a small alnding strip yet clear [the small strip had already been cleared by the 13th and remained clear on the 15th]. They were induced back only to be hit by a third raid on 30 August. This time five local workers were killed when a bomb hit a slit trench; work was once more delayed. Park took advantage of this unfortunate history to press the Air Ministry to supply at least one bulldozer and one excavator at each aerodrome, and to allocate repairs from a central pool of government workers [the actual assessment simply included the damage to Manston and Lympne, along with nine other stations, as evidence for the change in requirement]."
I don't think you've got what I meant there; your source is dated september 12th...a calendar month after the events began on the 12th of August that prompted Park's correspondence. Your reference confirms that in his eyes (and Winston's incidently, he visited Manston on the 12th!) the preparations were inadequate, and that he began to agitate...
What Overy's passage records is the panic measures the Air Ministry took
in the immediate aftermath of the attacks on the 12th because of that inadequacy - rushing their own repair depot workers to Lympne, employing local workers etc.. The HQ , 11 Group reference confirms is yes, preparations WERE viewed inadequate and Park began trying to do something about it...
But his longer-term view across the period from 12th August to 12th September and what was needed is different from the
immediate actions taken by the Air Ministry on or after the 12th. In effect - what THEY did was react to the events of the 12th of August and threw
MEN at the problem from various sources...
and kept on doing so, using local workers. What Park was saying is they needed instead to have the necessary
PLANT closer at hand.
You see, we know very well exactly when the bombings took place and the sequence of events on the airfields, so it is impossible for workers at Lympne to have been sent to Manston to repair damage that occurred the "day before".
Look again at what Overy said - "Repairs were slow because construction workers had been sent to Manston to help with the attacks of the previous day".
If you take out the bit referring to the incorrect date...what do you have?
Repairs were slow because construction workers had been sent to Manston to help with the attacks...
THAT's my point about it only being the date of the raid on Lympne that's wrong. If you take out
just the bits arising from the incorrect date...we still have a cohesive account. And that is why I'm waiting to see the Manston ORB -
to see what it says about the men sent from Lympne. Overy must have got it from somewhere, yes - and
yes, we don't know where...but the Manston ORB is the obvious first port of call.
Except the sequence of events he describes cannot happen
NOW do you see what I mean? Overy may be incorrect about the date the men were sent
from Lympne...but that doesn't necessarily mean he's incorrect about the OTHER side of the equation, them being sent
to Manston.
Here is the actual sequence:
12 August - two raids on Lympne, the second of which made it U/S except for a "narrow strip". Manston was hit and knocked out, but was serviceable on the 13th. Lympne was then hit on the 15th and was U/S for 48 hours. It was hit again on the 20th, but without significant damage. On the 24th Manston was severely hit and knocked out - initially it was "temporarily vacated" and then "permanently vacated" (in the sense of the "battle" that is. Lympne was again hit on the 30th, but without significant effect. On 2 September Lympne was hit yet again, but was considered still usable as a ELG.
That's the sequence of
the raids and the serviceability - but what I'm interested in is the sequence of
the remedial actions taken. Because according to Overy one of
those actions is the transfer of men from Lympne to Manston. That's what I meant several posts back about you getting hung up on the actual arfield serviceability dates. It's what he says about
the remedial actions that has bearing on the personnel at Lympne...or not.
2/ your OTHER primary source confirms one of the elements noted by Overy in that passage.
The only thing it "confirms" of Overy is that in late August, after the assessment of the airfield attacks, Park pressed for that action. Otherwise, there is no evidence to confirm the movement of workers and no evidence for those workers being other than Air Ministry or local contract labor, unless an RE complement was moved, which is possible of course.
Yes. That's why I said
ONE of the elements...and that's why I said a couple of posts ago it only had limited relevance to the discussion at hand, the Park correspondance bit
only.
3/ Kentfallen, the Lympne ORB etc. confirm the other events at Lympne, such as the deaths of the civilian workers later in the month.
Why yes, which actually only confirms the deaths of civilian contract workers at Lympne and nothing else.
No, it
directly confirms one other important thing...they were
there, working, to BE killed; as Overy states -
They were induced back only to be hit by a third raid on 30 August. This time five local workers were killed when a bomb hit a slit trench; work was once more delayed.
But look at exactly what he says about them...
They were induced back only to be hit by a third raid on 30 August. This time five local workers were killed when a bomb hit a slit trench; work was once more delayed.
...which by inference therefore confirms -
When Lympne was attacked once more, on August 15, the local men were so upset that they left, with only a small alnding strip yet clear...
They had to go away on the 15th, as Overy says, to be induced BACK
To address a couple of your additional notes...
[to Lympne? Or Manston? When? Are these the ones sent the previous day - 11 August - to Manston to repair damage that hadn't occurred?]
To Lympne; the paragraph is about the attack(s) on Lympne...whatever the date. It's a Lympne-centred paragraph and account, the Manston stuff is peripheral to the main topic of his account.
And no they're not the as-yest unidentified ones that went
to Manston; "
The Air Ministry sent 100 of its own building workers to help, and 150 men were found from firms in the surrounding district..." - These 150 local workers were NEWLY contracted on that day. In other words - the 100 Air Ministry workers and the 150 local contracted labourers were sent to Lympne immediately after the raid of the 12th...they were needed
because repairs were slow - the inference being that this was in turn because some element of Lympne's own cconstruction/repair complement had been sent off-site.
Did you note that both the A.O.C. 11. Group and the A.O.C.-in C. concurred in the inadequacy of the measure, but there is no note regarding the measures taken.
Yes, I noted that a few pages back now. But looking at Overy's account - he'd only been making concrete (sic) suggestions
since the 30th of August...and the Air Ministry was hardly going to be able to rejig its
entire damage repair organisation, including the depots it had rented or had had constructed for them, in
just two weeks?. Park had the ability to get right up people's noses; there's every chance the correspondance was filed in someone's bottom drawer...
Park took advantage of this unfortunate history to press the Air Ministry to supply at least one bulldozer and one excavator at each aerodrome, and to allocate repairs from a central pool of government workers.
Again, Overy fails to reference where that comes from; it would be nice to know.
Well, it
reads like an extract from a letter or letters...
"The attacks on our fighter aerodromes soon proved that the Air Ministry's arrangements for labour and equipment quickly to repair aerodrome surfaces were absolutely inadequate, and this has been made the subject of numerous signals and letters during the past four weeks."
...
some of which must have survived
somewhere for Overy to make that statement.
I doubt you'll do it by teasing apart the RAF allocation of guns from the Army's deployed AA assets if the sources are written up like that, mashing the two together; what I'm interested in is the RAF's ground defence allocations for airfields only; not the Army guns. We know what AA Command weapons the Army had at Lympne - two Bofors and crews. We don't know at present what the RAF had there, we can only work with the establishment figures and regard them as minimums.
Those are not RAF allocations of guns. They are the guns allocated to the RA AA divisions and the missions they were tasked with. The divisions were all directed to cooperate with the FC Group in whise zone they were deployed. RAF allocations are a different matter.
That's my point; it's the RAF allocation on a per-airfield basis that controls the number of ground gunners at said airfields...
What we need to do is find defence schemes for particular airfields such at Lympne and count the number of RAF positions.
That's a bit obsessive ....
Not really obsessive - it's just the easiest way into the issue as I doubt there's ANY way we'll find anything on paper now that states the precise number of whatever type and calibre of guns were allocated
in toto to RAF Lympne; you've been on the job long enough to read enough accounts of missing war diaires, and files at Kew with nice file numbers and subject titles...but when pulled from the shelf all that remains is an index of now-shredded contents
But the defence diagram should at least list Army-manned pillboxes, seagull trenches, etc.,...and the RAF's ground defence positions.
....and given the small number of RAF gun allocations - until later as you note - unlikely to change things significantly in August-September 1940
On the contrary; there's enough indication that the establishment figure of eight MG or cannon positions was added to at many RAF airfields as extra items like the .300 American Lewis Guns arrived from the U.S. through the summer. Look at the example that Knouterer gave yesterday of an RAF field with eleven gun positions instead of eight; on paper that's 66 ground gunners in that airfield's "Anti-Aircraft Flight" as opposed to the 48-man figure for eight AA positions. It may look insignificant - but it's still a 32% manpower increase in that one airfield defence flight.
The only problem is - as I stated previously - that we don't
know about RAF Lympne, so can only reliably work on the basis of the establishment figure.
Technically, Lympne wasn't "evacuated"; Manston after 24 August comes closest to that description.
Well - we DO have the statement by one witness that it was "evacuated"; the question is what that evacuation
did consist of...which is a question I've raised several times recently. But -
Again, it could be, since exactly what was "evacuated" appears to have been the operational units and their operational support elements. The station C&M element may have remained - the language is imprecise and it would have been logical to maintain a caretaker presence even if a flying element wasn't there.
...some things to bear in mind;
1/ We know RAF Lympne was allocated a
full Care&Maintenance unit in June...but that's a good deal
larger than the establishment manpower figure for an ELG
So, once it's status was reviewed, or downgraded, or changed, or however you want to describe it after August 15th...its establishment manpower allocation
should have gone down...
2/ We have evidence that various support elements were increasingly NOT available through August- two instead of an ideal three working on Allard's Hurricane, no driver being available by the end of AUgust to take downed fighter pilots to the officers' mess, etc...
3/ There's the whole issue of accomodation not being available, and personnel having to be billeted off the field...
4/ And not least - there's the aspect that "evacuation" in Fighter Command parlance also had a
specific meaning as described previously; it's detailed in footnote no.45 in James on p.132, whatever that equates to in the AIR file.
I think you're forgetting something. It's not just craters that caused problems on RAF airfields such as Lypmne after a raid - it's the percentage of unexploded German bombs. It's not just that craters have to be filled in, those UXBs have to be found and made safe for an airfield to be useable. The whole flightline and apron has to be safed, even if aircraft can only physically land on a narrow strip.
That was counted as a problem at Manston and led to its "abandonment",
but was not assessed as a problem at Lympne.
We don't atually know that; we don't (as yet?) have access to the Inspector-General's report on RAF Lympne of the 15th of August...
or the 12th, come to that.
That's nice...except that is not the way its condition was recorded. Work of some sort likely was continued at Lympne, if not Manston, but it is all rather moot since nobody used it except as an ELG after 2 September.
It's how it was recorded in the ORB. Which does of course tend, as with any ORB, to be a very "subjective" document by its very nature.
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See Oliver. The Bofors was preferred - but supplies of it were not available as the Army had first call, hence also the decision to opt for the Hispano, which was at least available...
...but I know you're aware this forward dispersal occured.
