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"England is invincible": How the Luftwaffe lost the Battle of Britain
When the Battle of Britain erupted, many Luftwaffe pilots anticipated a swift victory. Yet soon that confidence had been replaced by chronic fatigue and a crippling fear of drowning in “dirty water”. Victoria Taylor charts the mental disintegration of Hitler’s flyers
On a muggy night in late August 1940, Hinnerk Waller’s fraying tether had finally snapped. Relentlessly deployed in the Battle of Britain as part of the Luftwaffe fighter wing JG 52, Waller was paying for every nerve-wracking sortie with his sanity. Snatching hold of his Walther pistol, he sprinted into some nearby woods with the grim intention of killing himself. A few concerned airmen rose up to stop him, but their Staffelkapitän, Helmut Kühle, bade them to resume their seats. “He was a shrewd judge of character,” as Waller’s friend Ulrich Steinhilper later recalled, “and as we all sat waiting for what we thought was the inevitable shot, nothing happened.” Steinhilper added that this “was our first case of Kanalkrankheit [‘Channel Sickness’] – a combination of chronic stress and acute fatigue” that was brought on by constantly flying in the Battle of Britain. That this dramatic episode came only two months into the Luftschlacht um England (‘Air Battle for England’) – the German name for the Battle of Britain and the Blitz – highlights just how frenetic this aerial campaign had become for the Luftwaffe. Just four days after his suicidal crisis, Waller was unceremoniously flung back onto the frontline. What is most important to observe about his breakdown, however, is that it happened when the Luftwaffe was actually in its most successful phase of the aerial campaign against the RAF. Waller’s mental anguish, then, starkly demonstrates that military success and heightened morale do not necessarily go hand in hand. It also demonstrates that we should be wary about imposing British perspectives on the Luftwaffe’s mentality during the Battle of Britain. The enemy’s flaws Pointing out that the German air force was not as indefatigable as it is often presented is certainly not to downplay the monumental achievement of the RAF’s ‘Few’ in denying the necessary air supremacy and build-up of invasion barges for the Wehrmacht to invade Britain in Operation Sealion. On the contrary, to wear the aggressors down to their last nerve is testimony to the hellacious fight that the RAF put up during the campaign. Yet, if we are to recount faithfully why the Battle of Britain unfolded as it did, we must pinpoint how the Luftwaffe’s internal doubts and weaknesses rapidly conspired to erode its seemingly unflappable fighting spirit. Thoroughly fleshing out the Luftwaffe’s hopes and hangups allows us to transform its historical role in the RAF’s ‘Finest Hour’ from a cartoonish antagonist to a multidimensional, flawed yet formidable opponent. This makes it even more remarkable and crucial that the RAF managed to repel its aerial onslaught. Read more | The real SAS Rogue Heroes: the true stories behind the WW2 drama Mood of jubilation During the spring and early summer of 1940, Nazi Germany had captured Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries and France. With much of Europe sunken under the swastika, the Luftwaffe’s general mood was one of jubilation. Yet, for as long as Britain remained in the war, the Germans were unable to bask in their continental victories. The Luftwaffe had started to ponder clearing the English Channel for an invasion, but they mainly hoped that Britain could be pressured into suing for peace by throttling its essential shipping lines and maritime assets. Thus, on 2 July 1940, Hermann Göring directed Wolfram von Richthofen’s VIII Air Corps to begin attacking “Channel sea traffic”. The first phase of the Battle of Britain – the Channel Battle – was now under way. The German fighter pilot Günther Rall wrote optimistically of needing “a few more days, and the strait will be impassable. Then an essential prerequisite for the invasion will be created.” Yet Adolf Galland, who was more experienced than Rall, noted how “the German pilots thought that the [Nazi] propaganda about England being unprepared was wrong. It annoyed us. We found the English well prepared. Not an easy job. We were not hopeful of victory.” He added that “many pilots feared the water – the small, dirty water. All Channel Flyers felt this. I emphasise: the ‘Shite Kanal’ did as much damage to our morale as the English fighters.” As a Luftwaffe Soldat attached to an airfield operations company wrote on 20 July 1940, “We have a big victory behind us, but the biggest fight is still ahead of us. We don’t have earth beneath us, but water – that’s more dangerous. We hope for the best and wish to return to our homes as victorious soldiers.” British radar, too, was rattling the Luftwaffe. The German fighter pilot Hans-Ekkehard Bob noted of a sortie gone wrong over Britain in late July 1940 that “it was incomprehensible how this [Spitfire] formation could reach us in the rear without any sight in such a good attack position. “Later,” he continued, “we learnt that the British were at that time already in the possession of a kind of radar that could lead exactly in height and direction.” The RAF incorporated radar into the highly sophisticated ‘Dowding System’. Spearheaded by Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the system included radar transmitters, receivers and stations as part of Chain Home and Chain Home Low, the latter of which was optimised for detecting incoming Luftwaffe aircraft at lower altitudes. This not only gave the RAF an advance warning of up to 20 minutes as the Luftwaffe passed over the Channel, but it also constituted a huge blow to the German airmen who feared coming up as a blip on British radar. In the face of this increasing military resistance, Göring instigated Operation Eagle Attack, which was devised to sock the knockout blow to Britain. RAF flying units, ground installations (including radar), supply organisations, and the British aircraft industry would all come under intense attack in this next phase of the Battle of Britain. Göring had made Adolf Hitler the rather lofty promise that the RAF could be subdued within five weeks – spanning from 8 August to 15 September – ahead of the amphibious Wehrmacht invasion on ‘Sealion Day’. After a bout of patchy weather, the Eagle Attack was finally earmarked to commence on 13 August 1940, codenamed Adlertag (‘Eagle Day’). Yet, that same day, a junior doctor with the Luftwaffe bomber wing KG 2 wrote a most forlorn letter to his wife: “Here in France, we are all slowly going crazy. If we don’t get relieved in the autumn, I think almost all of our men will be nervous and exhausted. What has been asked of us for years is too much. God grant us that the last stroke of violence succeeds. As a doctor, I see how things are with us. People gather their last strength to win. The last few days have brought us some terrible experiences. We have lost many brave and loyal comrades and are immensely sad.” Read more | 6 Battle of Britain Myths The junior doctor’s observations suggest that the Luftwaffe was in a far worse psychological state early into the campaign than is often acknowledged. To add to the operational strain, the morning of Adlertag opened with disaster for the Luftwaffe. Several unescorted bomber units did not receive Göring’s early postponement order due to the poor weather, as their radio crystals had not been updated to be compatible with the fighter units’ communication system. As the weather cleared up in the afternoon, the Luftwaffe went on to launch 1,485 sorties, hitting RAF Detling and Eastchurch especially hard. Nevertheless, with much of the German bomber crews striking at the wrong targets, Adlertag exacted too heavy a price for what was achieved. The Luftwaffe lost 42 aircraft, along with 89 pilots and aircrew killed or captured – 13 per cent of its striking force. On 15 August, Göring hastily organised a staff conference to dissect the air force’s mistakes. On this same day, the Germans suffered their heaviest losses of the battle so far – a day they dubbed ‘Black Thursday’ and the RAF hailed ‘The Greatest Day’. Then, on 18 August 1940, came ‘The Hardest Day’, due to the fact that it saw the highest number of combined RAF and Luftwaffe aircraft losses in a single day. By late August, the Eagle Attack began to swing in favour of the Germans, who had managed to bring the kill tallies on both sides to a more even ratio on its best days. Yet, in a reflection of how their hunger for medals and victories could sometimes get the better of them, a captured Leutnant and Oberleutnant were overheard discussing in September 1940 how, “We underrated the English fighters. Recently everyone who wanted a few easy additions to his bag flew over, but they got a surprise.” By late August, Ulrich Steinhilper had become greatly disillusioned with this opportunism: “The picture looked grim. I was thinking we were all fighting to rid the sky of the RAF, and what was really developing was that many individuals were using this battle as a stage upon which they could further their own careers and personal scores, while apparently giving little consideration to the overall tactics or the losses of their men who were behind them. There were times when my morale took severe knocks.” IN NUMBERS: THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN 30,000 is the number of sorties that the Luftwaffe flew over Britain during the Blitz 600% is how much Luftwaffe losses shot up from previous operations during the first week of the ‘Eagle Attack’ in August 1940 26 was the average age of German airmen during the summer of 1940 – six years older than their British counterparts Between 3 and 4 is the number of sorties that it's estimated the average German bomber crew survived during the most intense periods of the air war over Britain The Blitz begins Things were about to get even more complicated. On the night of 24–25 August 1940, stray German bombs were unintentionally dropped over civilian boroughs in East Ham and Bethnal Green. On 7 September, after the British prime minister Winston Churchill immediately greenlit a retaliatory blow from Bomber Command against Berlin, an enraged Göring launched his first major strike against the British capital. The opening day of the Blitz killed 448 civilians and wounded 1,337 more, marking the start of the campaign’s longest phase – one that would run until May 1941. For some Luftwaffe personnel, the Blitz was seen as a natural escalation of the Luftschlacht um England. One Soldat wrote confidently on 8 September 1940 that: “I have a lot of work these days. There is no longer any ‘closing time’ at all. Unfortunately, I cannot write to you about our special tasks. But you will have already heard on the radio in detail about the extensive destruction in England and especially in London caused by our bombers. We’ll soften up the English. Our planes all returned from combat missions yesterday…” Hans-Ekkehard Bob, on the other hand, claimed that “as far as I could learn, the RAF had by accident bombed Berlin. The supreme command retaliated and ordered to bomb London. We, the fighter pilots, were told at that time that strategic aims in the district of London were attacked. The bombing of civilians was out of the question for us.” <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/AKG1129394cmyk-WL-3850251.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A black and white photograph shows a group of children huddled together in a trench, all looking up to the sky" title="Children shelter in a trench in hop fields in Kent in September 1940, while RAF fighters engage with Luftwaffe bombers on the way to attack London (Image by AKG)" /> Not all Luftwaffe airmen, however, shared Bob’s sentiments when it came to attacking non-military targets. One captured Luftwaffe prisoner reportedly said of bombing British hospitals: “Well, the people are half dead anyway, and if the hospitals are bombed, no fresh casualties can be admitted.” Another had tried to bomb Hyde Park because “he knew there were a lot of air raid shelters there”. In a bugged conversation between three captured fighter pilots from September 1940, one claimed that “England is invincible. That is the mentality of the people here, and if every civilian defends his home stubbornly, then it’s a difficult matter.” His colleague replied: “They’ll simply be shot.” Thus, even the German fighter pilots – who are often portrayed as a noble adversary to Fighter Command in British histories – were hardly blind to the criminal nature of the regime they were fighting for, nor the deadly repercussions of a Luftwaffe victory for Britain. On 15 September 1940, the Luftwaffe launched a major raid on London, Portsmouth and Southampton. Benefiting from the lull in attacks on RAF airfields during the Blitz, however, a revitalised Fighter Command shot down 56 German planes – two for every British fighter lost. The RAF would hail this day as ‘Battle of Britain Day’; the Luftwaffe would remember it as a disaster. The bomber pilot Otto Bechtle said of his men’s losses that “the whole Gruppe was nearly demoralised. It was a drunken party, weeping for comrades. The survivors sang: ‘The steel wings are flashing; the Tommy has given us a hiding.’” This defiant counterattack stunned Hitler into postponing Sealion indefinitely on 17 September 1940. From July until the end of October, the Germans lost around 1,887 aircraft of all types. The Luftwaffe’s nerves were now so on edge that an unprecedented number of 79 suicides and suicide attempts was reached among its personnel between mid-September and October 1940. By 1941, the Luftwaffe surgeon-general even had to issue a special directive that dealt with the prevention of suicide within the organisation. The impact of losses Towards the end of 1940, however, it was not just the Luftwaffe’s mental wellbeing that was suffering. The German air force’s lack of a proper reserve compared to that of the RAF meant that, as the senior Luftwaffe psychologist Dr Siegfried Gerathewohl put it, “even the totally unsuitable were accepted for training”. Inexperienced and overzealous recruits posed a risk not just to themselves, but also to their more senior commanders. Oberst Johannes Fink, who was Kommodore of the bomber wing KG 2, witnessed the disconcerting combination of operational naivety and night-time flying during the Blitz. “On the way back from London, I saw the flight mechanic of a plane ahead fire wildly and shoot holes in his own tail. In my aircraft, all the crew were wounded. No pilot in my aircraft – I flew the machine myself, had only the observer/bomb aimer up front with me. All except me were wounded, mostly splinters. I had a map in my hand – a bullet went through the map. When we got back to the airfield, the flight mechanic of the machine ahead was excitedly pointing to all the holes in the tail of his aircraft and saying what a narrow escape he’d had: ‘Look at all the hits we’ve had.’ I walked up to him and said: ‘That was you.’” More alarming still for the Luftwaffe was the number of airmen being lost in crashes in the darkness, as well as those forced to bale out over the English Channel during the perishing autumn and winter months. In November 1940, a British intelligence report documented that “a total of 158 German air force personnel were reported, as either PoW or dead, by this section. Of these, 54 were living and 104 dead, which is a considerable reversal of the proportions previously encountered.” Throughout the Blitz, the Luftwaffe haemorrhaged a further 600 bombers on top of its previous losses in the main Battle of Britain – resulting in a total of 2,487 German aircraft lost across the entire Luftschlacht um England. Nearly 2,000 members of its flying crews were killed and a further 2,600 had gone missing during its full 10-month assault on Britain. Although the Luftwaffe’s bomber crews had succeeded in leaving scores of British cities in rubble, the country’s overall wartime production had not been greatly affected in return for the considerable strain of launching nearly 30,000 sorties during the Blitz alone. Some Luftwaffe veterans later tried to downplay the long-term detrimental effects of the British campaign on its operational strength, with Walter Lehweß-Litzmann – who later became the Kommodore of a Luftwaffe bomber wing – claiming that “the Luftwaffe was by no means weakened as it moved east, as its superior initial effectiveness subsequently demonstrated. The crew losses over England were offset by the combat experience gained by the units and commanders, of which I was a member.” In reality, however, the Luftwaffe that headed into 1941 had been badly affected in both the quantity of its aircraft and quality of its aircrews. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/H3AE57cmyk-WL-21c8ed3.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="A group of men in military uniform stand around a map, with two men in the front bent over it, discussing things" title="A Luftwaffe unit receives a briefing. By late 1941, the losses incurred in the Battle of Britain had blunted the German air force’s firepower (Image by Alamy)" /> The butterfly effect The Germans knew that a failure to subdue the British in 1940–41 would now have negative repercussions for the war in the Mediterranean and north Africa, with the Luftwaffe having been assigned to protect General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps in February 1941. And, with the Luftwaffe failing to replace its earlier losses over Britain, the further depletion of its operational bomber strength during the six-month struggle of ‘Barbarossa’ – the titanic invasion of the Soviet Union – was acutely felt. By the time that the USA entered the war in December 1941, the Luftwaffe theoretically fielded only 47 per cent of its intended bomber strength. And, with roughly half of these aircraft actually being in commission, the Luftwaffe possessed just 468 serviceable operational bombers by the first week of December 1941. The true importance of the Luftwaffe failing to knock the British out of the war during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, then, lies in the potent butterfly effect that this failure triggered. Its disappointing aerial campaign over Britain may not have guaranteed Nazi Germany’s eventual defeat, but the unfavourable outcome had certainly robbed the Axis of being able to secure a swift, decisive and straightforward victory by 1941. Read more | The Few: who exactly were the heroes of the Battle of Britain? Thus, as Herbert Rieckhoff – formerly the Geschwaderkommodore of the bomber wing KG 30 – later confirmed, “the first blow from which [the Luftwaffe] never recovered came in the late summer of 1940, during the fight against England. This was followed by the Blitz against England in 1940/41, in which it slowly continued to bleed out.” Fighter Command, then, had not only saved Britain from going down the darkest of timelines. It had also helped to wear down the German airmen’s resources and resolve. In doing so, it helped set a crucial precedent for the Luftwaffe’s chronic overexertion during the latter half of the Second World War. Timeline: The Luftwaffe's assault on Britain 10 July 1940 The Battle of Britain begins The intensification of German air attacks against Allied shipping in the English Channel marks the opening of the ‘Channel Battle’. The Luftwaffe flies more than 1,300 sorties during this five-week phase. 13 August Hitler ramps up the pressure ‘Eagle Day’ sees the Luftwaffe beginning a full-scale assault on RAF airfields, radar installations and other critical defence infra- structure. The Germans lose 48 aircraft in the air, compared to 13 for the British. 15 August A black day for the Luftwaffe The Luftwaffe loses a further 75 aircraft on what it dubs ‘Black Thursday’. Fighter Command, which sustains less than half of the losses incurred by the Germans, hails this ‘The Greatest Day’. 18 August ‘The Hardest Day’ Fierce air battles over southern England, including RAF Kenley and Biggin Hill, result in Fighter Command losing 68 fighters to 69 Luftwaffe aircraft downed – the heaviest daily combined loss for both sides. 24/25 August Britain bombs Berlin Perceiving stray German bombs that accidentally hit residential London areas on 24 August to be deliberate, Winston Churchill greenlights a retaliatory blow against Berlin on 25 August. 7 September London is hit hard Göring launches his first thunderous attack on London and other neighbouring cities, describing it as “a stroke right into the enemy’s heart”. A total of 448 British civilians are killed and 1,337 are injured. 17 September Hitler shelves invasion plans During a raid on London, Portsmouth and Southampton on 15 September, the Luftwaffe loses two aircraft for every British fighter lost. Two days later, Hitler postpones Operation Sealion indefinitely. 31 October The Battle of Britain comes to an end The Germans launch their final daylight raid before the solely nocturnal phase of the Blitz gets under way. This signals the end of the Battle of Britain. 14-15 November Coventry takes a pounding The Luftwaffe inflicts a deadly raid on Coventry. The bombing kills 554, while a third of the city’s houses are destroyed and Coventry Cathedral is razed to the ground. 10-11 May 1941 The last major raid With 1,500 civilians killed, 10–11 May marks London’s ‘Hardest Night’ of the Blitz. By the end of the Blitz that month, around 43,000 British civilians have lost their lives. Victoria Taylor is an aviation historian. Her new book, Eagle Days: Life and Death for the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, is out now, published by Apollo This column was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Winston Churchill: is he still the greatest Briton in history?
Over two decades ago, a BBC poll named the wartime British prime minister as the Greatest Briton. Now, on the 150th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s birth, David Reynolds ponders whether he deserves to remain as top dog in the pantheon of British history
In a much-publicised poll in 2002, the BBC asked viewers to rank figures from British history, as part of the television series 100 Greatest Britons. The poll was in no way scientific, but simply reflected votes – more than 1.6 million of them – from people who chose to contact the BBC, following presentations championing famous individuals ranging back in time from the 20th century to William Shakespeare and Elizabeth I. As is well known, Winston Churchill came out a clear first, garnering close to 457,000 votes. Two decades later, as we mark 150 years since he was born, it’s interesting to revisit that moment, and to reflect on how perceptions of Churchill have changed over time – and also on what is meant by historical ‘greatness’. Because Churchill’s craving to make himself ‘great’ lies at the heart of his extraordinary story. In the run-up to the BBC poll, politician Mo Mowlam – Churchill’s advocate – insisted that “he was the greatest Briton because he showed the determination and courage to protect Britain from invasion, and without his inspiring leadership the outcome of World War II may have been very different”. Let’s unpack that claim a bit. Did Churchill really make such a difference in 1940 – and, if so, how? The answer to the first part is surely: yes – most of all through his energy and drive. Although the tempo in Whitehall would have intensified anyway with the end of the ‘Phoney War’ and the German invasion of France, Churchill’s appointment as prime minister had a galvanising effect, dramatically symbolised by his famous red labels stuck on urgent documents: ACTION THIS DAY. Equally important, Churchill took a firm grip on military strategy. Mindful of the confusion and infighting of 1914–18, he appointed himself minister of defence. There was no ministry – that did not come until the 1960s. Churchill simply wanted the authority to deal with the chiefs of staff directly rather than via their politician ministers. He yearned to be a war leader, unlike Neville Chamberlain – his predecessor as PM – or Lord Halifax, the alternative when Chamberlain lost the support of the Commons. Neither of them had any appetite for such a role, whereas Churchill – a soldier by training – had dreamed of it since childhood. Read more | Neville Chamberlain is underestimated, argues author Robert Harris Churchill was also an accomplished communicator. Often he’s remembered for his soundbites – ‘fight them on the beaches’, ‘finest hour’, ‘special relationship’ – but these were only the icing on the cake. Churchill regarded his speeches as tools of public education, helping the British population understand what became known as ‘the people’s war’. When Adolf Hitler invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, Churchill gave a radio address on the BBC about what he called “the Fourth Climacteric”, connecting it to three earlier turning points in the war. He spent hours preparing his speeches in a way that may seem inconceivable now in the days of tweets and social media. There isn’t space here to do full justice to Churchill’s impact, but one other point should be mentioned. Most British premiers had received a classical education, informed by Latin, Greek and philosophy; few had any grasp of science and technology. By contrast, Churchill loathed the classics but was fascinated by gadgets and science fiction – by the world of HG Wells. That’s why he quickly grasped the value of Ultra – the operation to intercept enemy signals intelligence – and ensured that the codebreakers of Bletchley Park were provided with an abundance of money and gifted personnel. Read more | Bletchley Park: Britain's wartime intelligence factory The people’s war Yet there’s another side to the story of 1940 that was not voiced by Mo Mowlam. More important than Churchill’s “courage and determination” in protecting Britain from invasion after France fell were decisions during the 1930s by governments of which he was not a part. Key among these was the development of a new generation of fast monoplane fighters – Hurricanes and Spitfires – linked to the Chain Home system of radar stations giving crucial early warning of when and where enemy bombers were crossing the Channel. Churchill was aware of these developments, and contributed to some of the discussions, but these were his ‘Wilderness Years’ when he was out of office. The decisions were made while the ‘appeasers’ were in power – and they were vital in winning the Battle of Britain. That highlights a deeper point. Technological innovations such as radar and Ultra could have been developed only by an advanced industrial state – by what historian David Edgerton has called the ‘warfare state’ – often neglected in accounts of modern Britain because of a preoccupation with the welfare state. The war that Churchill waged was possible only because of a long series of decisions and developments going back to the industrial revolution. This provides a salutary reminder that an intense focus on individual leaders can blind us to structural factors that also shape historical change. Victory or bust Surviving 1940 was one thing; winning the war was very different. Three days into his premiership, Churchill told the Commons that his goal was “victory at all costs”. Yet after the French signed an armistice with Germany on 22 June, that sounded like fantasy. France had been Britain’s principal ally throughout the First World War, its army anchoring the western front. Britain was now alone – and there was no western front on the continent of Europe. Britain and its empire – from Canada to India, from the Caribbean to Australasia – made a major contribution to the war, but eventual victory over Hitler and the Axis depended substantially on the Soviet Union and the US. Put simply, the Soviets provided the manpower, the Americans the firepower. Read more | 1942: Churchill's darkest hour Between June 1941 and June 1944 – from the opening of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union until D-Day – more than 90 per cent of the German army’s battle casualties (killed, wounded, missing and prisoners) were inflicted by the Red Army. The US was the ‘arsenal of democracy’, producing an abundance of munitions and supplies, much of which was shared with its allies through Lend-Lease aid. And the arrival of the US and Soviet armies in Germany in 1945 was a prelude to the Cold War division of Europe between these two superpowers. Read more | Churchill's evolving perspective on D-Day Of course, Churchill was no mere spectator in all of this. The stereotype of the ‘bulldog’ can easily blind us to his remarkable skills as improviser. Even before the fall of France, he was assiduously courting president Franklin D Roosevelt with messages, later followed by personal visits to the US. He did the same with Joseph Stalin from 1942, becoming the essential intermediary between the White House and the Kremlin. During a photo shoot at the Tehran conference in November 1943, when someone remarked that the ‘Big Three’ looked like the Holy Trinity, Stalin responded: “If that is so, Churchill must be the Holy Ghost. He flies around so much.” The PM’s improvisations in shuttle diplomacy helped keep Britain in the diplomatic game – but by 1945, nothing could obscure the fact that the Big Three was more like the Big 2½. Strategy for greatness All that being so, the reason why he looms so large in accounts of the war, almost obscuring anyone and anything else, is because of Churchill the historian. We remember him in part because he was utterly determined not to be forgotten. That had been true all his life. Right from the start, he had a clear strategy for greatness: hit the headlines as a soldier or a politician, then be sure to write your own account. Deeds and words: both were essential to ensure that his story became history. That’s what he did in the Second World War – a hefty six-pack of volumes published between 1948 and 1954, less than a decade after victory was won. No other war leader was a serious competitor. Roosevelt died before the war ended; Stalin published no autobiography; and the trilogy of war memoirs by Charles de Gaulle did not appear until 1954–59. So Churchill got into print quickly and in formidable detail, determined to shape the public narrative before others could do so. He was careful to say that his work was not history but “a contribution to history which will be of service to the future”, told mainly from the vantage point of Number 10. But the heavy ballast of quotation from his own minutes, memos and telegrams, and the absence of replies (partly to avoid long wrangles about copyright), had the effect, as the cabinet secretary put it, of “creating the impression that no one but he ever took an initiative”. Read more | Did Churchill and Hitler ever meet? And the choice of title – The Second World War rather than War Memoirs – enhanced the sense that Churchill’s personal story enfolded the whole global conflict. The hardback sold 2 million copies in Britain and a similar number in the US. And Churchill’s take on the war reached even larger audiences around the world through book translations and newspaper serialisations. That was not the end of Churchill’s history-making – only the end of the beginning. Before his death in 1965, he commissioned an official biography, based on privileged access to his papers. His son, Randolph, authored the first two volumes before his own death in 1968; the work was completed by the Oxford historian Martin Gilbert, with the eighth and final volume appearing in 1988. The furrows that Churchill had dug through the war were deepened further by 23 volumes of documents, a project started by Gilbert and rounded off by wealthy acolytes in the US. Screen portrayals of the 1930s and the war also kept him centre-stage, initiated by Robert Hardy in the ITV series Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years in 1981, for which Gilbert was co-scriptwriter. Read more | Books interview with Boris Johnson: "Churchill was a tremendous bully in some ways, but we needed a bully" Later depictions featured Albert Finney (The Gathering Storm, 2002), Brendan Gleeson (Into the Storm, 2009) and Gary Oldman (Darkest Hour, 2017). Popular biographies took the same approach, encapsulated by Boris Johnson’s entertaining contribution, The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (2014). Creating an icon As historians Allen Packwood and Warren Dockter have observed: “Churchill the writer played a key role in creating Churchill the icon,” adding that “ironically, in doing so he also raised his own profile to such a level that challenges to his reputation became inevitable.” Even before Churchill died, an edited version of the diaries of Lord Alanbrooke, wartime chief of the Imperial General Staff, revealed some of the challenges of working with this volatile genius. Within a year of Churchill’s death his doctor, Lord Moran, went into print with Winston Churchill: The Struggle for Survival, provoking a storm of controversy about the ethics of a physician writing about his patient. And in 1970, Robert Rhodes James, formerly one of Randolph’s research assistants, published a biography of Churchill up to the Second World War. In it he argued that, had Churchill died in 1939, his life would have been deemed A Study in Failure. Seen that way, the war premiership stood out as an aberration. Like any historical personage, over time Churchill was becoming a figure of controversy, and the mass of documents published by the Churchillians fed the debate, both for and against. In any case, historical perspectives inevitably shift with time. Mo Mowlam, his BBC champion in 2002, was born in 1949. For people of that generation, and for those who lived through the war, the conflict still seemed all too present – not least in the urban wastelands and prefab housing that bore witness to the Blitz in many cities, and in the emotional power of Remembrance Sunday. Yet for ‘Gen Z’, born in the late 1990s and 2000s, the Second World War can seem almost prehistoric. Britain today is far more ethnically diverse than the predominantly white country led by Churchill in 1940–45, largely the result of postwar immigration from the former British empire. Read more | “London is the place for me”: David Olusoga on the Windrush generation Earlier statistics are not precise, but census returns for the past few decades show that the proportion of people in England and Wales identifying themselves as ‘white’ fell from 91.3 per cent in 2001 to 81.7 per cent in 2021, by which time 9.3 per cent of residents described themselves as Asian, 4 per cent as black and 2.9 per cent as mixed race. Although many of these people had been born in Britain, they often had a different sense of their heritage from Mowlam’s generation, influenced by parents or grandparents who grew up in the Caribbean or south Asia. In recent years, there has been a passionate debate about India’s war. For that nation, the focal wartime trauma was not the Blitz but the Bengal Famine of 1943–44, which killed perhaps 3 million. Causes and contributing factors are complex and hard to balance, including floods, crop disease and wartime inflation in Bengal, the disastrous fall in rice imports after Japan’s conquest of Burma, the slow reaction of the British authorities, and the shortage of shipping in 1943–44 because of the Allied build-up for D-Day. But in Churchill’s Secret War: The British Empire and the Ravaging of India during World War II (2010), Indian-American journalist Madhusree Mukerjee blamed much of the policy failure on the PM. Churchill’s contempt for what he called (privately) in February 1945 the “foul race” of Hindus was noted by many British politicians and officials of the time, and drove his conviction that Indians were not capable of self-government. Read more | The untold story of India’s WW2 prisoners of war The debate was fanned anew by the Black Lives Matter movement in the US and the UK after 2019. Accusations of genocide were levelled at Churchill, and his statue in London’s Parliament Square was daubed with “was a racist”. Churchillians offered robust defence, but the anti-Churchill polemics – often based on ignorance of the detailed story – remind us that heroes can easily be turned into villains as perspectives change. A rival perspective It’s often said that Churchill’s attitude to India was just part of the mental baggage of Victorian England. A glance at Clement Attlee, his successor as PM in 1945, offers a useful corrective. In fact, examining Attlee’s rise to power provides an intriguing perspective on Churchill’s world view. Born in 1883 – thus also a Victorian, though eight years younger than Churchill – Attlee grew up in a prosperous professional family in the south-west London suburb of Putney. Whereas Churchill’s imperialist ideology was shaped by service as a soldier on the frontiers of Victoria’s empire, Attlee’s crucible was London’s East End. Attlee lived in a social work settlement for nearly a decade before the First World War. This opened his eyes to urban deprivation, but also to the potential of many adolescents in London’s docklands if given discipline and motivation. He became a lifelong socialist. Read more | Why Churchill’s reputation is still on the line Unlike many Labour men of that era, Major Attlee was no pacifist. He served as an officer in the Gallipoli campaign and on the western front. But he was not an imperial diehard like Churchill, who never set foot in India after the 1890s. Two extended tours around the Raj with a parliamentary delegation in 1928–29 convinced Attlee that India must follow Australia and New Zealand along the path to self-government and eventual independence. And he acted on that conviction as prime minister in 1945–51. With the death of Churchill in January 1965, Attlee penned a reflective tribute, judging him to have been “the greatest leader in war this country has ever known”. Not because he was the greatest warrior or strategist, but because “he was able to solve the problem that democratic countries in total war find crucial and may find fatal: relations between the civil and military leaders.” Attlee had in mind the 1914–18 feuds between ‘Frock Coats’ and ‘Brass Hats’, but maybe also the ‘Bonapartist’ tendency of successful war leaders to seize political power. When Churchill put himself before the electorate in 1945 and was resoundingly defeated, he accepted their verdict, despite deep resentment at being kicked out. Read more | Churchill: the ‘cry-baby’ war hero Attlee regretted the fact that Churchill did not retire from politics in 1945. “I had seen enough of him during the war to be sure that, unless there was a war on, he would not make much of a prime minister,” he wrote. Instead, “what Britain required when the war was over was an architect, somebody who could build new parts into our society, and repair damage.” Attlee was, of course, positioning himself as the architect trying to repair the damage of two world wars and rebuild British society on socialist lines. Both Churchill and Attlee were deeply patriotic, but they differed about the essence of national greatness. For Winston it was the empire, whereas Clem saw imperial overstretch as an outdated burden. Despite the eventual bloodbath over the partition of India, Attlee was proud of bringing the Raj to what he saw as a long-overdue end, and of helping transform empire into Commonwealth. At home, what mattered for him was the concept of social security he had evolved in the East End, and “the duty of the state to act as the coordinating factor in making all individual effort work for the good of the citizen”. Commonwealth and socialism defined his sense of what it meant for Britain to be great. In this piece I’ve emphasised the importance of seeing Churchill in context – against the wider dynamics of the Second World War and in relation to his contemporaries. Back in the 1890s, Rudyard Kipling rebuked those who held a myopic view of English history: “What should they know of England who only England know?” Adapting Kipling, we might ask today: “What should they know of Churchill who only Churchill know?” By definition, a biography tends to isolate its subject as good or bad. Placing a leader in context is surely the task of any historian. For me, the question of who was the greatest ever Briton makes no sense. But I’ve no doubt that, in his ‘finest hour’, Winston Churchill did win the immortality he craved. David Reynolds is emeritus professor of international history at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him (William Collins, 2023) This article was first published in the Christmas 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine
Overwhelming odds and inevitable invasions: 3 myths surrounding the Battle of Britain
The Battle of Britain has a resounding legacy in Britain – an unlikely victory against overwhelming odds that could have seen the country stand or fall. However, as Victoria Taylor explains, the conflict is shrouded in myth that has somewhat shifted our understanding of its nature…
Please note: this is a transcript of an extract from an upcoming episode of the HistoryExtra podcast that has been lightly edited for clarity. The full episode will be released in September 2023 here. There are three major myths surrounding the Battle of Britain that tend to be perpetuated within British wartime mythology. The Luftwaffe vastly outnumbered the RAF The first for me is this idea that the Luftwaffe vastly outnumbered the RAF. It's true, to some degree, that the RAF initially lacked in fighter pilots compared to the Germans – at the start of the conflict, the RAF numbered around 1,113 operational fighter pilots, with the Luftwaffe being closer to 1,450. There's also differences in the operational aircraft – the RAF is looking at around 650 operational fighter aircraft, whereas the Luftwaffe is a little bit closer to 1,000. Read more | 8 reasons why the Luftwaffe didn't stand a chance against the RAF in the Battle of Britain But that really discounts from the fact that British aircraft production ramped up in this period. Both sides are pretty much at about 1,000 operational fighters apiece as we get into August 1940 and the real action of the Battle of Britain. So, that's the first myth for me. Operation Sealion was Germany’s ultimate goal The second myth is that Operation Sealion was Germany’s ultimate goal. It's common for us in Britain to think of this moment as Britain's finest hour because it saw our defence of the realm against the entirety of the Wehrmacht, the unified armed forces of Nazi Germany. It wasn’t just defeating the Luftwaffe, but it stopped the Kriegsmarine, which was the German navy, as well as the German army from attacking Britain. Read more | What was Operation Sealion? But, at the same time, this wasn't the German’s goal. They were hoping to try and get Britain to sue for peace. They were trying to go for the easy option because they've already had losses in the Battle of France, and they're hoping they're not going to have to replicate them again against the British. They've come up against Spitfires at Dunkirk – they don't want to be messing too much with the British. As a result, it's important to remember that if the Germans can get out of this as cleanly as possible by attacking British shipping, getting a blockade going and trying to get British politicians to sue for peace, that suits them far easier than going into a difficult and complicated amphibious landing. That's a big hint for me that Operation Sealion wasn't inevitable – of course they made plans for it and these preparations were intense, but they were hoping that that was going to be the worst-case scenario. It wasn’t always a gentlemanly joust Finally, the third big myth of the Battle of Britain, and one which is perhaps the most controversial, is the fact that it wasn’t always a gentlemanly joust. It was common for Luftwaffe and RAF fighter pilots to forge bonds after the war, because of their shared experience. In a lot of cases there was some level of gentlemanly conduct in the skies – it was well known that some Luftwaffe and RAF planes let each other escape with a wave. But, in other cases, we have to bear in mind that there were moments where British fighters shot down German air-sea rescue service planes. And there were points where German gunboats ended up opening up on British rescue vessels. It's really important to remember that this isn't just a ‘knights of the skies’ narrative, but that this really was a fight to the death that did see moments of humanity creeping in. Victoria Taylor is an aviation historian who is just completing her PhD in the Luftwaffe and its politicisation under the Nazis.
The Battle of Britain, which took place between July and October 1940, was a major air campaign in which Britain’s Royal Air Force defended the British Isles against Nazi Germany’s air force, the Luftwaffe
Swedish historian Christer Bergström dispels six myths that still surround the epic Battle of Britain – from the role of Bomber Command and the competence of the Luftwaffe’s commander Hermann Göring, to the flying skills of the German and British fighter pilots who fought the battle for the skies. Writing for HistoryExtra, the author of The Battle of Britain – an Epic Conflict Revisited separates facts from fiction… Myth: The Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring was incompetent According to popular perception, the commander of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring (aka Goering), was a totally incompetent commander, whose unfortunate decisions placed the Luftwaffe in an unnecessarily difficult position. Certainly, he was a ruthless Nazi who eventually amassed a huge list of crimes against humanity. However, the widespread image of him as a thoroughly incompetent air force commander needs to be corrected. At the beginning of WW2, the Luftwaffe, the most effective air force in the world, was, after all, Göring’s very personal creation. Admittedly, not everything about the Luftwaffe was a result to Göring’s accomplishments, but he had the ability to put the right man in the right place, and he was more open to new, revolutionary ideas than many of his younger subordinates. Watch: 3 biggest myths about the Battle of Britain View Green Video on the source website Göring realised early the benefits of new types of combat aviation, such as dive-bombers and long-range fighter escort. As one of the first air force commanders in the world he also took the initiative to create a specialised night-fighter force: early in the war, he ordered a couple of fighter units to begin night-fighter experiments. The twin-engined Messerschmitt Bf 110 proved to be the aircraft best suited for this task, and in June 1940 Göring decided to redesign the fighter wing I./ZG 1 under Hauptmann Wolfgang Falck to become the first regular night-fighter unit, NJG 1. Hermann Göring also had an inspiring effect on his subordinates. Hans-Jürgen Stumpff, who commanded Luftflotte 5 during the Battle of Britain, described Göring as a man “with a tremendous strength; he was full of bright ideas. After each meeting with him you felt strongly inspired and filled with energy”. What happened during the Battle of Britain? Described by prime minister Winston Churchill as the RAF’s finest hour, the Battle of Britain (10 July – 31 October 1940) was the first major military campaign in history to be fought entirely in the air. Historian Julian Humphrys takes us through some of the biggest questions and facts surrounding this pivotal aerial campaign… Your guide to the Battle of Britain: how the RAF turned back the Luftwaffe Myth: Hermann Göring ruined the German possibilities to win the battle by turning the attention against London <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2015/10/March2019382C20German20Fuhrer20Adolf20Hitler2C20left2C20and20Prussian20premier20Hermann20Goering_0-8a8a289-efc2627.jpg" width="620" height="413" alt="17 March 1938: German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, left, and Hermann Göring watch a parade honouring Hitler while standing on a balcony at the Chancellory, Berlin, Germany. Hitler had just annexed Austria in the Anschluss. (Photo by Three Lions/Getty Images)" title="17 March 1938: German Fuhrer Adolf Hitler, left, and Hermann Göring watch a parade honouring Hitler while standing on a balcony at the Chancellory, Berlin, Germany. Hitler had just annexed Austria in the Anschluss. (Photo by Three Lions/Getty Images)" /> It is a fact that just when RAF Fighter Command was on the brink of destruction as a result of German air raids against its ground organisation, the Germans shifted focus and started to bomb London instead. This took place on 7 September 1940, and it gave the RAF a ‘breather’, which was used to repair the destroyed installations. When Fighter Command met the Luftwaffe in force again, on 15 September, the result was the decisive victory that compelled Hitler to cancel the planned invasion of Great Britain. Hermann Göring has often received the blame for this change in tactic. But a study of first-hand sources show that no one was more staunchly opposed than him to shifting the air offensive towards London. Myth: Bomber Command played a minor role in the Battle of Britain Winston Churchill’s speech in the British parliament on 20 August 1940 is well known: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. All hearts go out to the fighter pilots, whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day.” However, precisely what Churchill immediately afterwards asked us not to forget has been largely omitted in historiography on the Battle of Britain: “But we must never forget that all the time, night after night, month after month, our bomber squadrons travel far into Germany, find their targets in the darkness by the highest navigational skill, aim their attacks, often under the heaviest fire, often with serious loss, with deliberate careful discrimination, and inflict shattering blows upon the whole of the technical and war-making structure of the Nazi power.” In fact, had it not been for the British bombings of Berlin from late August 1940 and onward, the Battle of Britain might have ended quite differently. The small-scale Berlin raids in 1940, carried out by a handful of bombers with totally inadequate navigational equipment, have been regarded as more or less meaningless pinpricks. But this disregards the main object of warfare: to destroy the enemy’s fighting spirit. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/01/Winston20Churchill20inspects20bomb20damage20caused20by20Luftwaffe20night20raids20in20Ramsgate2C20Kent2C20England20on202820August201940_0-440087d.jpg" width="623" height="623" alt="Winston Churchill inspects bomb damage caused by Luftwaffe night raids in Ramsgate, Kent, on 28 August 1940. Eight days previously he had delivered his famous speech in parliament. (Photo by Capt. Horton/ IWM via Getty Images)" title="Winston Churchill inspects bomb damage caused by Luftwaffe night raids in Ramsgate, Kent, on 28 August 1940. Eight days previously he had delivered his famous speech in parliament. (Photo by Capt. Horton/ IWM via Getty Images)" /> On 1 September 1940, American correspondent William Shirer (the US was, at that time, still a neutral country) wrote in his diary in Berlin: “The main effect of a week of constant British night bombings has been to spread great disillusionment among the people here and sow doubt in their minds. One said to me today: ‘I’ll never believe another thing they say. If they’ve lied about the raids in the rest of Germany as they have about the ones on Berlin, then it must have been pretty bad there.’” The direct effect of these ‘pinprick’ raids was that Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to stop attacking RAF Fighter Command’s ground organisation and instead start bombing London. It is commonly accepted that this was what saved Fighter Command from annihilation. But RAF Bomber Command contributed to the victory in several other ways too. Through incessant nocturnal harassment raids, the RAF bombers disturbed the sleep of the German airmen, which – according to German reports – had serious consequences. The RAF bombers also wrought a great deal of havoc among the barges that made up the German invasion fleet, and, not least, helped to raise spirits among the hard-pressed British population. Days of destiny: 5 key moments of the Battle of Britain Myth: The twin-engined Messerschmitt Bf 110 was worthless as a fighter Beginning in early September 1940, some German air units equipped with the twin-engined fighter plane Messerschmitt Bf 110 were withdrawn from the English Channel to be used as night fighters. Sometimes this has been regarded as a ‘degradation’ of the Bf 110. In fact, under heavy pressure from Hitler and the German population to put an end to the night raids against Berlin and other German cities, Göring chose to use his very best fighter plane, the Bf 110. This should come as a surprise to many, because a fairly common notion is that the Bf 110 didn’t suffice as a day fighter; that it performed poorly in combat; and because of this had to be assigned with fighter escorts of single-engined Bf 109s. However, none of this stands up to closer scrutiny. The twin-engined, long-range fighter Bf 110 was the result of the war games conducted under Göring’s supervision in the winter of 1933/34. These showed that the prevailing view by then that “the bombers will always get through” – the notion that regardless of intercepting fighters and air defence a sufficient number of bombers always would get through to their assigned targets, where they were expected to cause enormous damage – was incorrect. In the summer of 1934, the leadership of the still secret Luftwaffe presented a study that suggested what at that time was quite revolutionary: a twin-engined fighter, heavily armed with automatic cannons as well as machine guns, to protect the bombers against enemy fighter interception. The idea was to dispatch these twin-engined fighter aircraft in advance, at a high altitude over the intended bombing target area, to clear the air of enemy fighters before the bombers arrived. In fact, when used in that way, the Messerschmitt Bf 110 was quite successful. Actually, the Bf 110 appears to have had a better ratio of shot down enemy aircraft to own combat losses than any other fighter type during the Battle of Britain. Yet in most accounts of the Battle of Britain, the accomplishments of the Bf 110 have been nearly totally neglected (although admittedly this is largely a result of the inaccessibility of sources on this aircraft). Investigations of the available material have enabled a completely different picture to be drawn of the Bf 110 during the Battle of Britain. Bf 110 fighter units sustained some very heavy losses on various occasions. In most cases, however, this was when the Bf 110 fighters were ordered to fly slow, close-escort missions to German bombers. In those cases, there was no difference between what the Bf 110 suffered and what the Bf 109 suffered. There are numerous cases where Bf 109 units were absolutely thrashed by RAF fighters because they had to fly on foolishly slow close-escort missions. In this way, Bf 110-equipped I./ZG 26 lost six aircraft over the North Sea on 15 August 1940, just as Bf 109-equipped I./JG 77 lost five aircraft on 31 August 1940, to pick just two examples. Myth: Göring despised the German fighters Göring has been accused of advocating these slow-flying, close escort missions. In reality, as protocols from Luftwaffe conferences show, things were exactly the opposite. No one advocated the German fighters to be unleashed on free hunting – where they were most effective – more strongly than Hermann Göring. The people who ordered the fighters to fly these close-escort missions were the commanders at the English Channel. Göring, in fact, favoured the fighter pilots, quite contrary to what many of them have stated after the war, and he heaped medals and awards on them as with no other pilots. Myth: The German Bf 109 pilots were absolutely superior to the RAF’s fighter pilots In recent years, it has been popular to revise the Battle of Britain in a way that gives the impression that the German Bf 109 pilots were absolutely superior to the RAF’s fighter pilots. Of course, some of the most experienced Luftwaffe pilots – such as Adolf Galland and Werner Mölders – had accumulated a far greater experience than most RAF pilots. But a comparison between British and German pilot training shows that they were of about equal standard. How the RAF won the war What, however, is fairly clear when one compares RAF fighter pilots with German airmen during the Battle of Britain is that the RAF pilots generally fought with a greater stamina than many of their opponents. While it was not uncommon to see a dozen RAF pilots climb to intercept a many times larger German formation in their relatively obsolete Hurricanes, whole German bomber formations could jettison their bombs when RAF fighters appeared, or German fighter pilots would be satisfied with one gunnery run at a British formation. There also were several cases when RAF pilots deliberately rammed an enemy aircraft. Beyond the Battle of Britain: 9 podcasts about war and military history Guts, glory, tragedy, waste – they can all be found in the annals of military history. Explore beyond the Battle of Britain in these nine podcasts from the HistoryExtra archives, incluiding episodes on the Battle of Trafalgar, war trauma and the role of Indian soldiers in World War One By comparing RAF fighter losses with the number of lost Bf 109s, some writers have in recent times drawn the erroneous conclusion that the Bf 109 units on average shot down two RAF planes for each own loss. By revealing the number of RAF aircraft that were shot down by Bf 110s, this conclusion proves to be utterly false. The ‘revisionist’ version of the Battle of Britain, according to which the courage and efforts made by the RAF airmen is ‘exaggerated’, also does not stand up to scrutiny. It is beyond any doubt that without the unparalleled courage and efforts by ‘The Few’, and the contribution made by the RAF bomber crews, the Battle of Britain would not have been won. Christer Bergström is the author of several highly acclaimed Second World War and aviation books, such as The Battle of Britain – an Epic Conflict Revisited (Casemate UK, 2015) and Black Cross/Red Star: Operation Barbarossa 1941 v. 1: The Air War Over the Eastern Front (Pacific Military History, 2000) This article was first published by HistoryExtra in October 2015
The difficult birth of the Spitfire – and how the WW2 fighter almost missed the battle of Britain
Adored by its pilots and feared by the Germans, the Spitfire is rightly seen as the greatest British fighter ever built. However, as Leo McKinstry reveals, bureaucratic bungling meant that this iconic aircraft nearly remained on the ground
At the height of the battle of Dunkirk in May 1940, the brilliant New Zealander Al Deere was on patrol in his RAF Spitfire over the French coast. Suddenly, through the haze of smoke drifting upwards from the raging combat on the ground, he spotted a German Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter below him. He instantly gave chase. Soon, both planes were descending earthwards at high speed. “Down we went, throttles fully open, engines roaring and each determined to get the last ounce out of his straining aircraft. From 17,000 feet down to ground level I hung to his tail,” recalled Deere. Desperate to shake off the Spitfire, the Bf 109 dramatically changed course, levelling out from his dive and then going into a steep climb. But Deere could not be beaten. “I continued to close range until at about 15,000 feet I judged that I was near enough to open fire. A long burst produced immediate results. Bits flew off his aircraft.” Moments later, Deere watched the Bf 109 plunge into a field near Saint Omer and “explode with a blinding flash”. Engagements like this were typical of the Spitfire’s formidable combat performance during the retreat from Dunkirk. The battle was the first time during the war that the plane had engaged the Luftwaffe in significant numbers, and the results shook the Germans, undermining their belief in their own invincibility. The effectiveness of the Spitfire was demonstrated even more graphically in the months that followed, as the aircraft played a central, heroic role in the defeat of the Luftwaffe during the battle of Britain. Adored by its pilots and feared by the Germans, it grew into an enduring symbol of British determination in the struggle against Nazi tyranny. The Vickers Supermarine Spitfire is rightly seen as the greatest British fighter ever built, an inspiring blend of elegance, power and speed. So successful was the plane that over 22,000 were manufactured in 19 different marks and 52 variants, with production lasting right up to 1948. Supermarine Spitfire: 8 key dates in the making of an icon October 1931 | The Air Ministry issues specification F7/30, calling for a new day and night fighter to replace the ageing Bristol Bulldog. Supermarine’s chief designer, RJ Mitchell, comes up with an all-metal monoplane, the Type 224. Though not a success, the lessons learned lead to the creation of the Spitfire. 5 March 1936 | The maiden flight of the only Spitfire prototype, K5054, takes place at Eastleigh near Southampton. “The handling qualities of this machine are remarkably good,” writes Supermarine test pilot Joseph ‘Mutt’ Summers. The Air Ministry is so impressed that 310 are immediately ordered. October 1938 | After severe production difficulties and political crises, the Spitfire finally goes into service with the RAF. No 19 squadron, based at Duxford, is the first unit to receive the plane, and pilots are reportedly delighted with the new fighter. 16 October 1939 | Spitfires go into combat against the Luftwaffe for the first time, when aircraft from 602 and 603 squadrons take on nine Ju 88 bombers over the Firth of Forth. At the first sight of the Spitfires, the Germans turn and try to escape across the North Sea. As one surviving German pilot later recalls, it was “not a pleasant experience”. 15 September 1940 | The Battle of Britain reaches its most climactic day, with Spitfires playing a key role in turning back a massive Luftwaffe attack on London. The German high command mistakenly believes that the RAF is almost broken. In truth, Britain’s fighter forces are stronger than earlier in the battle. 7 March 1942 | Spitfires take off from HMS Eagle in the western Mediterranean to fly to Malta, where the strategically vital island is under siege. They fight heroically against the superior Luftwaffe and Italian forces, and with regular reinforcements arriving from aircraft carriers, begin to turn the tide. Their victory in the skies above Malta marks the beginning of the end for the Axis in the west. May 1942 | The Spitfire Mark IX is unveiled. With its two-stage, two-speed Merlin 61 supercharged engine, it is widely regarded as the greatest of all Spitfire marks. Squadron Leader Ron Rayner described it as “marvellous, absolutely incredible”. Throughout the war, the Spitfire is in a constant state of evolution. 1 May 1951 | The final combat flight of the Spitfire is undertaken by Wing Commander Wilfred Duncan Smith during the communist insurgency in Malaya. Spitfires assist with meteorological reports until 1957. Why Britain almost sidelined the Spitfire Yet perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Spitfire story, rarely told before, is that the aircraft was almost sidelined by the government before 1940. With hindsight it is astonishing to find that the fighter, which developed into as great an icon of national resistance as Winston Churchill himself, was regarded in the Air Ministry with disdain at the outbreak of war. Some saw it as a stop-gap until the arrival of supposedly more powerful fighters. Others viewed it as little more than a commercial venture for raising revenue from exports. As early as 1938, barely two years after the Spitfire prototype had flown, the plane was described by a senior figure in the Ministry as “obsolescent”. A few months later, Chief of the Air Staff Sir Cyril Newall was trumpeting the virtues of the twin-engine Westland Whirlwind prototype, which he claimed represented “a considerable advance” on the Spitfire. In the same vein, the Air Ministry discussed at the start of 1940 the possibility of phasing out the manufacture of the Spitfire at the main Supermarine plant in Southampton, switching production instead to the Bristol Beaufighter. It now seems incredible, looking back on the period up to March 1940, to see how little the Spitfire featured in the Air Staff’s long-term thinking. The main aim appeared to be to reduce production numbers of the aircraft and promote foreign sales rather than burden the RAF with an unwanted fighter. In June 1939, just months before the outbreak of war, Sir Wilfred Freeman, one of the most senior figures in the RAF, argued that from March 1940 sales abroad “should take up the whole of Supermarine’s output”. How the RAF won the war Part of the reason for this indifference towards the Spitfire was strategic. Before 1940, planners at the Air Ministry had not envisaged the kind of aerial combat between fighters that was to take place during Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain. They hadn’t foreseen the rapid fall of France and so believed that the Luftwaffe would have to operate from bases within Germany. This in turn meant that the deadly Bf 109 fighter would not have the range to reach Britain. The Air Staff therefore perceived the main threat to be the German bomber force. In the putative contest between RAF fighters and Luftwaffe bombers, manoeuvrability and rate of turn – two of the Spitfire’s greatest assets – were seen as less important than firepower. And here both the Whirlwind and the Beaufighter, armed with cannon, appeared, in theory, to be more lethal than the Spitfire whose early versions carried less penetrative Browning machine guns. Winston Churchill himself, though an eloquent advocate of a strong RAF throughout the 1930s, was guilty of this kind of flawed thinking. He too had little faith in the Spitfire before 1940, preferring to pin his hopes on two-seater fighters with rear-mounted turret guns. Typically, in 1938 he urged the Air Ministry to build “heavily armed” turret fighters “in as large numbers as we can”. His request was driven by the fact that the forward-firing Spitfire had only one mode of attack and so in any pursuit was too easily exposed “to destruction”. But there were other practical and political reasons for the mounting disillusion with the Spitfire. In the four years after the maiden flight of the prototype in March 1936, the production of the plane was in a state of near permanent crisis, plagued by technical difficulties, gross mismanagement and recalcitrance in pockets of the workforce. Orders from the Air Ministry were not met; promises on deliveries were unfulfilled. Meetings of the Air Staff were filled with complaints about the alarming delays in equipping RAF squadrons with this new fighter. At one stage in 1938, the secretary of state for air, Viscount Swinton, described the shambles of the Spitfire programme as “a disgraceful state of affairs”, while his military chiefs echoed this sentiment by attacking Supermarine’s approach as “totally unacceptable”. Delivering promises All this was a far cry from the excitement engendered by the Spitfire when it first took to the sky. With its phenomenal speed of 350mph, metal finish and sleek aerodynamic lines, the prototype appeared to be the harbinger of a new era for the RAF, then still largely equipped with fabric-covered biplanes capable of little more than 200mph. The plane was the work of Supermarine’s chief designer, RJ Mitchell, whose genius combined engineering practicality with creative flair. The Spitfire’s maiden flight, on 5 March 1936, confirmed its awesome potential. “It really looked as if we were going to have something that could match up to anything the Germans could build,” recalled RAF Intelligence Officer Group Captain Frederick Winterbotham. Delighted with the success of the prototype, the Air Ministry had placed an order with Supermarine, part of the Vickers group, for 310 Spitfires. Sir Robert McLean of Vickers promised that deliveries would start in September 1937, reaching at least 60 aircraft by the end of that year. But, as the months passed, it became obvious that McLean’s forecast was wildly optimistic. The schedule fell badly behind, and in January 1937, Chief of the Air Staff Sir Cyril Newall complained that Supermarine “had frankly miscalculated the magnitude of their task. The situation was most disquieting”. There were two factors at the heart of the production problems: one lay in the nature of the aircraft itself, the other in the running of Supermarine. The Spitfire was a far more advanced plane than any fighter previously built for the RAF, hence the techniques used in its manufacture were often highly complex, sometimes untested. An array of engineering difficulties were created by everything from the hydraulics for the retractable undercarriage to the curved leading edge of the elliptical wing, the Spitfire’s most celebrated feature. Who exactly were the heroes of the Battle of Britain? All you need to know about The Few The other factor was logistical. In the mid-1930s, Supermarine was a small company with no experience of delivering a major contract. The firm had been established in 1913 in Southampton by the eccentric aeronautical pioneer, inventor and neo-fascist politician Noel Pemberton Billing, and for most of its existence had specialised in flying boats and seaplanes. When it won the contract for the Spitfire, it was short of facilities, space, equipment and staff. It was, in the words of Denis Webb, a Supermarine manager, “a low-key set-up”. To meet the new demands from the Air Ministry, the company not only had to expand its works and its payroll, but also sub-contract much of the Spitfire production. By 1938, almost 80 separate contractors were involved in the Spitfire order. These arrangements turned out to be a recipe for chaos, with the subcontractors complaining about the late delivery of drawings and material, and Supermarine grumbling about the slow manufacture and poor quality of vital parts. The disarray was compounded by the building works at Supermarine. “The place reminded me of Dante’s Inferno, except that in winter it was bloody cold with at times no roof and at other times no walls,” wrote Webb in his private memoir. A race against time By May 1938, with still no Spitfires in service, the deepening shambles over the contract prompted a full-blown political crisis. Viscount Swinton, a tough Yorkshire squire, had been the driving force within government over the award of the Spitfire contract, but he now had to pay the price for the failure of Supermarine to deliver. The mood of panic at Westminster had been exacerbated by the increasing menace of highly militarised Nazi Germany, which had seized Austria in March and was threatening Czechoslovakia. As the row mounted and the Labour opposition pressed for answers on delays in the air programme, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain forced Swinton out of the cabinet. Ironically, the first production Spitfire flew at Southampton on 14 May – the day of Swinton’s departure – but it was too late to save him. Swinton’s replacement as air secretary was Sir Kingsley Wood, who immediately took a dramatic step that was aimed at transforming Spitfire production. He instructed the industrialist Lord Nuffield, founder of the Morris cars empire, to build a huge new factory to fulfil an initial contract for 1,000 Spitfires. Having promised to turn out 60 Spitfires a week once the £2 million factory was completed at its site of Castle Bromwich in Birmingham, Nuffield assured Wood that “no effort is being spared to make the ultimate issue a successful one”. Rarely has a pledge been left so unfulfilled. Lacking the dynamism of his youth, Nuffield proved a disastrous organiser of the project. He resented outside interference, moaned about the quality of drawings from Supermarine, complained about modifications to the Spitfire’s design and failed to control the Castle Bromwich workforce or his expenditure, which shot up to £7 million by March 1940 without a single plane coming off the assembly line. The battle of Britain: a brilliant triumph that involved far more than just the chosen few It was obvious by then that Nuffield had lost his grip. When the bombastic press tycoon Lord Beaverbrook became minister for aircraft production in May 1940, on the creation of the Churchill government, he dismissed Nuffield and handed over management of Castle Bromwich to Vickers. A report commissioned by Beaverbrook showed how woeful the Nuffield regime had been. The study, written by aircraft manufacturer Sir Richard Fairey, painted “a picture of extravagance and an inability to understand the problems of aircraft production”. Large sums of public money were wasted on machinery that was not used. Record-keeping was chaotic, management cowardly. The workforce was “in a very bad state. Discipline is lacking. Men are leaving before time and coming in late. There is every evidence of slackness,” wrote Fairey. Castle Bromwich was soon turned around by Vickers, helped by a spate of sackings, and the factory produced 13,000 Spitfires during the war. But Nuffield’s legacy, combined with Air Staff indifference and the earlier production problems at Supermarine, stretched Fighter Command to the limit in 1940. National survival would have been more assured had the Spitfire been available in greater numbers. As Sir Hugh Dowding, head of Fighter Command, put it after the war: “The main trouble was that we had such a tiny output of fighters”. Who designed the Spitfire? The Spitfire may have been the most advanced British aeroplane of its time, but it was designed and built in primitive conditions at the Southampton plant of the Supermarine company. Space was tight, the workforce small and facilities limited. An atmosphere of penny-pinching and disorganisation prevailed. “There was no proper recording system and parts were not stored in any order,” recalled the Supermarine employee Denis Webb. One manager was so exasperated by the outdated equipment that he bought a machine tool out of his own pocket, while on another occasion a hair dryer had to be used as a makeshift wind tunnel when testing a specialised version of the Spitfire with fuel drop tanks. Due to Supermarine’s lack of capacity, much of the Spitfire’s production had to be sub-contracted to other firms, which led to chaos over drawings and delivery of parts. When the Southampton factory was bombed in September 1940, the entire Supermarine operation had to be dispersed around the south of England. Tiny airfields and pre-war flying clubs were used for assembly but by far the grandest of the new sites was the 18th-century colonnaded Hursley House near Winchester which became the firm’s administrative headquarters. Hangars were put up in stable yards, the linen room was turned into a laboratory, the wine cellar became a dark room and the ballroom was the drawing office. Here are five of the press barons, politicians and pioneers who saved the Spitfire... RJ Mitchell The creative genius behind the Spitfire was born in Stoke in 1895 and trained as a locomotive engineer then joined Supermarine in 1917. He designed a series of record-breaking seaplanes before the Spitfire. Tragically, he died of cancer in 1937, before the Spitfire went into service. Joe Smith Smith succeeded Mitchell as designer for Supermarine. He lacked Mitchell’s originality, but had the vision to see the huge potential of the Spitfire. While Ministry officials continued to dream of new designs, Mitchell reassured Supermarine that the Spitfire “will see us through the war”. Sir Hugh Dowding Head of Fighter Command during the battle of Britain, Dowding spotted the awesome potential of the Spitfire earlier than anyone in the RAF. However, he became over-cautious towards the end of the battle and was forced to retire from his post in November 1940. Lord Beaverbrook The Canadian press tycoon became Minister for Aircraft Production in May 1940, when Britain faced its gravest threat. With a mixture of bombast and threats, he turned round Spitfire production. Loathed by many for his autocracy, he was greatly admired by Churchill. Lord Swinton The Tory Cabinet minister who became Secretary of State for air in 1935 took many crucial decisions that put the Spitfire in the sky in 1936. He decided that 310 Spitfires should be ordered after its maiden flight. He was forced to resign in 1938 over delays in production. Leo McKinstry is a journalist, historian and author. His books include Spitfire: Portrait of a Legend (Hodder & Stoughton, 2007) This article was first published in the November 2007 issue of BBC History Magazine
Days of destiny: 5 key dates in the Battle of Britain
What are the key dates in the Battle of Britain? Kate Moore picks out five moments from that fateful summer, when a group of Allied pilots were engaged in desperate battles with their German foes, hoping to secure control of the skies and prevent a Nazi invasion of Britain
Following the collapse of France, the Luftwaffe had spent most of the latter half of June and early July 1940 preparing for the coming battle with the British. As Winston Churchill electrified the nation with his soaring oratory, strengthened the resolve of the embattled British people and gave them hope, a small band of fighter pilots – just over 700 in total – would indeed act as that thin blue line of defence. Tentative plans had been made for an invasion of England, codenamed Operation Seelöwe (Sea Lion), but Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, commander of the Luftwaffe, believed that his air force alone could bring Britain to her knees. Göring, however, failed to recognise that the campaigns in the Low Countries and France had taken their brutal toll, and the Luftwaffe could now only muster 1,380 bombers and 428 dive-bombers, nowhere near the 5,000 he liked to boast of in his propaganda. Supplemented by 1,100 fighters, the Luftwaffe still enjoyed a numerical superiority of almost five to one over the British defenders. But Göring’s bomber pilots should have taken little comfort in this. They were simply ‘potential kills’ for Spitfires and Hurricanes, incapable of attacking the British fighters effectively themselves. If the British pilots were deployed correctly, then the dice would not be as heavily stacked against Fighter Command as is commonly believed. It all came down to how the imminent battle would be fought. What might have happened if Germany had invaded Britain? Watch: 3 myths surrounding the Battle of Britain View Green Video on the source website 10 July 1940: the official start of the Battle of Britain The battle began with the Kanalkampf, or Channel Battles phase, when the Germans launched sustained attacks against British shipping to prevent much-needed supplies from reaching the beleaguered British Isles. Such attacks had been taking place since late June, but early July saw a marked increase in the frequency and ferocity. The tenth of the month was the date later chosen by the RAF as the official start date for the battle proper and this day certainly saw the largest dogfight fought over the Channel up to that point. By sundown the RAF had lost seven planes against the Luftwaffe’s 13. This was an astonishing rate of success for the outnumbered British fighter pilots. German losses should have sent alarm bells ringing within the Luftwaffe high command but instead they chose to believe their own inaccurate intelligence reports that claimed 35 British ‘kills’. It was a portent of things to come. Explore the Battle of Britain and its wider context in the Second World War Your guide to the Battle of Britain: how the RAF turned back the Luftwaffe 8 reasons why the Luftwaffe didn’t stand a chance of beating the RAF in the Battle of Britain The Battle of Britain: a brilliant triumph that involved far more than just the chosen few How the RAF won the war 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about the Second World War <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2018/04/GettyImages-3421129-93ea562.jpg" width="3504" height="2414" alt="A flight of Hawker Hurricane fighter aircraft of No 73 Squadron RAF, over France, 19 April 1940. (Photo by S. A. Devon/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="A flight of Hawker Hurricane fighter aircraft of No 73 Squadron RAF, over France, 19 April 1940. (Photo by S. A. Devon/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> 13 August 1940: Eagle Day With the outcome of the Kanalkampf phase of the battle inconclusive, Göring made plans for an all-out assault against Fighter Command on the British mainland. Codenamed Adlerangriff (Eagle Attack), it was due to commence on 13 August. Yet the weather was to throw German plans into disarray. Grey skies and mist forced the Luftwaffe high command to order a postponement, and when several bombers – unaware of the change in plans – arrived over England unprotected by their fighter escort, they were badly mauled. The Luftwaffe regrouped in the afternoon and, flying in better weather conditions, launched a determined assault. Throughout August the airfields would come under virtually unremitting attack, causing devastating losses to fighters caught on the ground as well as support crew. But the Luftwaffe continued to rely on faulty intelligence, frequently attacking bases that were not operational fighter stations. A total of 87 RAF aircraft were destroyed on the ground on 13 August, but only one of these was from Fighter Command. Three British pilots were killed, while the Luftwaffe lost almost 90. 8 reasons why the Luftwaffe didn’t stand a chance of beating the RAF in the Battle of Britain Fighter Command could take heart from its performance. The tactic of deploying in small numbers to prevent all available fighters being caught refuelling on the ground was paying dividends. However this policy required nerves of steel from the heavily outnumbered British pilots. 18 August 1940: The Hardest Day Believing their attacks were decimating the much smaller force of Fighter Command, the Luftwaffe planned a series of ambitious assaults on key British airfields including Kenley, Biggin Hill, Hornchurch and North Weald. With the British pilots putting up a desperate defence, the attacks were soon reaping a grim harvest. In fact, 18 August saw both sides suffering their greatest number of losses so far: 69 German aircraft versus Fighter Command’s 29. It had been a terrible day but just one in an ongoing battle of attrition. It is little wonder then that many pilots on the frontline of Britain’s defence were beginning to show the strain, as Spitfire pilot Alan Deere recalled: “You were either at readiness or you were in the air. It was pretty tiring. I was bloody tired, I can tell you; very tired. My squadron, 54, I think we were down to five of the original pilots so were operating on a bit of a shoestring.” Listen | Historian James Holland describes how the Luftwaffe and RAF fought to control the skies over Britain in 1940, in a talk from our 2015 History Weekend at Malmesbury. He explains how Britain came out on top in one of the pivotal clashes of the Second World War 7 September 1940: The Blitz begins Dismayed by the failure to destroy Fighter Command and incensed by a British bombing raid on Berlin, Göring turned his attention to London. Now the citizens of the British capital would feel the full wrath of the Luftwaffe, and in the process either the RAF would be destroyed or the British government would be forced to the negotiating table. British radar screens lit up as wave after wave of German bombers streamed towards London. It was an astonishing and terrifying sight, 350 Luftwaffe bombers accompanied by 617 German fighter aircraft. Your guide to the Blitz, plus 9 places affected by the bombings Within an hour, every squadron in a 70-mile radius of the capital was either airborne or waiting to be scrambled. Fighter Command realised too late that the raid’s intended target was not its own airfields – and soon, bomb after bomb began to rain down on the docks, factories and houses below. The British were caught unprepared and lost 28 aircraft and 448 lives in the attacks. But once again there was no definitive result. Another test was required. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/07/GettyImages-2668585-1-08fd771.jpg" width="3327" height="2632" alt="Two Luftwaffe Dornier 217 bombers flying over the Silvertown area of London's Docklands on 7 September 1940 at the beginning of the Blitz. (Photo by Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" title="Two Luftwaffe Dornier 217 bombers flying over the Silvertown area of London's Docklands on 7 September 1940 at the beginning of the Blitz. (Photo by Central Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)" /> 15 September 1940: Battle of Britain Day A spell of bad weather had meant a delay in hostilities on Eagle Day. But 15 September dawned clear and bright. As the first German bombers began to appear one after the other, the British scrambled their fighter squadrons. Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park, commander of No 11 Group, responsible for the defence of London, famously ordered all his aircraft into the air to defend the capital, abandoning his own policy of deliberate, smaller attacks by individual squadrons. The Few: who exactly were the heroes of the Battle of Britain? Drawing on reserves from No 12 Group to the north, the British fighters swarmed around the massed German formations, peeling the fighter escorts off into individual dogfights. It was a tactic that left the bombers unprotected – and they were soon falling in devastating numbers. Park’s decision was absolutely critical. If the Germans had launched a second mass raid immediately after the first, British fighters would have been caught on the ground refuelling. But Park had banked on the Luftwaffe having no reserves, as was the case with Fighter Command. He took a huge gamble, but battles are not won by the timid. For months the Luftwaffe had believed that Fighter Command was on its last legs and all that was required was a final knock-out blow. As the Germans tallied up their devastating losses, it was clear that they had failed. Kate Moore is the author of The Battle of Britain (2010), which was published by Osprey in association with the Imperial War Museum This article first appeared in the September 2010 issue of BBC History Magazine
Your guide to the Battle of Britain: how the RAF turned back the Luftwaffe
By the end of June 1940, the forces of Nazi Germany and its allies dominated Western Europe. In July, Adolf Hitler turned his attention to Britain which, despite the seemingly hopeless military situation it was in, had refused to surrender. We bring you the everything you need to know about what followed – the Battle of Britain
Described by prime minister Winston Churchill as the RAF's finest hour, the Battle of Britain (10 July – 31 October 1940) was the first major military campaign in history to be fought entirely in the air. It was one of Britain's most important victories of the Second World War and is credited with preventing Germany from invading Britain. Historian Julian Humphrys takes us through some of the biggest questions and facts surrounding this pivotal aerial campaign... When and why was the Battle of Britain fought? Adolf Hitler aimed to force Britain to submit by bombing, naval blockade or, if necessary, invasion. But to achieve this, he needed air supremacy. So, in the summer and autumn of 1940, a few thousand airmen waged a dogged battle in the skies over Britain. Next to the later conflicts of World War II, it was a tiny affair. But the stakes were huge – resting on the result was the survival of Britain and the outcome of the entire war. What happened during the Battle of Britain? Here are 5 key dates... 10 July 1940: Official start of the battle of Britain The battle begins with the Kanalkampf, or Channel Battles phase, when the Germans launched sustained attacks against British shipping to prevent much-needed supplies from reaching the beleaguered British Isles. 13 August 1940: Eagle Day With the outcome of the Kanalkampf phase of the battle inconclusive, Luftwaffe commander-in-cheif Hermann Göring makes plans for an all-out assault against Fighter Command on the British mainland. 18 August 1940: The Hardest Day Both sides suffer their greatest number of losses so far: 69 German aircraft versus Fighter Command’s 29. 7 September 1940: The Blitz begins Dismayed by the failure to destroy Fighter Command and incensed by a British bombing raid on Berlin, Göring turns his attention to London. 15 September 1940: Battle of Britain Day Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park famously orders all his aircraft into the air to defend the capital, abandoning his own policy of deliberate, smaller attacks by individual squadrons. Read more details about each date in Kate Moore's 5 key dates in the Battle of Britain What led to the Battle of Britain? Within a few hours of each other, on 3 September 1939, Britain and France declared war against Nazi Germany following its invasion of Poland. With the exception of a brief French incursion into Germany, a few notable naval actions and some small-scale bombing raids, the opening months of the conflict were remarkably quiet. As such, the period gained the nickname ‘the Phoney War’. In the spring of 1940, all that changed. 10 key Second World War dates you need to know In April, the Germans began their conquest of Norway and then, on 10 May, they invaded France and Belgium. Bypassing the heavily fortified Maginot Line, which ran along the Franco-German border, and employing fast-moving Blitzkrieg (‘lightning war’) tactics they swept through the Ardennes before turning for the coast, cutting off hundreds of thousands of French and British soldiers at Dunkirk. Operation Dynamo, the Allied evacuation from those beaches, brought over 300,000 of them back to England. But France had been knocked out of the war, and the British had been forced to leave most of their equipment behind. Hitler expected the British to come to terms but Winston Churchill – the new British Prime Minister – was having none of it. Scorning surrender, he demonstrated to the world (and to the US in particular) Britain’s ruthless determination to fight on by attacking the fleet of its former ally, France, to prevent it from falling into German hands. Watch | 3 myths about the Battle of Britain View Green Video on the source website Faced with what he saw as stubborn intransigence on the part of Britain, Hitler planned to force its surrender by bombing, naval blockade or, as a last resort, invasion. But to do this he needed to gain mastery of the skies over Britain, which meant knocking out the Royal Air Force (RAF). Only then could a large-enough bombing campaign be mounted to force the British to the negotiating table, or an invasion force have any chance of crossing the English Channel in the face of the powerful Royal Navy. What did the Battle of Britain mean for Hitler’s plans? In July 1940, Hitler ordered plans to be put in place for a seaborne invasion of Britain, which was given the code name Seelöwe or ‘Sealion’. The invasion plan was seen very much as a last resort. Hitler hoped that through blockade, bombing and the threat of an invasion, he could break the British will to fight. What was Operation Sealion, Hitler’s planned invasion of Britain? And why was it cancelled? Had Operation Sealion actually gone ahead, it would have been an incredibly risky undertaking. For a start, a long spell of calm weather was needed for the fragile invasion barges to cross the Channel – anything more than a mild swell and they risked being swamped. And lurking in the wings was the fearsome Royal Navy. There was a real danger that it might attack the invasion fleet as it crossed the Channel, or cut off the German ground forces once they’d landed. Only victory in the air would have given the invasion any prospect of success, but it seems highly likely that, though it may well have suffered heavy losses from bombing, mines and U-boats, the Royal Navy would have been able to intervene decisively had the invasion been attempted. Could Operation Sealion ever have succeeded? The RAF’s Battle of Britain heroics are credited with saving the nation. But, argues Nick Hewitt, it was the Royal Navy’s savaging of the German fleet in the battle of Norway in the spring of 1940 that scuttled Hitler’s grand invasion plans. "In truth, there’s little chance that Germany could have invaded England, even if the RAF had been defeated in the Battle of Britain," he says. "That’s because, some weeks earlier, Britain had already, in effect, been saved." The battle for Norway, 1940: the forgotten Battle of Britain How strong were the RAF and Luftwaffe in July 1940? The German Air Force, or Luftwaffe, consisted of three Luftflotten (‘Air fleets’), deployed in an arc round Britain from Normandy to Scandinavia. During the Battle of Britain they had about 2,800 aircraft, two-thirds of which were bombers. The Luftwaffe had already defeated the air forces of Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and the RAF contingent prior to Dunkirk. Its crews were experienced and confident and its commander predicted it would only take a few days to knock out the RAF. Days of destiny: 5 key moments of the Battle of Britain In 1936, the RAF had been organised into four separate Commands: Training, Coastal, Bomber and Fighter. Fighter Command was organised geographically into four ‘Groups’. Air Vice-Marshal Park’s 11 Group, in the South East, would bear the brunt of the fighting. It had about 650 aircraft and 1,300 pilots at its disposal at the start of the Battle. Fighter Command had suffered heavy losses during the Battle of France and its commander Hugh Dowding controversially refused Churchill’s request for more squadrons to be sent there, arguing that every plane was needed for the forthcoming fights over Britain. Listen | Historian James Holland describes how the Luftwaffe and RAF fought to control the skies over Britain in 1940 Who were the key players? Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding The commander-in-chief of Fighter Command, Dowding modernised Britain’s aerial defences, encouraged the design of modern fighter planes and supported the development of radar. Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring A WWI flying ace who took over the fighter wing once led by the Red Baron, Göring was Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe during the Battle. In 1946, he committed suicide before he was due to be executed for war crimes. Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park A flying ace in WWI, New Zealand-born Park commanded the Number 11 Fighter Group – responsible for the defence of London and the Southeast, and bore the brunt of the fighting. Generalfeldmarschall Hugo Sperrle Sperrle was commander of Luftflotte III, which was heavily engaged during the Battle. He had previously commanded the German Condor Legion, which flew on the side of the Nationalists during the Spanish Civil War. What was the Luftwaffe's plan? The aims of the two sides were relatively straightforward. The Germans planned to bomb key British military, industrial and, later, civilian targets, thus devastating Britain’s ability and willingness to fight. They also reasoned that, as the RAF would have to respond to these attacks, its fighter force would be worn down until the numerically superior Luftwaffe enjoyed supremacy in the skies over Britain. Then, an invasion might just be possible. 8 reasons why the Luftwaffe didn’t stand a chance of beating the RAF in the Battle of Britain In order to get at the bombers, the RAF first had to fight its way through a protective screen of enemy fighters. And here, the Germans enjoyed a tactical advantage. The RAF had always liked close formation flying. Its three-plane V formations looked impressive, but were not very agile in battle. The Germans, on the other hand, had learnt from their experiences in the Spanish Civil War. They replaced the V with a pair of planes – one would lead while the other acted as its wingman, watching its back. Two pairs often worked together and, until the British adjusted their own tactics, these looser formations gave the Germans an edge in close combat. Why did Hitler choose the swastika, and how did a Sanskrit symbol become a Nazi emblem? However, the Germans consistently underestimated how many planes the RAF had, and how quickly it could replace those it had lost. And, like the RAF, they usually overestimated how many planes they’d shot down. As a result, they never really had a clear picture of how the battle was going. In August, they began attacking RAF airfields, which did, in fact, put Fighter Command under severe strain. But when, in early September, they switched their sights to British cities, they did so at just the wrong time. They believed Fighter Command was on its last legs. They were wrong. When large numbers of RAF fighters inflicted heavy losses on the raids of 15 September, it was a devastating blow to Luftwaffe morale. What common myths still surround the Battle of Britain? One enduring belief is that the Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring was incompetent, and his unfortunate decisions placed the Luftwaffe in an unnecessarily difficult position. Christer Bergström dispels this fallacy and five other Battle of Britain myths. Who were 'the Few'? RAF fighter pilots were a cosmopolitan bunch, very different to the public school ‘Tally Ho’ chaps they’re popularly seen as. In fact, of the almost 3,000 pilots that flew during the Battle of Britain, fewer than 200 were public-school educated. The rest came from a wide variety of backgrounds – bank clerks, shop assistants and factory workers all served as fighter pilots. What they did have in common was their youth. While a few ‘old sweats’ were over 30, the average age of an RAF fighter pilot was just 20, and many were as young as 18. At the time, you had to be 21 to vote so many of these young men were risking their lives in defence of a democracy they were not yet old enough to participate in. The Few: who exactly were the heroes of the Battle of Britain? Not all of the Battle of Britain pilots were British About 20 per cent of Fighter Command’s aircrew came from overseas: New Zealanders, Canadians, Australians and South Africans took part in the Battle of Britain, and they were joined by volunteers from a variety of nations including neutral countries like Ireland and the US. Vital contributions were also made by pilots from Nazi-occupied countries – Poles, Czechoslovakians, Belgians, Frenchmen and Austrians all flew in the Battle. Many of them were experienced fighters, often motivated by an intense hatred of the country that was oppressing their own. Although it was only operational for six weeks, the Polish No 303 Squadron shot down more German planes than any other unit. Is the Battle of Britain overrated? Historian Sean Lang argues that this clash of aerial supremacy is among the nine most overrated battles in history – alongside Bannockburn, Bosworth and the defeat of the Spanish Armada. RAF pilots generally received less training than their German counterparts At this time, all German aircrew had to undergo at least six months of basic training; British pilots rarely got more than a month. German aviators received up to 80 hours’ training at specialist bomber or fighter schools, and took part in simulation sorties and mock battles before seeing combat. RAF pilots were lucky if they got more than about 20 hours of actual flying before they were posted to an operational unit, such was Britain’s shortage of manpower. Pilots on both sides rapidly learned that there was a world of difference between the flying they’d learned in training and flying in combat. You might have been the most elegant flier in the world but it counted for little if you couldn’t shoot straight. How the RAF won the war Fighter planes normally had only enough ammunition for about ten seconds of sustained firing, and so often the best tactic was to get your plane as close as possible to an enemy – ideally without him seeing you – fire off a short burst of one or two seconds and then quickly move on. Such deadly encounters often lasted moments and in these circumstances strong nerves, quick reactions and good eyesight were as important as technical flying ability. The 'many' on the ground were as important as the 'few' in the air "The Few, the pilots in their fighter aircraft, were one cog that made up the first fully co-ordinated air defence system in the world," writes James Holland. "This saw modern radar, an Observer Corps, radio and a highly efficient means of collating, filtering and disseminating this information being combined with a highly developed ground control to ensure that Luftwaffe raids such as those on 14 August were intercepted and harried repeatedly." The Battle of Britain: a brilliant triumph that involved far more than just the chosen few Women played vital roles in the Battle of Britain Many worked in factories building the aircraft that actually did the fighting while one out of every eight of the pilots in the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA), which delivered planes to stations across the country, were female. One of these was the accomplished Amy Johnson, who died in 1941 when the aircraft she was flying crashed into the Thames estuary. When women flew Spitfires Members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) worked alongside the RAF as drivers, clerks, telephonists, cooks and orderlies. Some served at radar stations while others famously worked as plotters in the various Fighter Command operations rooms mapping friendly and enemy aircraft positions and helping to direct fighter planes. Many of the places they worked at were primary targets for German attacks. More than 750 WAAFs lost their lives during the war. Meanwhile, women in the Army’s Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS) worked as radar operators, and joined the crews of anti-aircraft guns and searchlight units. More than 250,000 women served in the ATS during World War II, including the future Queen Elizabeth II, who joined up while a princess at the age of 19, training as a driver and mechanic. The Spitfire was not the only RAF fighter For many, the sleek and slender Supermarine Spitfire is the enduring symbol of the Battle of Britain. Indeed, at the time, just a glimpse of its silhouette in the sky gave hope to those below, who knew that Fighter Command were on the scene, tackling the enemy over Britain. But the Spitfire was not the most significant plane in the RAF: Britain's number one fighter was the Hawker Hurricane. Solid, reliable and tough, it was the first monoplane fighter to enter service with the RAF, which it did in 1937. During the Battle of Britain, Hurricanes shot down more enemy planes than all the other types of Allied aircraft combined. Was the Battle of Britain the country’s finest hour? "One of them, certainly," writes James Holland, "as it consigned Hitler to a long attritional war on multiple fronts – a conflict his forces were not designed to fight, and which materially meant they would always be struggling." The Battle of Britain overlaps with the Blitz The Blitz is the name given to the sustained bombing of British cities that began with the first massed air raid on London on 7 September 1940. It continued in one form or other for eight months, only petering out in May 1941 when the Germans began to prepare their invasion of Russia. London came under sustained attack – it was bombed for 57 consecutive nights and by the end of October more than 250,000 Londoners were homeless. This content first appeared in the May 2015 issue of BBC History Revealed, and curated with content from BBC History Magazine and HistoryExtra published between 2010 and 2015
8 reasons why the Luftwaffe didn’t stand a chance of beating the RAF in the Battle of Britain
The Battle of Britain, the aerial campaign fought between the RAF and the Luftwaffe from 10 July to 31 October 1940, was one of Britain's most important victories in the Second World War. But did the German air force have any chance of succeeding? Not at all, writes historian James Holland...
Insufficient radio communciations The Germans had far more sophisticated radar than the British but failed to use it. Radio communications once in the air were non-existent between fighters and bombers, leading to repeated confusion. There were no ground controllers as such, so that once on their way to England, the Luftwaffe were left with the pre-flight orders and nothing more. Otherwise, they were on their own. Confusion frequently ensued. Your guide to the Battle of Britain: how the RAF turned back the Luftwaffe The Battle of Britain (10 July – 31 October 1940) was the first major military campaign in history to be fought entirely in the air, described by Churchill as the RAF’s finest hour. What exactly happened, how was the battle won, and what did it mean for Hitler? Get the answers to these questions and more in our full guide to the Battle of Britain. Hitler had his own shortcomings Because of his background and lack of military command experience, Adolf Hitler’s geopolitical understanding was poor. He spent much of the summer of 1940 in a state of indecision, unsure what to do about Britain’s refusal to play ball. He mostly remained in his Bavarian retreat, and there was no joint-service planning or joined-up thinking in any way. The woman who gave birth for Hitler Intelligence was poor Luftwaffe intelligence was woeful and largely in the hands of Colonel ‘Beppo’ Schmid, who spoke no other languages, liked the bottle, and had barely been out of Germany. He was also a sycophant who told Göring what he wanted to hear rather than the reality. He massively underestimated British strength, and had no idea that the RAF was divided into three commands. Moustaches, Cossacks and an inland lighthouse: a brief history of the Royal Air Force There was an overdependence on dive-bombing The Luftwaffe high command were obsessed with dive-bombing and placed the future of bomber development with this in mind. Dive-bombing was fine when the Luftwaffe controlled air space and when attacking a fixed target, but as Dunkirk had shown, it wasn’t so effective when targets such as ships were moving or when British fighters were waiting to pounce. Over England, the Stukas were decimated and swiftly withdrawn. The 11 most significant battles of the Second World War A lack of home advantage If an RAF pilot was shot down, then provided he was uninjured, he could be flying again later that day. In contrast, if Luftwaffe aircrew came down over England, for them the war was over. British pilots were also treated like heroes whenever off-duty, whereas if a Luftwaffe pilot went to a French bar when off-duty, the chances were he’d be treated with cool contempt. Furthermore, Luftwaffe pilots had to cross the Channel to fight, and the fear of being lost and drowning increasingly played on their nerves. The Few: who exactly were the heroes of the Battle of Britain? Care for German pilots was insufficient One of the reasons that Fighter Command commander-in-chief Dowding was so worried about squadron strength dipping to 75 per cent was because he feared it would mean putting too much strain on his pilots. The Luftwaffe command had no such concerns, forcing their aircrew to fly and fly and keep flying. Unlike in Fighter Command, any kind of leave was rare and irregular. Combat fatigue was the result. How the RAF won the war Low aircraft production Aircraft production lagged badly behind that of Britain. In July 1940, for example, Britain produced 496 new single-engine fighters, while the figure for the Luftwaffe was just 240. It was a ratio that only worsened as the battle progressed. Complacency, shortage of materials, and increasingly chaotic staff procurement were to blame. Days of destiny: 5 key dates in the Battle of Britain The Luftwaffe was not a strategic air force The Luftwaffe was designed to support the army, and was highly effective at this role during the war’s early campaigns. As such, it was later called a tactical air force. Taking on the RAF, independently from ground forces, was a strategic rather than a tactical role – and one for which it had never trained. This article was first published in the July 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine
The Few: who exactly were the heroes of the Battle of Britain?
Ahead of the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, military historian Patrick Bishop reflects on the experiences of the ‘fighter boys’ of the RAF, lionised by Winston Churchill as the Few, and how they succeeded in defeating the Luftwaffe
Eighty summers ago, the inhabitants of the Home Counties witnessed something the world had never seen before and never would again. Day after day, above their heads, air armies waged a gigantic battle – one that would have a decisive effect on the outcome of World War II. For the first time in British history, a life-or-death struggle was fought out in view of large numbers of the nation’s citizens. The combat took place over the stalwarts of everyday life – above houses, streets and fields. 10 key Second World War dates you need to know Those below had only to look up to see an amazing sight: huge flocks of German bombers and escorts crawling across the sky while the RAF’s fighters swirled around them, scribbling chalky condensation trails in the blue and stitching it with the gold and red of tracer ammunition and cannon. The British people watched with a mixture of fear and excitement and, above all, admiration for the pilots upon whose skill and bravery the fate of the nation so obviously depended. Your guide to the Battle of Britain: how the RAF turned back the Luftwaffe The Battle of Britain (10 July – 31 October 1940) was the first major military campaign in history to be fought entirely in the air, described by Churchill as the RAF's finest hour. What exactly happened, how was the battle won, and what did it mean for Hitler? Get the answers to these questions and more in our full guide to the Battle of Britain. The story so far In the summer of 1940, Britain seemed finished. France, with its huge armed forces and the seemingly impregnable defences of the Maginot Line along its German border, had been overwhelmed by Hitler’s forces in just a matter of weeks. The British army had only avoided complete destruction by what seemed like a miracle, when hundreds of thousands of men escaped from the beaches of Dunkirk. The Germans thought they were invincible. Hitler was convinced that, having seen what had happened to first Poland, then Belgium, Holland and France, the British would soon come to their senses and make peace. And there were plenty of people in Britain’s government – including the Foreign Minister, Lord Halifax – who believed it was time to start negotiations. But not Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Soon after Dunkirk, he made a fiery speech laying out the grim situation facing the country: Britain had to fight. Otherwise it, along with Europe, would “sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age”. The Battle of France was over, he told the nation, before proclaiming: “The Battle of Britain is about to begin.” These were chilling words. But instead of cowing his listeners, it created a mood of stubborn determination. Most of all, it inspired the small band of airmen who would determine whether Britain fell. Churchill’s greatest speeches – chosen by his grandson Hitler’s gambit Adolf Hitler had not yet made a serious plan to invade Britain. He didn’t think he would have to. If the British government was stupid enough not to sue for peace, then it would not take long for the German air force to persuade them. The Luftwaffe was strong and drunk on victory. The Germans believed that the Royal Air Force would be no match for them. In this they were very much mistaken. Although very little money had been spent on the British military between the world wars, the lion’s share had gone to the RAF. Some far-sighted planners had ordered modern fighter aircraft – the famous Spitfire and Hurricane – to counter the German threat. They had also invested in the new technology of radar, so they could detect enemy aircraft and direct their fighters to intercept them. How the RAF won the war Once Churchill had signalled defiance, the Luftwaffe offensive began. The battle played out in three main phases. In early July, the Germans attacked shipping in the Channel, trying to force the British fighter squadrons based along the coast of southeast England to come up and be chopped down by the supposedly superior Luftwaffe. When that didn’t work, in mid-August they targeted the fighter airfields themselves. Having failed to knock them out, the Germans switched to bombing raids on London. By mid-September, it was clear they had failed – Hitler would never win control of Britain’s skies, nor invade its islands. This was the first time since the war began that the Germans had been beaten anywhere. It was a great moment, showing that the tide of the war could be turned by determination and skill. What are the key dates in the Battle of Britain? Kate Moore picks out five crucial moments from that fateful summer... The battle was a victory for British technology – in the shape of the Spitfire and Hurricane as well as radar – and of the leadership provided by Churchill and the head of Fighter Command, Hugh Dowding. But above all, it was a triumph for the young men – called ‘the Few’ by Churchill – who flew the aircraft. They were the real stars of the Battle of Britain. Credit for famous victories typically goes to commanders: Agincourt belonged to Henry V, Trafalgar to Horatio Nelson, and Waterloo to the Duke of Wellington. This time, though, the glory went to a small but very unusual group. Significantly, its members were not drawn exclusively from the upper classes. They came from every level of society and were, as proclaimed by the newspapers and radio of the time, “ordinary people doing extraordinary things”. Listen | Historian James Holland describes how the Luftwaffe and RAF fought to control the skies over Britain in 1940 What was Fighter Command? In the summer of 1940, the pilots of Fighter Command were the nation’s poster boys. People spoke of them as if they were their own sons. They were the ‘fighter boys’ – a term that reflected the fact the pilots were, on average, only 20 years old. Many were still too young to vote. The media was fascinated by them, and the government was only too eager to play along, building up their image in lots of interviews and photo ops. Did you know? Combat fatigue was a real problem, with British pilots facing 15-hour shifts and heavy bombardment of their airfields. Pilots had to take to the skies and fight several times a day, and some turned to amphetamine pills to stay alert. The young aviators played their part perfectly, conveying just the right mixture of boyish exuberance and strength of purpose. The coverage presented them as modern-minded and competent. This was just as well, as the army’s performance to date had created exactly the opposite impression. In Norway and France in the spring of 1940, defeat had followed defeat, and the courage of the troops was betrayed by shoddy equipment and poor leadership. The army still believed that you had to be a gentlemen to be an officer. Those who had led soldiers into the war all belonged to the same military caste. They went to the same schools, boasted the same moustaches, and married one another’s sisters. But the RAF was different. The technical nature of the service meant that the net had to be cast wider than the military’s traditional recruiting base – for officers and men alike. Your guide to the Blitz, plus 9 places affected by the bombings Who were the pilots who became 'the Few'? In 1936, when the war was still looming, the doors to the world of flying were thrown open. The Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve (RAFVR) was formed to provide a pool of trained pilots to replace those who were expected to fall in the first phase of combat. The qualifications required were modest, and suddenly the dreams of a legion of lower-middle class lads brought up on the adventures of the fictional fighter ace James ‘Biggles’ Bigglesworth came true, as they set off at weekends to learn to fly at government expense. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2020/07/GettyImages-1170899311-4a19464.jpg" width="600" height="413" alt="Royal Air Force fighter pilots stand by for their instructions in a ready room at a RAF Fighter Command station in August 1940" title="Royal Air Force fighter pilots stand by for their instructions in a ready room at a RAF Fighter Command station in August 1940" /> “I’d always wanted to fly, from when I was a small boy,” remembered Charlton Haw, who left school at 14. “I never wanted to do anything else, but I never thought there would ever be a chance for me. Until the RAFVR was formed, for a normal schoolboy it was almost impossible.” He joined up in York aged 18, went solo in half the average time and flew Hurricanes with No. 504 Squadron. The reservists joined their squadrons as sergeant pilots, and as such they would make a vital contribution to victory. More than one-third of the 2,946 men who flew in the Battle of Britain were non-commissioned officers (NCOs). However, they were paid less, lived in poorer accommodation and enjoyed fewer privileges than their officer comrades. Looking back from the standpoint of today, it seems unfair that men who fought and died together in the air should eat in different ‘messes’ on the ground, but in my conversations with survivors over the years, I rarely heard any complaints. “We were all very close,” said Maurice Leng, who flew as a sergeant with No. 73 Squadron. “There was no sort of officers versus sergeants ballyhoo. We were all in the same boat, and there was marvellous camaraderie.” By the later stages of the engagement, death and injury had done much to even things up. Almost every NCO pilot ended up with a commission, and the amateurs of the RAFVR soon proved they were the equal of the pre-war professionals. ‘The Few’ were bound together by a shared passion. They were drawn to the RAF because they were fascinated by flying – still a glamorous and mysterious activity – by a willingness to take risks, and an eagerness for fun and adventure. While researching my various books on the Battle of Britain, I was struck again by how closely the popular image of ‘the Few’ matched the reality. “We were young and had great confidence in our abilities and in our planes, so we all, quite joyfully, joined in the absurd race to death and destruction,” recalled Charles Fenwick, who flew with No. 610 Squadron. The Battle of Britain: a brilliant triumph that involved far more than just the chosen few Life between missions The pilots constructed their own reality in which the possibility of death, although ever present, was rarely mentioned. Off duty, life was lived to the full; who knew how much time was left? At the end of a long day’s fighting, pilots jumped into their jalopies and headed through the green lanes and ripening cornfields to their favourite pub, such as the White Hart at Brasted, Kent, which was frequented by the squadrons based at the nearby RAF base, Biggin Hill. Station commander Group Captain Dick Grice often led the charge to the watering hole. “Dick Grice had a tannoy speaker mounted on his car; you could hear him a mile away,” remembered Pete Brothers, a flight lieutenant with No. 32 Squadron. “‘This is the CO, and I want three scotches and two pints of bitter.’ He’d got a bunch of chaps in the car and was calling up the bar.” As the battle gathered pace, girls didn’t feature much in the airmen’s lives. There was no time, and many thought it was not fair to form emotional bonds when they knew they might well die tomorrow. More like boys than warriors Many of those fighting were barely out of adolescence and sounded more like boys than warriors in their letters home. “Dear Mum and Dad,” wrote 19-year-old Pilot Officer John Carpenter of No. 222 Squadron on 29 August, just before his unit moved base to Hornchurch and into the thick of the fighting. “I am writing this at five in the morning, we are leaving at eight and should be there by nine. I hope to be shooting Jerries down by ten.” Listen: 9 top HistoryExtra podcasts about the Second World War Three days later, his parents received an update: “Sorry I haven’t written in the last 24 hours, but my time has been rather occupied. So far I have one Messerschmitt 109 and one 110 to my credit, but in getting the 110 I was shot down and had to bale out... Lots of fun here – just what we’ve been waiting for.” The next letter was from Maidstone Hospital, where he was recovering after being downed again – this time by friendly anti-aircraft fire. “I am not shooting a line when I say that the machine just disappeared from under me in one big BANG... I must have got a hit over the head somewhere, because I could not see coming down...” What common myths still surround the Battle of Britain? One enduring belief is that the Luftwaffe commander Hermann Göring was incompetent, and his unfortunate decisions placed the Luftwaffe in an unnecessarily difficult position. Christer Bergström dispels this fallacy and five other Battle of Britain myths. The light-heartedness was to some extent put on. Robin Appleford of No. 66 Squadron described how, as an 18-year-old Spitfire pilot waiting for the order to scramble, he “got that sort of sick feeling all the time. I think most people if they were honest would confirm this”. But it was considered bad form to show it. The airmen believed that they were simply doing their jobs and were often surprised at the reception they got from the public. On 18 September, Sergeant Ian Hutchinson’s Spitfire was hit over Canterbury, and he bailed out. He was taken to hospital where his shrapnel wounds were bandaged up, and as there was no transport, he had to make his own way back to Hornchurch by rail. “I had to change trains somewhere,” he recalled. “I was standing on the station with a bandage on my leg ... I was carrying a parachute under my arm, and everyone was coming up and shaking my hand, and I wished the ground would have opened up and swallowed me.” The WW2 battle of Okinawa: the bloodiest assault of the Pacific War Perhaps those shaking hands with the sergeant weren’t simply thanking him: they wanted to show their solidarity. Everyone was in this battle together, and those on the ground were demonstrating the same courage, selflessness and determination as those in the air. It was an attitude that made a return to the pre-war order of social injustice and class privilege unthinkable. The memory of those days and the example of the airmen would find political expression when the shooting finally stopped, and the country set about constructing peace from the ruins of the conflict. Patrick Bishop is a military historian who has worked extensively with veterans. His books include Air Force Blue: The RAF in World War Two (2018) and Fighter Boys (2020) This content first appeared in the July 2020 issue of BBC History Revealed
9 of the most overrated battles in history (and one underrated one)
From Bosworth and Bannockburn to the Battle of Britain, historian Sean Lang examines nine British battles accorded a decisive importance that, he argues, does not necessarily stand up to close scrutiny…
To be overrated, a battle must be famous and have been generally regarded as decisive or of great historical significance. Of course, some battles, like those of the Crimean War, never had much reputation to start with; others, such as El Alamein, are genuinely debatable: a sideshow in the grand scheme of things, it helped turn the tide in the Second World War’s north African campaign and was of genuine value in stiffening British morale. Judging a battle to be overrated does not mean it was insignificant; still less does it deny the bravery and sacrifice of those who fought in it. It simply means that it has been accorded a decisive importance that does not necessarily stand up to close scrutiny. For reasons of space, I have restricted this exploration to battles from British history; other peoples can doubtless compile similar lists of their own. Julius Caesar’s invasions of Britain, 55 and 54 BC The cheeky satirical volume 1066 and All That gave 55 BC as one of the two memorable dates in English history (the other, of course, being 1066), but a memorable date does not prove a battle’s significance. What was Julius Caesar actually doing in Britain? What was his landing supposed to achieve? Caesar himself says it was to punish the Britons for the aid they sent the Gallic tribes during his conquest of Gaul in 58–50 BC, which would make it a sort of punitive expedition, like the ones the British would later launch in their own empire. Either way, it cannot be called a conquest, or even, properly speaking, an invasion. One of the problems with Caesar’s raid, as with so much ancient history, is that we are so heavily dependent on tainted written sources – in this case Caesar’s own written account. Corroborative archaeological evidence for the scale of Caesar’s expedition is relatively sparse. We do know that Caesar’s account was a propaganda exercise to promote his own bid for power, and that it would have suited his purposes to ‘big up’ what was either a large raid or an embarrassingly aborted invasion. Either way, its significance seems to have been overblown. Read more about Caesar's British gamble Bannockburn, 1314 Robert the Bruce’s victory over King Edward II at the battle of Bannockburn was unquestionably important, but it wasn’t as decisive as many like to claim. For one thing, Edward II was one of the most incompetent men ever to occupy the English throne; it is hard to imagine his father, Edward I, the fearsome ‘Hammer of the Scots’, walking so blithely into Robert the Bruce’s trap. In the short term, the English were so completely defeated that Bannockburn really did seem to have established Scottish independence. But not for long. 10 things you (probably) didn’t know about Scottish history The English kings’ claim to overlordship of Scotland remained in force, so in 1320 Bruce had the Declaration of Arbroath drawn up, addressed to the Pope and asserting Scotland’s right to be a free kingdom. It was needed, because although Bruce got the English to accept Scottish independence in 1328, just over a year later he was dead, leaving his five-year-old son, David II, on the throne. The English promptly invaded, forced the king into exile, put Edward Balliol on the throne and annexed the southern part of the kingdom. It was the end of the reign of the House of Bruce. Later Scottish nationalism was to accord Bannockburn a decisive significance that would not have been so obvious to people in Scotland at the time. Bosworth, 1485 It is still popularly believed that the battle of Bosworth, the battle in which Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, took the throne from the Yorkist King Richard III, marked the end of the Wars of the Roses and therefore of the English Middle Ages. It did nothing of the sort. Militarily, the battle hung on the decision of Lord Stanley as to which side to support; he chose Henry Tudor, which sealed the contest, though the real significance of the day lay in the fact that Richard III himself was killed. It gave Henry just enough of an opening to try to make his rule permanent, but by no means did it indicate that his position was secure. Treachery at Bosworth: what really brought down Richard III There were plenty of people with a stronger claim to the throne than Henry Tudor, and he knew it. The Yorkists were a genuine threat, especially as they had good contacts abroad, in France, Burgundy, Ireland and Scotland. It’s too easy for us nowadays to underestimate the importance of the Yorkist pretenders to Henry’s throne: the battle of Stoke Field in 1487, in which Henry VII faced the Irish-backed Yorkists under the pretender Lambert Simnel, required him to mount a robust defence and has a better claim to be the last battle of the Wars of the Roses. Even after Henry’s victory, the Yorkists were able to maintain their military and diplomatic pressure through a second pretender, Perkin Warbeck. Bosworth’s importance in the popular imagination comes from the significance given to it by Henry’s skilful use of propaganda, rather than from events on the battlefield. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/07/GettyImages-638913846-1-153b046.jpg" width="6557" height="6717" alt="An illustration of Richard III at the battle of Bosworth, a clash which historian Sean Lang argues is overrated. (Photo by Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="An illustration of Richard III at the battle of Bosworth, a clash which historian Sean Lang argues is overrated. (Photo by Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> The Armada, 1588 The defeat of the Spanish Armada was for so long such an iconic moment in English history that it might seem perverse to include it here. Certainly, English naval gunnery was superior, both in technology and in its execution, and as an English propaganda coup, the Armada campaign was a masterpiece: the narrative of the little English ships nipping in and out between the ungainly Spanish galleons, of Drake’s fireship attack at Calais, and above all of Queen Elizabeth’s speech at Tilbury, has stirred patriotic hearts for centuries. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2019/07/GettyImages-463909425-0345deb.jpg" width="3699" height="2827" alt="A portrait of the Spanish Armada. "The English attacks on the Spanish fleet made very little impression on its strong defensive formation," says Sean Lang. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)" title="A portrait of the Spanish Armada. "The English attacks on the Spanish fleet made very little impression on its strong defensive formation," says Sean Lang. (Photo by Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)" /> The reality was very different. The English attacks on the Spanish fleet made very little impression on its strong defensive formation, and it was acknowledged even at the time that what really destroyed the Armada was the stormy weather that drove it northwards to be wrecked on the rocky Scottish and Irish coasts. More importantly, the battle did not establish immediate English naval supremacy, as so many have assumed: the English fleet dispersed shortly afterwards and many of the sailors were soon destitute. In 1596–97 the Spanish sent two further invasion armadas, which were again defeated more by the storms in the Channel than by the English fleet. The defeat of the Armada was a major blow to Spanish prestige, but the English had no call to be complacent. Was the Spanish campaign doomed to fail from the start? Plassey, 1757 For many years, Plassey was up there with Blenheim and Waterloo as a triumph of British arms – a “miracle”, as one historian once called it. This was the battle at which Robert Clive (‘Clive of India’) defeated the treacherous nawab (ruler) of Bengal, avenged the atrocity of the Black Hole of Calcutta and established British rule over India. The trouble is, almost none of that version of events is accurate. The nawab had driven the British from Calcutta and, in an event still hotly disputed, some of the prisoners he took died in the airless room in which they were confined – the famous ‘Black Hole’. He also flirted with the idea of a French alliance, so Clive was sent to retake Calcutta and deal with the French. He did both of these, and that should have been the end of the campaign – only Clive sensed an opportunity to stage a palace coup and replace the nawab with one of his subordinates, Mir Jafar. The result was a strange non-battle: although his forces heavily outnumbered Clive’s, the nawab didn’t know which of his own men he could trust, while Clive, for the same reason, didn’t want to press home an attack in case he was killing the wrong men. What fighting there was began on the initiative of a British officer who disobeyed Clive’s orders and launched an attack. Politically, Plassey was of the first importance, but as a military exercise it has been heavily overrated. The chaotic conquest of India New Orleans, 1815 New Orleans is a battle more overrated in the United States than in Britain, where few people have ever heard of it. It was the climax of the curious Anglo-American War of 1812–14, a sideshow to the main military event of the time, the war against Napoleon. It must rank as one of the most needless conflicts in history: American merchants were caught between the wartime blockades that Britain and France imposed on each other, and opinion was divided in the United States over whether to fight France or Britain. In the end, British impressment of US sailors tipped the balance in favour of war with Britain, but the war began badly for the Americans: their invasion of Canada was defeated and the British were able to outmanoeuvre them and take Washington DC itself, burning the presidential mansion down as they did so. Trafalgar, a futile victory? Why Nelson's triumph didn't turn the tide on Napoleon American history myths: 7 things people get wrong A war over wartime trade restrictions becomes pointless when that war ends, so when the European war ended in 1814, there was nothing left for Britain and the US to fight about. A number of Wellington’s Peninsular War veterans were shipped over to the States, led by Sir Edward Pakenham, Wellington’s brother-in-law, a competent rather than a gifted commander. The British attack on New Orleans, where the American commander was Andrew Jackson, was not well planned, and Pakenham was himself killed in the fighting. It was certainly an American victory; however, since peace between the two countries had already been signed (the news had not yet crossed the Atlantic), the battle cannot be said to have decided the war one way or the other. It was undoubtedly a source of patriotic pride to the Americans, but of much less significance to the British. Rorke’s Drift, 1879 The Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 was as blatant an example of aggressive war as one can find: Britain had no particular quarrel with the Zulu people before invading their land. Moreover, the British commander, Lord Chelmsford, was comprehensively outmanoeuvred by the Zulus and committed the elementary blunder of dividing his force when he could not be certain where his enemy was. That enemy turned out to be attacking Chelmsford’s base camp at Isandlwana, where the British force holding it was wiped out. To the Victorian public, Isandlwana was a defeat of unimaginable proportions. All the more reason, therefore, to make the most of the more successful engagement that followed, at Rorke’s Drift. The attack on the tiny mission station at Rorke’s drift was led by Zulu commander Prince Dabulamanzi, in defiance of strict orders not to attack fortified positions, especially along the frontier with British territory, as Rorke’s Drift was. He and his men had played no part at Isandlwana and they were keen to ‘wash their spears’ in British blood. The defence was led by two junior officers, Lieutenants Bromhead and Chard, who displayed an almost impressive lack of military imagination, missed the chance to evacuate and just sat there, waiting for the Zulus to attack. In the event, even rudimentary fortifications of mealie bags and biscuit boxes proved enough protection to break the Zulu attack, which was called off before British reinforcements could arrive. No fewer than 11 Victoria Crosses were awarded to the defenders of Rorke’s Drift, and the 1964 film Zulu helped to embed the battle in national consciousness; in reality it was an unnecessary battle, badly planned on both sides, and given a huge importance it never really deserved. 9 medieval battles more significant than Agincourt The Siege of Mafeking, 1899–1900 When the Boer republics launched pre-emptive strikes into British territory at the start of the Anglo-Boer War towards the end of 1899, they managed to catch the British on the hop and besiege them in a series of townships, including Kimberley, Ladysmith and the railway junction at Mafeking. The British commander at Mafeking, Robert Baden-Powell, having got himself unnecessarily trapped there, went on to make the most of it by a brilliant news management campaign, presenting himself as the plucky lad at the wicket, gallantly blocking some fiendish Boer bowling. When Mafeking was finally relieved by troops under Field Marshal Roberts in May 1900, the British public went wild with joy and relief. The importance of the siege of Mafeking was always heavily overstated: it gave the Boers some initial propaganda leverage, but in military terms it tied too many troops down and left them unprepared to face the main British attack when it came. The British presented the siege as a sort of test of manly character, though it was of limited importance to the outcome of the war. It also gave them a sense of moral superiority, which was soon undermined by the revelations about the appalling conditions in the concentration camps in which the British held the local Boer population. The Battle of Britain, 1940 You might think you need your eyes tested, or me my brain examined, to see the Battle of Britain in this list. The crucial role of the RAF in denying the Germans control of the air in 1940 and therefore persuading Adolf Hitler to abandon his invasion plans is so well known that it might seem almost sacrilegious to question it. There is, indeed, no cause to question the importance of the battle, but was it solely responsible for saving Britain from invasion? Not quite. For a ruthless dictator, Hitler was surprisingly sensitive about heavy losses in battle and his navy had taken a pounding in 1940 during the invasion of Norway. The difficulties of launching an amphibious invasion across the Channel were hardly a secret, and he knew the appalling damage that even a relatively small squadron of British ships could inflict on an exposed German fleet of invasion barges if it caught them mid-Channel. The loss of life would be devastating, and so would the blow to German prestige. Had the Germans been able to get hold of the French fleet the odds might have been evened, but Churchill’s ruthless decision to sink it at Mers-el-Kébir denied Hitler that possibility. German control of the air would certainly take a heavy toll on the Royal Navy, but it only needed a few British planes disputing the skies with the Luftwaffe to allow the Navy to destroy the German army in the West. It was probably never worth the risk and Hitler almost certainly knew it. The Battle of Britain: a brilliant triumph that involved far more than just the chosen few And one underrated battle: Jutland, 1916 The battle of Jutland was probably the single most important British victory of the First World War, yet not only is it often underrated, some books even suggest it was a British defeat. It was nothing of the sort. When Winston Churchill called Admiral Jellicoe, in charge of the British Grand Fleet, the one man who could lose the war in an afternoon, he was speaking the truth. If Britain lost control of the sea, the Allies would lose the war. If the Germans controlled the Channel, they could cut British military aid to France, land troops on the undefended French coast and launch a devastating attack in the Allied rear. Submarines could certainly take their toll on Allied shipping, but the Germans’ key to landing a decisive blow lay with the battleships of their High Seas Fleet. All they had to do was command the sea. And that is why Jutland was so important. Jutland was certainly not decisive in the way Nelson’s battles were: the British actually lost more ships than the Germans, in many cases through poor ship design, and the Germans escaped to fight another day. Except, they didn’t fight another day. As an American journalist put it, the German fleet had assaulted its jailer and was back in jail. Where it stayed until the end of the war – thanks to Jutland. Sean Lang is a senior lecturer in history at Anglia Ruskin University, specialising in the history of the British empire. He is also a professional playwright and a regular broadcaster on radio and television. You can follow him on Twitter @sf_lang