Battle of Britain
The Luftwaffe tried to destroy the Royal Air Force over southern England in the summer of 1940 and failed. The object was an invasion. Germany could not cross twenty miles of water while the RAF and the Royal Navy were intact, and the air force had to be beaten first. The two sides were closer in strength than the story usually allows. Fighter Command had about 750 serviceable fighters at the start and produced more aircraft each month than Germany did; the shortage was pilots. What Britain had that Germany did not was a system. The Chain Home radar stations, the Observer Corps, and a network of telephone lines feeding filtered plots to a single operations room let Dowding scramble squadrons at the right place and time instead of flying standing patrols, which multiplied the force available. The Germans understood the radar masts mattered and stopped attacking them after a few days. The critical phase was late August, when attacks on the sector airfields were beginning to break the system. Then a navigational error dropped bombs on London, Churchill retaliated on Berlin, and Hitler ordered the effort switched to the capital in September — which took the pressure off the airfields at the moment it was telling. The invasion was postponed indefinitely on 17 September. Some 544 Fighter Command aircrew were killed, including Poles, Czechs, Canadians and New Zealanders, and about 1,700 German aircraft were lost. Churchill's sentence about so much being owed by so many to so few was delivered on 20 August, in the middle of the fighting rather than after it. Dowding, who had built the system that won it, was removed from his command in November.
- Year: 1940 CE
- Category: Military
