The Battle of Britain
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The Battle of Britain, which took place over a few weeks in the summer of 1940, is the most famous episode in the history of air warfare. It inspired Winston Churchill, the century's most quotable statesman, to make his most quoted remark, of the British fighter pilots in the battle, that "never before in the annals of warfare did so many owe so much to so few." It was a fundamental turning point in the course of the Second World War the first serious check suffered by the hitherto triumphant Nazi German war machine, and which ultimately led to the two front war that all German strategists, including Hitler himself, desperately wanted to avoid. Why was the Battle of Britain fought, and why did it come out the way it did? To understand the strategic meaning of the Battle of Britain, it must be viewed in the context of the most decisive military operation that never took place: Operation Sea Lion, the planned German invasion of Britain. Essentially, the strategic role of the Battle of Britain, from the German perspective, bore the same relation to the planned invasion that the Spanish Armada bore, nearly four centuries earlier, to the the invasion force then gathered in the Spanish Netherlands under the Prince of Parma. The Armada of 1588 was supposed to gain sea control of the English Channel for the crucial days, and to escort Parma's invasion barges across the Channel. The Luftwaffe air fleets of 1940 were supposed to gain air superiority over the Chann
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of Painswick," cited in Fleming (1957: 89 90), includes pots and pans, and reads like a list of preparations made by J.R.R. Tolkien's Hobbits to protect their Shire from an invasion by Mordor. In English eyes, the invasion threat, so central in earlier wars since 1588, had been replaced by concern about mass bombing. The anticipated effects of the latter were grossly overestimated; estimates made at the outbreak of war in 1939 estimated that bombing of London would cause hundreds of thousands of casualties in the first week (Dyson, 1984: 17 18).
The Germans also had high expectations for city bombing. The plans for Operation Sea Lion called for massive bombing of London just before "D Day," for general demoralization and to clog the roads with panicky, fleeing refugees, thus disrupting defensive military movements. But in the event, the bombing of London would be a turning point in the Battle of Britain in England's favor and was the third decisive tactical error which the Germans made.
Their first tactical error was made in June, when France collapsed. Instead of immediately launching an air offensive against England, the Germans held back, and carried out only low intensity operations. Now, it can
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Approximate Word count = 2844
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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