BRITAIN, BATTLE OF.

In June 1940, having defeated France in one of the most spectacularly decisive land battles in military history, the German Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) expected his remaining adversary, Great Britain, to make peace. His expectation was reasonable. The British Foreign Minister, Lord Edward Frederick Lindley Wood Halifax (1881–1959), saw no point in continuing the war, and in May had been one of only two candidates to replace Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) as prime minister. The other candidate was Winston Churchill (1874–1965), who got the job by the narrowest of margins. Churchill regarded Nazism as a malevolent evil that had to be defeated, whatever the cost, in order to safeguard the West.

In order to put pressure on Britain to come to terms, Hitler ordered preparations to be made for an invasion. As a necessary precondition, the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe, was to establish air superiority over southeast England. The head of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring (1893–1946), did not take the invasion plans seriously, but thought the Luftwaffe alone could bring Britain to the negotiating table. The Luftwaffe was never clear about exactly what it was trying to achieve.

The odds were stacked against the Germans from the outset. Under the leadership of Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding (1882–1970), Fighter Command of the Royal Air Force (RAF) had created the most fearsome air-defense system in the world, designed to foil just such an assault. Its heart was a unique and extremely robust command and control network—the world's first intranet—that made use of radar to locate hostile aircraft. The British Hurricane and Spitfire were the only fighters in the world in 1940 to match the German Messerschmitt Bf 109. At the time, however, the German threat appeared to be overwhelming.

THE BATTLE

As the Luftwaffe moved to improvised bases along the coast of northern France, it began attacking British convoys in the English Channel. Air battles over convoys reached a new level of intensity on 10 July. This date generally marks the beginning of what Churchill called "the Battle of Britain," now identified with the defensive battle fought by Fighter Command. As this battle went on, the rest of the RAF bombed the invasion barges gathering in French ports and the canals that led to them.

The campaign against Britain itself began in earnest on 12 August with attacks on radar stations, followed on 13 August by "Eagle Day," a series of attacks on mainland targets including fighter airfields. They continued until 18 August, after which there was a pause as the Luftwaffe reorganized before beginning again on 24 August. Believing that they were failing to put the radar stations out of action, the Germans concentrated on airfields. However, they were failing to put those out of action as well.

Under the brilliant leadership of the New Zealander Keith Park, Fighter Command's 11 Group, which covered the main battle area, preserved itself and inflicted heavy losses on its assailants. Despite superior tactics in the air, the German fighter force never came close to achieving the kill ratios it needed in order to defeat the RAF. The bombing of the RAF's infrastructure was neither effective nor sustained enough to cripple it, for the system was designed to withstand many isolated blows. Dowding maintained a reserve throughout the battle, and Fighter Command was able to oppose every major raid. British fighter production outstripped Germany's by two to one, and aircraft were always in good supply. The RAF was strengthened by many pilots from the British Commonwealth and Europe, notably Poles and Czechs. Although replacing losses entailed the sending of many vulnerable novices to frontline squadrons, Fighter Command had more pilots in September than in July. The Luftwaffe could not replace all of its losses, and its strength slowly declined.

Some German commanders had always believed that the Luftwaffe should attack London in order to produce a rapid result. Hitler had forbidden this, but in late August the RAF managed to drop a few bombs on Berlin. This demanded a political response, so Hitler publicly announced that British cities would also be attacked. On 7 September the Luftwaffe launched a mass raid on the London docks, and returned that night, beginning what the British call the London "Blitz."

The following week the weather was bad. There was little flying, and when there was, interceptions were scrappy because the raiders were hard to locate in the clouds. Misled by false intelligence estimates of British strength and buoyed by the optimistic claims of their pilots, Luftwaffe commanders concluded that one more big push would make Fighter Command collapse. When Sunday 15 September dawned fine and clear, they launched two large raids on London. The defenders met them in strength, finally revealing that for the previous four weeks the Luftwaffe had been getting nowhere. Two days later, Hitler postponed the invasion preparations until further notice.

Daylight bombing raids continued until the end of September, after which the Luftwaffe restricted itself to fighters. By that time it was all a bluff, and as the year wore on, daylight air activity died down. While the Battle of Britain is usually taken to have ended on 31 October 1940, the night Blitz continued through May 1941. The RAF's strategy of denying the enemy air superiority had succeeded.

SIGNIFICANCE

The consequences of the British victory were far more momentous for the rest of the world than for Britain itself. From June 1941 the war was largely fought out between Germany and the Soviet Union. British belligerence forced Germany to fight in the West, provided a base for American forces from 1942, and was the precondition of the invasion of Normandy in 1944. This meant a Western presence in postwar Europe. Had Britain lost and made peace—a far more likely outcome of defeat than an invasion—it would have survived largely intact, but Europe from the Urals to the Atlantic would eventually have come under either Nazi or Soviet domination. Either result would have meant at best widespread impoverishment and human degradation for decades, or at worst the displacement and slaughter of millions and the descent of Europe into an age of barbarism.

See alsoAviation; Blitzkrieg; World War II.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bungay, Stephen. The Most Dangerous Enemy: A History of the Battle of Britain. London, 2001. The author's own full account of the background, events, and consequences of the battle, which has now become a standard work.

Orange, Vincent. A Biography of Air Chief Marshal Sir Keith Park, G.C.G., K.B.E., M.C., D.F.C., D.C.L. London, 1984. The authoritative biography of the key operational commander on the British side, of whom it was said, "if ever any one man won the Battle of Britain, he did."

Price, Alfred. The Hardest Day: Battle of Britain, 18 August 1940. London, 1979. A brilliantly detailed account of a single day's action that gives new insights into the battle as a whole.

——. Battle of Britain Day, 15 September 1940. London, 1999. A companion work to the above covering the events of 15 September 1940, still celebrated as "Battle of Britain Day."

Ray, John. The Battle of Britain: Dowding and the First Victory, 1940. London, 2000. A scholarly but readable analysis of Dowding's role that sheds new light on what went on behind the scenes and illuminates some of the more controversial aspects of the battle.

Steinhilper, Ulrich, and Peter Osborne. Spitfire on My Tail: A View from the Other Side. Keston, U.K., 1989. The only firsthand account written by a typical German fighter pilot.

Wellum, Geoffrey. First Light. London, 2002. One of the best written of the many autobiographies by British pilots, vivid and moving.

Wood, Derek, with Derek Dempster. The Narrow Margin: The Battle of Britain and the Rise of Air Power. Washington, D.C., 1990. First published in 1960, this was for many years the standard work and is still valuable for its explanation of the RAF system and its dayby-day account of the fighting.

Stephen Bungay

Britain, Battle of, 1940. On 18 June 1940 Churchill declared ‘the Battle of France is over; I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin’. On 2 July Hitler reluctantly ordered planning for the invasion of England, preferring a peaceful acceptance by the British of German dominance in continental Europe. The Churchill government, supported by most public opinion, chose to fight on and challenge Hitler who knew, Churchill declared, ‘that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war’. The German army had ample resources to conquer the UK. Could they be landed, and, if landed, supplied when the Royal Navy had overwhelming superiority? The German navy thought they could not, even if the Luftwaffe could beat the RAF and then attack British warships. Certainly, the invasion was impossible without German air supremacy. The battle was a German attempt to destroy RAF Fighter Command and so win air superiority over the Channel and south-east England.

The single-seat aircraft in the decisive encounters were evenly matched. The Messerschmidt 109E was as fast as the British Spitfire and faster than the Hurricane; the British types were more manœuvrable. The British fought over their own air space with a chain of radar stations, supplemented by observers who reported approaching aircraft to sector headquarters, from which fighter squadrons were directed at the enemy by radio. The German bombers began by attacking shipping from mid-July to mid-August. The plan was to force the RAF to attack German fighter escorts. On 13 August, ‘Eagle Day’, the Germans began the main battle, attacking airfields and aircraft factories. The British came closest to defeat in late August and early September. The Germans made repeated attacks on airfields in the south-east and put out of action many sector control posts. British losses in aircraft and pilots began to exceed replacements. The Germans exaggerated their success and thought the RAF beaten: throughout the Second World War air crews constantly believed they had destroyed more hostile aircraft than post-war evidence confirmed. On 7 and 9 September heavy attacks hit London; the Germans lost 84 aircraft. Evidently the RAF was not defeated and Hitler postponed the decision to invade. On 15 September a renewed attack on London gave the RAF another success: 60 German aircraft and only 26 British were lost. On 17 September Hitler again postponed the invasion and on 12 October it was abandoned.

The Battle of Britain helped, especially since British successes were overstated, to reinforce British support for Churchill's decision to continue the war. The battle encouraged Roosevelt's decision to assist Britain to fight on. In 1941 it forced Hitler to attack the USSR without first solving the problem of the British and American threat. The Battle of Britain was a highly visible contest between small numbers in summer skies. The British lost fewer than 800 aircraft, the Germans nearly 1,400. It was a fierce, limited struggle. Fewer than 3,000 British air crew took part, of whom 507 were killed and about the same number seriously wounded. Churchill was correct: ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’

R. A. C. Parker

Battle of Britain ★★½ 1969 (G)

A powerful retelling of the most dramatic aerial combat battle of WWII, showing how the understaffed Royal Air Force held off the might of the German Luftwaffe. 132m/C VHS, DVD . Harry Andrews, Michael Caine, Laurence Olivier, Trevor Howard, Kenneth More, Christopher Plummer, Robert Shaw, Susannah York, Ralph Richardson, Curt Jurgens, Michael Redgrave, Nigel Patrick, Edward Fox, Ian McShane, Patrick Wymark; D: Guy Hamilton; W: James Kennaway, Wilfred Greatorex; C: Frederick A. (Freddie) Young; M: Malcolm Arnold, Ronald Goodwin, William Walton.

Britain, Battle of a series of air battles fought over Britain (August–October 1940), in which the RAF successfully resisted raids by the numerically superior German air force. Winston Churchill said in the House of Commons, 18 June 1940, ‘What General Weygand called the ‘Battle of France’ is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin.’

Britain, battle of (1940) Series of battles fought in the skies over Britain. Early in World War II (as a prelude to invasion), the Germans hoped to destroy Britain's industrial and military infrastructure and civilian morale by a sustained series of bombing raids. Failure to eliminate the fighters of the Royal Air Force in August–September resulted in the abandonment of the plans for invasion, though bombing raids continued.