“A winter saved the Russians, an island saved the Brits” -Napoleon
After losing the Battle of France it was not looking good for Great Britain. They were alone facing the continent of Europe. The British Navy undeniably overpowered the Germans, but Hitler had set out with a plan, but to succeed they would need to have hundreds of thousands of soldiers cross the English Channel, where the British had naval superiority. The British Isle was untouchable for hundreds of years thanks to the power of their navy, but there was now the capability to wage war in the skies. The Luftwaffe was to bomb key industries and destroy RAF (Royal Air Force) fighters on a large scale. And so, after harrassing convoys and southern ports, the German air force launched their massive aerial assault on South England. These saw airtime bombing raids where British targets were hit en masse for weeks; a raid happening on a factory every 4-5 days for a month. What the Luftwaffe did not expect was the strength of the Royal Air Force.
The Germans overestimated the power of the Luftwaffe from their air support role in the Battle of Britain, and the transmissions that the British received made them overestimate the Luftwaffe’s strength as well. So as the Germans were placid about their airforce, Britain was precarious with it. There was no room for error and they massively stepped up their aerial production to match with the Luftwaffe. More important, though, was their capability to transmit info. A big issue in combat is that you can only predict where the enemy is and what they are doing. In a three-dimensional space such as the sky the problem is even worse. Many planes that would be sent out wouldn’t even find their targets. The British, encumbered with bombing raids, developed a more efficient system. So while a Luftwaffe pilot could find its target 30% of the time, a RAF pilot could find their target 75% of the time.
So over the next few weeks of raids and assaults, the RAF started to cut down the numbers of the Luftwaffe. The British were engaging bombers before they were reaching their targets and experienced pilots were no longer returning to Germany. So in early September, the attacks stopped and the Blitz began. Massive bombing raids on London intended on doing maximun damage. The RAF would fly sorties against each raid nightly, and the civilian bombing would find it’s end on the 31st of October, when the order was given in the Luftwaffe to stop sorties on non-military targets.
I find a lot about this story interesting as the battle of Britain was fought around the very beginning of the implementation of radar to detect planes over larger distances (To my knowledge, the RAF was the first group to use what eventually became transponders which still is the standard for aircraft tracking and identification). At one point, Britain even set up massive concrete dishes across Britain that were tuned to hear the low rumble of aircraft engines from around a hundred miles away just to be able to get some form of early warning about attacks from the Luftwaffe.
The Battle of Britain, a defining moment in the early years of the Second World War, told very well. To think about how crazy Hitler’s plan to take over the entirety of Europe astonishes me. The RAF vs the Luftwaffe will be a theme that will come up a LOT in this war, especially in Northern Africa (which is an area you could look into later in this blog potentially), and it’s interesting to see one of the first times the two meet, especially when we think about the impact it had on the British civilians.
It’s interesting to see like WHY one side can win battles to me. As someone not very educated on battles and wars and such, I never really consider what edges each side having on the other causes the victory. It’s clear that there has to be some advantage to decide who wins, but I have never thought so deeply about it, so to see an explanation of exactly why one side won a battle is really intriguing to me. Now I kinda wanna know why the RAF could find targets so much better.