Figure 1.--After the failure of the Luftwaffe to break the RAF in August and September 1940, Hitler turned to the terror bombing of London and British cities. Because of severe losses during the day, the Luftwaffe shited to night time raids. Here Queen Elizabeth visits Londoners in a deep shelter during November. There are no known comparable images of Hitler visiting with Germans in shelters.

After the fall of France, Hitler expected the British to make peace. Whn they did not he ordered an invasion of Britain preceeded by an air campaign to establish air superority to cover he Channel crossing. The Luftwaffe quickly established bases in France and by July 10 launched preliminary strikes in what has come to be called the Battle of Britain. The Luftwaffe wih a series of successful campaigns was confident of victory. The Luftwaffe while better trained and outnumbering the RAF was ill prepared for the campaign. The Battle of Britain began in earnest on July 10 and reached intensive levels on August 13 with Luftwaffe raids on British airfields and aircraft factories. Hitler had assumed that the Luftwaffe could force the British to capitualte. The Luftwaffe im its August campaign seriously weakened the RAF and Fighter Command was having increasing difficulty maintaining its forward air bases in Kent. Then off-course German bombers accidentally bomb London on August 23-24. RAF Bomber Command on August 25-26 mounted a small reprisal raid against Berlin. Hitler is furious and orders an immediate change in Luftwaffe tactics. Rather than completing its offensive against the RAF infrastructure, Hitler ordered a "blitz" on British cities which began in earnest on September 7. The Luftwaffe wreaked havoc on civilians in London and major English cities. An estimated 42,000 civilians were killed. Thousands of civilians were killed. White British cities burned, the RAF was given a respite, allowing its forward air bases to recover from the damage done in August. As a result the RAF was able to mount increasingly costly attacks on the German bomber fleets. The Luftwaffe eventually is forced to shift to nightime raids. Night bombing made it impossible to hit actually military and industrial targets, only cities could be targetted. The British were battered, but held.

German Tatics

There were two kinds of battles in World War II. The first kind was battles in which the outcome was preordained because of the preponderance of forces on one side. Surely the NAZI invasion of Poland or the Soviet invasion of Finland had preordained outcomes not matter what tactics the Poles and Finns used or how valiantly they resisted the invasion of their country. The other type of battle is those in which the forces of the adversaries are relatively balanced and the outcome could have gone either way because of tactics or other factors. The Battle of Britain is surely one of the latter battles, although the odds were probably not as stacked against the British as widely believed at the time. It was the German tactics, and ill-advised changes in those tactics that probably proved decisive. At the time, air warfare was relativelly new. Some strategists believed that bombing could force am opponent to surrender. That view was apparently held by Hitler and Göring. The Germans initiated the Battle of Britain. Thus the phases pf the battle were largely based on their plan and changes in that plan as the battle developed. The initial plans were laid by the professional staff of the Luftwaffe. Tgey were designed to destroy the RAF. When that plan did not bring immediate results, Hitler and Göring intervened which in the end doomed the German campaign. Some analysts believe that even if the Luftwaffe had continued focusing on the RAF, the Luftwaffe would have failed. That is an unresolved issue. What is certain is that Hitler and Göring turned to terror bombing which provide the RAF a respite that was sorely needed. Churchill writes, "The German air assault on Britain is a tale of divided counsels, conflicting purposes, and never fully accomplished plans. Three or four times in three months, the enemey abandoned a method of attack which was causing us severe stress, and turned to something new. But all those stages over-lapped one another, and cannot be readily distinguished by precise dates. Each one merged into the next." [Churchill, Finest, p. 341.]

Battle Phases

The Battle of Britain can be divided into four major, but overlapping and not always easily destinguishable phases. The critical stage, was the second one in which the Luftwaffe attempted to destroy the organization and forward air bases of the RAF. If accomplished an invasion might have become feasible, although Hitler still hoped the British could be forced to make peace. This was the most critical phase for the RAF. British industry was producing substantial numbers of fighter aircraft, especially the all-metal Spitfires, but the Luftwaffe still had an edge in trained pilots. If Britain was to be defeated, this was the critical time. The failure of the Luftwaffe to destroy the RAF at this time mean that a vengeful and determined enemy was left in the West with important technological and industril resources that would prove to be the launching board for a stratehic bombing campaign that would dwarf the Blitz and destroy German cities. Britain would also be the necessary launching board for the ground assault on Hitler's Fortress Europe.

Sources

Churchill, Winston. Their Finest Hour (Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1949), 751p.

Davidson, Eugene. The Unmaking of Adolf Hitler (Univesity of Missouri: Columbia, 1996), 519p.

Fest, Joachim C. Hitler (Vintage Books: New York, 1974), 844p.

Gilbert, Martin. A History of the Twentieth Century Vol. 2 1933-54 (William Morrow and Company, Inc.: New York, 1998), 1050p.

Olson, Lynne and Stanley Cloud. A Question of Honor: The Kosciuszko Squadron: Forgotten Heroes of World War II (Knopf, 2003).

Created: January 14, 2003
Last updated: 4:04 PM 11/4/2008