236: Conclusions and Continuations

Description

In this concluding episode of the Battle of Britain series, we examine the final outcomes and lasting impact of Germany’s 1940 air campaign against Britain. While the Luftwaffe lost approximately 1,900 aircraft compared to the RAF’s 1,600, the true failure lay in Germany’s inability to achieve their strategic goal of neutralizing Fighter Command before the planned invasion. Despite inflated kill claims on both sides, Air Marshal Dowding’s assessment reveals that German airfield attacks never came close to crippling RAF operations, with only two airfields rendered unfit for more than a few hours. The episode explores why the Luftwaffe’s objectives were fundamentally beyond their capabilities, given the limited time window and insufficient understanding of what strategic bombing required. With Sea Lion postponed in September 1940, the focus shifts to how this victory - while preventing invasion - was far from ending the war, as Churchill’s sobering October speech reminds us that “long, dark months of trials and tribulations” still lay ahead in the Mediterranean and beyond.

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Summary

Hello everyone and welcome to History of the Second World War Episode 236 - After the Battle of Britain Pt. 4 - Conclusions and Continuations. This week a big thank you goes out to Kyle for the donation through Ko-Fi along with the funny message, than you Kyle, and to Marco, Stewart, David, and Pamela for supporting the podcast by becoming members. Members get access to ad-free versions of all of the podcast’s episode plus special member only episodes roughly once a month. Head on over to historyofthesecondworldwar.com/members to find out more. There are a few important concepts to keep in mind when attempting to discuss the German air attacks on Britain from July 1940 until the postponement of the invasion plans in the middle of September . The first is that the Luftwaffe, and the German military, were not launching an attack against the RAF just to try and destroy them, they specifically wanted to degrade their fighting capabilities to the point where they could not respond to a German invasion. It is against that goal that the German efforts must be judged, which is a problem for the Luftwaffe because they were incredibly lofty goals that, in retrospect they had no chance of actually achieving at any point in time. When it came down to the decision point in the middle of September, several crucial German leaders had already turned against the idea, Admiral Raeder the head of the German Navy chief among them. And while at times Hitler would overrule any military leader if he really wanted to, Hitler seems to have been just as much in doubt by that stage as anyone else. He had also started to shift his eyes to other theaters. On the British side, their path to victory in the war was completely unclear, but their path to survival against the Luftwaffe was as clear as it possibly could be. They had, and it is not an exaggeration to say this, spent the last half of the 1930s planning for exactly the kind of campaign the Luftwaffe was planning. And when they were confronted with that scenario, Fighter Command did very well. Just as importantly so many other areas of Britain’s war effort also rose to the occasion, with manufacturing, production, and civil services matching the efforts of The Few in their Spitfires and Hurricanes.

The easiest place to start would be by looking at numbers. There are two different set of numbers to discuss when it came to the battle. The first of these are the actual numbers of the aircraft that were damaged or destroyed during the fighting. The exact numbers are a bit fluid based on specifically when you start counting and when you end your count with some histories starting during June and July while others start as late as Eagle Day. The ending date is also a bit fuzzy, depending on whether or not you continue to count throughout September, October, and then the rest of the Blitz or if you end at the end of September. There are also considerations around exactly which aircraft you count as part of the total, which is pretty straightforward on the German side but on the British side, there were Bomber Command and Coastal Command aircraft that were being lost throughout the period of time, but were not directly related to the Luftwaffe attacks over Britain. But enough disclaimers and considerations. The number of Luftwaffe aircraft lost was around 1,900 . On the RAF side the number was around 1,600. The major reason for the larger Luftwaffe number was the fact that the German bombers were much more exposed to enemy actions, and more vulnerable to British fighter attacks during the daytime raids. Bomber Command and Coastal Command on the British side also heavily featured bombing activity, but much of this was done at night where the losses were generally much lower. Obviously, those raw numbers make it clear that the entire campaign did not go well for the Luftwaffe, who had started the campaign with the goal of neutralizing the RAF while retaining enough of their own strength to support the invasion. There were periods of the fighting when the number exchange ratio was in the Luftwaffe’s favor, and the exchange ratio just in fighters was often to the Luftwaffe’s advantage and it is only when the bomber numbers are added in that the ratio decisively turns against the Germans. Unfortunately for the Luftwaffe the Battle of Britain was a war of attrition for all aircraft types, and when it came to defeating Fighter Command and supporting the invasion the bombers that they were losing were just as important as the fighters. But in some ways the actual numbers, the ones that are important to us today when looking at the history were far less important to the actual decision makers at the time. Those decision makers were instead working off of the estimated numbers of enemy aircraft destroyed, which for both sides was on a completely different level in terms of numbers.

The issues with estimating enemy losses has been a major theme of the last several episodes of the podcast, it was a very important problem for the Germans as they tried to determine whether or not they were coming close to accomplishing their stated goal for the campaign: the destruction of the RAF. For the RAF, their estimates were similarly exaggerated, particularly near the end of the campaign as they began to engage German raids with larger and large groups of fighters . But for the British leaders their estimates were generally less important, they were going to keep meeting the German raids as best as they could regardless of the loss ratios. On both sides the bad estimates did have important strategic implications though, and the two that are important to highlight is the shift in German strategy away from the focus on fighter command bases and on the British side the evaluations on the tactics used by the various RAF Fighter Command groups, particularly around the idea of using the Big Wing style of attacks. The Luftwaffe had started the campaign believing that would only take them maybe 3 or 4 days to destroy Fighter Command, this was based on faulty intelligence around the number of fighters that the RAF was able to field in the fighting. The goal was to hit Fighter Command hard both in the air and at their airfields and then to shift the focus of the Luftwaffe groups to other targets that were important to the invasion. When the estimated Fighter Command losses was compared with the expected starting number, it seemed that things were going quite well . This meant that starting in late August there was a subtle shift away from the Fighter Command airfields that had been the focus and towards other targets, like the bombing of London and other industrial targets. The decision to shift effort was also accelerated by the accidental bombing of London on August 24th and RAF Bomber Command’s reprisal raids of various German cities. In retrospect this is seen as a major mistake by the Luftwaffe, and in some ways it was, but they were also never having the impact that they wanted or need to have on the airfields that they had been targeting, making it unlikely that they would have somehow completed their campaign objectives with more focus on those airfields. On the British side their bad estimates, particularly later in the campaign would play a major role in the debates about the best way to respond to the German raids, with Leigh-Mallory from 12 Group using heavily exagerrated numbers as part of his case for why his tactics were superior. Park and 11 Group were concerned that the numbers were not accurate, but there was only so much that they could do to argue against the estimates. By inflating the effectiveness of his squadrons Leigh-Mallory had a much easier job making the case that his tactics were simply better, causing the eventual dismissal of Park from 11 Group.

While aircraft losses were important for both sides, aircraft were always replaceable, it might take some time but a Spitfire was always a Spitfire, a Bf-109 was always a Bf-109. But it was much more difficult to replace the pilots that were lost during the fighting. In total there would be about 2,700 total Luftwaffe losses. The British would take around 1,000 prisoners between July and October, and they were often sent off to Canada for the duration of the war, preventing an y kind of escape attempt. One of the interesting features of those prisoners was how few of them had started their training after September 1939. One of the features of the run of success that the Luftwaffe would have between the invasion of Poland and the defeat of France was that they experienced very little attrition within their fighter and bomber groups. This meant that by the time they were flying over Britain they were generally highly experienced particularly when compared with the British pilots who had fewer chances to gain real combat experience. For these pre-war pilots, Britain would be one long attrition event as day after day they made the long flights across the channel and then engaged with the British fighters. In many ways, the quality of Luftwaffe pilots would never really recover from this experience, with the cadres of experienced pilots no longer available to share their hard earned knowledge. There were still victories in the future, the destruction totals in the skies of Russia would be legendary, but that was primarily preying on a weaker enemy, not one that was of similar quality.

There are two questions that must be asked about the Luftwaffe efforts against Britain in the summer and early autumn of 1940: how close did they get to succeeding and why did they fail to achieve their goals. We can start with how close they came to their goal, which again was to destroy RAF Fighter Command as a fighting force that could impact the invasion plans while also retaining enough Luftwaffe strength to support the invasion. To quote Stephan Bungay from the Most Dangerous Enemy who is referencing Theo Osterkamp, one of the German fighter pilots who took part in the fighting: “The fundamental dilemma facing the German fighter pilots had been recognised by Osterkamp right from the start. They needed a very high kill ratio, which meant selecting only favourable opportunities, but they also needed a high absolute level of kills, which meant using every opportunity for fighting.”. The importance of the kill ratio maintained by the Germans cannot be overstated, and throughout the battle they really struggled to maintain it, particularly when bombers were taken into account. We already discussed numbers earlier in the episode, but the key problem for the Germans was simply that they were unable to destroy the British fighters fast enough, particularly later in the campaign as British factories continued to increase the speed at which they were building new fighters. This meant that as the campaign wore on, the Germans were losing the battle of attrition, and were unable to replace the losses they were suffering, even as the RAF would actually getting stronger. Many histories will point to the decision discussed just a moment ago, the shift from a campaign focused on bombing British airfields and instead focusing on other targets as the cause for this failure. But there is a lot of evidence that the decision did not actually change the calculus of the campaign. The best possible source for this is from Air Marshal Dowding, who was leading Fighter Command throughout the course of the battle. Throughout the battle he was of course getting reports from the various air groups discussing the course of the campaign as they saw it . One of these was from 11 Group’s Park which covered the first month of the fighting from 8 August to 10 September. This included the entire time period during which the Luftwaffe was focused on destroying fighter command both in the air and on the ground. And here is Dowding’s response: “I agree with the Air Officer Commanding 11 Group that the damage done by air attack to aerodromes has been serious, and that it was beginning at one time to affect materially the efficiency of our fighter operations. Nevertheless, I must point out … (i) That 13 aerodromes in the Group underwent a total of over forty attacks in three weeks, but Manston and Lympne were the only two that were unfit for day flying for more than a few hours. (ii) That although the scale of attack certainly exceeded the capacity of the works organisation existing at the outset, this was rapidly strengthened, and I do not wish to express any dissatisfaction with the measures taken to effect this improvement.”. Dowding’s response makes it clear that he never felt that the Germans got close to degrading Fighter Command’s ability to respond to their raids, and really was never even close to removing 11 Group from the board which would have been the first domino to fall. The greatest damage was caused late in August with the raids focused on some of the sector stations like at Biggin Hill and Kenley, but even in those raids which did cause damage to those airfields the ratio of losses was far from favorable for the Germans. Even if they would have continued it would have been very costly to put in the number of raids required to cause real long term damage which would have caused them to fail in the key second pillar of the campaign which was to retain enough strength to support Sea Lion.

So if the Luftwaffe did not get close to succeeding in their goals, the next obvious question is why they were unable to make it happen. At the very beginning of this series I already gave my opinion on this, but to review: the Luftwaffe failed in their goals during the Battle of Britain because what they were attempting to do was fundamentally beyond their capabilities. Every air force during the interwar years, without exception, and including the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force, did not understand the amount of effort and the scale of the bombing campaign that would be required to have a decisive impact during a strategic bombing campaign. This caused them to overestimate the impact that the forces available to them could have on an enemy in a situation in which only air power was being used, instead of just air power as a complement to ground forces. For the Battle of Britain this resulted in the Luftwaffe spreading itself way too thin and trying to do too much without enough focus on one specific target and one specific area. This might have been workable if the Luftwaffe had more aircraft, or if they had more time, but both of those were very finite resources. The timing window for the invasion was fixed even before the air campaign started, and there were many days in which the weather did not allow for air operations. This made it impossible to extend any single piece of the campaign and, in my mind, made the entire endeavor impossible. Obviously, the British took actions that made things worse for the Luftwaffe, and one of the most important was the decision throughout the campaign to focus the vast majority of Fighter Command strength on the German bombers. What the Luftwaffe fighter groups really wanted to do was to engage in fighter vs fighter actions, without the bombers present to slow them down and put them out of position. But Park in particular made sure his Sector leaders knew that they were to avoid strictly fighter vs fighter action as much as possible. This was put in place such that if a German raid was known to only contain fighters the British aircraft would just stay on their airfields. This frustrated the Luftwaffe’s attempts to engage the British aircraft under the most favorable terms, and at the point where they could achieve the largest kill ratios.

Behind the scenes in most histories, but very much front of mind for both the British and German leaders was the German plans for an invasion. On September 17th, with the failures of the German attacks on September 15th, Sea Lion was postponed under the spring of 1941. However, it was unclear to the British that the invasion had been called off for 1940 and so there were still concerns that it was going to happen. The British were essentially seeing phantom preparations throughout October and November. German preparations for the spring 1941 possibility also included for the entire winter, with actual dedicated landing craft being developed and built which would have resulted in the German forces having access to purpose built landing craft that would not have been present for their 1940 efforts. The Spring of 1941 would also have worked better for the German Navy. During 1940, the Kriegsmarine, and Admiral Reader as its leader, was very concerned about the ability of the German air and sea forces to protect the invasion from attacks by the Royal Navy. In September 1940, due to damage sustained by the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau the largest ship available to the invasion was a single heavy cruiser. There was very little that any of the German ships could do against the numbers and power of the Royal Navy’s ships that could be brought to bear. But by the spring of 1941 the situation at sea had shifted greatly, the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau could be made avaiable, and just as importantly the new battleship Bismarck would also be ready for action. This could have completely changed the force comparisons at sea. The British had also been building of course, and they had greatly increased the strength of their coastal forces particularly in the area of mother gun boats which were the perfect invasion flotilla killers with 20mm and 40mm guns along with search radars for night interception. But for the German leaders, their focus had already shifted first to the Balkans in April and then to the attack on the Soviet Union in June. And so the invasion was never revisited as an option during 1941.

While the Luftwaffe had failed in their attempts to curtail RAF strength during the summer and autumn of 1940, on the British side there was much to celebrate. It had seemed like the British Isles were at their greatest risk of invasion since the days of Napoleon and they had been able to fight it off. And it was a nation wide victory, with everyone playing an important role in the struggle, from the fighter pilots that became legendary heroes, to the grounds crew that kept them in the air, to the workers in the factory that were building their aircraft, to the random citizen who did not panic when the bombing shifted to civilian targets. While this was a victory, it was about as far from a final victory as as possible. Britain did not win the war in the Battle of Britain, they barely managed to not lose, which was still an accomplishment but the war was far from won. But instead of the events over Britain causing both sides to move towards any kind of peace agreements, they instead would find themselves in a war that was growing to a scale beyond anything previously imagined. Many eyes turned towards the Mediterranean as the fighting between the British and Italians continued to expand in scope and ferocity. German eyes were of course already turning east, with their great struggle with the Soviet Union to begin during the summer months, but only after there was a Balkan diversion. It is reasonable to claim that, until 1941 the Second World War as not truly a World War, confined to a few areas of Europe and northern Africa. 1941 would change that, and it would become the largest conflict of all time.

Every historical event goes through a process over the decades that shifts how it is viewed and the impact it has on those that experienced it and those that come after. The Battle of Britain is no different. It is one of the foundational moments of modern Britain, with illusions to the Blitz Spirit and a unique ability to persevere under harsh conditions becoming an important legacy to British society. And for many decades those that lived through the events of the war were able to pass down those memories and those experiences. Some were forgotten, some perhaps grew in the telling, but they were still an important part of the legacy of the event. But as the decades pass those that watched The Few of Fighter Command battle it out over Britain, or who survived the bombing of the Blitz, passed away. In March 2025 the last combat pilot of the RAF passed away at the age of 105. Those that survived the event, even as children, will not be far behind. And this represents an important shift in how modern people remember and understand the events of the pass, once it moves out of living memory, once those who experienced it have passed on, it begins its transition into the legendary past. This has already happened for the Battle of Britain, and its exact impact on the war, its impact on the RAF and the Luftwaffe, on the citizens of Germany and Britain almost do not even matter. It is famous speeches, questionably reported aerial heroics, and everyday stories of keeping calm and carrying on remain, outside and without regard for exact historical events. But with the benefit of hindsight, and when setting aside emotion, it is easy to see the Battle of Britain as just one small story in the great saga of the Second World War. And there were no illusions about the situation that Britain found itself in even after it has fought off the possible German invasion. On October 8th Churchill would give one of his many updates on the War Situation to the Commons, discussing the night bombing raids, actions in North Africa, and other events. I will read the end of his speech here in full, as it is far less well known than his speeches from the summer months: “Because we feel easier in ourselves and see our way more clearly through our difficulties and dangers than we did some months ago, because foreign countries, friends or foes, recognise the giant, enduring, resilient strength of Britain and the British Empire, do not let us dull for one moment the sense of the awful hazards in which we stand. Do not let us lose the conviction that it is only by supreme and superb exertions, unwearying and indomitable, that we shall save our souls alive. No one can predict, no one can even imagine, how this terrible war against German and Nazi aggression will run its course or how far it will spread or how long it will last. Long, dark months of trials and tribulations lie before us. Not only great dangers, but many more misfortunes, many shortcomings, many mistakes, many disappointments will surely be our lot. Death and sorrow will be the companions of our journey; hardship our garment; constancy and valour our only shield. We must be united, we must be undaunted, we must be inflexible. Our qualities and deeds must burn and glow through the gloom of Europe until they become the veritable beacon of its salvation.”. There was a very long road ahead, and the podcast will begin to walk down that road starting in just a few weeks, when begin to focus on the events in the Mediterranean, which would occupy much of the British war effort for the better part of 2 years. The British did not win the war during the Battle of Britain, the Germans did not lose the war during the Battle of Britain, but the road to victory and defeat would continue on the waters of the Mediterranean and the sands of North Africa