The Battle of Britain

This post is a bit belated-real life intervened again. On August 15, 1940 the Germans launched a massive air offensive against Britain with Eagle Day, a day of maximum Luftwaffe effort which saw almost 1,800 sorties against the British Royal Air Force and its airfields. ( A “sortie” is one flight by one aircraft.) While German air raids had begun in July, Eagle Day marked the beginning of the critical phase of the Battle of Britain as intended precursor to a German seaborne invasion. The intended result of this air campaign was to defeat the RAF thereby gaining air superiority over the English coast so as to be able to launch a successful invasion of England across the English Channel. The Germans would use their air superiority first to defeat the British navy as it tried to destroy the invasion forces at sea and then to support the land battle.

Something to remember is how new this all was. The British were using radar to plot fighter intercepts and while the Germans made a brief attempt to destroy the British radar installations it was a weak almost accidental effort against a vitally important target. The British were also reading Luftwaffe radio traffic using the Ultra code breaking intercepts which informed them of Luftwaffe plans at the operational level. The Germans attacked British airbases – to destroy or damage airfields and facilities to be sure but almost as much to draw the British fighters into battle with the intention of wearing them down. Air campaigns had an element of attrition to them. The supply and replacement of aircraft and more importantly the supply of trained pilots would be a crucial factor in success or failure. The British had the advantage that if a pilot bailed out of a downed aircraft he would land in friendly territory and could fly again while downed German pilots and crew became prisoners of war. Exactly when you had acquired air superiority sufficient to launch an invasion, how effective aircraft would be in protecting an invasion force at sea and other important questions had no clear answers at the time.

On August 17, 1940 the Germans declared a blockade of Britain by both air and sea warning that neutral shipping bound for Britain risked destruction. It is also worth noting that today is the 70th anniversary of the British evacuating their East African colony of British Somaliland in the face of Italian invasion. British Somaliland was in an isolated position and the British chose to strike the Italian East African colonies and Italian occupied Ethiopia using more logistically established and better located areas such as Kenya. The war in East Africa marked a further territorial spread of this increasingly “world” war.