The Battle of Britain

Decisive WWII action.  Had the British lost, Hitler would have invaded Britain and that would have changed everything, for the worse.  In the spring of 1940 Hitler looked invincible.  He had conquered and occupied Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, The Netherlands, France (a great power) and driven the British (the other great power) into the sea at Dunkirk.  Although the British had managed to rescue most of their soldiers, they abandoned all their tanks, trucks, artillery, tents, rations, and ammunition. Only a few troops retained their rifles.  Had Hitler been able to put a few divisions ashore in England in the summer of 1940, it would have been all over for the Brits.

   Only the Royal Navy stood in the way.  Had the Germans set out for England in their fleet of Rhine River barges, the Brits would have steamed up along side in destroyers and blown the Germans out of the water.  The Brits had better than 100 destroyers backed up by 30 odd cruisers and a dozen battleships. They had sunk Graf Spee and Bismarck.  The actions off Norway had wiped out most of the German destroyers.  Those river barges would have been on their own crossing the channel. 

   The German Luftwaffe might have been able to drive the Royal Navy away and safe guard the crossing.  For this to work, the Luftwaffe had to establish air superiority.  You cannot be attacking RN destroyers with Spitfires on your tail.  This means shooting down RAF fighters in the air and bombing RAF bases out of operation. 

   The Brits knew what was coming.  They had invented and installed the first modern air defense system.  We were still using the idea in USAF in the 1960s.  It consisted of ground radar, linked by telephone to “sector stations” which scrambled the fighters and gave them vectors and altitudes to fly for interception. 

Without the radar Luftwaffe strikes would have surprised the RAF on the ground unless the RAF flew reconnaissance sorties to spot the Germans at a distance.  The number of recon sorties would have huge.  A fighter unit can only put up so many sorties a day.  To waste all those sorties just flying around looking for the enemy would have meant the end for the British.  With the radar, the British fighters could stay on their fields, all fueled and armed, ready to scramble, and count on intercepting the Germans on pretty much every sortie.  No sorties wasted flying recon.

   Had the Germans figured things out, they could have bombed the radar stations.  There were easy to find, being right on the coast and having 300 foot high antennas marking their positions.  And they could have bombed out the sector stations by homing in on their radio transmissions.   But, the Germans never figured out what was going on and let the radars and the sector stations operate undisturbed.  They counted on shooting down the Hurricanes and Spitfires in the air, and bombing their fields.  This didn’t work out because the British planes and pilots were as good as the Luftwaffe planes and pilots, and the British cranked up their aircraft factories and were building more planes than the Germans were shooting down. 

  Why do we care?  England was a Great Power; she had 50 odd million population.  Not too shabby even compared to our 100 odd million back then. And England could count on solid support from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India.  India put up many of the troops that beat Rommel in North Africa, and later beat the Japanese at Imphal and drove them out of Burma.  And, England was the base for the air war on Germany and for launching D-Day.  Many of the craft that landed in Normandy were open landing craft.  They could cross the Channel in good weather but they would never survive crossing the North Atlantic even in summer.  In short England was key strategic terrain.  Had the Germans taken it in 1940 it is difficult to imagine how we would ever have been able to beat Hitler.