Happy Battle of Britain Day!

[Bob Womack]

From WIKI:

"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." - Winston S. Churchill

Churchill apparently first said the famous sentence to Major General Hastings Ismay after exiting the Battle of Britain Bunker at RAF Uxbridge on 16 August, four days before the speech was given. He had been visiting the No. 11 Group RAF operations room during the day of a battle, where at one point every squadron in the group was engaged while more waves of German planes were crossing the coast. After the fighting had slowed that evening and Churchill and Ismay had departed for Chequers, Churchill said, "Don't speak to me; I have never been so moved." Several minutes later, he told Ismay, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."
More HERE.

Bob

[Nymuso]

And ya know what? We still owe them.

[Gromitspapa]

A friend of mine was telling me the turning point was in Hitler deciding to attack London instead of destroying the RAF. I looked it up and this link illustrates a lot of other advantages the RAF had against the Luftwaffe:

https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/0808battle/

Just as things were looking grim, Hitler made a critical mistake. He changed Luftwaffe targeting. In August, two German pilots who had flown off course on a night mission dropped their bombs on London. The RAF bombed the Berlin suburbs in reprisal. Germans were shocked and outraged, having been assured by Hitler and Goering that their capital was safe from British bombers. An enraged Hitler on Sept. 5 ordered a change in basic strategy, shifting the Luftwaffe’s focus of attack from British airfields to the city of London.


That took the pressure off Fighter Command at a critical time. RAF fighter losses fell below the output of replacements. In diverting the offensive from the RAF, the Germans had lost sight of the valid assumption with which they had begun: The key objective was destruction of the RAF. Otherwise, the Sea Lion invasion would not be possible.

[Silurian]

The importance of the Dowding System, providing an integrated command structure and rapid deployment of air power cannot be underestimated.

The 'few' were those on the ground as well as the air.

[Silly Moustache]

I live pretty much in the middle of the area on which the Battle of Britain was fought.

Somewhere I have a reprinted picture of a damaged Stuka falling on my town in walking distance of where my house was built many years later.
Although most down German planes were removed for scrap, and crew were buried , it is said that the plane and crew were quickly covered over and is now underneath a housing development.

Remarkably our ancient city suffered lightly from the BoB, despite being very close to one of the most important fighter airfields.

There was one attempt by the Germans to bomb a building that they thought was some sort of communications centre - it was a junior school, and they missed but hit every house along the street. Deaths occurred but relatively few.

The biggest disaster was a bomb laden USAAF Lliberator which was evacuated by the crew but it landed about 200 yards away from my house (which was then a lake) .


See : https://thenovium.org/article/28860/...r-Bomber-Crash

I pass "Liberator Place" when I cycle to the gym.

My house and my allotments are in filled land which was an opencast mine which then became a lake into which, some say, many damaged ww2 aircraft were dumped during the war.
Further when the Canadian army were preparing to leave on D-Day they also dumped some trucks with Tank spares that could not be shipped to France.

After the war, the lake was filled with bomb spoil from the East End of London, and when I dug a pond, I found lots of burned "domestic" evidence.

The RAF was very clever in their use of agricultural land as airfields.

They built a central hub (which they knew would be attacked) but with several remote airfields made to look like farmhouses, barns arable fields etc.

Few, if any of these ever got attacked.


edit - I found the Stuka picture - the Chimneys are still there.

[Bob Womack]

Fascinating stuff, Silly! They are still digging Spitfires and BF109s out of the streets of London.

The 15th was the day that sergeant pilot Ray Holmes bumped a Dornier Do17 with his Hawker Hurricane over London, knocking off the Do17's empennage and causing it to fall into the Victoria Station rail yard.

Bob