Battle of Britain

The Battle of Britain was the air campaign of 1940 in which the Royal Air Force defended the United Kingdom against large-scale attacks by the Luftwaffe, the air force of Nazi Germany. British accounts date it from 10 July to 31 October 1940. It was the first major campaign fought entirely by air forces, and Germany's failure to defeat the RAF and force Britain out of the war was its first major defeat of the Second World War.

By June 1940 Germany had overrun France and the Low Countries, and Britain faced the prospect of invasion. On 18 June Prime Minister Winston Churchill told the House of Commons that the Battle of France was over and the Battle of Britain was about to begin, giving the campaign its name. German leaders hoped above all to push Britain into a negotiated peace. They recognised that a landing across the Channel would be very difficult while the Royal Navy controlled the sea, so on 16 July Adolf Hitler ordered preparations for an invasion, Operation Sea Lion, to follow only once the Luftwaffe had won control of the air.

At the start of the battle the RAF had roughly 1,960 aircraft of all types, including about 750 single-seat fighters, mostly Hurricanes and Spitfires. The Luftwaffe deployed some 2,550 serviceable aircraft against Britain. The British had one crucial advantage: a chain of radar stations along the coast, linked by telephone to observers and control rooms under Fighter Command's chief, Hugh Dowding. This reporting network let controllers send fighters to meet incoming raids instead of patrolling blindly. About a fifth of the RAF's pilots came from outside Britain, including Poles, New Zealanders, Canadians and Czechoslovaks.

In July the Luftwaffe attacked convoys in the Channel and ports such as Portsmouth. On 1 August it was ordered to destroy the RAF, and from mid-August it struck at radar stations, airfields and aircraft factories. From 24 August it concentrated on Fighter Command's airfields in the south-east, hitting key stations such as Biggin Hill and Hornchurch repeatedly. Losses of pilots and aircraft strained the RAF, and many replacement pilots arrived with very little training.

After RAF bombers raided Berlin from late August, Hitler withdrew his ban on bombing London, and in early September the Luftwaffe switched its main effort to the capital. This took pressure off the airfields. On 15 September, now marked as Battle of Britain Day, the Luftwaffe launched its largest attack yet, and the RAF met it in force and defeated it. Daylight raids declined afterwards. Meanwhile RAF Bomber Command had sunk nearly 200 invasion barges in Channel ports, and Hitler postponed Sea Lion indefinitely. German night bombing of British cities, known as the Blitz, continued into May 1941; German historians often treat the whole period as one campaign.

Both sides greatly exaggerated how many enemy aircraft they destroyed, often by two or three times. According to commonly cited figures, the RAF lost about 1,740 aircraft and 1,542 aircrew killed, and the Luftwaffe about 1,980 aircraft, with 2,585 aircrew killed and 925 captured. Some 23,000 British civilians were killed in air raids between July and December 1940.

The battle ended the immediate threat of invasion and kept Britain in the war as a base from which the liberation of western Europe would later be launched. It also helped persuade the United States that Britain could survive and was worth supporting. Churchill's tribute that never in human conflict had "so much" been "owed by so many to so few" gave the pilots their lasting name, The Few. Germany turned east and in June 1941 launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union.

Our 1938 map shows Europe on the eve of the war, and the 1945 map shows the continent at its end.