The Battle of Britain by Richard Overy

Author:Richard Overy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781846143564
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2004-12-14T14:00:00+00:00

A VICTORY OF SORTS

I think we have managed to avoid losing this war. But when I think how on earth we are going to win it, my imagination quails.

HAROLD NICOLSON, DIARY, 8 NOVEMBER 19401

We shall win, but we don’t deserve it; at least we do deserve it because of our virtues, but not because of our intelligence.

WINSTON CHURCHILL, 10 AUGUST 19402

Britain was not driven into the ground in 1940 and Germany did not win the war. These statements are commonplace enough. The difficulty is to decide what, if anything, connects them, for the Battle of Britain did not seriously weaken Germany and her allies, nor did it much reduce the scale of the threat facing Britain (and the Commonwealth) in 1940/41 until German and Japanese aggression brought the Soviet Union and the United States into the conflict. The issues in 1940 cannot be reduced to a simple dividing line between victory and defeat.

In the first place the threat from the German Air Force was just one of the problems Britain faced in the autumn and winter of 1940. The war against Italy in north and east Africa was a major contest, whose outcome was just as critical for the long-term survival of Britain’s global imperial position. In August Italian armies invaded Somaliland, and in September crossed into Egypt. The large Italian Navy forced Britain to fight a major naval campaign in the Mediterranean at a time when ships were desperately needed for defence against invasion and to protect the vital trade routes across the Atlantic on which Britain’s long-term survival depended. This war against Italy exposed how fragile Britain’s position was in 1940, fighting two European great powers, her navy under constant submarine threat, the economy in crisis, a predatory Japan in eastern Asia, waiting for Britain’s star to fall like France before her. In the end only a small portion of the war effort of Britain and the Commonwealth was exerted against the German Air Force in the autumn war in the air.

The German threat itself was only partly reduced as a result of the air battles. In late November 1940 a pessimistic Churchill was reportedly still anxious that Germany ‘will strive by every means to smash us before the Spring’.3 The one thing that the Battle of Britain could not prevent was the bombing. Even during the daylight clashes between July and September, a high proportion of bombers reached and bombed their targets. German air fleets could not bomb at will, and they sustained what proved to be debilitating loss rates by day, but there was no effective way of preventing bombing, even when the navigational beams were finally jammed by British counter-measures in November. The factors that undermined the effectiveness of the bombing campaign both by day and by night were self-inflicted: bomb attacks were carried out with small bomb-loads, with relatively small numbers of aircraft, and over a widely scattered number of targets. Many of these targets were of secondary importance; no target system, whether airfields, communications, ports or industry, was attacked repeatedly, systematically or accurately.

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