When Britain Saved The West by Prior Robin

Author:Prior, Robin [Prior, Robin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300166620
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2015-05-25T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN

THE ANTAGONISTS

ANY ACCOUNT OF THE Battle of Britain must note from the outset the strange nature of the encounter. Consider these points:

•There is no agreement on when the battle started or when it ended.

•For most of the battle a maximum of 50 per cent of the Luftwaffe engaged a maximum of 40 per cent of Fighter Command and usually the numbers were much smaller than that.

•Although almost all the action was in south-east England, for the entire battle 25 per cent of Fighter Command’s single-engine fighters were in Scotland.

•Neither side knew the strength of the other. Nor did they establish with any accuracy what damage they were inflicting on each other.

•The Germans had no overall plan to defeat the RAF.

•For any given day of the battle, it is not known with any certainty the number of German aircraft over Britain, nor is it known exactly how many British planes were sent against them.

We will return to many of these matters as the battle is described.

In 1940 the air defence of Great Britain depended on two factors. The first was the performance of two types of single-engine fighters, the Hurricane and the Spitfire, and the skill of the pilots who flew them. The aircraft were outstanding and the pilots who survived their first encounters showed increasing skill as the battle progressed. However, it is doubtful whether Fighter Command could have prevailed had it not been for the second factor. Britain possessed the most sophisticated air-defence weapons system in the world. There were three keys to this system – the gathering of information about incoming raids, the rapid dissemination of this intelligence to the fighting squadrons, and the direction of those squadrons onto the enemy aircraft.

Intelligence of raids was gathered from two sources – radio waves and human observation. In 1935 R. W. Watson-Watt discovered that aircraft passing through radio waves interrupted them and produced a ‘blip’ on a small cathode-ray screen. This blip could be read with sufficient accuracy to obtain a rough idea of the distance of the aircraft from the screen.1 In further developments, the direction and the height of the incoming aircraft could be determined, although these measurements were very crude in the initial period.

The practical application of radar began in 1936 when a series of stations (called Chain Home) was built around the British coast. The stations consisted of eight lattice towers standing from 250 to 350 feet high. They looked out to sea and gave the stations a range of 70 to 140 miles (Map 16).2 At the beginning of the Battle of Britain there were 34 Chain Home stations between Scapa Flow and Pembrokeshire in Wales. To account for low-flying aircraft, a second series of stations called Chain Home Low was constructed along the same stretch of coastline.3

The radar stations worked thus. The staff continually scanned the small screens (approximately 5 × 3 inches) for blips that indicated incoming aircraft. After allowing for friendly aircraft that were equipped with an electronic

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