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World War II air campaign -- Battle of Britain the Blitz
World War II Air Campaign: Battle of Britain--German Tactics
Figure 1.--The caption of this international news photograph read, "Two children died here--victims of NAZI warbirds. Somewhere in England. Two innocent little victims of war died here--leaving their shattered dolls and toys scattered about where they were thrown by the bomb which killed their owners. The children were Mollies, 10, and Len, 5, children of Mr. Mrs. Palmer. Mr. Palmer had both legs broken by the explosion. This was the raid in which eleven persons were killed, and seven NAZI bombing planes were shot down." The photograph was taken July 2, 1940. British sources often inflated Luftwaffe losses. The Luftwaffe was to find out that destroying houses and their residents would not defeat an adversary with a modern air force.
"You laid the dead of London at our doors and we knew that the dead were our dead. Without more emotion than needed be ...you have destroyed the superstition that what is done beyond three thousand miles of water is not really done at all. There were some people in this country who did not want the people of America to hear the things you had to say."
-- Archibald MacLeish, tribute to Edward R. Murrow, December 2, 1941
There were two kinds of battles in World War II. The first kind was battles in which the outcome was preordained because of the preponderance of forces on one side. Surely the NAZI invasion of Poland or the Soviet invasion of Finland had preordained outcomes not matter what tactics the Poles and Finns used or how valiantly they resisted the invasion of their country. The other type of battle is those in which the forces of the adversaries are relatively balanced and the outcome could have gone either way because of tactics or other factors. The Battle of Britain is surely one of the latter battles, although the odds were probably not as stacked against the British as widely believed at the time. It was the German tactics, and ill-advised changes in those tactics that probably proved decisive. At the time, air warfare was relativelly new. Some strategists believed that bombing could force am opponent to surrender. That view was apparently held by Hitler and G�ring.
The Germans initiated the Battle of Britain. Thus the phases pf the battle were largely based on their plan and changes in that plan as the battle developed. The initial plans were laid by the professional staff of the Luftwaffe. Tgey were designed to destroy the RAF. When that plan did not bring immediate results, Hitler and G�ring intervened which in the end doomed the German campaign. Some analysts believe that even if the Luftwaffe had continued focusing on the RAF, the Luftwaffe would have failed. That is an unresolved issue. What is certain is that Hitler and G�ring turned to terror bombing which provide the RAF a respite that was sorely needed. Churchill writes, "The German air assault on Britain is a tale of divided counsels, conflicting purposes, and never fully accomplished plans. Three or four times in three months, the enemey abandoned a method of attack which was causing us severe stress, and turned to something new. But all those stages over-lapped one another, and cannot be readily distinguished by precise dates. Each one merged into the next." [Churchill, Finest, p. 341.]
Sources
Churchill, Winston. Their Finest Hour (Houghton Mifflin: Boston, 1949), 751p.
