Dan Snow's History Hit - 1. The Battle of Britain Explained: Preparation, Pilots and Propaganda

Episode Date: August 25, 2024

1/2. The Battle of Britain was Hitler's first and possibly most important defeat. It defined the course of the Second World War, forcing him to make a series of decisions that guaranteed his own destruction. In this two-part series, we'll trace this monumental story from the dark days of the defeat of France, through to the triumph of RAF Fighter Command in the skies above Britain.In Part 1, Dan takes us from the total defeat of the Allied armies on the European mainland through to the all-out air assault in the skies above Britain. He shares the exhilarating stories of pilots in their iconic fighter planes and outlines the crucial factors that would turn the tide in favour of the Allies.Written and produced by Dan Snow, and edited by Dougal Patmore.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

In 1945, Nazi Germany's most senior field commander, Gerd von Rundstedt, was in captivity. He was a guest of the Soviet Red Army. This was the man who'd helped occupy Poland. He'd smashed through Allied lines in 1940. He'd sent his men on the astonishing dash to the Channel Coast. He'd won, at one time, probably the greatest encirclement battle ever at Kiev in 1941. He was an overall commander of the German garrison in France on D-Day and had commanded German forces in Western Europe until the last week of the war.

Hitler had described him as the best field marshal I have. But now, he was in a cell. And whilst in captivity, he was interviewed by his Soviet captors, and they asked him which battle of all those he'd taken part in or witnessed had been the most decisive in the war. And they obviously wanted him to say Moscow, 1941. Stalingrad, 42, 43. But he shot back immediately. The Luftschlacht um England. The air battle for England.

Now, in the English-speaking world, we call that the Battle of Britain. His Soviet interrogators did not get the answer they were looking for. They were not impressed. But von Rundstedt had a point. The Battle of Britain, fought in the summer of 1940, was Hitler's first and probably most important defeat. The failure to defeat the RAF, the failure to knock Britain out of the war, either by negotiated settlement or invasion occupation, was a setback of such enormous consequence that it defined the course of the war. It forced Hitler to make a series of decisions that guaranteed his own utter final destruction. final destruction.

So I'm very happy to say that over the next two episodes of this podcast, I'm going to be telling the story of that battle. I'm going to sketch out three quite distinct phases of the battle. It's a story that I've always loved. I made the first of several programmes about the Battle of Britain 20 years ago now. In my early career, there were still dozens of RAF aircrew that you could just phone up and chat to. Pete Brothers, Paul Farnes, Tom Neill, William Walker. I always remember William Walker, who was a poet,

and he wrote a special poem that he read out in Westminster Abbey for the commemoration in 2010. I was lucky enough to be working there for the BBC. The Battle of Britain still looms very large here in the UK. Many of us still recognise the roar of a Spitfire's engine. In fact, my kids still pour out of the house when we hear that unmistakable sound overhead. And when I see my kids raising their arms to the sky and I hear them shouting, spitfire, well, it does something to me every time. I've visited the critical nerve centres

where the decisions were made that won that battle. From Bentley Priory, the headquarters of Fighter Command, to the airfields where men and women met each raid with enormous courage, places like Tangmere and Hornchurch, Biggin Hill up at Duxford Loads, of course, that's a wonderful museum now. And I've also visited the mysterious towers that carried the radar antenna, Britain's secret battle-winning weapon. And perhaps the most moving, perhaps the most important site

connected with the Battle of Britain here in the UK is a bunker in Uxbridge, really on the outskirts of London. That is where Prime Minister Winston Churchill would watch raid after raid roll across the Channel. It's where he muttered to himself an observation that he would later work into a speech, a speech that's now famed as one of the most famous in the English language. Never, he said. most famous in the English language. Never, he said, watching the reports of young men hurling themselves back into the fray for the third, fourth and fifth time in a day,

never was so much owed by so many to so few. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit, and this is the story of those few. The stories of what those young pilots did, and why they did it, and why it matters, and why Churchill was just about right. We, the many billions of human beings born since that summer of 1940, owe so much to those pilots and their support teams. We owe so much to those pilots and their support teams. We owe so much to the few. 90% of the French port was destroyed. The seaport was littered with abandoned vehicles and equipment.

Nearly all the dock facilities were smoking ruins. Cranes toppled, steel rails for the goods locomotives grotesquely twisted. The seaside town was a parade of facades. Nearly every single house was just a front. The rest was open to the sky. Blackened rafters were jutting up. The ruined houses themselves ransacked for food valuables. Some of these houses had been strong points and attacking forces had called in artillery and turned the former residents into a pile of bricks, gaps like missing teeth in a row of terraces. There were parcels of sullen French prisoners in huddles. The odd Brit was here or there among them. The Germans, victorious, admitted that the Allies had fought hard for this town, Dunkirk. It's amazing how the sea at your

back and nowhere else to run can stiffen your sinews. The older German troops allowed themselves a moment of celebration. They'd spent four years lunging at the French channel ports like Dunkirk in the First World War. They'd manured the fields of Flanders and Picardy with the blood of their brothers and their mates without end. Now they wandered around on the French beach, having reached here in just over three weeks. They'd humiliated the two greatest military powers on earth. They'd torn the British and French forces in half. The battered northern sector had been driven back into the sea. 364,000 British and French had fled in a hastily cobbled together armada of naval vessels and even the odd pleasure cruiser and river craft. In Britain, they were calling it a miracle. But the Germans wondered

if that headlong dash back across the channel, leaving all their heavy gear behind and abandoning the rump of the French army, unable to defend Paris and the rest of the country, was a miracle. They didn't want to see the British definition of a disaster. Sure enough, the rest of France soon fell to the German army. Around three weeks later, by the 22nd of June 1940, Germany's ancient enemy, with its massive army, was utterly defeated. France rejected a desperate but remarkable suggestion by the British Prime Minister to join Britain and France together in act of indissoluble union. Instead, France surrendered. They came to terms with the Germans.

Britain remained the last major power at war with Hitler's Germany. The war was as good as won. It was June 1940. The war hadn't even lasted a year. Britain's army now consisted of around 14 battered and bruised divisions. Survivors of Europe armed only with rifles at best. There were 15 divisions still in training. There were local defence volunteers, which we now call the Home Guard. There was one armoured division, which didn't

really have many tanks. And Germany had 130 divisions, 10 of them armoured. It looked pretty hopeless, but no one had told the man, now at the helm of the British state. He never wavered. He insisted, almost bizarrely, that Britain would fight on. To many, this Prime Minister looked belligerent and irrational. He was unpopular with many in his own party. He'd only been in power for, well, just over a month. He'd presided over the greatest catastrophe in British military history. His name was Winston Spencer Churchill. Hitler assumed he'd be swept from office, discredited, his name a footnote discredited, his name a footnote in centuries to come. And some in Churchill's own party agreed. Churchill has succeeded the former Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, despite the King's preference for another politician, the Earl of Halifax. And the King was not alone. Rab Butler, an MP,

a rising star in the Conservative Party, an under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, called Churchill the greatest adventurer in modern political history. An adventurer in that period was not a compliment. He called Churchill's accession a coup, a serious disaster, and Churchill, he said, was a half-breed American. The day that France admitted defeat, 22nd of June, Butler talked to the Swedish ambassador and said that, quote, no diehards would be allowed to stand in the way of peace. The ambassador told his boss in Stockholm that Churchill could be replaced by Halifax and peace overtures made. A telegram with that intelligence landed on Hitler's desk in Berlin. It made him more confident than ever that Britain would not, could not fight on. But Churchill disagreed. There was a cabinet meeting on the 28th of May

and he issued one of the greatest calls to arms ever heard around that historic table. I love it. If the long island history of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground. And around that time, he told his daughter-in-law over dinner

that it was everyone's duty to take a German with you. She said she didn't have a gun, and he growled at her to go and get a knife from the kitchen. As long as Winston Churchill was in charge, Britain would fight. And he was prescient. He knew what was coming. On the 19th of May, he told the nation, after this battle in France abates its force, there will come a battle for our island, for all that Britain is and all that Britain means. A couple of weeks later, on June the 4th,

he'd addressed Parliament and he'd promised victory at all costs. Victory in spite of all terror. Victory however long and hard the road may be. And he started to prepare his countrymen for what he knew was about to happen. He said the great French army was very largely, for the time being, cast back and disturbed by the onrush of a few thousands of armoured vehicles. May it not also be that the cause of civilisation itself will be defended by the skill and devotion of a few thousand airmen. There's the few motif already appearing in his mind.

On the 22nd of June, with France now out of the war, he told the British public simply, as you've heard, the Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin. Hitler, on the other hand, he didn't want to fight Britain. A decade before, he'd written in Mein Kampf, his very weird memoir, that they were powerful, the Brits. They fought with ruthless tenacity. And he thought, basically, the British and Germans were natural allies. He wrote, taking a cool, dispassionate look at the world today, it is above all these two states, England and Italy, whose most natural, selfish interests are at least not in fundamental conflict with the basic existential needs of the German nation and indeed might to some extent be identified with them. Britain, he thought,

wanted its empire. Germany wanted an empire, but they wanted an empire built on the ruins of Soviet Bolshevism. He thought, how could the Brits possibly argue with that? After the Battle of France, Germany sent out peace feelers. They approached Sweden and Italy and Switzerland and Spain. Hitler made a speech in the Reichstag, German parliament. And in July, and he said he couldn't see the point of continuing the war, he suggested that there was a huge difference of opinion between the British people and the belligerent Churchill regime. And he appealed to British reason and common sense.

Hitler's military planners, though, well, their job was to work out a plan. What to do in the event of those peace feelers being rebuffed? Really, it boils down to this. Germany could settle for a long siege, but Hitler didn't have anything like enough U-boats, so submarines, to close the shipping lanes. They only had 27 operational U-boats in July 1940. So they'd have to build loads more submarines and keep them at sea for longer and build an entire maritime blockade strategy, which would take years. They'd also abandon the construction of a long-range heavy bomber, so an aircraft that can take off with a really big payload and strike targets all over the UK. That would take years to build. And Germany was in a hurry because Germany wanted to head east.

Germany was convinced that the Soviet Union was weak now, partly a result of Stalin's purges, but that the Soviet Union had come to its senses. Officers were being rehabilitated, armour was being upgraded, the Soviet Red Army was being improved. They didn't like what they were seeing in these intelligence reports. They wanted to head east and fulfil Hitler's dream of a mighty empire in Eurasia by smashing the Soviets. So they needed a quick decision against Britain. The answer was smash the RAF, smash the Royal Air Force, flatten British targets, the British city, strike at London perhaps. Hope all that provoked a surrender. If not, try and invade. It might work.

The Poles and the Dutch had surrendered. The Poles had surrendered after Warsaw had been really badly hit. The Dutch had surrendered immediately when Rotterdam had been smashed from the air by the Luftwaffe. So use what air power you do have. Hope to knock some sense into the Brits, knock them out of the war, by terror from above, or if necessary perhaps, by an invasion across the Channel. The Germans did not have a fleet to compare with the Royal Navy, but perhaps, perhaps, if the German Air Force could achieve air superiority, they could shepherd a little

fleet of civilian barges across the Narrows, across the Channel, get a toehold in Britain, and hope that the Brits collapse. So the decision was taken. In fact, they chose a little from column A and a little from column B. And in doing so, the Germans made their first mistake. The head of the German Luftwaffe High Command, Hermann Goering, celebrity pilot from the First World War, addicted to morphine after he'd used it as a painkiller to recover from a wound, a wound sustained during the failed Munich Putsch, in which he and Hitler tried to seize power in Bavaria. He was now morbidly obese, he liked to steal art from conquered territories, and live an astonishingly lavish lifestyle. In fact, in July he was about

to be made Reichsmarschall der Großdeutschen Reich, Reich Marshal of the Greater German Reich, which was a rank made up for him. He didn't make up the rank. He designed the fanciest of uniforms and waved around a jewel-encrusted baton. This was the man in charge of the coming German effort. And at the end of June, he set out the vaguest of strategies. Weaken the RAF, but also try and blockade, cut Britain off from the outside world. He sort of set both the long and the short campaign in motion at the same time, and essentially subordinate commanders were invited to get on

with it, and so they did in their own way. By mid-July, with no hint of compromise coming from Whitehall, the Germans started to ramp up air attacks on Britain in a very piecemeal fashion. They had a slow start. The world's first battle fought in the air was about to begin. On the 14th of July 1940, a BBC van pulled up to a very good vantage point on the White Cliffs of Dover. And inside there was a young reporter called Charles Gardner. They were setting up their microphones when suddenly he saw aircraft above a convoy of ships moving through the Straits of Dover. He proceeded to give a breathless account of the fighting. Now the British fighters are coming up. Here they come. They come in absolute steep dive

and you can see their bombs actually leave the machines and come into the water. You can hear our own guns going like anything now.'m looking around now i can hear machine gun fire but i can't see our spitfires there must be somewhere there oh here's one coming down now there's one coming down in flames there's somebody's hit a german and he's coming down there's a long streak he's coming down completely out of control a long streak of smoke he's uh our man's bailed out by. The man's bailed out by parachute. The pilot's bailed out by parachute. He's a Junkers 87 and he's going slap into the sea and there he goes, smash! Terrific clumbling of water and there was a Junkers 87. There was

only one man got out by parachute. The fighting that he watched was sudden, it appeared totally chaotic and it was virtually incomprehensible to anyone on the ground. Now, what in fact had happened was that Luftwaffe had launched a sizeable raid on a British convoy of ships. They'd sent 30 or so dive bombers, the famous Stukas, infamous for their siren that screamed as the aircraft was thrown into a steep dive. They used the angle of that dive to aim a bomb. They pulled out that dive at the last minute once they'd released the bomb and the bomb would continue on to hit the target on the ground. Dive bombers came about because planners realised that diving down and releasing your bomb at the nadir of the dive was a more effective way to target your bomb than flying along horizontally and just trying to drop it in the right place. So these Stuka pilots, they would spot a target, they'd roll the plane onto its back, throw it into a dive, near vertical dive,

at 450 metres above the ground, they released the bomb and pulled a 6G turn to bring the aircraft back to the climb. Now these bombers are quite slow and they're very vulnerable because when they're in that dive, enemy aircraft know exactly where they're going, they're committed to a particular course. know exactly where they're going. They're committed to a particular course. And so these bombers, well, like all bombers, in fact, in this period, have a swarm of fighters to keep them safe. Fights of different type of aircraft. You've heard of these fighters like Messerschmitt, Spitfire, Hurricane. They are interceptors. Their job is not to carry bombs and smash things on the ground. Their job is to carry machine guns or what's described as cannon, big machine guns basically, and shoot down enemy

aircraft. They are interceptors. That day, Charles Gardner watched a group of German fighters, the famous Messerschmitt 109. He watched them protecting that bomber force. The 109 was a marvel single seat, just one pilot. In 1940, it was still one of the world's most advanced fighters. It was all metal, retractable landing gear, V12 liquid cooled engine, armed with an autocannon, which is a machine gun really, but doesn't fire bullets. It fires much larger explosive shells. Remarkably, it would serve until the end of the war in 1945. It remains the world's most produced fighter. 34,000 of them made during the Second World War. Many of them made on assembly lines using slave labour from Hitler's concentration camps.

So these aircraft were beginning the job of trying to bring Britain to its knees. You target an essential economic resource, in this case the convoy, close to these Luftwaffe bases in occupied northern France, just in the Channel. And in doing that, you A, try and cause economic damage, you try and start blockading Britain, but you also try to provoke the RAF to come out and fight. The plan was that these RAF planes would then obviously be shot down because of the essential brilliance of battle-hardened German pilots and wonderful machines, and the Luftwaffe would notch up a win. The strategy was that the RAF would run out of planes within a month. Well, on that day at

3.15, the RAF did show up. Interceptor aircraft arrived from the RAF's fighter command. These are the British equivalents to the Messerschmitts. These are the fighters. Four Hurricanes from 615 Squadron, seven more from 151, and alongside them, 12 Supermarine Spitfires from 610 Squadron. Hurricanes and Spitfires, two of the most evocative names in British aviation history. Hurricanes were a little bit older, but there were many, many more of them.

And they really are the unsung heroes. They're the workhorse of the Battle of Britain. They'd entered service way back. Goodness me, 1937. A long time in those frenzied years of innovation. They had been state-of-the-art back then, and they were still capable of holding their own now. Wooden framed, originally with a linen cover, although through the battle, the fabric on the wings was being replaced by aluminium or aluminium alloy which allowed greater diving speeds

alongside them the supermarine Spitfire what can I say definitely the greatest piston engine fighter ever built the only allied aircraft capable of serving on the front line in the Second World War from day one to its very end. In 1940, it was powered by its Rolls-Royce Merlin engine. They were fiddly to make. They had complex curves. The smooth fuselage required a huge amount of hand finishing. It had its slim elliptical wings, which enabled the aircraft to turn in tighter circles because that ellipse meant lower drag and more equal downwash patterns. It had its slim elliptical wings, which enabled the aircraft to turn in tighter circles,

because that ellipse meant lower drag and more equal downwash patterns. So basically much more efficient. It had less drag in level of flying and much less drag in its turns. It's certainly one of the most beautiful planes ever produced. There's just something about it. There's a bubble canopy, a clear bubble canopy. So elegant and so effective. And these British fighters tore into the German formation. One Stuka dive bomb was hit and that's the one that Gardner saw plunge into the sea. Another one claimed by RAF pilots. A hurricane flown by pilot officer Moody was shot

down by the Messerschmitts. He bailed out and landed in the sea, he was rescued but died of his burns the following day. The Stukas turned and dashed for home. The fighters continued in their aerial duel and we think one more 109 was shot down. Another two were badly damaged upon landing back in France. Churchill was pleased and a message of congratulation that night. And he also went on the radio and he claimed that Britain was an island fortress girt about by the seas and the oceans where the navy reigns, shielded from above by the prowess and devotion of our airmen. And there was reason to be cheerful. They had seen off the Luftwaffe attack. No ships had been lost. Five Luftwaffe aircraft had been destroyed for one RAF machine. It had been a good day. And at this point, we need to put one myth to

bed. The Luftwaffe was not a gigantic, terrifying, amazing force which overawed and dwarfed the British. That's pre-battle propaganda. That's so effective that even Goering believed it. Even the boss of the Luftwaffe believed it. In a meeting that summer with his subordinates, Goering believed it. Even the boss of the Luftwaffe believed it. In a meeting that summer with his subordinates, Goering was appalled to discover that the Luftwaffe numbered 4,500 aircraft. Now, planes come in all different shapes and sizes. Some are for transport, for heavy lift. Others are for reconnaissance. Others carry bombs. Others are the fighters I've mentioned. And others are training aircraft. Goering thought he had 1,500 fighters. His team told him he had something like 800, and they had around the same number of bombers.

He sat down in shock. Is this my Luftwaffe? He murmured. Yes, it was. They'd lost around 1,500 aircraft in the Battle of France, and they hadn't replaced them as efficiently as they should. The wild truth about the Battle of Britain is that on the 1st of July, the British had only very slightly fewer fighters than the Germans. They had around 550 hurricanes and spitfires, and 100 less effective fighters. They also had plenty of trained pilots to fly them. They were operating from home bases rather than improvised airfields in the north of France. They were fighting above friendly terrain. And the key point is that Britain's factories were churning out more replacements than German factories.

This was not a David and Goliath story. If anything, the Brits began the battle with enormous advantages. If pilots had to bail out there to leave a stricken aircraft and parachute to the ground, they landed back on British soil. They went back to their airfields. The Germans landed on British soil. They went to prison. The Brits literally could have a beer in the pub with the locals,

and they were back at their airfield for action the following day. The Germans, by contrast, were having to fly across the Channel, and they were having to operate at the end of their fuel range. They had to judge the exact moment when they had to just turn and burn for home. Many got it wrong and they ditched within sight of the French coast and the freezing waters of the channel. But above all the British had one astonishing advantage. They had a brand new invention and a hugely innovative way of using it. The British had radar. You'll listen to Dan Snow's history. This is my story of the Battle of Britain. More coming up after this. get into the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who

were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Now, the next few minutes of this podcast are going to get a little bit techie here, a little bit technical, which I make no apology for, because it's one of the most extraordinary stories ever told. It's a thing of absolute beauty, so enjoy. In the 1930s, a committee had been set up to basically try and get their heads around this new technology that was cascading out of the labs. There was a thought that they might be able to use radio waves

as a death ray blasting planes out of the sky. This rightly suspicious scientific committee asked a team under Robert Watson Watt from the National Physical Laboratory to prove that this would not work. And he did that very effectively. It would not work. There were no death rays. But someone noticed that the rays, these radio waves, were interrupted by the aircraft. They couldn't zap the aircraft out of the sky, but they could be used to identify the presence of a plane. Because rather than just passing through air as radio waves did, they hit these metal aircraft and bounced back. They looked

into this a bit further and they discovered that radio beams could identify aircraft 50 miles away. They called it radio direction finding. Moving remarkably swiftly and effectively, the British government built a chain of transmitters and receivers along the coast. A few of those towers I mentioned remain today. It's wonderful to see them. This radar, the name is Americanism, came in later, but we're going to use it. This radar could tell roughly the range and the height and the size and the bearings of the course of incoming German raids. But it's what they did next that's particularly beautiful. It's what they did with that information that proved decisive. And it was simple and it was beautiful. The RAF built the prototype of an integrated air defence system that is still used all over the world today.

The radar information was rushed to operations rooms all over Britain. So the raids were plotted on big tabletop maps, the precursor of that sort of air traffic control system, which now today is digitised. You see it on a screen. Well, they didn't have that technology back then, so the screen was a huge table, and they physically plotted the raids on those tables. And then, once the raids were over Britain, radar can't see backwards, so the information was checked and corroborated by

thousands of observers on the ground, just normal people with binoculars and eyeballs, and they reported via telephone that they saw that aircraft that has flown overhead. So they confirmed or even improved on the radar information. So there's a constant flow of information coming back to these operations rooms. I say rooms for good reason, because this is what's so exciting. It's distributed network.

It's all happening in parallel with each other. If one operations room was blown up, if the Germans got lucky and blew up the operations room in one particular airfield, it wouldn't matter because other operations rooms across the country had the same setup. The plotting tables were mirrored elsewhere. Now, all of these rooms had a real-time,

three-dimensional airspace picture of what was going on over Britain. And using this picture, commanders could then allocate interceptors to the rates. They make a phone call and they get this squadron or that squadron airborne. It's just stunning. Until then, you defended airspace by just maintaining standing patrols. You got up in the morning, you went for a fly, you hoped to bump into some of the enemy, you had a fight, you landed. Now that is an astonishing waste of time. You're wasting engine hours, you're wasting fuel, you're wasting pilot energy, you're just cruising around hoping you stumble across the enemy. Now you're chilling out, you're eating, you're sleeping,

you're relaxing, you get a phone call, you get in your aircraft, you get up in the air and you pounce on a passing raid, you empty your ammunition cans into some bombers, then you land and rearm. It's incredibly efficient. It is a masterpiece. It is Britain's greatest contribution to 20th century warfare. A resilient, networked, information-rich, simple, distributed system. Every single HQ or situation room that you've ever seen in the movies, every time you've ever seen a senior commander fed real-time information and make operational decisions, all of that really stems from this system built by Fighter Command, and built in particular by the eccentric, genius, introverted, quiet legend that ran Fighter Command, Sir Hugh Dowding,

introverted, quiet legend that ran Fighter Command, Sir Hugh Dowding, the man who won the Battle of Britain. And one of the most astonishing things of all, the Germans did not have the first idea that any of this was going on. They did know that these towers were blasting out radio signals, but that's it. They didn't have a clue about the rest of it. Anyway, we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves. Let's get back to the front line here. We date the Battle of Britain. Battle of Britain starts, according to history books, on the 10th of July. There was a German attack on a channel convoy, very like the one that was witnessed by the BBC journalists a couple of days later. A big battle was joined over a convoy. That battle is interesting because very brave pilots from 1-1-1 squadron went straight at

the Germans head-on. So the closing speeds, if you think about it, are several hundred miles an hour. It's a very bold, very dangerous way to engage the enemy, and it tends to achieve the effect of completely wrecking the formation of enemy aircraft as everybody swerves, climbs, dives out the way. It's a huge game of chicken. In fact, one British hurricane collided with a German bomber, all was shot down. One ship was hit and sank, but the Germans lost six aircraft. So that was a terrible start to the Battle of Britain. Even worse was the fact the Germans consistently took the wrong lessons from these engagements. Across the board that day, right across southern England, the Germans had damaged nine planes, only one of which was a loss to the RAF. But German intelligence estimated that they'd destroyed 30 RAF aircraft.

So they think things are going fine. In fact, a German officer literally reported to his high command the following day that everything was on track. The RAF would be defeated in two to four weeks. The Germans were feeling pretty bullish, in particular one pilot. The following day, one young wannabe Luftwaffe ace, a boisterous young chap, he tried to, in the words of his comrades, stupidly take on the whole of the RAF by himself. And he ended up hitting a Dorset hillside, being killed. His name was Hans-Joachim Goering. And his uncle, the Luftwaffe boss, was furious. On the 19th of July,

Hitler issued his final appeal to the British to see reason and negotiate. Churchill got his foreign secretary Halifax to reject this proposal, saying that he and Hitler were not on speaking terms. Hitler announced that if the war was to go on, he would strike the final blow. And it was around that time he ordered his planners to start preparing for an invasion of Britain should it be required. They named it Operation Sea Lion. This was the first phase of the Battle of Britain. It often took place over convoys, convoys in the Channel, and there were some savage battles. On the 19th, Fighter Command actually suffered one of its worst days in the whole of the Battle of Britain. They lost 10 aircraft to the Luftwaffe's four. There were several convoys that needed protection, but fighter

command made a decision to send out an obsolete aircraft, really a defiant, to cover some of these convoys. And these outdated aircraft paid a terrible price. The Straits of Dover, the narrowest place between Britain and Europe, became known as Hellfire Corner. There were lots of German aircraft here. There was also fast-moving German torpedo boats, there was artillery at Calais, and it was all making daytime maritime activity in the Narrows prohibitively costly. On the 26th of July, all daytime merchant shipping through those straits was cancelled by the British, and on the 29th of July, all daytime naval movement through the straits was cancelled. And indeed, the naval base at Dover was closed and moved elsewhere. So the Germans were having some strategic success. They

were denying the sea, they were denying the maritime space, and even making it very uncomfortable on land for the British. So the Germans continued to ratchet up their efforts. They planned for a massive strike, which they hoped would pretty much knock out the RAF with one or two blows. And they gave it a typically melodramatic codename, Eagle Attack. It would start on Adlertag, Eagle Day. Now, it's one of the weird moments in military history, I think, where both sides are optimistic about this escalation. The Germans thought they were going to smash their enemy, and Dowding and Fighter Command were pleased because they could also sense something was coming and Dowding welcomed it. He didn't want to fight over the water. He wanted them to attack him over Britain. He wanted them to try and strike at the entrails

of the RAF. He would lure them in and he would break them. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga and in Gone Medieval we get into the greatest mysteries the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history we're talking vikings normans kings and popes who were rarely the best of friends murder rebellions and crusades find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. The 13th of August was Adler Tag. The weather was poor at dawn. Goering postponed the major strike that he hoped would prove decisive against the RAF,

but several units didn't get the message and there were some uncoordinated chaotic attacks that went in through the morning. The big concert attacks were in the afternoon, but they were badly chewed up by the RAF. I'm actually going to focus indeed on a really testing day for the RAF, which came two days later. So let's say Eagle Day turned out to be a bit of a soft launch. The Luftwaffe did lose 47 aircraft that day. Fighter Command fared better, but there were still losses. 14 aircraft lost, but only three pilots killed. Various other planes, obsolete old airframes, some bombers, they were lost on the ground, but the 14 fighters is the key metric. German Hegemann realised it hadn't gone well. There were frantic meetings and plans were drawn up for a maximum effort on the 15th of August. The first phase of the Battle of Britain was very

much over. The attacks on convoys and some other targets, that phase of the battle was the German Luftwaffe feeling out its enemy, a period that really in some ways lacked coordination. The Luftwaffe was feeling its way. Now, with Ardlertag in the days that followed, phase two would begin, the concerted assault on the RAF. There was also bad weather at dawn on the 15th of August. Joan Fanshaw saw clouds overhead as she went to work in the early hours. overhead as she went to work in the early hours. She's one of around 50 RAF personnel in the early shift at the Uxbridge bunker that morning. She had joined the Women's Auxiliary Air Force in early July, so she's only a couple of weeks into her service, and she's almost straight away been sent to Uxbridge where she works deep underground in a top secret bunker, a vital node in this web of air defence that I've described earlier. I met her years ago, she was deep into her 90s. She had a gleam in her eye that made her look 30 years younger. Now she'd been secretly

keeping a diary, which I was allowed to see, and she begins her diary by worrying about the physical changes she's going to have to make as she prepares to do her bit and join the forces. The whole day dominated by my thoughts of having my hair cut off tomorrow. It's a terrible wrench for having had it long all my life and being my chief attraction. I shall feel rather as if I've lost my individuality without it. Anyway, she got over it pretty quickly and on the 15th of August she takes up the story. She writes, got up early to go on duty at 6.45. We were not really terribly busy until the end of the watch when things started to happen. I've been down the bunker. I've stood where she stood that day. Her job was to look after one particular sector of the huge

plotting table, which had a big map of southern England on it, she looked after specifically the block Dover to Calais, the Narrows, Hellfire Corner. She would listen to that intelligence incoming from the radar stations, and then she would plot the position of enemy aircraft using wooden blocks, which represented Luftwaffe raids. And she would also plot the position of RAF squadrons as well, so that the commanders could look at the

table and get a full picture of exactly what was going on at any time in the air. Now meanwhile, while she was doing that, the RAF Drem in East Lothian in Scotland, a 28-year-old pilot was trying to get some sleep because he'd been on night patrol. He'd landed at 4.20am. His name was Archie McKellar. He had already been in the RAF for about four years. Very unusual background, Archie. He'd come from a tenement block in Paisley. He'd been an apprentice plasterer, but he'd snuck away. He'd learned how to fly at a local club. He got talent spotted by the RAF, and the system worked. He was fast-tracked. He became a pilot. He was, in fact, the first RAF pilot to shoot down a German bomber in World War II, and he would later become. He became a pilot. He was in fact the first RAF pilot to shoot down a German

bomber in World War II, and he would later become an ace in a day. He shot down five enemy aircraft in 24 hours later in 1940. He had extraordinary charisma. He was a bit of a legend. His men loved him. He was immaculate always, shaved and groomed himself every morning, even during the Battle of Britain, and he insisted his squadron follow his examples. If I want to die, I want to die clean, he remarked to a colleague. Now, by 11 o'clock in the morning, the clouds are breaking up, but there is blue sky appearing along the coast, particularly over Kent, and the radar just lights up with readings. The Germans are coming.

Joan Fanshawe immediately plots these raids on the map coming across the Channel, and decisions flow from there. British interceptors are scrambled. One pilot scrambled is William Hopkin of 54 Squadron, based at RAF Hornchurch in East London. I've been to Hornchurch today. It's so weird. It's so close to London. I mean, you can see the skyscrapers in the middle of town. But now it's Heathland. There are bushes growing there. There's little paths that wind their way through them.

There's also dog walkers. But there are clues as to its military past, if you look closely. And I met William Hopkins' son, Simon. He showed me his dad's logbook once. He told me his dad was 18, 18 during the Battle of Britain. He'd just started his training when war had been declared. He was the youngest of three brothers, and his middle brother, Alan, had joined the Air Force in 1938.

And Alan had flown a spitfire over his father's house, and the family had all rushed outside to watch it. I think from that moment onwards, younger brother Simon was always going to join the RAF. In the logbook, what's so wonderful is his first ever flight in the RAF is with his brother as a training officer. And on this day at RAF Hornchurch, he's been operational for three months. He's never shot down enemy aircraft. As soon as the order to scramble comes in, he takes off. He takes the

air in his Spitfire. I've flown in the back of a Spitfire. And you get in this aircraft, you think, here we go. This is 1930s technology. I've been in jet fighters. This is going to be nothing. you think, here we go, this is 1930s technology. I've been in jet fighters, this is going to be nothing. And you are stunned by the power of the Spitfire. As it accelerates up that runway, it kicks you in the back. The engines roar. You get into the air and it feels dainty. It feels agile. You cannot believe that you are flying in something coming up to a century old. At the time, it must have felt like nothing else on Earth. In fact, it was really like nothing else. It was the most advanced technology on Earth. And I also remember the brightness of it,

the unobstructed view you get from that bubble canopy. You can see the skies above in a great arc. It was the perfect interceptor. William left an account of what came next. He said, I got on the tail of one and managed to fire a fairly long burst using 1600 rounds, saw the enemy aircraft dive away steeply with smoke coming out of it. It was William's first kill. Now William didn't know it at the time, but there was a celebrity in the sky that day. Among the German fighters was the 28-year-old Luftwaffe veteran,

the German pinup Adolf Galland, and he pounced on the Spitfires of William Hopkins' squadron. He sent one Spitfire plummeting to Earth. Inside was the 25-year-old Polish pilot Klesinski. He's only been in action for three days, and he managed to bail out, but it took him two years to recover from his injuries, and he never flew in combat again. Galland then turned and shot down another Spitfire, that of 23-year-old Sergeant Norman Lawrence. The plane burst into flame, but astonishingly, Lawrence

survived. And at that, Galland has turned around and head back to Calais. Despite the loss of aircraft in the air, what the radar had allowed the RAF to do is get off the ground. Planes are obviously very vulnerable on the ground. So the key thing is to get them off those airfields where they can be strafed or bombed and get them in the sky where they can take the Germans on in dogfights. And the radar had enabled the RAF to do that. That morning, not a single RAF fighter was destroyed on the ground. But the Germans did achieve one of the most effective blows that day, and the whole thing was by accident. An astonishing coincidence. They were attacking some airfields,

their bombs missed, and they hit power cables that carried electricity to the radar stations at Rye, at Faunus, at Dover, so Kent. And that took a day to fix, to restore the power. So the Germans had knocked a hole in Britain's radar coverage, but they had no idea they'd done that, they had no idea about their success, and they failed to redouble their efforts over that sector at that time. And they could have caused enormous damage to the RAF had they done so. Instead, actually, the Luftwaffe came away feeling they'd had a disappointing morning. The afternoon, though, brought more surprises. Around midday, radar screens did light up, but this time it was radar at the other end of the country. Flying from based in Nazi-occupied Scandinavia, enemy raids were approaching across the North Sea.

So most of the action in the Battle of Britain is focused on the southeast of England, because it's closer to the airfields in France. But on this particular day, the Luftwaffe tried to strike across the whole of Britain, thinking they might be able to catch certain RAF units unawares. Scotland and the North are in the firing line, and the Scottish pilot Archie McKellar I mentioned earlier, he hears that signal to get airborne. The Germans approached the coast thinking they'd achieved surprise, that they would assume that most of the RAF would be in the South, they'd be able to strike targets at will across the North of Britain. But there's no such thing as surprise when you've got radar.

In fact, if anything, the long journey across that open expanse of sea meant that the radar was really able to get an accurate fix on these German air armadas. They'd stood out beautifully. So their arrival is anticipated and Archie and his mates are airborne waiting for them. At 12.30, over 100 German aircraft appear over the skies of Northumberland. A few minutes later, they're over Newcastle and a huge aerial battle develops. Archie McKellar over Tyneside pounced on one German aircraft, fired a three-second burst into it and sent it spiralling to earth.

Archie McKellar's aircraft then suffers enemy fire in its wings, but luckily he can keep flying. He's able to shoot down two more German aircraft before coming into land. I've seen a letter he wrote to his mother after that raid. He said, dearest little mother, I'm very well and very pleased with myself. On Thursday, I saw 70 to 80 nasties in one big formation. Whipped into them with my flight, I got three down. Everyone gave the nasties the fright of their lives. I was very proud. All my love, Sonny. By the end of the day, it was clear that the attack in the north had been a catastrophe for the Germans. Never again would they attempt to attack across the North Sea like this. In the south, it had been a savage day

of fighting. Joan Fanshaw was knackered after all her plotting. I laid down a bit after lunch, feeling rather tired. But then her diary, she said, had a drill after the watch. We had to do some imaginary saluting of officers to each other. We nearly died with laughter. At four, I dashed off down the tube and caught the tube and met Pat Wickens, who was a family friend. We had tea. I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I met Jocelyn coming back off the train. We had a snack and then the air raid siren went. We absolutely dashed back on my bike and poor Jocelyn running. It had been a long day for the women of the WAF,

but it was a lot harder for the young men flying the aircraft. That air crew would not be granted enough to jump on the tube and go and see a mate. There had been raid upon raid. Hundreds of enemy aircraft flooding the skies, go and see a mate. There had been raid upon raid, hundreds of enemy aircraft flooding the skies, particularly of southeast England. But if you look at William Hopkins' logbook, you can see that at 1500 hours, he took off again. And that's the fourth time he took to the sky on the 15th of August, 1940. It was exhausting. And there was no let up. As long as there was daylight, there were attacks. At around

5.30, there was a big strike on a Royal Navy base at Portland on the coast of Dorset. So halfway along the south coast of England. 87 squadron of the RAF were scrambled to meet that raid. There was a young pilot called Peter Cumley, who was 19 years old in that squadron. He had been a schoolboy with a passion for flight. He joined the RAF 17. He's had a quiet Battle of Britain so far, but he's about to be thrown into the thick of the action. I went once to the National Archives in Kew to look at the combat record for what followed that day.

The commanding officer wrote it up afterwards, and he described it as the fiercest dogfight yet experienced. Less than half an hour from leaving the ground, the first hurricanes were returning, i.e. they'd taken off, they'd emptied all their ammunition in just half an hour, and they were landing back on the ground to rearm. And the commanding officer writes, the results of this attack on Portland were as follows. Pilot officer, Cumbly 1, ME-110 destroyed. follows. Pilot Officer Cumley won. ME-110 destroyed. But then the following line says our casualties were Squadron Leader Lovell Gregg and Pilot Officer Cumley killed. Pilot Officer Cumley was able to shoot down an ME-110 into the sea, but unfortunately another one was on his tail and he followed his victim into the water. It had been a very short battle for Peter Cumley, been a short life. I was lucky enough to see a

letter written by Peter's friend, his commander, Flight Lieutenant Ian Glead. He wrote a letter to Peter's father and his grandson showed me that letter once. Dear Mr. Cumley, thank you for your letter. One of my pilots saw Peter's plane hit the sea about 10 miles off Portland. He had not used his parachute. After the battle, two other planes and myself searched the area but found nothing. It is with very deep sympathy and sorrow that I must tell you that in my opinion, there is very little chance of Peter being still alive. I cannot tell you how much we all miss him. Sincerely, Glead, Flight Lieutenant. I just wanted to give everyone a sense of the personal there, so that the individual struggles,

the bravery, the loss, the pain, the exhilaration of the young men who fought in the skies over Britain isn't lost amongst the big operational level descriptions of the battle. And there were so many moments like that on that terrible day of two young men turning, twisting, diving, climbing hundreds of miles an hour, trying to shoot each other out of the sky. Sometimes successful, other times not. And it wasn't just the men in the sky. There were men and women on the ground too. An airfield at Croydon got smashed by low-level German aircraft that day and there were women, there were WAFs among the casualties. The Germans had been trying to hit what they'd identified correctly as an

important fighter station at Kenley, RAF Kenley, but they'd got the target wrong and they'd attacked the wrong airfield. In all that day, the Luftwaffe flew 2,000 sorties. That's the highest number of sorties of any day of the Battle of Britain. Defending against that massive onslaught, the RAF lost 34 fighters, but we now know that the Luftwaffe lost 75. It became known in the Luftwaffe as Black Thursday. Their attack on the north of England had been particularly costly. 88 air crew had been killed or were missing. The Luftwaffe were reeling at these losses, but they had to believe, they convinced themselves, that the RAF must be suffering worse than them. They were convinced that they had destroyed 50% of Fighter Command's strength in a week, and the only option

was to plough on. In reality, they'd done nothing like that amount of damage. Goering, after that day, made two decisions that would prove momentous. He suggested that Luftwaffe stop attacking these radio stations, i.e. the radar. He didn't think they'd had any success in trying to bomb these funny little towers with these little odd outbuildings, and he didn't think that there was any point to doing it anyway. He also said that they shouldn't attack an RAF airfield when it had been successfully attacked the day before. And with these two decisions, Goering essentially guaranteed the survival of fighter command. The only way to victory for the German Luftwaffe

was to blind the British radar and then smash the key RAF fighter stations day after day after day to make sure they couldn't be repaired, holes in the runway couldn't be filled in, the pilots could not rest and recover. Goering had just denied the Luftwaffe the chance of doing either of these two things. Churchill had been watching the day's events unfold. He'd been watching them at Bentley Priory, where you can still go today and see Dowding's office there. And when Churchill left that facility, he described it as one of the greatest days in history. And the next day he would remark to a friend that never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few. Four days later, he'd repeat that line in Parliament and it would become one of the most famous pieces of rhetoric in history.

and it would become one of the most famous pieces of rhetoric in history. Churchill was feeling buoyant, but had he spoken too soon? That is the end of part one of my miniseries on the Battle of Britain. Join me for the next part in this miniseries on the battle. Next time, I'll be looking at how the battle developed, in particular looking at two days that really shaped the course of the Battle of Britain, one of the most important of the 20th century. Episode two will be coming out on Wednesday.

Thank you for listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. you