Dan Snow's History Hit - 2. The Battle of Britain Explained: The Climax

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

2/2. The Battle of Britain was Hitler's first and potentially most important defeat. It defined the course of the 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 2 Dan takes us through the battle's crescendo, as British, Commonwealth and European pilots took to the skies time and again to contest Luftwaffe raids. He explains why Hitler decided to turn away from this attritional battle and direct his rage against London - and how that terrible decision affected the course of the war.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.

The Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, spent much of the late afternoon deep underground at one of the most secret sites in Britain. He loved nothing more than popping into the headquarters of RAF Fighter Command's 11 Group. This was the unit tasked with protecting the airspace above London and South East England. with protecting the airspace above London and South East England. And that airspace in the summer of 1940, and particularly on that day, the day on which Winston Churchill visited, the 16th of August,

was being intensely contested between the British Royal Air Force and the German Luftwaffe. It was the first great battle in history to be fought primarily in the air. It was one of the most decisive battles in the history of the world. We remember it simply as the Battle of Britain. Churchill, well, he always wanted to be where the action was. During the Blitz, rather than later on in the war,

he used to get quite angry when it was suggested that he should take shelter in the bunker under 10 Downing Street, as he rather liked watching the action from the rooftops of Whitehall. Much later in the war, four years later, the King himself had to give Churchill a direct order not to go aboard a battleship to watch D-Day unfold just off the coast of Normandy. And during these fierce days of battle in the summer of 1940, the Prime Minister liked nothing more than to stop on his drive between Downing Street and Chequers, which is

country residence, at the conveniently placed RAF Uxbridge right there in West London and once he arrived to go down several flights of stairs which you can still climb down today and he'd enter a large operations room with a huge table as its center and on that table there was a real-time picture of what was happening in the air, where the German and RAF aircraft were, their height, their bearing, their combat state. This was cutting-edge stuff. It was a God's-eye view of the Battle of Britain, and Churchill loved it.

On that afternoon, on the 16th of August, Churchill's chief of staff wrote that he felt sick. He felt sick with fear. He saw that RAF fighter command was all in. Their chips, well, they were literally all on the table. There were no reserves in the 11 group area. And as they climbed back up those stairs, he and Churchill, the prime minister said to him, don't speak to me. I have never been so moved. After about five minutes in the back of the car, Churchill said to him, never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

He would repeat those words in Parliament a few days later. And it has become, to use a terribly overused word, it's become iconic. One pilot joked, watch out lads, he's just seen our mess bills, meaning the tab at them, the mess or the bar that he's drinking after a day's flying. But Asquith's, the former Prime Minister's, daughter, Lady Violet Bonham Carter, got it right. She wrote to Churchill that this sentence would live as long as words are spoken and remembered. Nothing so simple, so majestic and true has been said in so great a moment of human history. I think it's hard to argue with that. This is the story behind those words. This is the story behind those words.

This is the story of those few who fought and won the Battle of Britain. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. This is episode two of my series on the battle. Last time, I sketched out how and why it was fought, the first phase and the transition to an all-out assault by the German Luftwaffe, the German Air Force. In this episode of the podcast, I'm going to tell the story of how the German assault on the RAF reached its crescendo, and then just like that, stopped, or rather pivoted, as Hitler's rage was directed against a different target, the imperial capital, one of the biggest and richest cities on earth, London.

And why that terrible, tragic assault on London, that blitz on the capital, saved Britain and the free world. You're listening to Dan Snow's History here. This is the Battle of Britain, part two. It was a typical English summer. That August, there were hot days. There was cloud and rain and sudden squalls. There was a mix of both, of everything. As we like to say, sometimes you get four seasons in one day.

The southern counties of England were coming to terms with a battle that was raging, pretty much uniquely to that point in history, exclusively in the skies above them. And sometimes it intruded on them, on the ground. Communities living near factories, ports or airfields knew the fear of hiding in trenches and dugouts, something that the rest of the country would soon come to know all too well. Occasionally carcasses of aircraft would plough into fields, crash into rooftops. They'd be set upon instantly by groups of lads who stripped them for souvenirs and hopped on their bicycles to take their stash home. Sometimes burned, bloodied airmen came crashing down on parachutes through a canopy of

trees. They interrupted tennis matches. They were sometimes cheery, happy to be alive and see friendly faces. They were sometimes dead, with legs and torsos peppered with machine gun rounds from an enemy who'd grown more bitter and was not in the mood to show mercy, even to those who'd bailed out of stricken aircraft. The British people absorbed all these changes. At Richmond Golf Club, they issued a set of temporary rules to deal with these, well, these odd times through which they were living. For example, they specified, a player whose stroke is affected

by the simultaneous explosion of a bomb may play another ball from the same place. Penalty, one stroke. It's quite right there should be a penalty. Not even the explosion of a bomb really should put an Englishman off his golf swing. And as people on the ground tried to accommodate this new shocking reality the battle itself above them was changing as August progressed.

As I explained last time, after weeks attacking shipping convoys in the English Channel trying to attack factories, a range of airfields. The Luftwaffe was gradually, slowly learning. It was facing up to the reality of what would be needed to achieve a win in this Battle of Britain. They were focusing more and more on gaining control of the skies above southern England. Then they could bomb whatever they wanted till their hearts were content. They could break the will of the British people to continue the war. They could, in their fever dreams, force Churchill from office by discrediting the warmonger. They could force Britain to make an unequal peace. They could even try and invade.

Now that was a difficult task with the mighty royal navy lurking in its orkney base ready to race down the channel and annihilate any invasion armada so the invasion was unthinkable without total air superiority that was what was at stake and to gain that air superiority they had to destroy fighter command they had to sweep the pesky RAF fighters, the interceptors, the hurricanes, the spitfires, single seat, fast, agile aircraft, armed with machine guns. They had to sweep those planes from the sky. Most of the pilots of fighter command flew hurricanes, but there were less numerous, but more advanced, newer fighters, spitfires, that haunted the dreams of German airmen. Now the problem for the Germans was they couldn't just

surprise them, bomb them, strafe them on the ground. They couldn't find these aircraft to destroy them because the British had invented the world's first integrated early warning system. I mentioned the radar and the attraction. They've got cutting-edge radar, that's spotting the Germans assembling on the other side of the channel. Then you've got a vast network of human observers, just people with binoculars. They're dotted all around the country and they're plotting the progress of enemy planes as they cross the British countryside. This is all linked up, networked, the radar and the observers, linked up by a brilliant system of communications along phone lines that means that RAF commanders could scramble, they could get British aircraft into the sky to attack the German bombers they lumbered towards their targets. The Germans had been stunned

by all of this. The Germans had been shocked by the casualties that they had started to sustain from the middle of August when they had made their maximum effort. But they had hopeless intelligence about Britain and the RAF and they simply surmised that if they were hurting, the RAF must be hurting even worse. And so on the Luftwaffe plodded, its commanders driving their unhappy aircrew along the road to hell. I'll pick up the action where I left off last time. There was some poor

weather for a few days. There was a pause as the Luftwaffe attempted to reorganize. And then on the 24th of August, the battle restarted. And this Luftwaffe reorganisation, to be fair to them, there was an improvement. They were learning. The Luftwaffe commanders had worked out that the only target worth attacking was fighter command. They had to dismantle these fighters and the systems that backed them up. And that meant the Luftwaffe would focus more and more on the key airfields, which they were slowly working out that these fighters were operating from. The so-called sector stations, RAF Kenley, RAF Biggin Hill, RAF Tangmere. Now those airfields are also the airfields where there are operations rooms, like the one in Uxbridge that I mentioned before, where all the information about the air picture is plotted on a huge table, and that allows commanders

to allocate fighters in the most efficient manner possible to intercept this raid or that raid. They know where the raids are, they know what height they're at, they know what bearing it is, and you can therefore send your hurricanes and spitfires to make life miserable for the Germans. The Luftwaffe's only conceivable chance of winning this battle was to smash these sector stations, disable the runways, blast the infrastructure, and critically, take out these sector station operations rooms, which were the brain of RAF fighter command. The problem for the German Luftwaffe is the one at Uxbridge was buried deep underground and was top secret. The others were either in bunkers or well protected by blast walls. They measured about 2,000 square feet. They were nondescript buildings and the Germans didn't know they existed.

So the chances of actually knocking them out were pretty slim. So let's come back to the action on the 24th. The German Luftwaffe attacked Manston. Now that's an aircraft very near Dover. They attacked it again and again. Finally, they showed the consistency, the tenacity required to just crush an airfield systematically. They attacked it again and again. Firemen on the ground floor had to contain blazes. Unexploded bombs littered the airfield. Buildings were levelled. And the RAF, interestingly, admitted that it was inoperable and effectively abandoned it. It was not a key sector station, not one of these absolutely key nodal fighter commander airfields. But it did show the Germans were getting the right idea.

Sustained battery of RAF airfields. And the Germans kept it up. The next week was a week of brutal attritional violence. The Luftwaffe hurled themselves against the airfields of the southeast. RAF fighter pilots would take off, empty their magazines into a German aircraft, land, rearm, refuel, take off again. Some flew four, even five times a day. Cheeks became hollowed out, eyes wild. There was a deep exhaustion. Some of these pilots were told developed nervous tics. There was the crackling effect of adrenaline which courses through the body again and again as these young men called upon their deepest reserves.

They knew that they faced death several times a day and still had to drag themselves back to their aircraft and up into the sky. Men fell asleep whilst taxiing after landing. The Luftwaffe, to be fair to them, were probably even in a worse state. They were the ones who had to head day after day into the bear pit. Their commanders kept telling them that the RAF was on its last legs, and yet these RAF interceptors, like swarms of insects, kept pouncing on them every time they crossed the white cliffs of Dover. Every Luftwaffe airman had watched friends, comrades,

plummeting down in great arcs, smoke spewing from their engines, etching out the course of their final journey as they smashed into the home counties below. It's very, very difficult to extricate yourself from a plunging Heinkel or Dornier bomber. And those slow-moving bombers with their heavy bomb loads, well, they were bait. They were bait to try and bring the Spitfires and Hurricanes close to the formations so that the Messerschmitt 109, the German fighters, could dogfight them and send them crashing to the earth. But those Messerschmitts, those fighters, had a fear all of their own. They had a very limited fuel range, so one eye had to be glued to the fuel gauge. They all felt the agony of abandoning their bombers, abandoning the planes they were supposed to be escorting. They'd have to turn around, turn and burn for their airfields

back in Calais. They faced, all of them, faced a nail-biting flight back across the Channel. All of them knew someone who ditched off the coast of France. And life expectancy in the channel was, well, a couple of hours if you were lucky. Very few came out alive. On the 29th of August, the Germans tried something different. They sent over a very small group of bombers, literally in this case the Bait, escorted by nearly the entire fighter strength of the Luftwaffe. So that's a small number of bombers with something like 500 Messerschmitt 109s swarming and banking around them. The British commander of 11 Group, the man responsible for the defence of South East England,

Keith Park, saw that it was bait and told his crews not to engage. The Germans, as Germans often have done throughout military history, in fact, the Germans wanted to precipitate a decisive battle. They did not want to get locked into this attritional struggle they felt they couldn't win. They wanted one enormous melee. They wanted the British to present themselves for destruction.

And the British didn't give them the opportunity. The 30th of August, the day worth focusing on. On that day, there was great activity in the plotting room at RF Biggin Hill. The room was staffed by women, women who were serving in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force. They would monitor communications channels and they would plot the raids on the giant table, enabling local commanders to make decisions about how to deploy their planes. One of the women on duty that morning was Corporal Elspeth Henderson. She was 27 years old. She'd volunteered early in the war. She was in years old. She'd volunteered early in the war. She was in Edinburgh. She'd gone in December of the previous year, 1939, to her cousin's

wedding. And her cousin had been a young lawyer, but he was now getting married, but he was also joining up. And she felt that was morally wrong, that he, now that he was a family man, he had a responsibility, he had a wife, he was joining up and she, a single woman, continued to enjoy civilian life. So she joined up and she would play a significant role in the battle. On the 30th, the Luftwaffe crossed the coast in waves every half hour or so. And the effect on this day was to actually swamp this very effective system that Fighter Command had developed. They saturated southeast England with groups of bombers and groups of fighters. And the hope was for the Germans, they could sow such confusion that they could hit the RAF

on the ground. This was the dream. It is far easier to kill enemy aircraft stationary on the ground than when they are dogfighting with you at 10,000 feet. Elspeth Henderson remembers plotting those German raids, those reports of those raids, as they're coming closer and closer to Biggin Hill. With extraordinary coolness, she plotted the raids until they were on top of the air station themselves. The base was bombed. Most of the bombs actually land outside the base. Seven-year-old Jeff Greensmith, who was one of those boys who loved hunting for souvenirs, and his dad actually ran the cafe on the base, so he knew the base, he knew the men real well. They dived into an air raid shelter,

they survived, but bombs fell very close to them. Jeff remembered later, the fourth bomb landed 20 yards behind our shelter. There was a huge bang, and the back of the shelter comes out of the ground. It picked me up and moved me through the shelter. I hit the front wall of the thing, couldn't breathe. My mother's mouth was going up and down. I was convinced we were dead. A few minutes later, fascinatingly, Jeff came face to face with a German airman who'd bailed out. He parachuted down. He was badly wounded. He remembers his dad cradling him and giving him brandy. Now, the Germans did have an extraordinary stroke of luck that day. One of their bombs, by accident, knocked out the electricity supply for the whole of Kent,

the whole county of Kent. Every single radar station in the county went offline. So for the next few hours, the RAF was totally blind. And the German aircraft were able to crash through a great hole torn in the defensive net. It's a hole they didn't know was there. They hit Biggin Hill again at 1800. They attacked at a thousand feet, so low level.

They blew up a hangar with two aircraft in. They blew up the WAF sleeping quarters. They blew up a workshop. They blew up the sergeant's mess. They knocked out some of the supplies, like water, some of the amenities. They hit one shelter directly and killed 39 airmen. For the next hour or two, Biggin Hill was pretty much inoperable as an airfield. An RAF sector

station had been knocked out, albeit briefly. It was back online again the following morning, but the Germans would come again. This was how the Germans could win the Battle of Britain. The next day, Elspeth Henderson was back in the ops room. She plotted the German aircraft again until they were right on top of her position. And on the 31st of August, that operations room with Elspeth in it took a direct hit. She remembers the bomb coming straight through the roof

that bounced off a teleprinter and exploded. She stayed at her post. Her job that day was actually manning the phone line between that operations room and fighter command headquarters at Benley Priory, so being the key conduit for this flow of information. And she stayed at that post until the operations room was completely engulfed in flame. She later told her family members that she felt a curious detachment. She was only doing her job, and she wasn't facing anything like the risks and the dangers of those young airmen who flew day after day.

Elspeth and two of her female colleagues were awarded the Military Medal, the first women ever to receive the honour. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. That's the 30th and 31st at Biggin Hill. Let's just quickly go back to the day before, because on the evening of the 30th, a remarkable squadron enters the fray. 303 Squadron. 303 was manned by the Poles. The Poles had fought the Germans in Poland, the Poles had fought the Germans in France, and now the Poles were keen to fight the Germans in Britain. They would fight Germans wherever they

found Germans. And they called Britain the island of the last hope. The problem is the British weren't sure that the Poles were able to fight for them. They didn't have quite the right tactics, and they didn't do things quite in the proper fashion. So they were locked in a training regimen, even as the battle was raging around them. But on this day, on the 30th, one of the Polish pilots, Ludwik Paszkowicz, on one of those training missions, spotted a lagging German bomber, a Dornier bomber. His British squadron needed Tom to leave it well alone and concentrate on training. Paszkowicz disobeyed. He dived on the bomber. Now, interestingly, we do know who was on board the bomber that day, a witness, radio operator Heinrich Nordmeier. He said, my pilot was badly wounded in the attack, in Pascovich's

attack. He was shot in the stomach. He ordered me to bail out, but I didn't want to. I was too frightened. He must have felt he had only a few more seconds to live. So he threw the cabin roof off, turned the aircraft on its back, and I fell out. Nordmeier glided to safety and his parachute was taken prisoner. His pilot Georg Anthony went down with the aircraft. Now the British squadron leader of 303 decided to ignore this indiscipline and instead he asked if his squadron could go operational and fighter command replied that it could and so it did. And wow, did 303 deliver. Before we leave the 30th behind, I want to tell you about another couple of remarkable pilots. You've got Tony Woodscown.

He takes off from Tangmere down in Sussex, quite close to where I live now, in his Hurricane. He's a very experienced pilot. He's 22 years old. We think he's got six enemy aircraft to his name by this point. Shot down six enemy aircraft. Now in the skies further east along the coast over Dungeness is his older brother Patrick, who is also a hurricane pilot, and he's already airborne. He's 24 years old, and he's got nine confirmed enemy kills to his name. And they were

best mates growing up. They did everything together. They lived a country life. They lived very near Farnborough, which was the beating heart of British aviation between the wars. They rode their motorbikes around. It was sort of inevitable at least one of them would join the RAF. As an excitable teenager, Patrick, thinking war might be on the horizon, he signed up for a short service commission in the RAF. He progressed well. He would earn a distinguished flying cross during the Battle of Britain for shooting down a number of enemy aircraft in just one day.

The claim is that he shot down four enemy planes in that one day. And younger brother Tony was very keen to follow in Patrick's footsteps, particularly when Patrick, when he finally went operational, flew an aircraft low, roared over the family home. His younger brother Tony was never going to let his brother get away with that. But there was a problem. Thanks to childhood tuberculosis, Tony was pretty much blind in one eye. And so he had no chance of passing the sight test unless he cheated. He queued up, someone came out and told him all the letters. So he memorized them, went in and passed the eye test. And then he got some prescription goggles that were not, definitely not regulation for the RAF, but Tony managed to get them on the sly and up in the air he went. That meant, sadly, Tony had been shot down a lot during the Battle of

Britain, but he was infamous. He kept coming back for more. He'd get shot down, he'd get a bus back to his airfield, he'd get another plane, he'd fly again the next day. He was shot down on Eagle Day, which I mentioned in the last episode. He was shot down a couple of days later on the 15th. On that occasion, he crash-landed on the Isle of Wight, knocked his front teeth out, took the ferry to Southampton, spent the night in a hotel, and the following day called his airfield, said, send someone to pay the bill if they want me back. And they did.

Now, on the 30th, they're both involved in a massive air battle, just on the coast. Patrick Woodscarn shot down a plane near Dover. A few minutes later, Tony also shot a plane down. We think there's something like, they have something like 17 victories between them. And that's not the only thing they share, because they both share a great love for the same woman. Her name was Bunny Lawrence. And I've met her grandson, a wonderful guy called Ben Mather, he once showed me her letters. Patrick began writing to Bunny when he was at flying school in 1938. He describes

his elation after flying a hurricane for the very first time. It's a brilliant snippet of letter I'll share with you. Darlingest, I have flown a hurricane so I've reached eighth heaven. The seventh, sixth and fifth heavens are you my God, what an aeroplane. Younger brother Tony was shot up again. Having lost his front teeth, he was shot down again on the 18th. But this time, his aircraft was shot up. He actually landed safely. And that's when he found out he'd been awarded a DFC as well. So he'd leveled the field with his brother. Both of them now have the Distinguished Flying Cross. And riding the wave of exhilaration, perhaps from receiving that gallantry medal,

he asked Bunny to marry him on the 20th. He is also in love with Bunny. And shockingly, she agrees. The younger brother it was. So she told Patrick on the 22nd of August, she was weeping. And he said simply, that's all right, Bunny.

It can't be helped. And he offered to help pay for a cottage for his younger brother and the love of their life. Now, I'm afraid I'm telling you that story because it has a very sad ending. And actually, it was around this time of the battle, it was late August, I think it could have been the 1st of September, that tragedy struck. Patrick bailed out of an aircraft, a strickenicken aircraft too low and died. 24 hours later, Tony came down as well. Again, he was flying too low, bailed out of a hurricane just like his brother.

Perhaps thankfully, Tony didn't know about his brother's fate. I've been to the field actually in Romney Marsh in southeast Kent. been to the field actually in Romney Marsh in southeast Kent. I've been to the field where Tony came down just less than 24 hours after his brother. He was found close to his plane. He was carried to St George's Church where he died of his injuries. And the story is that in his last gasp, he was dragged in. He was laid on the altar where they attempted to treat him and he died. Bunny Lawrence mourned both her fiancé and his brother who had loved her equally. Bunny's grandson told me a nice detail. She lived till she was 94 and she always remembered them.

She'd always talk about them, brought a tear to her eye. Even though she'd happily remarried and had a wonderful family, at Christmas and other occasions she'd raise a glass to the RAF. The following year, age 19, in fact, she joined the WAF and she went to Buckingham Palace with the Wood Scowans' father in June 1941 to collect their medals from the King for both of them. Now speaking of gantry medals, I probably should mention the only Victoria Cross that was given out to a fighter command pilot during the battle remarkably and it was actually in this period of fighting slightly earlier that lieutenant nicholson of 249 squadron he took off and he was at the head of a flight of three hurricanes the sun was behind them they were bounced so that german aircraft came out of the sun all three three aircraft were hit. Nikolson's hurricane was on fire, and he was about to bail

out, he was about to slide back the canopy and jump out and try and parachute back to the earth, when suddenly a German aircraft shot past him. He decided to stay in the cockpit, despite the aircraft being on fire. He held the fire button down on his steering column, the stick he steers with, until he could bear the heat no more. And then he jumped out of the aircraft and parachuted back to earth. Strangely, as he landed, he was shot in the buttocks by a member of Dad's army, by a member of the Defence Volunteers, that so-called Home Guard, who was getting a little bit carried away and thought this could be the beginning of airborne landings by the Germans. He was burned, he had shot in his buttocks, he was taken to hospital, and he was still in hospital on the 15th of November, where he learned he'd been awarded the Victoria Cross. The first thing he said, apparently, is, now I'll

have to go out and earn it. He telegrammed his wife, darling, just got VC, don't know why, letter follows, all my love, Nick. And the more you read about the battle, the more stories you hear, you realise they could have given that Victoria Cross to any one of dozens or even hundreds of RAF pilots. The 31st of August was a very tough day. The attritional effect on some of the squadrons was becoming really apparent. 56 Squadron had been fighting since the beginning of the Battle of Britain. They were clearly exhausted. They got bounced by German fighters. They lost four aircraft in one day,

including, tellingly, their two very experienced flight commanders. Their squadron had essentially been decapitated and they were moved the next day to a quieter sector in the rest of the country. If this went on much longer, more squadrons could also fall out of the line of battle. The Germans attacked Biggin Hill again. After that strike, everyone on the base, anyone who was anyone, frantically filled up holes in the runway with rubble, sand, and earth so that the base's planes could land. Hornchurch was hit by raiders actually on the 31st. This is an interesting raid because this is one of the very, very few occasions of the battle

when the German Luftwaffe, their dreams came true. They managed to catch their enemy on the runway taking off. And that means they're going slow. They're going straight. They're very predictable. They're hittable. The Luftwaffe dropped bombs on those planes as they were taking off. The bombs fell amongst the last few aircraft

to take off. Al Deer, who's an extraordinary Spitfire pilot from the battle, his aircraft was blown onto its back. He skidded down the runway, scraping. His helmet straps were actually scraping the ground for 100 metres. He was almost cheese grated by this aircraft on the runway. Then he was trapped in an upturned plane. There was fuel pouring out of it, leaking all over him, terrified of it catching fire. And he strapped into the cockpit upside down, unable to escape. Slowly would have been burned to death, shockingly. Thank goodness a fellow pilot rescued him. But in that one attack, four Spitfires were written off. And yet all four pilots flew again the following day. And that shows the real problem for the Germans. How do you destroy an airfield? How do you destroy fighters and pilots in greater numbers than they can be replaced?

When you drop bombs on an airfield from 15,000 feet, they just scatter all over the place. The vast majority just make unsightly holes in the ground, in the fields, in the buildings surrounding the airfield. But the airstrip itself remains usable. The various sheds and fuel dumps remain unscathed. It's very hard to achieve precision bombing in 1940. The only option is just massive, massive amounts of bombs dropped from vast numbers of planes day after day after day. And the Germans simply did not have those resources in 1940. the day after day and the Germans simply did not have those resources in 1940. So Hornchurch has been struck but not put out of action. Biggin Hill, the operations room, has been hit. I should follow

up with that. It was unintentional. The Germans didn't know that room existed but it also shows the resilience of the British system because the operations were just diverted via RAF Kenley, which is in a neighbouring sector. They were able to receive the information from fighter command, they were able to make tactical decisions about what aircraft should be where, and they were able to transmit those to satellite airfields that had been run by Biggin Hill. So the system fixed itself. The information flowed along different lines, but still reached the fighter pilots where it mattered. It's also true that the operations room at Biggin Hill was back up and online by the following day. And that

following day Biggin Hill was hit again. The operations room in fact was hit again and this time they decided they'd go for a backup in the village. And that shows the difficulty. How are the Germans? A, they don't know the room is there. Now they've just set up a temporary operations room where you can receive calls, make calls, direct the battle, plot the air picture on the table. You can do that pretty much anywhere. And the Germans have even less idea that it's in the village. That evening, evening of the 31st, Churchill went back to Arya Foxbridge. He told his secretary after, the air is all right. The Admiralty is now the weak spot, which is outrageous for a former First Lord of the Admiralty.

So disloyal. Nothing on with the Navy. Anyway, Biggin Hill was attacked again on the 2nd. It was attacked again on the 3rd. The North Weald Airfield took a pasting on the 3rd. Hangers were blown up. There was lots of superficial damage. But again, the operations of those airfields were not greatly interrupted. This is one of my favourite stories. On the 4th

of September, the station commander at Biggin Hill had a brainwave. He went up in a little plane, he looked down at his base, and he looked on it as an enemy would look on it, and he made a very remarkable decision. He landed and ordered the one big remaining hangar that was still intact to be blown up. And sure enough, it went up with a bang at six o'clock that night. Now, this was utterly remarkable. He was censured. It was said he was going to be disciplined, but the case was quietly dropped, because actually it was genius.

The Germans sent over reconnaissance aircraft. They looked at Biggin Hill, and they were convinced that it finally had been properly knocked out. And they only actually returned once in a small way through the rest of the Battle of Britain. And they turned their attention to other airfields. So again, deception in war playing a critical part. Now this late August, very early September, was the most dangerous week in the Battle of Britain.

The Germans were attacking the right targets. They were deploying their best aircraft in the cleverest ways. During the first week of the main offensive after Eagle Day, Adler Tag, the losses of about two and a half German planes for every British plane lost. Now, it was about 1.3 German planes for every British plane lost. So the odds were going in the right direction. But could the Germans maintain this level of attrition? And they were still presented with a pretty

bewildering picture. Even in this critical week, they were still getting it wrong. They were still attacking airfields that weren't connected with fighter command, you know, airfields with bombers on them or airfields with training aircraft, just other airfields that weren't essential to the fighter effort. And that shows just how difficult the Germans' job was. They were trying to do something never really been done before. They were trying to win an air battle against a determined enemy, armed with equally, if not better, machines, and certainly better technology in terms of early warning. And that's not easy. The RAF fighter command had a much easier task. You identify a German raid, you take off, you shoot one or two of them down, you land again. You're over

friendly territory. And the Germans just continue to be surprised. When they fought the Poles, when they fought the French, the Luftwaffe just swooped down like birds of prey on French, on Polish airfields, where there would be aircraft lined up on runways, where there'd be no early warning. They came out of the dawn like predators and destroyed whole units of their enemy air forces. Not in Britain. In Britain, they were made to work for every single enemy machine that they shot down. By September the 6th, the system was under enormous strain, but it was holding. The British pilots were tired. They were billeted on local families. Often their barracks were in ruins. And Keith Park, who's commanding the effort in this

southeast part of England, he did say, he wrote to his superior saying, it's having a serious effect on the fighting efficiency of his squadrons. Old hands were being killed and injured. Newer and fresher, less experienced pilots were filling their places. So the turnover is bad for Fighter Command. Even though there were replacements available, both aircraft and men, even though, extraordinarily, Fighter Command now had more pilots than it had done at the beginning of July, they were not of the same quality. And the intense attrition of the last fortnight, if that was continued, it would start to threaten a shortage in the median term. For these few days, the Germans were managing to kill and injure more

pilots than were coming online, but it was not dramatic enough to win the battle in the short term. The Germans, however, did have a manpower problem in the short term. They could not go on with this intensity. Their units were now terribly understrength. Their supply chains were straining from the factories of northern Germany right the way across to the Pas-de-Calais. The temporary airstrips they built there, the facilities they had there, which are not capable of sustaining modern aerial warfare for this longevity at this scale and intensity.

The German aircrew's morale was shot. Many of them would be briefed on missions and would then go and vomit in the toilets. Men were queuing up to have their appendixes removed. Engines were mysteriously misfiring. Pilots were returning to base having got separated from their comrades in Channel Fog. Goering visited them at one point, the Reichsmarschall, as he then was, Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, in charge of the German Luftwaffe, Hitler's absurd sidekick. He visited them and asked if they had anything they needed,

and a brave voice shouted back a reply, a squadron of Spitfires. Goering didn't laugh. At this point, the only thing keeping the Germans going is clinging to the assumption that the RAF must be in worse condition. It was reported back to the Supreme Command in Berlin that the British were down to their last 200 fighters. In fact, the RAF on the 6th of September had 750 frontline fighters and 1,200 pilots to fly them. It's often said that generals prepare to fight the last war, but that is utterly untrue in the case of the RAF in 1940.

The men, the machines, the technology, the resources had been brilliantly prepared with extraordinary foresight for what future war might look like, and it was unlike anything that had gone before. Now it is the case that if the Germans could somewhere and somehow find the resources and the motivation to keep going with this plan, on this track, pounding these fighter command airfields for another two, maybe three, maybe four weeks, then maybe, just maybe, fighter command would have been put on life support. But that assumes the Germans could keep up that tempo. And in the event, the Germans did not press ahead with that plan.

No. Instead, they went and bet the farm on a total change of strategy. They threw a Hail Mary to snatch a victory. Would it work? You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm telling the story of the Battle of Britain. More coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. 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. To talk about what happens next, I need to go back a few days. I need to talk about what happened on the evening of the 24th, 25th of August,

when some German bombs had accidentally fallen on St. Giles' Cripplegate, a famous church in the east end of London. They'd been striking oil tanks, actually, slightly further along the Thames, but they'd gone too far in the confusion of battle at night, and they'd struck London itself. The British War Cabinet made an important decision. They authorised a strike at the German capital, Berlin. And so the evening of 25th, 26th,

a raid of very brave RAF bombers headed to Berlin. They tried to strike the airport there, the airfield and a Siemens factory. It was a bit of a fiasco. It was cloudy. There were headwinds, a few bombs dropped in some fields. There was a sort of outhouse in a Berlin suburb that was hit, so absolutely no damage done whatsoever to the German war effort.

They struck again Berlin the 28th, 29th, the evening 28th, 29th, and this time Hitler lost it. He had been promised, and he had promised the German people, that Berlin was untouchable. The people of the imperial capital had nothing to fear with the mighty Luftwaffe prowling the skies above them. And yet here were the British, now bombing not once but twice, seemingly with impunity. Hitler lifted the restriction that he'd placed on the Luftwaffe's ability to bomb London. Goering agreed. Goering wanted to hit back at London for political reasons, like Hitler. With them, it was always about the politics. But Goering's sub-commanders also agreed, interestingly, they also wanted to strike London, because they believed, finally, that would provoke this decisive engagement they'd been craving. They hadn't had much luck

destroying Spitfires and Hurricanes on the ground. They hadn't had much luck destroying them in the sky because they couldn't get them to mass in big enough numbers for the Me 109s to pounce on them. Spitfires and Hurricanes came up in ones and twos and threes. They sniped at the edges of formations. They shot down a plane, dived back into the clouds and made their escape. It was like partisan warfare. What the German Luftwaffe commanders wanted was for massive numbers, or all the remaining Spitfires and Hurricanes in England,

to take to the skies in a big formation where they could be slaughtered by these wonderful German aces. And they hoped that by striking at London, they might precipitate that decisive battle. The date for the all-out assault on the British capital was set for the 7th of September. That morning, on the British side, things were strangely quiet. The Air Ministry issued an invasion-imminent signal to all its commands, Invasion Alert Number One. It was sunny, the skies were pretty clear, nothing had happened, it was all rather spooky. Perhaps German barges, the fleet of invasion barges, were about to appear, pouring from river mouths from the low countries about to land on the east coast. There was activity, excitement in occupied Europe,

but it was of a different sort. A train pulled up to the station in Calais. It was called Asia, and the man it carried had an ego as big as that continent. Hermann Goering stepped out of the train. Flunkies staggered about carrying crates of fine vintage wine for their boss during the day. He'd designed himself a new uniform that befitted the rank that he and Hitler had made up for him, the Reich Marshal, and he waved a jewel-encrusted Marshal's baton at the line of officers who'd come to greet him, again, of his own design. He inspected one fighter unit that morning. He tried and failed to get into a 109 cockpit, an ME-109. He had been a very well-known celebrity fighter pilot during the First World War, but he was now a morphine-addicted, obese caricature,

but he was now a morphine-addicted, obese caricature, and he failed to get into the cockpit. After that, though, he went undeterred. He went to Cap Greenay, the closest possible point to Britain. And a picnic had been set up there, some of the wine laid out, and he settled down to watch the show. The operation was named after the Viking god of fire, Logi. London was to be set aflame. Just before four o'clock in the afternoon,

signals traffic started arriving at Bentley Priory, Fighter Command's headquarters, from radar stations. It had taken a long time to arrive, but a big raid was on its way. At 4.15, the Observer Corps, remember these folks dotted all over the country, they reported that there were now hundreds of aircraft crossing the coast and heading inland. In fact, there were 350 bombers with around 600 fighters, some of them amongst them, but lots of them 10,000 feet above them, waiting to pounce. This was every aircraft for Le Fafard get airborne. This was it. A do or die attempt to break Britain. And within 15 minutes of that

intelligence landing at Bentley Priory, every single squadron within 70 miles of London was airborne or engines on on the runway queuing to take off. At first there was some confusion. Where was this massive raid heading? We have the account of Sandy Johnston, he was the squadron leader of 602 Squadron, and he said it was the most planes he'd ever seen in his life in the air. He called it a vast air armada. The escorting fighters saw us at once and came down like a ton of bricks. The squadron split up and the sky became a seething cauldron of airplanes swooping and swerving in and out the vapour trails and tracer smoke. A hurricane on fire spun out of control ahead of me, while above to my right an ME-109 flashed across my vision and disappeared into the fog of battle before I could draw a bead

on him. Everyone was shouting at once and the earphones became filled with a meaningless cacophony of jumbled noises. Everything became a maelstrom of whirling impressions, a Dornier spinning wildly with part of its port mainplane missing, a stoutly built German floating past on the end of a parachute, his arms held above his head in an attitude of surrender. Despite the melee developing in and around this vast armada, it didn't break up. It headed like a huge battering ram straight towards London. British interceptors waited for an opportunity to pounce. And as the Germans hoped, in fact, a massive air battle developed.

Something like a thousand aircraft and a swirling, vicious dogfight on the eastern approaches to London. Those bombers reached the city and hammered the east end. Fires ripped through the docks. There were incendiary bombs, there were high-explosive bombs, there were naval mines. The incendiary bombs are small, they burn very, very hot. There are dozens, hundreds of them,

and they just set fire to the timbers and roofs in attic spaces. Soon whole buildings and blocks are infernos. They managed to sink something like 100,000 tonnes of shipping in the Thames and the docks, which at that time were probably still, I think, the world's largest port. 400 people were killed on the ground. 1,600 people wounded. Normal civilian Londoners. One bomb, extraordinarily unlucky reading about this,

one bomb passed through a ventilation shaft into a bomb shelter. Dozens of people were killed or wounded on the spot. The fires in East London raged all night. There were factories full of trade goods. They roared. The flames, an array of colours, as exotic materials, chemicals, burned. People remember the smell of sugar and tobacco and spice

mingled with the dust of battle, the sweat of the shaking bodies beside you. The massive German formation, this massive attack, had in some ways done its job. They'd lost 41 aircraft, which is a lot, but it's still better than some of the early days of the battle. And fighter command had lost 23 aircraft. The Germans had days of worse ratios. But again, only six pilots had been lost to the RAF because pilots were able to bail

out. They were able to survive over friendly territory and return to their squadrons. Although, of course, every single one of those losses, a human story, is a tragedy. One of them, for example, was a dashing squadron leader who'd married his wife five weeks earlier. But the issue for the Germans, if they wish to attack London again and again, their issue is now one of range. The Messerschmitts, these fighters, these escorting fighters that keep the bombers safe, they only had about 400 miles of range. By the time they formed up over Calais, they flew across the Channel, south-east England, by the time they got to London, they only had about 10 minutes of flying time over London before they had to whiz home. And so any deviations on the way, if they went off to

chase any British aircraft, if they went hunting, looking for targets, that ate into their fuel and it took them away from the bombers. There came a terrible moment in all of these raids, a terrible moment when the bomber crews saw their protectors bank away sharply and the bombers were alone. And that would be the story of the attacks on London. But this attack on London heralded a new phase in the war. In fact, it was a new kind of war. It was a war that had been glimpsed before, but it had never been done on this scale with this intensity. The Germans had bombed Rotterdam. The Germans had bombed Warsaw. But these had been lightning strikes. This was a sustained attempt to break the will of the British people, to knock Britain out of the war. The German aircraft returned that night to keep the fires raging, and they would return for many nights after that. Winston Churchill drove

through the East End the next day. He visited the shelter that had taken the direct hit, in fact. He wept at the sight of it, and the people of the East End cheered him. Some even thanked him for coming. London was now the battlefield. The city would be struck every day or night for months. In fact, it was attacked on 57 consecutive nights from this point forward. It was the start of what we in Britain call the Blitz, one of the world's greatest, richest, most beautiful cities would burn. Some of those blazes, for example, in December 1940, some of those blazes would destroy more property than the Great Fire of London had done in 1666. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, London had done in 1666. murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. But the tragedy for London, the city's suffering,

was a blessed relief for the fighter stations. These RAF airfields could now rebuild. The pilots could rest. They'd get into the air without the terror of being bounced on their runways. And now everybody knew where the Germans were going. There was no more element of surprise. It was simply a matter of wait for them along their track and hurt them on the way and hurt them on the way back. Over the next few days, the weather was poor. And so on the 10th of September, Hitler postponed his

decision on whether to launch the invasion, Operation Sea Lion. He postponed his decision to the 14th. There was a bit of fighting on the 11th. Actually, there's an interesting, there was a low level attack on a Spitfire factory in southampton luckily it hit the wrong building that factory was known to the germans and it was still producing a large proportion of the spitfires that were being made ready for battle other satellite factories were up and running but not quite at full production yet and so that factory was a vital weak link in the chain for the british for the rest of the Battle of Britain, there was always a squadron of fighters just patrolling the skies above that factory. Shows how important it was. Luckily on that occasion, as I say, the Germans hit the wrong building. That night, on night the 11th, Churchill broadcasts The Nation. And it's a wonderful broadcast. He compares

this moment now in history, the 11th of September 1940, to the moment when Drake was playing bowls on Plymouth Ho as the Armada was seen sailing up the Channel. He compared it to Nelson and his fleet standing between Napoleon and Britain in the summer-autumn of 1805. But Churchill told his listeners what they were enduring now was of far greater consequence to the life and future of the world. Imagine hearing that. Imagine your leader telling you that what you're living through now is up there on a par with these great events of the past that you've seen in the paintings, you've seen acted out on the stage, you've read about in novels and seen in comics, and you're living through that now. And Churchill was right.

More days of bad weather followed. There was the odd nuisance raid here and there. One of them was very important, in fact, because the Germans made the government's job much, much easier. They randomly dropped a bomb in very bad weather, so it can't have been deliberate. They dropped it on Buckingham Palace, and it actually did some damage to the chapel of Buckingham Palace. The royal family could now claim to be facing the same dangers as the East End,

because previous to that, there had been major concerns about social cohesion. In fact, Hitler had shared the belief that if you pound the East End, the poor East End, that that would cause a schism in Britain. And East Enders would rise up and throw off the yoke of their wealthy overlords who lived in fancy houses in West London that were not being bombed. I've seen aristocratic diaries and letters before the war that really voiced this fear.

It was played upon by the Luftwaffe, but this bombing of Buckingham Palace really helped because the king and queen were able to say, we too have been bombed. We know what you're going through. We're all in this together. And the government, the press went all out to cement, to make the case, to cement this social cohesion. Now Hitler met his commanders on the 14th of September. The weather wasn't good. The Luftwaffe still did not have air superiority over southeast England and he was forced to make another delay to the decision to invade. The last day, realistically, you're going to invade across the channel in an ad hoc, rather bizarre fleet of barges taken from

the river systems of Europe that are not capable of dealing with bad weather. The last day the tides and the weather's like to be favorable is the 21st of September. The next window is going to be decidedly autumnal. It's going to be into October. This fleet, such as it was, is not going to survive an October in the Channel. It's now or never. It's getting to the crunch. The Luftwaffe promised one more massive attempt to knock out the RAF. One more attempt to gain air superiority, to make that invasion at least a possibility. It would be on the 15th when the skies look to be clear.

And the Luftwaffe were not wrong. What happened on the 15th of September 1940 would prove decisive. It was a warm start to the day. There's a 28-year-old Scottish hurricane pilot called Archie McKellie. He wrote wonderful letters to his mum and he was waking up at Croydon Airfield and he wrote to his parents. They live in a tenement in Glasgow and usually he's from a poor background. And he said, Fritzie is trying to blow the hell out of the big bad city but is getting a thrashing

at the same time. I've now managed to shoot down three more bombers and a yellow nose ME-109, one of the very super fighter huns. The boys are all doing very well and I think that gives you a sense of the mood among the RAF fighter pilots in mid-September 1940. Churchill also woke up that morning, looked at the weather, and in his words, he said it felt like it was going to be blitzy. And so with a police bell ringing from his car, he was driven at breakneck speed to Uxbridge to watch as the day unfolded. Now, he wasn't allowed to smoke there because of the air conditioning. It would break the air conditioning, apparently. So he sat with an unlit cigar clamped in his mouth. It was 10 o'clock in the morning when the first

German aircraft took off at Calais. There was some confusion as they assembled, so those escort fighters bearing very valuable fuel they could not afford to lose, as they took off they circled waiting for the bombers to join them. Now this is the key advantage. The British know after the 7th, they know these raids are heading to London. It's deeply predictable. So squadrons were just sent to line the route. The Germans were attacked as they crossed the coast. They were attacked over East Kent. They were attacked over Canterbury and Ashford. They were attacked over North West Kent near Maidstone. They were attacked as they pushed into the southern suburbs of London. They were attacked without mercy by British fighters. At one point, there were lines, there was

a queue to tear into the Luftwaffe armada, the bombers and the Me 109s. And it reminds me almost the German spearmen who ripped into Varus's Roman legions as they wound their way through that brutal Teutoburg forest in 9 AD. One German aircraft was shot up. The pilot put it on autopilot and they bailed out. The pilot was attacked by a mob as he parachuted down in South London. He died of the wounds he sustained. The plane flew on, unmanned, to Victoria. And there, one Ray Holmes, may his name be remembered for eternity, he closed for the kill. So he pushed his firing button on his stick, but he was out of bullets. You only have about nine seconds of ammunition on these fighters, so you have to shoot very short bursts. It was a sign of inexperience to shoot long bursts. Anyway,

he's run out of ammunition. So he made the incredibly reckless decision to ram this aircraft with his own plane. He sighed the tail off. It fell like a stone, landed right by Victoria Station. Holmes' aircraft was sent into a spin. He bailed out. He landed in a back garden in a tangle of bins. He leapt up, kissed two girls in a neighbouring garden, then found his way to Chelsea Barracks to have a few beers in the mess. And the wonderful epilogue to that story is in 2004, Ray Holmes, still with a twinkle in his eye, was at present as the tangled remains of his aircraft were excavated from a street in West London. And it was part of a TV show presented, hosted by my dad. So my dad and Ray Holmes watched as that plane was lifted out of

the ground. The attacks continued on the German formation. We're very lucky, in fact, to have a very special moment of aerial combat recorded by both sides, quite unusual. There's a Spitfire pilot called Tony Lovell, 21 years old, and he was in the skies of Addison Woods near Canterbury. He wrote, we broke up to attack ME-109s which were attacking us. I sighted my ME-9 turning east and diving. I dived after him and chased him for some 15 miles in and out of the clouds. And then, interestingly, we have the account of the ME-109 pilot, a man called Herbert Chopper. He wrote an account saying, during a turn, we were attacked by spitfires coming out of the sun. Muller, his wingman, effectively, was hit in the arm and broke away. My plane was hit in both wings. I wanted to

get back to France, thinking of my fiancée and my forthcoming wedding at the end of September. I tried to hide in the clouds, which were about 1,500 metres. However, when I came out of the clouds, I was hit by a second burst. It was Tony Lovell who had managed to damage Joppa's plane, and the German pilot had no choice but to bail out. He writes, I threw off my cabin roof, undid my seatbelt. A third burst hit home, and from my instrument panel came flames like an oxyacetylene

torch. My hands and my face were severely burnt. The explosion followed. I found myself hanging from my parachute. Two spitfires circled me. The first pilot saluted and I did the same. I came down in a mixed forest and got hung up in a tree about five feet from the ground. For him, the war was over. But the day's fighting was certainly not. At nearly two in the afternoon, another force of what would prove to be nearly 500 German aircraft was spotted. This was actually the main effort for the day. Now imagine the bravery. There are a few RAF fighters. They were detailed to attack before this formation got close to London as they attacked over North Kent. This is one, two, three aircraft hiding in the sun, hiding high above the German armada, and then diving straight into the mass of 500 German aircraft, like birds of prey,

diving at extraordinary speed, choosing a target as they tear through the armada, then in a flash, bang, they're away. And what started with these isolated attacks just grew and grew and grew until it was a mighty crescendo on the eastern outskirts of London. This German effort was ripped apart by RAF fighters. The terrible moment came when the German fighter cover, these Me 109s, headed for home and the bombers struggled on. The docks were obscured by cloud, the German fighter cover, these Me 109s headed for home, and the bombers struggled on. The docks were obscured by cloud. The German bombers turned around, they retreated, they littered the eastern suburbs of London with bombs. They sought to unburden themselves and escape to lighten their load. They ducked, they weaved, they tried to hide. Some made it to the coast by mid-afternoon. One German remembers seeing a lone Spitfire. He said he'd never forget this, just sweeping down,

ignoring the 109s, knowing he had to get to the bombers, ignoring the escorting German fighters. He screamed down. The German fighters turned to chase him, and in fact, they hit him. And this British plane was now spewing smoke. Still, he came on. He took the bombers head on, an incredibly dangerous way of attacking for everyone involved. Very, very difficult. You're playing chicken. Your closing speed is hundreds

of miles an hour. He took the bomber's head on. He shattered with his machine gun rounds the plexiglass window from which the German witness was watching in amazement. Then he turned his spitfire on its back and he swept through the bomber's spitting machine gun rounds as he went on his back. And then the German watched as in a long curve, he plummeted to earth. We know the name of that pilot. He was Peter Pease of 603 Squadron. And he and his aircraft ploughed into the ground near Leeds Castle in Kent. Remarkably for the Germans, I don't know how they did it. They did send some other raids

over later in the day, but for the most part, most of the RAF pilots could go to the pub, they go to the mess, they celebrated a good day. Churchill left Uxbridge exhausted and slept soundly for once. The Luftwaffe had lost 56 aircraft that day, plus 25 seriously damaged. The RAF had lost 28, that's two to one. But again, aircrew figures are fascinating. 81 Germans killed, 31 injured, 63 taken prisoner. Fighter command lost 12 pilots killed, 14 wounded. Many German bombers landed, or I should say probably crash landed on airfields, screaming. Teenagers were manhandled out of the narrow fuselages, some blinded by splinters of plexiglass,

others burned, others had their flesh torn by the 303 rounds fired by the hated Spitfire's machine guns. These figures were simply unsustainable for the Le Faf. They were a catastrophe. They were as bad as any day that they had suffered so far in the Battle of Britain. And this was meant to be it. This meant to be the coup de grace. The RAF was supposed to be on its

knees. Instead, the RAF had inflicted shocking losses on the Luftwaffe. The sky above London had seemingly been swarming with RAF aircraft. And the pilots that flew them, they didn't seem to lack the appetite for the fight. The Germans had watched as RAF pilots had pushed their attacks to the point of suicide. They'd watched pilots ram into German aircraft, pilots who'd risked all their head-on attacks, taken on entire air fleet by themselves. The RAF was not broken. In fact, it was the Luftwaffe that was broken. And that's why we remember the 15th of September to this day as Battle of Britain Day, because it was on that day that anyone who had a clue what was going on in the German Luftwaffe knew that they had been defeated. The tenacity

of fighter command had convinced the Luftwaffe that they could not win this battle. And the process of convincing the higher-up decision-makers began. The attempt to knock Britain out of the war, the attempt to gain air superiority, the attempt to prepare the way for an invasion, had failed. Hitler was briefed, and he was told that the pesky British, found sportingly, had sent untrained pilots to the front line with planes fresh from the factories, unpainted, some with no ammunition. They'd been reduced to ramming. Goodness me. That and, of course, then the English weather. Had it not been for the weather, there would have been a much better result. Always blame the weather. But whatever the officials spin, what the Germans did belied the truth. Two days after the 15th of

September, Hitler issued an edict to the high commands of the army, navy and air force. Operation Sea Line was postponed until further notice. There would be no invasion. And days afterwards, the fleet of invasion barges so carefully marshalled in channel ports began to be dispersed and invasion troops moved east to be billeted elsewhere. The prospect of an invasion of Britain was over. The British didn't know this at first, it was a gradual process. They did know there were no more massive daylight attacks on London, and the action really slowly morphs after the 15th of September into the focus on night terror bombings, the blitz that levelled so many British cities, like my beloved

Southampton where I'm recording this from now. Historians will tell you that the Battle of Britain did go on until the very end of October but the serious attempt to win air superiority over southern England ended after the 15th. Hitler had experienced his first defeat. defeat. Like Napoleon before him, he was faced with a powerful, globally connected, defiant island nation to his west, with a powerful fleet that cut him off from the rest of the world. And just like Napoleon before him, that drove him to make some foolish decisions. In particular, the decision to turn east and smash the Russians. Only then did Hitler believe, like Napoleon, that he could turn around and deal with the British at his leisure. For both of those would-be hegemons, the road to London led through Moscow.

And that seems so crazy to us because we know the gigantic, we know the unprecedented scale and ferocity of warfare that would follow Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union. But we always have to hold on to this fact. He turned east in 1941 because he believed it would be easier than invading and subduing Britain. Like Napoleon, Hitler's finest units would be hewn down, ground to pieces in the steppe grasslands, scoured off the frozen vastness, lost in the ice-choked rivers of Belorussia and Smolensk. Because the channel, with the Royal Navy ships on it and now Arya fighters above it was simply too powerful a barrier to penetrate. And without that defeat above Britain, the Second World War and the rest of the 20th century would be unrecognisable. I often think as I'm walking around footpaths through the fields of Kent and Sussex, strolling down the banks of the Medway River,

having a pint in one of the many pubs that's been there ever since, well, certainly since the 1940s, probably for centuries before that, I always look around and think perhaps it's an improbable place for a battle of global significance, a marathon, a salamis. And yet, there it was fought, in living memory, can still talk to old men and women who looked up at the skies as children and saw it happening and it was fought largely over those fields and hedges of Kent and Sussex. You never know where and when history is going to happen. The fate of peoples and nations can be decided anywhere, at any time. Ours was decided above those fields in the long summer of 1940.

You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit, and that is my mini-series on the Battle of Britain. If you're a subscriber, please go to History Hit, where you can watch many documentaries that we've made on the Battle of Britain. i flew in a spitfire which i didn't even get to tell you about this podcast i meant to but i got carried away i visited bentley priory where i interviewed the brilliant stephen bungay about the integrated air defense system if you want a deep dive on that with one of the most brilliant historical minds around please go and watch that documentary we've got loads and loads on there it's the world's best history channel so please head over there and subscribe historyhit.tv but in the meantime folks

thank you for listening i'll see you next time you