Dan Snow's History Hit - Battle of Britain: Why the RAF Won

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

80 years ago, in 15 September 1940, the Luftwaffe made a gigantic aerial assault on London in the belief that the Royal Air Force was down to its last few fighters. This, they hoped, would be the decisive clash that finished the RAF, and force Britain to the negotiating table or even pave the way for invasion. To mark this anniversary I went to Bentley Priory, the HQ of RAF Fighter Command, with historian Stephen Bungay. He more than anyone I know is able to describe exactly why the RAF won. A tale of technology, leadership, bravery and organisation. A version of this interview appears on History Hit TV.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hits. Exciting day today. Today marks the 80th anniversary of the huge aerial assault that Adolf Hitler's Luftwaffe launched on London. Today marks the 80th anniversary of what has become known as Battle of Britain Day. It marks the last great daylight raid on London, the climax of the Battle of Britain as Hitler's Luftwaffe attempted to deal a knockout blow to the RAF, which they believe was on its last legs, and begin aerial bombardment of London, which they believe was on its last legs, and begin aerial bombardment of London, which would force the British government either to the peace table or prepare possibly the way for a German invasion of the UK. British fighter squadrons took to the

skies and inflicted terrible losses on the Germans, convincing them that the Battle of Britain could not be won. It was a decisive victory, Hitler's first defeat in the Second World War. To mark this anniversary, we've got a season of programmes going out on History Hit TV. We've got podcasts, we've got Victoria Taylor coming up this week talking about the German point of view during the Battle of Britain. But today we've got an interview I conducted with historian Stephen Bungay at Bentley Priory, which used to be headquarters of fighter commanders, Hugh Dowding's headquarters, from which he planned and then ran the Battle of Britain. You're going to hear today Stephen Bungay explaining why the RAF won and why it wasn't even very close, thanks to the extraordinary

marriage of technology, operational and tactical innovations made by Sir Hugh Dowding and others. It turns out the RAF was brilliantly prepared to meet an aerial challenge in the skies above the UK. You can watch a version of this documentary on History Hit TV. You can watch a whole series of other programmes we've made to mark this important anniversary. We've got a season out at the moment. If you go to History Hit TV, yeah, I hate doing this, but we've got a special offer at the moment because it is the Battle of Britain.

If you go to History Hit TV, and if you use the code BATTLEOFBRITAIN, all one word, BATTLEOFBRITAIN, you get a month for free, and then you get the next three months for just one pound, dollar, euro, for each of those three months. It takes you up and beyond Christmas. Insanity. You'll still be riding the Battle of Britain train in January. So head over to HistoryHitTV, use the code BATTLERBRITTON, but in the meantime, enjoy this podcast with the very brilliant Stephen Bungay.

This is headquarters fighter command, and one of the key things that happened here was processing information that came in from radar. But the way it works is absolutely brilliant, conceptually far ahead of the time. This system is in fact the ancestor of the internet we know today. This is Dowding's headquarters, his office, his telephones, chair he sat in, not the original I suspect but this is where the man who masterminded all of this spent his time. And so he didn't, what's exciting about this space is he built and designed this system and then he operated it all from here, from this desk. Yeah, well he made big calls I suppose, he kept himself out of day-to-day operations. He made sure that they were working properly. His main job in the summer of 1940 was making sure that Fighter Command was properly resourced.

Getting pilots from elsewhere, from Training Command, beating up the training units to provide them. Making sure that aircraft production and supply were working, but they weren't really a problem. And then working on new problems. So he was, as it were, thinking about the next battle while other people were fighting this one. And he spent an inordinate amount of time on night air defence and working out how to do that. Because at the time, in the summer of 1940, we were helpless at night. We had absolutely nothing. You're kidding me. So Hugh Dowding was busy thinking about the blitz that was to come. Yeah, the one that was to come. He actually wrote a letter that he had distributed across Fighter Command to his fighter boys, as he called them, saying, you know, you're not going to be seeing very much of me over the coming months, but my thoughts will always be with you and I'm working

on some other things to help you. So, you know,ith park as it were to his subordinates to his subordinates okay well let's let's take it right back he's sitting here in the late 1930s he's scribbling out he's typing out what are the decisions he makes and how do those win the battle of britain okay well his main decisions at that time are really about putting the whole system together um he he's got scientific working, he's got to sort out things to do with aircraft armament. He started his time in research and development, so an awful lot of it was about managing technical experts and putting it all together in such a way that the whole thing worked. He had to work with civilian organisations such as the post office,

which at the time contained what we now know as BT as well. Thousands and thousands of miles of telephone cable were laid. Power had to be got to the operations rooms right across the country, and you had to make sure the national grid didn't fall apart. It was a bloody good job we had a national grid actually because a lot of countries didn't. They had regional grids. Without the national grid, well, very difficult to say whether the whole thing could have worked or not. He was commissioning people to build underground bunkers. He got this place armoured and he put the filter room down there. Thousands and thousands of things he had to deal with. Talking about a submarine company that made Spitfires? Yeah, no, he was involved in all that, in the specification that led to the Spitfire and the Hurricane well how many guns they were going to have you know the eight gun decision he was a

part of that that was his department that did all the work that proved that they would actually need eight machine guns if that was what it was going to be and yet at the same time he has this vision of how this thing can all work so at the same time it's very unusual to find this in one person, he's very detail orientated and very practical and very visionary and very conceptual. Usually you find people are one or the other and he was both. That was characteristic of his genius. And then of course when the threat comes, he has to work out how to deal with it. So he's got all these resources, how's he going to deploy them?

And that comes down to strategy. Now what you do as a defender is going to depend on what the other guy's going to do. So what are the Germans trying to do? Well, the problem they have is that they never really made up their minds. So are we going to cut England off and lay siege? Are we going to seek a political decision? Or are we going to prepare for an invasion? They never really decided, and that has direct operational consequences. So, for example, Luftwaffe go off and they bomb Southampton because it's a port. And the army come along and say, what are you doing bombing Southampton? We're going to need every tonne of British port capacity we have once we land or we'll lose the build-up battle.

So, oh, terribly oh you you are going to invade are you yeah well uh maybe um okay yeah so do we or do we not just wait on the whole bloody time fighter command strategy was very very clear you could formulate it by saying that Dowding and Park together said we're gonna defeat every serious raid in order to deny the enemy air superiority. We're not that worried about how many, we're just going to inflict a price on every incursion into British airspace with bombers that can do damage. Send over fighters, that's fine, they can burn up petrol at 30,000 feet over Kent if they like and then go home, we'll leave them. They want us to come up and fight big air battles with their 109s, we're not going to play their game, they're going to force them

to play our game. You send a bomber over and there's Spitfires and Hurricanes all over it, but you leave the fighters alone. And they keep going, the idea is you retain the ability to keep going whatever they do indefinitely so you conserve your own strength and eventually the other lot are going to realize they're getting nowhere and give up. There was an alternative idea which was to try to engage in large air battles in order to inflict large casualties but that's actually what the Luftwaffe wanted us to do and big air battles don't actually cause high percentage casualties they're just very confusing there's no such thing as decision in an air battle it's always attrition

so that the clarity of that message filtered on down right into the way they ran operations but he was very controversial and there was opposition within the air force himself there was opposition within fighter command that came from sholto Douglas who was Deputy Chief of the Air Staff in the Air Ministry and of course from Lee Mallory and 12th Group who thought that he was mishandling the battle, he ought to be fought in a very different way, amassing large numbers of fighters and indulging in large air battles. That was their counter-strategy and there was a lot of scheming that went on, it was very political. He was not liked by some very senior officers of the RAF the man who portrays him I think in the most insightful way was Frederick Pyle who was actually

an army man who was in head of AA command and he worked together with Dowding of course the anti-aircraft defenses had to be coordinated with all of this and he referred to Dowding as the most outstanding airman he met at the war but he said said he was an odd fish, a difficult man, a stubborn man, and his nickname of course was Stuffy, because he was extremely formal and very reluctant to praise, shall we say, a certain type, rather austere, but actually very humane. I mean he had a run-in with Trenchard during the First World War over Trenchard's ruthless use of pilots in the RFC and you know they wanted to ban parachutes and so on and Dowding opposed this. So Trenchard didn't like him and that eventually led to his dismissal and his removal from

fighter command but that's that's another story now at the time I think one would have to say he had all the political backing he needed particularly from Churchill and all the resources he needed because you think about it the country was spending unprecedented amounts of money on the Air Force on things like radar and nobody knew if they were going to work. I know I've done this before, you know, it's taking huge risks, you know, similar in order of magnitude I guess to the building of the dreadnoughts before the First World War, which was a big risk. At least you knew the thing was going to work but nobody knew whether the system was actually going to work or not, it was all put together. So unlike other great commanders in British history, Nelson.

Nelson fights sea battles in his prime on ships that hadn't changed that much since he was a boy sailor. Dowding, sitting in that chair, is presumably trying to work out how you bring in technology that is just cutting edge, hardly even covers it. This is stuff that's never been used. No, absolutely. Nobody's done this before. So military technology starts to change during the 19th century. I mean, if you look at an infantryman who fought with Marlborough at Blenheim, shifting forward a hundred years on the Battle of Waterloo, he could pick up everything within five minutes, not a lot's changed. Shifting forward another hundred years to 1915 and a clue what's going on,

can't fire the weapons and everything he's been taught to do about standing upright in the brand new uniform is going to kill him within two seconds at the front. So everything's changed. Now we're going a step further in the 20th century where we're dealing with this thing, the aeroplane, that has doubled in speed, range, size every 10 years or so since it was invented. And it's continuing and it's speeding up. That rate of change is speeding up. You've got this new technology radar that the Germans knew all about, by the way, but they developed it in the German Navy to deal with shipping.

And we're using what actually to them is a rather crude version of it but all sorts of problems come up so after the war started they find they're getting they're picking up signals from behind the stations and they're rather getting rather confused about what's coming in coming out identification friend and foe is still a problem they got a basic solution but there's a big cock up just a few days into the war there's a battle barking creek when spitfires attack hurricanes because of the teething troubles so you imagine you've got this brand new it system that is leaping a few generations um and you've got to work it up and you've got to have people who understand how to make it work as well so you've got a lot of training to do so there's a sort of race to get it ready in time and it meets its most severe test um luckily um just

short of nine months into the war when they had a chance to try it out there's never been an air battle before no no this is the first pure air battle there's ever been. In the first World War, of course, there was a lot of air activity. The main thing, though, was to clear the airspace behind the enemy lines so that your own reconnaissance aircraft could do spotting for the artillery. It was subservient to the army. The RFC was part of the army. It only became an independent force in 1918. Likewise, the Navy used aircraft for its own purposes largely reconnaissance, you need to control of the air for that reason. This is quite different, this is you know that the whole question of whether we stay at the war or not being resolved

solely in the air and the threat of bombing was also an unknown. I mean in the 1930s people's attitude to being bombed from the air conventionally is rather similar to our view of nuclear war. I mean HG Wells writes these science fiction novels where it's just devastation. The civilian authorities expected London to have a few hundred thousand casualties in the first weeks of the war. They expected everybody to panic. They thought it quite likely the Germans had dropped gas on them. All sorts of things that didn't happen. Nobody knew London could take it, as they said, until London actually did take it and people didn't panic and they did go into their shelters and they followed the air raid warnings. And

in fact, every city on earth took it, as it were. A lot of them like Tokyo and Berlin on a far bigger scale than London ever did. But just threatening the bomb was seen as, unless you could stop them, was seen as terrifying. And Baldwin's famous phrase from 1934, I'm sorry to tell you the bomber will always get through, so the only answer is for us to kill more of their women and children they kill of ours was terrifying and nobody had challenged it except the guy who sat there who listened to said this and they said no the way to stop it is the fear of the fighter so dowding believed you could stop the bomber dowling flew in the face of conventional wisdom indeed within the Air Force itself which is why the Air Force was building up its so-called strategic bombing fleet from bomber command that was going to so if they do it to us we'll do it to them only more right

so the death toll is going to rise and rise and now they say no if we have fighters that are good enough and are able to control them properly. If you give me 52 squadrons of them and keep them at strength, I can defend this country against all comers indefinitely and in the end if they've got an ounce of sense they'll stop because they'll realise they're just getting nowhere and that's exactly what happened. So what exactly was it that this genius had been squirrelling up in this office? What was that system that allowed the RAF to win? The most interesting bit of all Dan and to show you that we need to go next door. Okay so this is a sort of reconstruction is it? Yes that's right so this is showing the sort of thing

that used to go on downstairs in in the filter room If you know what that is, you've got to get an idea of what this system was designed to do. The military would call it a C3 system, command, control and communications. But you can think of it as basically an information processing and communication system. So you start off with information from two sources. One is radar looking out to sea, but it's blind when an aircraft crosses land so it's backed up, it's most advanced of technologies by the oldest of technology, what Churchill called 30,000 pairs of the Mark 1 eyeball. There they are, the observer corps. There were posts all over the country. Some of the most dangerous raids that came in at low level

underneath the radar were in fact tracked by the observer corps. All that is fed in here. So headquarters fighter command is the information processor and the key thing is the filter room. So it's working out what all these blips on the radar mean, how many raids there are because you're getting different radar stations getting the same raid, what height they're flying at, that was one of the hardest things to estimate, and their strengths and their trajectory, where they were going to. And they're all laid out on the plotting table here. So the plotting table is, we now are so familiar with the air traffic control, with the screen,

this is the first great airspace management system. Yeah, that's basically what it is. Here you can see it here, people lying over, oh, on here you can see the blocks that would have been pushed around and so what people saw here is then reproduced exactly the whole thing standardized group so we're here at the top of the operations room of filter room in headquarters here with all the information coming in it's worked out which rate is which it passes that information down to the group. So that's 11 group covering the southeast, 10 groups southwest, 12 groups the midlands and

13 groups Scotland. They are the people who then make the decision about what to do about the raids. They control the aircraft and so someone will say in 11 group okay call Biggin Hill, Scramble 72 and 92 squadrons, Patrolmaidston Angels 2-5 but the group won't send those signals out because it's got too many aircraft to be able to deal with. The next level down is the sector and the sector is an individual airfield Tangmere, Biggin Hill, Kenley, Hornchurch, Northfield in 11 group who would also have a few satellites where some squadrons will be stationed they usually controlled about three squadrons each and they would actually ring the bell call out squadron scramble and then talk to the pilots as they took off that information would be fed back up into group so the group knew where its forces were from released to engaged and all the stages in between

and fight command here just kept on updating the information that came in through someone called a teller they would update the information every two minutes and so all these little markers would be moved so you're you're dealing in in three dimensions here. You visualise three dimensions and time, right? So you've got height, direction and time. And it's all done using colour. It's all very clear. Everybody knows what they're supposed to do in it. And nobody else in the world had anything like this. And it's so interesting hearing you talk about it because for much of military history, you think about Napoleon in Russia. The problem is complete lack of information. You've got no idea what your enemy's doing. We're now entering that very modern world that we all know very well today.

We've got far too much information coming out. Yes. There was some uncertainty around the information. The most dodgy bit of information was height. Hard to estimate, and pilots knew that, so they always used to, if they're ordered to patrol at 15,000 feet, they'd make it 18, just to be sure, because they wouldn't be on top. And there were missed interceptions because of that because they're going up too high but generally it gave them a vivid real-time view of the battlefield which is something a commander had never had before and able to act on it very accurately. I mean if you wanted to understand how it works in terms we're all familiar with, this little thing right, you, this is radar, there you are out carrying radar in your

pocket in a German bomber. That tells Google, which is headquarters fighter command, where you are, what you're up to. Google passes that information on to Google Ads which is group and they then when you get a ping it means that an advertiser has intercepted you and you've been told there's 25% off today. It's exactly the same principle this was revolutionary at that time this is part of our daily lives the main difference is that this uses digital technology that uses analog technology but the basic design principles are the same. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt,

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And so you mentioned analog technology. I'm so struck by all of these being connected by phone lines. And you've pointed out in your books that it was almost impossible to destroy this network. Yeah, yeah. So if you think of a traditional command and control system as used in the First World War, you have a telephone line from the brigadier down to the battalion headquarters in the front line, the next minute a shell lands and cuts the line, dead, they're cut off, command and control is no longer possible.

However, if you cut a bit of a net, the information flows around the hole, so even if you manage to take out one of the operations rooms at the sector level, then the information flow down around it. So one stage, Biggin Hill went down for an afternoon, so Kenley and Hornchurch took over control of the squadrons. The Germans noticed nothing and at the same time it's self-repairing. So once the raid's gone, WAFs come out with red flags to mark unexploded bombs, chaps with shovels have some gravel to fill in the bomb craters, they'd already thought that that might happen so they stopped part of the stuff, and the GPO come in, GPO engineers as they then were,

and twist all the telephone lines together. The biggest vulnerability was power and both Biggin and Kenley went down because power lines were hit. They did of course have emergency generation but what they did in both those cases was to evacuate the operations room which is doing all this stuff to the neighbouring village, one to Biggin Hill, and the other, Kenley, evacuated to an old butcher shop in Caterham Village. I've spoken to the guy who used to patrol the telephone lines running down from there to

Kenley, and he said he used to patrol it with a shotgun. I said, John, what are you going to do with a shotgun against German paratroopers? He said, I don't want to worry about paratroopers. He said it's the bloody squirrels, they gnaw through them. Imagine these SS squirrels gnawing through, paralysing our system. The secret enemy, they probably achieved more than the German Luftwaffe. They would have done, yeah.

And what's striking is that you talk about setting up, you just need a phone, so just like we go, I'll set up a workstation offsite, you just need a phone. No, I mean, okay, so they evacuated Ken the Ops to Caterham Village down the hill. They could have we go i'll set up a i'll set up a workstation off-site you just need to know i mean okay so they evacuated ken the ops to cater village down down the hill they could have evacuated it to india in principle it was your back office operation we're doing exactly the same thing as long as they can talk to each other and they share information up your uncle um and they had a third line beyond that now if i'd wanted to win the battle, if I'd been in charge of the Luftwaffe, I wouldn't have even bothered attacking the airfields or the radar stations.

To start off with, I'd have attacked the National Grid. I'd have hit every power station in South East England. Because in order to defeat the system, you've got to make it blind and dumb before you do anything else. And if you've made it blind and dumb, you can start to paralyse it because then I could do surprise attacks and catch aircraft on the ground. But too many radar stations take out, very difficult targets. They managed a few, then they

gave up. They naively thought oh it doesn't matter if they know when we're coming because we want to engage them in the air anyway. That's how clever the leadership on the other side was. So I think yes, you could have taken out this system but it would have been an act of imagination that would have been impossible for someone at that stage and let's just talk about because now this is the system that basically

everyone in the world everyone in the world uses this but before this month so in the fight for France nothing it's a matter of take your lads, go on a patrol, see if you see any Germans coming over. That's right, so you'd go off on your dawn patrol, as you did in the First World War, and if you saw some enemy aircraft, you'd call for help. I mean, the alternative to this was standing patrols, and that would have used up hours and hours and hours of flight time, and would have required many more than 52 squadrons. They still did a lot of standing patrols, actually. If you look at the sortie rates, Fire Commander flying a lot of them,

especially over the Channel, where the warning times were short, which is why Dowding did not want to fight the Luftwaffe over the Channel. He wanted them to attack Britain, because if they did, he knew he could break them, as he put it. But they did that as backup. You know, it's very robust, right? So you lose a few radar stations, the others take over.

Lose one ops room, the others take over if you you back it up with the observer call you don't place your faith in this new technology you back it up you back up what you know from this system with standing patrols as well they used to send single spotter aircraft over if they had big raids coming in from calais they'd send someone in the spitfire up at 25 000 feet just to check where they all were and see where the top cover was hanging out and And check that the radar information was correct. It was correct, yeah. So you get a big raid coming from Calais, here we are, they come over to Dover, they're being tracked all the way across, and pilots can be having a nice old snooze till the last minute. Pretty much. And they're told when and where to engage. Yeah, they had

various states of alert, your nice old snooze is you're released, and then you have readiness, and then you're scrambled, you know. They're different levels. But you're not getting exhausted flying around in circles waiting for the enemy. No, it saves fuel, and above all, it saves pilots time,

because it was absolutely draining on the individuals concerned. Good job, David Young. So, is this the place to talk about the myth of the Battle of Britain? Because I was always brought up to say the Luftwaffe was much bigger than the RAF. They came across in these massive formations. It was nip and tuck, especially that last week of August before the Germans changed strategy and attacked London. It was close, they might have won. I don't think the Luftwaffe ever came close. I think the key word if you give it, want me to say, one word,

why did we win? The answer is strategy. And of course you don't see strategy, strategy is invisible. It's all this thinking that's going on behind it. So yes, the Luftwaffe as a whole was bigger than fighting them out of course because most of them were bombers, which were mainly targets. If you look at the fighter-fighter ratio, the Germans start off with a small advantage, but they lose strengths because they're unable to replace them as fast as we are, and we actually gain strength. We actually new squadrons come into fighter command. You know, the Poles were not there in the beginning, the Canadians were not there at the beginning. He actually gets reinforcements as well as replacements. So fighter command strength

remains steady. We are outproducing them in aircraft by a factor of two to one, and this is a battle of attrition. What matters is your ability to continue. We have one week when we started losing more pilots than we were replacing. But both Dowding and Park were onto why. It was because raw squadrons were being sent from the north as replacements. I don't mean raw pilots, everybody dealt with raw pilots, but they can learn from the experienced ones on the squadron. This is where no one on the squadron has been in battle before and no one knows

what to do. Those nine squadrons suffer 40% of fighter commands casualties and make 25% of the claims, most of which probably erroneous. So they're suffering a lot more damage than they're meting out. And Dowling changed that system on September the 7th, he saw what was happening. The other thing that changed was that the Germans had realised they really wanted to fight a battle, so they increased the ratio of fighters to bombers, and the likes were 3 to 1 to 5 to 1. But they couldn't sustain it because they were running out of fighters.

And so they're having smaller and smaller forces acting as escorts around any given set of bombers, and so that had to change. And if they do that, they're just sending over more targets and I don't think the target itself changed the thing on the air fighting but they're attacking Biggin Hill or Docklands it's neither here nor there where the bombs drop because they're very close I mean you can stand on the end of Biggin Hill runway I have done and see Canary Wharf clear as day when the weather's okay. It's only going to be significant if you're doing serious damage to

airfields that you're taking them out. Now living under an airfield that's being attacked, and the most intensively attacked was Biggin Hill, is a very unpleasant experience. But the only really serious target there is the ops room. You can blow up hangars, you can crater the runways, you don't need the hangars, you can disperse the aircraft around the side, you berth people off-site of course in the village. And to show you how important the damage was, one day in the beginning of September, Group Captain Grice, who was the station commander at Wigan Hill, decided he had enough and he got up in his Magister and took a German reconnaissance bomber's eye view of his

station and saw that there was one hangar left and at six o'clock in that evening there was a big bang and the last standing hangar on Biggin Hill went up in smoke and in the morning another dornier came along, took some photographs, went back and the Luftwaffe decided that Biggin Hill was finished, wrote it off and never attacked it again. Group Captain Grice was put on a charge for willful damage to the King's property but he was tried by an RAF court-martial who found him not guilty and they all went off to the White Hart, embraced and got dissed. So because the Germans had such a naive view of what damage they were doing and they didn't even know what an operations room was

that they didn't realize that all this sound of fury was really doing nothing when park wrote about this incident he says i wish to impress upon you he's writing to the air ministry that there was a period in time when the attacks on our infrastructure were threatening to create a serious loss in efficiency land a viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer.

Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week very serious indeed now you imagine you're the German commander you've been giving a maximum effort for four weeks and the enemy is worried that they may start losing efficiency and you think you brought him to his knees and he's

about to surrender I don't call that a narrow margin so it's fascinating because the clue should be in the title we're here in fighter command headquarters but they're not doing that much commanding no they're not they're actually not doing any commanding at all they're doing information processing the commanding is being done here at group command is giving direction telling people what to do the overall strategy defeat every serious raid in order to deny air superiority has already been fixed it's in everybody's head that comes from doubting then he stops he doesn't interfere and then if you consider the number of things that have to be done i mean when you're

controlling squadrons you've got to know where your guys are so they had another system called pipsqueak that's sending information back here that has to be processed on another frequency and then they got the IFF system the identification friend and post system working for them as well you imagine trying to get all that at a national level in this room forget it part of the genius of this system is that it realizes what work needs to be done by whom. Everybody knows exactly what their role is, they don't interfere with each other, they trust each other but everybody is working on a common shared understanding of what is going on and

that I have to say is a key to operational effectiveness in any business organisation today just as much as it was for then and there's a lot of them could learn a lot of lessons from this Stephen what I find so inspiring about the Dowding system is it's such a clever wonky technocratic response but at the sharp end of it there are unbelievably brave young men sweating and fighting and dying and bleeding. The fighter boys yes absolutely and I was privileged to get to know some of them. They certainly were remarkable chaps, but one of the things that struck me really powerfully

was their modesty. I mean, it was against the ethos of Fighter Command to shoot a line, as it were, to shell off. It was sort of the opposite of profiling yourself on Facebook today. And they all played it down because they understood that they were part of a bigger whole and you constantly know how did you measure do it oh well I was I was just doing my job I mean what one of the guys I got to know first was this this fellow here that's a portrait of him from from the time who was Bob Doe

who first popped up on a Channel 4 series in 1990, and he lived locally. I got in touch, and we got to know each other rather well. He was an unknown ace. He got 17 kills. And he was a gardener's son from Reigate, which is not far from where I live. And he tells his story of being the worst pilot in the squadron. He said, I was the worst pilot in the squadron. He said, I was the worst pilot in the squadron. I didn't like being upside down, he said. But, you know, the 13th of August came.

And there he was in 10 groups. The F would have been bombed and then they were scrambled. And I said, what persuaded you to take off? He said, I knew I was going to die, he said, but I was more afraid of being thought a coward. So he took off and stuck to take off. He said, I knew I was going to die, he said, but I was more afraid of being thought a coward. So he took off and stuck to his leader and he came back having shot down two of me on my nose and then he had a bit of a think about what he was doing and changed his tactics. He used to fly in slippers or socks so he had a better feel for a Spitfire and he was a dead shot which was very rare the reason

was being a gardener's son his his dad used to take him out when he was gardening when he was young and he gave him a little air rifle and he used to shoot the heads off tulips and he got his eye in that way and once you control the Spitfire instinctively you could do the same thing. Wonderful fellow he's one of the many who told me that he hates being thought of as a hero, so he asked us to do my job. But he's right, because of the downing system, he's right that he was obviously incredibly brave, tenacious, accurate, but he was put in the right equipment, in the right place, by a big assistant. And the other thing that always strikes me about these battle of britain pilots and aces they were often promoted they were promoted within rather than keep them on the

front line shooting down yes enemy aircraft like people like sailor milan i guess they were promoted they were they were the system and i think well actually say that there's a story is when he he led 74 i mean he was one of the finest pilots we had very hard disciplinarian but also very generous i mean he would deliberately take up young pilots as his wingman but in contrast to Gallant he allowed them to get the kill. He'd protect them to give them confidence and build them up and these guys didn't care that much except for a few of them did. Most of them didn't care that much about what their individual scores were whereas that's all that seemed to matter to some of the German pilots, some of the

aces. And of course it was also in many ways a meritocracy, I mean that's a famous figure up there in colour, that's Ginger Lacey. Now Ginger was son of I think a butcher from Yorkshire and he was a sergeant pilot. And he flew with 501 Squadron, but he was the best pilot on the squadron. And once they were in the air, they followed him. On the ground, they had a separate mess for the sergeants. They weren't supposed to mix with the officers.

Officers and gentlemen, you see, don't mix with butchers' sons from Yorkshire. But up in the air, it was meritocratic. And, of of course he was promoted afterwards. So gradually these class distinctions wore away but they're very strong of course initially. And you and I have been spending all our time here in this stately home thinking about this wonderful system and radar and tech but we shouldn't forget that up these guys on the front line at the sharp end

it was war. Oh yes there was nothing very romantic about it I mean you talk about Knights of the Air and so on and jousts but these sort of one-on-one combats were extremely rare few of them took place but very rare. Largely success was about creeping up on someone from behind and stabbing him in the back and running away before any of his friends could get you. I'm not sure how heroic that is, but that's basically what success was about. And it was, I mean, they were knackered. They were going out five times a day. Well, to go back to Bob, so he went into action on August the 15th and was continuously in

action for three weeks up to September the 7th when his squadron leader was shot down they withdrew his squadron 234 to Cornwall to St. Evil and I said he'd been able to tell me if I named a day I'd say so what were you doing on the afternoon of 18th of August ah right that was the raid on Portland and I was it a minute by minute was doing I said so okay so it's September the 8th here in Cornwall Cornwall, what do you do? He said, I've no idea. I said, well, I can't remember anything about the next two weeks. Really? Why? He said, because I was asleep most of the time.

He just, he lived on adrenaline and went clunk. And you can see it in their eyes. Sometimes you get these 20-year-olds with great black rims around their eyes. That's not tiredness, that exhaustion that's quite different they would I mean you think they'd sort of go to bed straight away actually used to party all night so they get two or three hours sleep a night they'd be down the white half they were big inhale because they're so tense start you after you've been in five air fights there's no way you're going to relax and have a nice snooze.

You're either going to collapse or you're going to keep going and they kept going until they collapsed and then they'd be up before dawn and do it again and you keep going for so long and then bonk and he describes that what we didn't have to anymore so he went bonk. Almost in a coma. I think he was very close to being in a coma for two weeks. And then he went back. And some of the descriptions of the burns, the hurricane particularly, wasn't it? Yes, yes.

Yeah, the problem there was the two very big wing tanks. You see the wings of a Spitfire were too narrow to put petrol in it. So you just had a tank in front of the... So it was behind the engine and behind the armor plating in the back, so of course it did catch fire, but it was less vulnerable to the target. If you've got the hurricane shaped, you've got these two huge wing tanks that are just down there, either side of the cockpit, there's no... there's no panel between them and the cockpit, and that's the center of the target if you're firing at a hurricane so you get one incendiary bullet in there and whoosh and the flames appear to come from in front and in fact they're coming from up here and

so you've got a few seconds to get out and then the question then is how much of your skin is left or whether and how much of you is left and they were all most of them are whipped off to the Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead but they came under the care of Archibald McIndoe who developed new grafting techniques and reconstructed them effectively and that was pioneering medical work at the time and created the guinea pig club in fact there's a picture of one pilot who's a Czech. You can see he's been through McIndoe's treatment as a member of the guinea pig club,

and that's how they would end up looking. And actually, I always like to spare a thought for the German pilots, because the Brits had it hard, but the Germans running out of fuel over the channel, ditching. Yes, I mean, it was worse for them because, I mean, they didn't have so many green pilots on the squadron because they just didn't have enough replacements coming in.

So the old hands used to have to keep on going. As Ulrich describes, the more senior commanders tended to have a mysterious case of appendicitis at some stage and be forced to leave their unit to go to hospital back in Germany. There was an old joke amongst German pilots that when you met a Battle of Britain veteran you said oh where's your appendectomy scar here's mine and guys like him you know he was sort of middle ranking officer, well lowest middle ranking officer were getting seriously pissed off because they felt let down by the system, the whole thing seemed pointless, and a lot of their senior officers seemed to be putting their own interests

first. So there was a steady build-up of sort of crisis in morale in the Luftwaffe that was building up throughout August and reached its peak in September, because they all realised it was pointless. I mean mean people will carry on that people will sacrifice an awful lot and endure great suffering and danger if they think they're getting somewhere but if they think it's all pointless that's when morale starts to drop and it was becoming apparent to most of them that it was pointless. Last thought surrounded here by the pictures of the some of the more famous of the few what did this what did this victory mean what did the Battle of Britain mean?

Well the Battle of Britain is often said victory prevented invasion it certainly put the seal on invasion because it was a necessary but not sufficient condition of the invasion taking place I think the German navy breathed a sigh of relief when it was postponed. But I think the most important thing was that it strengthened Churchill's position in Parliament. After the battle of Rome, Churchill's position was pretty much untouchable.

There were a couple of boats of no confidence later in the war, because the war continued to go from bad to worse, but they were very easily defeated. And that meant that we were going to continue fighting it also was the first time that hitler had actually suffered a reverse they pretended they hadn't it was pretty clear to everyone that they finally met their match and it had an important effect in the united states we exploited its propaganda value in the u.s in

particular for all it was worth, because one of the main planks of Churchill's grand strategy was to get the US involved. And he wants the US, get it on our side, it was only a matter of time, but they weren't going to come in for another year. So he used all this, it got an awful lot of sympathy, especially the Blitz got a lot of sympathy, Ed Munro's reports and so on went all around the US. And if I were asked to pinpoint the time when Germany lost the war, I would surprise everybody by saying it was July 1940, because that's when they decided to attack Russia without having cleared their backs by defeating or coming to terms with Britain. That means they would have been in a two-front war

and every general in Germany knew that a two-front war was a war that Germany was going to lose. And they walked into it. Hi everyone, it's me, Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying, and I hate it when other podcasts do this, but now I'm doing it, and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes, wherever you get your podcasts,

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