World War 2
The Battle of Britain
The fall of France had brought the seemingly invincible German army to the coast of France. Adolf Hitler brooded over the invasion of southern England, codenamed Sealion, an operation for which neither he or his high command had any real enthusiasm.
An Armourer working on a Spitfire before combat. One of the many unsung heroes of the Battle of Britain. Each aircraft had a ground crew of three - a rigger, fitter and armourer. The squadrons of RAF Fighter Command were sustained by a long chain stretching back from the ground crews to the workers in the factories.
The success of Sealion depended on the destruction by the Luftwaffe of the Royal Air Force’s Fighter Command. The confrontation air Battle began of the 10th of July 1940, and for three weeks the Luftwaffe and Royal Air Force traded opening blows, probing each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
The Battle moved into a higher gear in August, and on the 15th of August the Luftwaffe launched its main attack, codenamed Adler (Eagle), to provoke and win a decisive battle against the Fighter Command. In fierce air combat the Luftwaffe lost 72 aircraft on what became known as ‘Black Thursday’.
RAF losses, which were now outstripping the supply of new aircraft, were also causing concern. Exhaustion had set in among the battered squadrons defending the key battleground over south-east England. Several of the RAF Fighter Command’s vital sector stations lay in ruins from the bombardment of the Luftwaffe, although the battered bases were still able to send aircraft back into battle.
Throughout the Battle, the Luftwaffe had fatally switched back and forth between targets- the RAF’s coastal radar locations, Fighter Commands sector stations and aircraft factories - without knocking out any of them. On the 7th of September 1940 the Luftwaffe launched its first mass daylight raid on London. They mistakenly believed that the RAF has only 100 usable aircraft left, and on the 15th of September, the Luftwaffe suffered a crushing defeat when two heavily escorted waves of bombers ran into nearly 300 British fighters, who were scrambled and ready for the attack in the skies over London, this was all thanks to the British intelligence via the coastal radar locations the Luftwaffe had previously failed to demolish. Air superiority had been decisively denied to the German Luftwaffe, and on the 12th of October Hitler ordered the indefinite postponement of mission ‘Sealion’.