The Battle of Britain

Hitler tries to bring Great Britain to its knees

The spring of 1940 saw the victorious Wehrmacht scythe a path across Europe, encircling the French and Belgian forces and threatening to cut off the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) from the ports that connected it to its island home. Conducting a fighting retreat, the British managed to establish a perimeter at the port of Dunkirk, from where the majority of the BEF and many French soldiers were evacuated to Great Britain. The French capitulation of 22 June 1940 meant that Great Britain stood alone against Hitler. Seeking to put the country under pressure, the German Luftwaffe flew bombing raids on convoys in the English Channel and against English naval installations on 10 July 1940. This marked the start of what Winston Churchill called the “Battle of Britain”, which pitted the Luftwaffe against the Royal Air Force (RAF). The Germans launched mass bombing raids first on RAF air fields and other military installations and then residential areas. Historians are still unclear as to the exact German aims during this campaign and are unsure whether Hitler sought to force a negotiated peace, perhaps even an unconditional surrender. In mid-July, he gave the order to prepare for “Operation Sea Lion”, the code name given to the invasion of Great Britain.

Three days later, Hitler made a fresh appeal to Britain’s “common sense” and demanded that its government act to avoid further bloodshed. However, the new British Prime Minister – the appeaser Neville Chamberlain had been replaced by the more bellicose Winston Churchill – was convinced that the war against Hitler’s “monstrous tyranny” could only end in “victory at any cost”. Accordingly, a strengthened RAF was able to prevent the Luftwaffe from achieving the air superiority required to launch an invasion. Having been unable to defeat the RAF, Hitler shifted his focus to bombing British cities in an attempt to break the morale of the population. The failure of this strategy combined with mounting German losses caused Hitler to postpone Operation Sea Lion “indefinitely”. Although major daytime raids stopped at the end of October, the bombing of key cities was continued up to the spring of 1941, when Hitler needed all his resources for his attack on the Soviet Union. Claiming more than 27,000 civilian lives, causing extensive material damage in London and Coventry and leading to the destruction of 1,700 aircraft on each side, the Battle of Britain ended with the first German defeat in the Second World War.