In this grave hour, perhaps the most fateful in our history, I send to every household of my peoples, both at home and overseas, this message, spoken with the same depth of feeling for each one of you as if I were able to cross your threshold and speak to you myself.
For the second time in the lives of most of us we are at war. Over and over again we have tried to find a peaceful way out of the differences between ourselves and those who are now our enemies. But it has been in vain. We have been forced into a conflict. For we are called, with our allies, to meet the challenge of a principle which, if it were to prevail, would be fatal to any civilized order in the world. It is the principle which permits a state, in the selfish pursuit of power, to disregard its treaties and its solemn pledges; which sanctions the use of force, or threat of force, against the sovereignty and independence of other states.
Such a principle, stripped of all disguise, is surely the mere primitive doctrine that might is right; and if this principle were established throughout the world, the freedom of our own country and of the whole British Commonwealth of Nations would be in danger. But far more than this – the peoples of the world would be kept in the bondage of fear, and all hopes of settled peace and of the security of justice and liberty among nations would be ended.
This is the ultimate issue which confronts us. For the sake of all that we ourselves hold dear, and of the world’s order and peace, it is unthinkable that we should refuse to meet the challenge.
It is to this high purpose that I now call my people at home and my peoples across the seas, who will make our cause their own. I ask them to stand calm, firm, and united in this time of trial. The task will be hard. There may be dark days ahead, and war can no longer be confined to the battlefield. But we can only do the right as we see the right, and reverently commit our cause to God. If one and all we keep resolutely faithful to it, ready for whatever service or sacrifice it may demand, then, with God’s help, we shall prevail.
May He bless and keep us all.
King George VI’s Wartime Speech
3 September 1939
Turning once again, and this time more generally, to the question of invasion, I would observe that there has never been a period in all these long centuries of which we boast when an absolute guarantee against invasion, still less against serious raids, could have been given to our people. In the days of Napoleon, of which I was speaking just now, the same wind which would have carried his transports across the Channel might have driven away the blockading fleet. There was always the chance, and it is that chance which has excited and befouled the imaginations of many Continental tyrants. Many are the tales that are told. We are assured that novel methods will be adopted, and when we see the originality of malice, the ingenuity of aggression, which our enemy displays, we may certainly prepare ourselves for every kind of novel stratagem and every kind of brutal and treacherous maneuver. I think that no idea is so outlandish that it should not be considered and viewed with a searching, but at the same time, I hope, with a steady eye. We must never forget the solid assurances of sea power and those which belong to air power if it can be locally exercised.
I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once more able to defend our island home, to ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty’s Government – every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and the nation. The British Empire and the French Republic, linked together in their cause and in their need, will defend to the death their native soil, aiding each other like good comrades to the utmost of their strength.
Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous States have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be. We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
Winston Churchill’s ‘We shall fight on the beaches’ speech
4 June 1940
The Battle of Britain is about to begin… The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitlers knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.
But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of prevented science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves, that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’
Winston Churchill’s ‘This was their finest hour’ speech
18 June 1940
The gratitude of every home in our island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of guilt, goes out to the British airmen, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. All hearts go out to the fighter pilots, whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day; but we must never forget that all the time, night after night, month after month, our bomber squadrons travel far into Germany, find their targets in the darkness by the highest navigational skill, aim their attacks, often under the heaviest fire, often with serious loss, with deliberate careful discrimination, and inflict shattering upon the whole of the technical and war-making structure of the Nazi power. On no part of the Royal Air Force does the weight of the war fall more heavily than on the daylight bombers, who will play on invaluable part in the case of invasion and whose unflinching zeal it has been necessary in the meanwhile on numerous occasions to restrain.
Prime Minister Winston Churchill
Speech to the House of Commons on 20 August 1940
‘Their Finest Hour’
The Battle of Britain raged from June to October 1940, a short but concentrated conflict which, had the outcome been different, might have seen a successful invasion by Germany, and a Nazi regime ruling Britain. The road to this brief but intense battle began when the appeasement policy of Neville Chamberlain’s government towards the aggression of the Hitler regime finally failed in September 1939 with the German invasion of Poland, prompting Britain and France to declare war on Germany.
By the time Winston Churchill stepped into the position of Prime Minister on 10 May 1940, Germany had occupied Norway and Denmark, invaded the Netherlands and was well on the way to turning back the British Expeditionary Force in France; soon it would bring France to submission. The gravity of the British situation was brought home in the incredible rescue, ‘Operation Dynamo’, of over 330,000 Allied troops in the evacuation from Dunkirk during the nine days from 26 May to 4 June.
The success of the operation camouflaged the real losses to the British Army and the Royal Air Force in France, but the resolve of Fighter Command’s Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding ensured that Britain retained a reserve of fighter aircraft, even though the Hurricane squadrons in France lost 200 machines – a significant proportion of the RAF total fighter strength. At this low point in Britain’s fortunes, Churchill electrified and boosted the nation with his speech to the Commons on 4 June: ‘We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills;
we shall never surrender.’
Hitler and his Blitzkrieg commanders were understandably confident about their war machine but Nazi hubris bred false assumptions that would lead to Germany’s unexpected defeat in the Battle of Britain. The Luftwaffe had dominated the skies of Western Europe during the Blitzkrieg; its task now was to crush the RAF and disable its aircraft production. Field Marshal Hermann Goering, the Luftwaffe commander, boasted that the RAF would be broken in four days and its production capability wiped out in four weeks. However, the RAF were not to succumb to Goering’s plan. The Battle of Britain was to have four clear phases and on 18 June, Churchill predicted Britain’s struggle for survival with his famous ‘Finest Hour’ speech.
The first phase of the German offensive, dubbed ‘Kanalkampf’ (translated ‘Channel battles’), targeted Britain’s shipping and coastal defences to bring home the country’s vulnerability, isolation and dependence on sea transport. Traditional shipping routes made extensive use of the English Channel and the North Sea, placing convoys of ships within striking distance of German fighters and bombers, as well as heavy coastal guns sited close by in France. Early in the phase of the Battle, Britain’s Radio Direction Finding (RDF) Chain (a prototype radar developed as an early warning system in the 1930s), proved effective in anticipating Luftwaffe raids, scrambling the fighter squadrons of Coastal Command to meet the Luftwaffe before they reached their targets. However, the German raiders employed teasing tactics, feinting raids to spook RAF aircraft into the air, calculating their flying time and the need to return to base to refuel. These same tactics kept the civilian population on constant alert, fearful that an air raid was imminent.
On 12 August, the pace and spread of German attacks stepped up as Goering set in motion preparations for the September invasion of the British Isles, code-named ‘Operation Sealion’. This phase of the Battle was called ‘Adlerangriff’ or ‘Eagle Attack’ and was launched with massed attacks by hundreds of bombers and fighters on 13 August, ‘Adlertag’ (‘Eagle Day’). By mid-August, fine weather meant the Luftwaffe had clear skies for their daylight raids and a series of attacks were raised on Britain’s RDF Chain with the intention of permanently disabling it. The speed with which the RDF was restored caused the Luftwaffe to draw incorrect conclusions about the robustness of the system; if they had persevered with their plan, Britain would have been much more vulnerable. In fact the Luftwaffe failed to destroy the RAF’s fleet on the ground and although the Messerschmitt Bf-109 was superior to the RAF’s main defensive aircraft, the Hurricane and its glamorous cousin the Supermarine Spitfire, the Luftwaffe was unable to get the better of Fighter Command in the air, paying a heavy price in machines and pilots. The 15 August brought serious losses to the Luftwaffe – they named it ‘Black Thursday’; on 18 August – ‘the Hardest Day’ – losses on both sides were equally high.
The next phase of the Battle, which began on 24 August, concentrated on the destruction of RAF airfields. Although the Luftwaffe killed many ground personnel and damaged airfields with monotonous regularity, they still did not succeed in destroying Fighter Command’s defensive capability. Much of this failure must be attributed to the tactical skills of Fighter Command had to calculate their response to German raids with the greatest care: scrambling squadrons too soon might lead to their running out of fuel just as German raiders were approaching their targets. Luftwaffe Command knew that RDF would alert Fighter Command and often set traps for the hard-pressed RAF, which quickly realised the cat-and-mouse element to German attacks and responding too soon or too late or with too few or too many aircraft could have disastrous results. Dowding’s conservative approach, emulated by Air Vice Marshal Keith Park, in charge of 11 Group, kept up a continuous response to Luftwaffe attack, despite the exhaustion of pilots and the loss of aircraft.
At the beginning of September 1940, the RAF Fighter Command was at breaking point: the RAF had lost 300 pilots in August alone, and had only been able to replace 260 of them; in the 14 days leading up to 4 September, 295 fighters were destroyed, with 171 badly damaged; and in 11 Group, which bore the brunt of Luftwaffe raids, 6 out of 7 sector stations were almost out of action. Nevertheless, despite being on the brink of collapse, Fighter Command had succeeded in convincing the Luftwaffe that its strategy to destroy British fighter capability had failed. Alongside this state of affairs, in late August, German bombers had dropped bombs on civilians in London; in response, Bomber Command launched a night raid on Berlin on 25 August. Inexplicably, this enraged Hitler, who had given strict instructions that the Luftwaffe should not bomb civilian targets unless he specifically ordered it, and led to a change in the German’s line of attack when, on 4 September, his response was the escalated bombing of British cities. Just at the point where Fighter Command was on its knees with a shortage of planes and pilots, as well as its airfields being at breaking point, the Luftwaffe halted their effective strategy for a change in tactics.
On 7 September, the new German approach ushered in the fourth and final phase of the Battle of Britain with the beginning of the Blitz, as 950 German aircraft attacked London in the first and last massed daylight raid on the capital; 300 civilians were killed and 1,300 seriously wounded. For the next 57 consecutive days, London was remorselessly bombed in night raids. Fighter Command was amazed at this development, which perversely saved it from destruction, allowing its forces to recuperate and airfields to be restored. It was a terrible price for Londoners to pay, the death toll rose to 2,000 by 10 September. However, 15 September marked the heaviest bombardment of the capital so far – but at a loss to the Luftwaffe of 56 planes. This date, originally designated as the launch for ‘Operation Sealion’, would prove a turning point in the Battle of Britain, as the German High Command realised that their invasion of Britain would be at an unsustainable cost. Thus, 15 September became Battle of Britain Day. On 17 September, Hitler abandoned ‘Operation Sealion’ but not until 29 October could Britain breathe a little easier as the stream of German raiding aircraft subsided.
At the start of the Battle of Britain, Fighter Command was outnumbered four to one by the Luftwaffe and faced a better-equipped German force that was battle-hardened and had superior aerial tactics. Both sides revealed, in almost equal measure, gaps in their knowledge and understanding of the opposition. The Germans under-estimated Britain’s will to defend her shores and over-estimated the RAF’s defensive capability. Additionally, German intelligence was inferior to British, which began to experience the benefit of ULTRA – the British code name for the breaking of the German Enigma decoding system. On its part, RAF Fighter Command over-estimated the Luftwaffe strength and will, but it is easy to understand why this happened, when the attrition of such huge numbers of aircraft continued for so long. In reality, however, the Luftwaffe was also close to exhaustion by September 1940.
The milestone date for the end of the Battle of Britain – 29 October – was arbitrary to some extent, as Britain would continue to experience the German Blitz until early summer of 1941. Nevertheless, at this point in the war, it was possible to begin counting the cost of this decisive battle: during the Battle of Britain from 10 July to 31 October, Britain lost 1,065 aircraft (including 1,004 fighters) and 544 pilots; German losses numbered 1,922 aircraft (including 879 fighters, 80 Stukas and 881 bombers). British civilian losses in the Blitz that ended in May 1941 soared to over 40,000 killed and 50,000 injured. German Luftwaffe losses from August 1940 until March 1941 were nearly 3,000 aircraft lost and 3,363 aircrews killed, with 2,117 wounded and 2,641 taken prisoner.
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