Today, nearly seventy years later, the Battle of Britain—as it rapidly came to be called, after a phrase in one of Winston Churchill’s greatest war speeches*—unlike many other great events of World War II, has lost none of its luster. As modern warfare goes, it was, up to a point, both glamorous and gentlemanly (though, as we shall see, it involved plenty of horrors, atrocities, and suffering), and it was fought by fairly “dashing” young men on both sides (and on the ground, on the British side of the Channel, also by young women, the WAAFs of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force who operated the radar plotting stations and took their full share of casualties).

Of course there is, among the victors at any rate, a natural tendency to glamorize the past, but even allowing for that, the Battle of Britain still retains a certain glamour, and not just in the United Kingdom—even the Germans, who lost the battle, are still fascinated by it, to judge by the number of German-language books and Web sites on the subject, as are the Japanese, who were not even in the war at that time. In Britain it is still commemorated annually on Battle of Britain Day, September 15. Until 1959, the events of the day included the “fly past,” of a carefully preserved Spitfire and Hurricane, the two principal British fighter aircraft of the battle, flying low over London, weather permitting, the unfamiliar low-pitched, throbbing roar of their twelve-cylinder Rolls-Royce Merlin engines music to the ears of those old enough to have heard it before, as they passed over Buckingham Palace and climbed swiftly away. For a time, they were flown by aces who had taken part in the Battle of Britain, but soon they were too old to fly anymore.

Given time, all historical events become controversial. That is the nature of things—we question and rewrite the past, glamorizing it or diminishing it according to our own inclinations, or the social and political views of the present. Historians—indeed whole schools of history—have made their reputation by casting a jaundiced eye on the victories, heroes, and triumphs of their forefathers. Nobody in academe gets tenure or a reputation in the media by examining the events of the past with approval, or by praising the decisions of past statesmen and military leaders as wise and sensible.

Not surprisingly, the Battle of Britain has come in for its share of revisionary history and debunking, though given its special standing as (let us hope) the last in the series of great battles in which Britain stood alone against a tyrant threatening invasion (and seeking at the same time hegemony over the European continent), it has not come in for the kind of sharp criticism directed toward British motives and generalship in, for example, the American Revolutionary War, the Crimean War, or World War I. There is no equivalent here of General Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga, or the Charge of the Light Brigade, or the First Battle of the Somme. As at Trafalgar, the British got it triumphantly right—RAF Fighter Command made up for years of dithering, pessimism, and appeasement among the politicians between the wars (the “locust years,” as Churchill called them), and also of doubt in the Air Ministry that fighters could defend Britain against air attack, since the conventional view was not only that “the bomber will always get through,” a phrase Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had borrowed from an immensely influential book by the Italian theorist of aerial warfare Giulio Douhet, but that the only defense lay in having a bomber force big enough to deter any continental enemy. “The only defense is in offense,” Baldwin warned the House of Commons darkly in 1932, “which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.”¹ This was a grim prospect, which the prime minister, like most members of the House, wanted to eliminate or discourage altogether, rather than to prepare for; indeed, he was arguing against increasing military expenditure at the time.

Throughout the 1920s and the early 1930s, Fighter Command (as it eventually came to be called) was the Cinderella of the Air Ministry. Such money as was made available to the RAF by the politicians was used, according to the prevailing orthodox doctrine of air power, to build up Bomber Command. In theory, money spent on fighters was money down the drain, since the only real protection was thought to be a force of bombers large enough to scare off the Germans.

Reluctant as the British government and the air marshals were to develop an effective fighter force, it remained unclear what the role of the RAF was to be in the event that a diplomatic policy of “appeasing” Germany failed to prevent a war. The roots of many of the various controversies that surround the Battle of Britain may be found, as we shall see, in the prejudice against building fighters and the mistaken belief that bombers (theirs and ours) would always “get through.” In addition to this, there is a more recent, and growing, tendency to question whether the Battle of Britain in fact played the decisive role in discouraging Hitler from attempting to invade Britain when to his surprise the opportunity to do so suddenly presented itself after Dunkirk.

This is a difficult question to answer. The “what ifs” of history are always problematic and of course by definition unanswerable, but they usually involve supposing an alternative outcome to a historical event. What would have happened if Lee had won the Battle of Gettysburg? What would have happened if Admiral de Robeck had not heeded his fears and instead had pushed the British fleet on through the Dardanelles to take Constantinople in March 1915, as he came very close to doing? What would have happened if Hitler had released Panzer Group West on June 6, 1944, and Rommel had returned from his leave in time to destroy the Allied troops on the beaches at Normandy? Since these things did not happen, we can only speculate, and speculation is a bad habit for anybody writing history. As the old saying goes, “If my aunt had balls, she’d be my uncle.”

The speculation about the Battle of Britain is of a different kind. Nobody denies that we won it; but we simply do not know how serious Hitler was about invading Britain—or, of course, whether such an invasion would have succeeded. The mere fact that the Kriegsmarine assembled a large quantity of barges and tugs for Fall Seelöwe (“Operation Sea Lion”) as the German cross-Channel invasion was known, does not necessarily mean that the Führer had made up his mind on the subject, nor do the German army’s relatively makeshift exercises in getting tanks, guns, and horses onto and off these makeshift landing vessels, or the hastily printed guidebook to England for the use of German troops, or even the Gestapo’s long and often inaccurate printed booklet listing people who were to be arrested (and presumably murdered) once Britain was taken.* As we shall see, the German invasion plans were elaborate but ambivalent, and in a very untypical way much in them was left to chance or luck.

No doubt too there was an element of bluff. Hitler had taken Poland and defeated France, and was astonished at his own success. His opinions about the British were formed by those who, like former prime minister David Lloyd George, the duke of Windsor, and the marquess of Londonderry, had come to pay homage to him before the war and to assure him that the British desired peace at any price, and by Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop’s self-deluding impression—Ribbentrop was a victim of extreme vanity, snobbery, and tunnel vision—of those of the British upper class who had invited him to their homes when he was German ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Hitler was not wrong in thinking that many people in England, on the left as well as the right, would still have preferred a compromise peace to a continued, all-out war. As late as May 26, 1940, more than two weeks after Churchill took office as prime minister, Lord Halifax, the British foreign secretary who George VI and most of the Conservative Party had hoped would replace Neville Chamberlain as prime minister instead of Churchill, revealed to the War Cabinet that he had been talking to the Italian ambassador in London about the possibility that “Signor Mussolini” might agree to inquire of the Führer what his terms would be for peace with Britain. This démarche dismayed Churchill when he heard of it—his own opinion, as expressed later to the members of the larger cabinet, was, “We shall go on, we shall fight it out here or elsewhere, and if at last the long story is to end, it were better it should end, not through surrender, but only when we are rolling senseless on the ground.” *² Halifax’s chat with the Italian ambassador, however much it alarmed and displeased Churchill, must have kindled optimism in Berlin. Hitler himself had thrown the British what he intended to be an olive branch, in the form of a long speech in which he offered to guarantee the continued existence of the British Empire and fleet in return for a free hand for Nazi Germany in Europe. So far, the results of this were disappointing, to be sure, but who could be certain that in the face of invasion the British might not come to their senses and replace Churchill with, say, Halifax or Lloyd George, and agree to sit down at the bargaining table like sensible people? The British were defeated, Hitler believed—the fact of their defeat had simply not sunk in on them yet.

Many people, most recently Derek Robinson, the author of Piece of Cake, a splendid BBC series about a fictional fighter squadron in the Battle of Britain, have argued that the invasion was a sham, that what prevented it was not the RAF’s victory in the air but the Royal Navy’s ability to send several cruisers and as many as forty destroyers into the Channel, if need be, to destroy an invasion fleet, and that even if the Germans had managed to get ashore the British were sufficiently prepared and armed by midsummer to defeat them on the ground.*

There is nothing intrinsically impossible about this scenario—the Royal Navy would certainly have done something, and it had at least ten times as many destroyers available to attack the German invasion fleet as the Germans had to defend it, and certainly the flow of rifles from across the Atlantic was putting thousands of American Enfield .30-06-caliber rifles into the hands of the “Local Defense Volunteers,” later to be renamed more inspiringly the Home Guard by Winston Churchill, releasing their Lee-Enfield .303 service rifles to rearm those troops who had lost theirs at Dunkirk.

Still, all war is chance. Given good luck and good weather, the Germans might have gotten on shore in substantial numbers with some of their heavy equipment, and had they done so, the Home Guard, despite the affection with which we now look back on it, would very likely not have proved a serious obstacle to the German army; and after Dunkirk the British regular army was woefully deficient in guns, tanks, mortars, and machine guns. As for the Royal Navy, the sinking of HMS Repulse and Prince of Wales by Japanese bombers off the coast of Malaya a year and a half later would demonstrate just how vulnerable even heavily armored modern battleships were to determined air attack, particularly when close inshore—and at its narrowest point the English Channel is only twenty-one miles wide.

Much has been made by historians of the notion that Hitler was a “land animal,” ill at ease on the subject of naval warfare. Certainly, in one of the few photographs of Hitler visiting the German fleet in a naval launch he looks out of place and uncomfortable, and his hair is strangely windblown. Did he suffer from seasickness, one wonders? In any case, his view of the world remained that of an Austrian, and Austria is not by any stretch of the imagination a nation of bold seafarers. On the other hand, he did not hesitate to use the German navy in April 1940 in a daring, and successful, amphibious assault on neutral Norway that took the Allies by surprise. Admittedly, this assault cost the German navy most of its destroyers, and that became a matter of serious concern two months later as Sea Lion was being contemplated, but in the meantime he had extended German power to the Arctic circle, protected Germany’s supply of iron ore from Sweden, and handed the British a significant defeat. There is, therefore, no reason to suppose that Hitler suffered a prolonged attack of nerves on the subject of the invasion of Britain.

To be sure, he was no fool. General von Brauchitsch’s breezy characterization of Sea Lion as a grossen Flussüberganges, a “giant river crossing,” while comforting to his fellow generals who knew all there was to know about river crossings, created dismay among the German admirals, who had a more realistic view of what the English Channel was like even in good weather, and was no doubt taken with a grain of salt by the Führer. Hitler did not doubt that Sea Lion would be a difficult and risky operation, and although he allowed the preparations to proceed, it is telling that he took very little interest in them, and he seems to have thought of the operation as something that might take place after a change of government in Britain, or even that the mere threat of Sea Lion might be enough to bring the British to their senses and make them sue for peace. Thus, the date for Sea Lion was repeatedly moved forward in the expectation of good news from London. In the meantime, however, the one thing that was clear to everybody—Hitler, the admirals, and the generals—was that before Sea Lion could take place the Royal Air Force would have to be crippled, in the air and on the ground, and German air supremacy established over the English Channel and the southeastern coast of England in the area where the German army would cross and land.

This was nothing more than common sense. It would be hard enough to transport 250,000 German troops (and more than 50,000 horses, for the German army’s artillery was still largely horse-drawn), as well as quantities of field artillery and tanks—and this would constitute merely the first wave of the invasion—across the Channel in flat-bottomed river barges towed by tugboats, without their being constantly strafed by Fighter Command and bombed by Bomber Command on the way over. More important, the Luftwaffe could hardly concentrate on the vital task of sinking British cruisers and destroyers attacking the invasion fleet in the narrow waters of the Channel if the skies were full of RAF Spitfires and Hurricanes. When it came to Sea Lion, the German armed forces were involved in an “After you, Alphonse” situation. The army was ready to go as soon as the navy was prepared; the navy would go the minute the Luftwaffe had destroyed the RAF; and it was therefore left to the Luftwaffe to make the first move.