The Battle of Britain
The first battle fought entirely in the air — and the first defeat of the war for Germany.
With France fallen in June 1940, only the Channel stood between Germany and Britain — and to cross it, the Luftwaffe first had to sweep RAF Fighter Command from the sky. Through the summer and autumn of 1940 the two air forces fought it out over southern England: German bombers striking at convoys, radar stations and airfields, and a thin line of British fighters rising to meet them, day after day. Even Mussolini sent a token force — the Corpo Aereo Italiano — to join the assault from bases in occupied Belgium.
The crisis came in late August, when raids on the sector airfields pushed Fighter Command close to breaking. Then, on 7 September, the Luftwaffe switched its weight to bombing London — relieving the airfields at the decisive moment. On 15 September the RAF broke the largest daylight raids of all; two days later Hitler postponed the invasion indefinitely. It was the first time Germany had been stopped, and Churchill’s words for the pilots endured: “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.”
