Quote:
Originally Posted by mungee
I've read many accounts/books about the Battle of Britain and I've come to the conclusion that the RAF didn't win the Battle of Britain!!
What the RAF did do however, was prevent the Germans from winning!!
Preventing the Germans from winning was good enough to thwart Hitler's plan to invade Great Britain - so I suppose one could say that it was a "victory of sorts" for the RAF!
Hitler realised that he needed to URGENTLY switch his attention to Russia, before it re-armed etc to the extent that it would be too powerful to take on - which in fact is what it turned out to be ... no doubt aided by the necessity for the Germans to retain a lot of manpower, aircraft etc in the West.
I'm not so sure that the Luftwaffe was defeated when they "packed their bags" and moved east!
I live in South Africa and I really hope to see some of these BBC BoB programmes - hopefully they'll be screened on BBC Knowledge or come out on DVD.
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You see, I actually think that the RAF didn't prevent the Germans from winning: both the RAF and Luftwaffe lost around 1000 planes, but at the stage the RAF was on its knees, while the Germans deployed some 4000 aeroplanes for the Operation Barbarossa right afterwards! The Luftwaffe was far from being in the same dire conditions as the Royal Air Force. If Goering would have taken his stick out of his ar$e and listened to his commanders he would have got the aerial dominance in a matter of a few months. The real issue was that the tactics were changed halfway and it was one of the poorest decisions in the history of warfare.
The Germans had better planes, better tactics and more planes, after months of wasting resources they just decided to put things "on hold".