[Triggaaar]

Originally Posted by Sternjaeger II

You guys de-contextualise the air battle of 1940 as an episode per se, not considering it part of a more fluid, multi-layered and complicated warfare.

This particular air battle was just part of the entire war effort, no one is saying otherwise. But we are discussing this particular battle and each sides objectives for that battle, and there's nothing wrong with that.

"THE Battle of Britain" was happening only in England, there was no perception or interest as such in Germany on the matter. Surely, you lived it personally cos you were the ones being attacked and bombed, nobody is questioning that, but it had little or no reach to the Germans.

That sounds about right to me, but what's the relevance of this point? People in Germany may not have cared about the battle, that's not relevant to who won it.

You put up an efficient but desperate in some points defence system, which fortunately allowed you to put a marginal but effective limit to the offensive.

The RAF and Luftwaffe lost a similar number of pilots (The Luftwaffe lost more aircrew), and the numbers of the 4 months of intense battle show a similar number in losses proportionally. Let's not forget that the RAF sent up mainly two kinds of fighter planes and that's it, while the Luftwaffe invested more in terms of bombers and fighters.

You are refusing to look at the facts. The number of RAF pilots increased while the number of Luftwaffe pilots decreased, but that doesn't matter - it wouldn't matter if it was the other way round. Hitler had an objective for the air battle, and it failed, regardless of how well each side was doing with numbers.

Because of the poor planning and mistakes made by their Air Marshal, the Luftwaffe didn't manage to produce results as they were supposed to: the RAF was effective ONLY because of FAC and Radar, the real target that the Luftwaffe should have neutralised first.

Again... so? We're not currently debating why the Luftwaffe messed it up, or why the RAF were able to win.

Everything else is history of course, but the decision of concentrating the majority of fighters and logistic efforts over the Russian campaign wasn't an admission of defeat.

It doesn't matter whether Hitler 'admitted defeat'. He didn't exactly have a good grip of reality when it came to accepting defeat. Did the BoB destroy Germany's war machine - no of course not. We're not debating the significance of the battle at this point. Simply that Hitler had objectives and failed to meet them. Are we saying this was the most important thing to him - no, we're not trying to attach any level of importance or significance. We are simply saying that it was an air battle where both sides had objectives and one side met their objectives and the other didn't.

Many people talked about "David vs Goliath", with the difference that Goliath didn't die, just lost his interest and moved onto something else. You want to call that a victory?

Yes, that is a victory. If China were to attach Taiwan (well you brought up David and Goliath), and Taiwan were able to fight them off enough that China gave in (lost interest in you words), do you think that would be a draw? You do not understand the difference between defence and attack, you think a defender cannot win unless they go on the offensive. And as for losing interest - you think it was like this thread where at some point people will lose interest in trying to discuss this with you. When you're at war, fighting for you country, and thousands of people are dying, you don't just lose interest like with a board game.

The victory of the Battle of Britain was a perfect propaganda idea to celebrate a much needed victory after the shambles of the BEF and Dunkirk, this goes without saying, and of course it is understandable to be happy about the loosening of the attacks, but it's not like they stopped altogether or you managed to cripple the Luftwaffe.

It is true that it was useful to publicise it as a victory, but when looking back to determine whether it actually was or not, we don't need to look at what was said at the time, it's not relevant.

Truth is that the Germans didn't perceive it as a "battle", it was part of an operation which was interrupted by the command as it was going on.

Again that's not relevant. If you want to argue that it wasn't a battle, fine, stick to that. But you're arguing that 'it' (whatever term you'd like to use) was a draw, and we are arguing that 'it' was a British victory and German defeat.

I don't want to deprive anyone of their finest hour, but this whole concept of "winning" makes me think of Charlie Sheen's winning, more than the real victory that was celebrated on V-Day.

Seriously, none of us were flying, it wasn't 'our' finest hour. It's just one part of centuries of history and it doesn't make any difference to our daily lives whether it's called a battle or a victory.

We're just sticking to the facts. See post #704 on page 71 which states what the directive was. If you find new evidence showing that that was just a trick, and that Hitler's actual objective was just to distract Britain while he concentrated his war effort elsewhere (and actually he had no plans to invade Britain at all) - wow, that would change things. Suddenly Hitler's objectives would have been met, and the battle/smokescrene would have been a success. But back in the real world, we know what his objectives were, and he failed to meet them. And you bringing random points into the arguement, like 'well the RAF were lucky because the weather changed and there was a load of water in the way' etc doesn't change the facts.