BBC James Holland - Battle of Britain

[mungee]

Originally Posted by Sternjaeger

Does it really come as a surprise to you guys? The Spitfire winning the Battle of Britain is propaganda chowder, professional historians know that the Me109 was an overall superior fighter. The Battle of Britain was lost only because of the white dressed fat ba$tard (no, not Elvis..).

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.