The Battle of Britain Was The First Defeat For The German Luftwaffe.

[Triggaaar]

Originally Posted by Sternjaeger II

Don't really see it as much of a "defeat" there. Loss of personnel and material is an evaluated risk in warfare.

Your line of arguement means that it doesn't matter how many men/machines you lose, you can just right them all of as evaluated risk. That makes no sense. When drawing up the plans to invade, you would make such evaluation, and you'd find out whether you met your objectives after the event. Given that the objective was not met, the losses were not worth it were they.

Tactical defeat? Hardly, it was more of a tactical stalemate. No changes in the frontline, only war of attrition between air forces and extra damage to civilian targets with thousands of civilian casualties.

Germany's objective was to clear the way for an invasion that year. They failed. Britain's objective was not to gain air superiority over the channel, it was to prevent invasion, and they succeeded.

Operation Sea Lion was never cancelled, only postponed.

Do you think the operation is still live? No, so you realise it failed, and Britain didn't get invaded.

By the end of the big aerial offensive, the RAF was on its knees

No it wasn't, you need to look up some modern data.

Tens of thousands of civilian casualties, whole cities and factories turned into rubble, interruption of primary services. The situation was pretty grim by the end of the bomber offensive, it was obvious that mentioning a "victory in repelling the attacks" was of paramount importance back then.

If the German objective was to kill a lot of British civilians, and the British objective was to prevent the death of any British civilians, then Germany won the BoB. But they weren't the objectives, much as you might like to twist them to your arguement.