On 10 July 1940 German bombers attacked British convoys in the English Channel, and RAF fighters rose to meet them. The date is the official British start of the Battle of Britain, the air campaign in which the Luftwaffe tried to destroy the Royal Air Force and clear the way for an invasion. By the autumn it had failed. Hitler put the invasion off, and Fighter Command, including two Polish squadrons, had won the first great battle fought in the air.
Why the Luftwaffe came
Hitler had expected Britain to seek terms after the fall of France in June 1940. When it fought on, he ordered preparations for an invasion, Operation Sea Lion. The German army and navy were in no state to cross the Channel against the Royal Navy and the RAF, so everything depended first on the Luftwaffe winning control of the air over southern England.1
Britannica puts the forces at slightly more than 600 British frontline fighters against about 1,300 German bombers and dive bombers and some 1,200 fighters, based in an arc from Norway to the Cherbourg peninsula. What the British had that the Germans did not was the Dowding system, named after Fighter Command's chief, Sir Hugh Dowding, which linked radar, the Observer Corps and the operations rooms so that scarce squadrons could be sent where the raids were actually going.2
10 July: the convoy battles
Britannica dates the start of the German offensive to bomber attacks on shipping on 10 July, continued against convoys and ports into early August. The Battle of Britain Historical Timeline, compiled by N. A. Webb, describes that day's main action: a coastal convoy codenamed Bread, passing through the Dover Strait, was attacked in the early afternoon by Dornier bombers with fighter escort, and five RAF squadrons were sent up to meet them, with more than a hundred aircraft in the fight.3
The start date is a convention. The RAF Museum explains that the battle is officially recognized in the United Kingdom as running from 10 July to 31 October 1940, that the Germans do not count it the same way, and that its own breakdown of the battle's phases begins earlier, on 26 June, with scattered raids and minelaying.4
From the Channel to London
On 13 August the Luftwaffe launched its main offensive against airfields and other targets inland. In late August and early September Fighter Command came under its heaviest pressure, and on 20 August Churchill told Parliament that never in the field of human conflict had so much been owed by so many to so few. Then on 7 September the Germans switched the weight of their attacks to London, which brought the Blitz on the capital but gave the RAF's airfields time to recover. On 15 September Fighter Command broke up another massive assault, and the Luftwaffe had plainly failed to win air superiority. According to Britannica, Hitler ordered the invasion shipping dispersed on 19 September and on 12 October put Sea Lion off until the spring.5
The Polish squadrons
Nearly 3,000 airmen flew with Fighter Command in the battle, among them men from the Commonwealth and from occupied Europe; two Polish fighter squadrons, Nos. 302 and 303, were formed in the summer of 1940. No. 303 was declared operational on 31 August, at the height of the battle, and in about six weeks it claimed 126 enemy aircraft, the highest score in Fighter Command. The Imperial War Museums add that the battle's top-scoring pilot, the Czech Josef František, flew with No. 303. The RAF Museum counts 146 Polish pilots in the battle, who claimed 203 aircraft for the loss of 29 of their number killed.6
The whole campaign is told in our article on the Battle of Britain, and one of No. 303's commanders in our biography of Witold Urbanowicz.
Also on this day
- 1690: Battle of Beachy Head. Off Beachy Head on the south coast of England, Tourville's French fleet fought an Anglo-Dutch fleet under the Earl of Torrington in the Nine Years' War.
