Short video giving an overview about the balance of force, losses and military intelligence estimates and the overall course of the battle. disclaimer: I made this.
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Nicely done. I still have a slight issue with the figures for the total size of Fighter Command, though - just because they were in the British Isles, doesn't necessarily mean that they were involved in The Battle of Britain. You don't include every Luftwaffe aircraft - just those actually engaged in the battle - quite rightly so, of course, but what else was the Luftwaffe doing at this point? Why couldn't they bring the entire force to the fight?
I use Overy as main source, he probably had pretty good reason to use these numbers. Also the Fighter Command rotated their squadrons/pilots. Furthermore, I didn't mention how many planes the Fighter Command had in storage.
Defense: Bomber Command was already bombing. Training aircraft see also the different setup: RAF had a functional setup (see first video), thus Fighter Command was pretty representative of all forces defending the Isles. Also I don't include Coastal Command that had extremely high loss ratio and attacked German harbors and drew away some forces. The same goes with Bomber Command.
Overy seems to be at the less extreme end of the revisionist camp, but his principal objective is myth busting. I don't think he's entirely objective - he gives weight to the data which supports his thesis, as do we all.
Yes, we discussed this already - and I don't want to go over it all again, but the info I gave you on the different Fighter Groups clearly shows that at any given time the total number of fighters and pilots actually committed to the battle was rather less than the total theoretically available - including squadrons rotated out of 11 Group, but also squadrons which were 500km away, in the north (13 Group).
Bomber Command in 1940 was pitiful. Perhaps 350 operational aircraft of various degrees of obsolescence. The very largest RAF raids at that time involved 150 twin-engined bombers, of such types as the Wellesley, Whitley, Hampden, Blenheim - and the single engined Fairey Battle - all death traps. Of the 5 bomber groups, one was relatively fortunate in having early Wellingtons, but Bomber Command in general was not able to offer much of a threat in 1940. It was only really providing nuisance and propaganda value, compared with Luftwaffe raids involving 500 bombers - so how many fighters did the Luftwaffe really need to assign to defensive duties?
It's a rhetorical question, really - and I stress again, these are minor points I'm raising. Please don't feel like you have to defend your work - which is generally great. Just one final thing, though - and very important - you appear to talk about a 'cuddling toy' in your intro - that should be 'cuddly'.
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there is no such thing as "entirely objective", especially not in hiSTORY*. Even in Computer Science*, which has usually a very strong formal base with maths and allows usually to prove something in an empirical way in a short amount of time and labor in compared to nearly all other disciplines out there, there is loads of debate etc. going on. Even if there was something as "objective" probably nobody could agree on it.
*I have a MA in History and a MSc in Computer Science.
yeah, so was Coastal Command, but they drew away forces.
thx, I am a bit on the edge lately...
THX!!! dammit, I totally ingrained that one wrong, "cuddly toy" sounds even like a wrong word for me...
Granted - but in terms of academic discipline, it doesn't help if you are gathering evidence which supports a certain proposition, rather than examining the evidence and then drawing conclusions. There you are - didn't use the word 'objective', but that's what I mean.
And I'm talking about your source, not you, so don't take it personally.- 1