[Nick Beale]

Tony, I know you love doing this "why everyone was wrong" thing but in this case it wouldn't have hurt to read a little more widely before cranking up the old contrarian routine. This was all said years ago in Dizzy Allen's "Who Won the Battle of Britain?"

I have seen arguments (possibly in Angus Calder's "The People's War" or Len Deighton's "Fighter" but I couldn't swear to it) that Beaverbrook's achievements were as much a myth as anything else you cite. For instance it is arguable that he arrived too late to affect much during the BoB itself and that his measures achieved short term success at the expense of mid-term chaos (and exhausted workers who started making mistakes) that then had to be sorted out.

When you write "the RAF in general stubbornly adhered to tradition and hidebound procedures … Dowding's System of air defence [was] the exception that proved the rule" you're just trying to have it both ways. in the late 1930s the RAF ordered fighters and started building an air defence system to defend against an attack by unescorted bombers from Germany. There was no air defence system like it anywhere else in the world. That system and those aircraft proved good enough to handle attacks by escorted bombers coming from France in 1940. All in all, I'd say that was a pretty impressive feat of planning and implementation.

The German pilot:aircraft establishment of 1:1, their training infrastructure and their "fly-till-you-die" system (no tours of duty, just the odd break beside a lake) were all part of Germany's failure to plan for anything but a short war.

In 1940 Luftwaffe Intelligence was a contradiction in terms.

The Spitfire and Hurricane were designed from the outset to carry eight machine guns, the Bf 109 for two (perhaps on the basis that if it was good enough in 1917 it was good enough in 1935). The Bf 109 of 1939, playing catch-up, had half the Spit/Hurricane armament and in mid-1940 it jumped ahead for a short time.

You mentioned the Blenheims: a Blenheim achieved the first ever kill with airborne radar during the Battle, something the Luftwaffe couldn't manage for about another two years.

Nobody got everything right but the RAF still won the Battle of Britain.