Need assistance: Role of the Luftwaffe/Germany in the Battle of Britain?

[FalkeEins]

Originally Posted by Nick Beale

To say the Germans didn't lose implies that they attained some definable objective. What then was that objective and in what sense was it attained? What did Germany achieve by fighting the battle? What was gained for the expenditure of about 2000 aircraft and their crews?

..Isn't the absence of a strategy perhaps an indication that the 'battle', as we Brits like to understand it, was never any such thing in German eyes..ie the Luftwaffe didn’t lose the ‘battle’ (at least that is my understanding ) because there was no ’battle’ worthy of the name. In this respect Galland’s memoir ‘The First and the Last’ comes in for sharp criticism from the source mentioned in my previous post. While Galland writes that Luftwaffe fighter pilots regularly flew two or three sorties/day throughout the course of the battle, Prien puts forward the following figures which paint a completely different picture; that the average Jagdflieger flew no more than 50 sorties during an 85 day period from 8 August to 31 October, contacting the enemy on only around 20 of these; that for around 20 days at the supposed height of the Battle there were no German aircraft at all in the skies of England; that when the bombers turned on London in September the 1,000 Luftwaffe aircraft of the British ‘official’ history were never more than 400; that on only two occasions (7 & 15 September) could the Luftwaffe put more than 300 bombers in the air; that on nearly 20 days of the ‘battle’ the Luftwaffe flew less than 200 sorties..all pretty minor league stuff as Meimberg points out in his memoir, especially in comparison with the later battle over the Reich. This was no attempt to bring Britain to her knees by an overwhelming application of force. The 'so-called' Luftschlacht über England was ‘a relatively small affair..’ (Prien quoting AJP Taylor..), perhaps no more than Hitler’s attempt to exert some political pressure on British public opinion in order to strengthen the hand of the ‘peace faction’ in particular..

Continental authors are scathing too at what they see as the ‘mythification’ of the ‘battle’ (cf Jean-Louis Roba's recent 'La bataille d'Angleterre'); the notion of the ‘The Few’, the Churchillian propaganda of the ‘We shall fight them etc..’ - I think Bungay is too though IIRC. The RAF fighter force was patently not 'The Few' - certainly not being inferior numerically to the Luftwaffe's, which had just lost 25% of its strength on the Continent. Churchill in particular (as former First Lord of the Admiralty responsible for the Dardenelles fiasco) knew full well that there was no chance of a sea-borne invasion prior to 1941 at the earliest, even if such a scheme was ever seriously contemplated (statements from Goebbels diaries suggest it wasn’t).

[Nick Beale]

Originally Posted by FalkeEins

..Isn't the absence of a strategy perhaps an indication that the 'battle', as we Brits like to understand it, was never any such thing in German eyes ... the Luftwaffe didn’t lose the ‘battle’ (at least that is my understanding ) because there was no ’battle’ worthy of the name.

I repeat, what were they trying to achieve and did they achieve it? If the latter, was the gain proportionate to the human and material resources expended — let alone the economic cost of pulling all those barges off Europe's inland waterways and assembling them as sitting targets for the RAF bombers?

As for the "myth" the primary sources leave no doubt whatsoever that the British believed the threat to be absolutely real and imminent and deployed their resources accordingly. Maybe the Luftwaffe weren't trying their hardest but they were still losing aircraft faster than they could produce them and they appear to have gained absolutely nothing in return.