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00:01Next on Secrets of War, June 1940.
00:07England stands alone against brutal aggression.
00:10The Germans have yet to be stopped in their lightning thrust across Europe.
00:15The British are outnumbered, but they have a secret weapon four years in the making.
00:21The Battle of Britain is about to begin.
00:24Next on Secrets of War.
00:31Next in.
00:59This is aем T.
01:59For three weeks, the defeated French signed an armistice with the Germans and removed
02:05themselves from the Second World War.
02:14Britain faced a military juggernaut that had conquered most of Western Europe in less
02:20than two months, and that now stood poised 22 miles across the English Channel.
02:27The Fall of France wiped out any basis of the planning that Britain had for the war, and
02:33they were really faced with a situation that had been very serious before and was now not
02:39only catastrophic but planless.
02:43Stemming a growing sense of national panic, a new prime minister rallied the British people
02:49to stand firm against the scourge of fascism.
02:53The remnants of its own shattered army only barely escaping from France, Britain turned
02:59to its Royal Air Force, specifically to its newest component, Fighter Command, to hold the Germans
03:05at bay, and to spare the island nation the same fate as had befallen Poland and France and
03:17Belgium and Holland.
03:27At this crucial juncture, the Wehrmacht found itself unprepared to cross the English Channel.
03:36Unperturbed, Air Minister-in-Chief of the Air Force Hermann Göring ordered his vaunted Luftwaffe
03:41to subdue the English from the air, to break their will with bombs, without the Army or Navy.
03:49A revolutionary concept, and one for which the German Air Force had never planned.
03:57But the British, through the visionary leadership of Fighter Command, had been desperately preparing
04:03for this very event.
04:13The contest between bombers and fighters originated with the use of the air weapon in the First
04:18World War.
04:19These machines captured the imagination of military strategists on both sides of the Atlantic.
04:26By the mid-1920s, proponents of aviation in Europe and North America had assigned the
04:31bomber a preeminent role in modern warfare.
04:34The realm of flight was seen to hold unlimited potential for development of exotic new weapons
04:40that would make traditional armies obsolete.
04:45From the First World War onwards, many politicians and service staff believed that the bomber
04:51was absolutely powerful, that nothing would be able to touch it.
04:55A lot of them followed the ideas of the Italian general Douay, the Douay theory, that a war could
05:02be finished within a couple of days by heavy bombing.
05:05One of Douay's most vocal advocates was American General Billy Mitchell, who'd flown in the war
05:11and lobbied incessantly for increased support for Army aviation, even advocating a separate
05:18air service.
05:21His impolitic and inflammatory statements to the press eventually resulted in his being court-martialed
05:28and expelled from the military, but Mitchell never wavered in his views on strategic bombing.
05:36Air power will determine the next war.
05:40Each nation is organized now to master air power at the beginning of a contest.
05:47Instead of the armies and navies being the objects of the attack of air power, they will go directly
05:53to the vital centers.
05:55Our future in this country depends on air power.
05:59In defeated Germany, however, a more objective analysis of tactics and strategy arrived at
06:05a more balanced view of strategic bombing.
06:10General Hans von Secht, commander-in-chief of the Reichswehr, the post-World War I German
06:16military, envisioned an air arm capable of performing a wide variety of tasks, from heavy bombing to
06:24supporting fast maneuvering ground troops.
06:28Von Secht was not a pilot, but he possessed an almost instinctive understanding of the airplane's
06:34potential.
06:36His wartime service on the Eastern Front had exposed him to a rapidly changing tactical environment,
06:43unlike the trench warfare that had dominated the Western Front.
06:47He had a lasting influence on Luftwaffe doctrine.
06:53And the experience was, that in future wars, the Luftwaffe would be given the primary responsibility
07:02of shortening the punishing and exhausting land war by simply destroying the enemy supply
07:08lines behind the front from the air.
07:20Germany was prohibited from having its own air service.
07:24Sovan Secht established a clandestine shadow air force to train military pilots and teach
07:30cooperation between air and ground forces.
07:33secret contacts between Russia and Germany were initiated in 1922.
07:40In return for flight training centers within the vast Russian heartland, the Germans provided
07:46Western technical expertise.
07:51Although most of her aviation industry had been destroyed or dismantled and carried away,
07:57German aircraft companies continued to build airplanes through foreign subsidiaries.
08:04So-called sport flying and glider organizations promoted air-mindedness and supplied a steady stream
08:12of highly motivated candidates for the Reichswehr training program.
08:20German civil aviation in the 1920s was expanded and effectively militarized by staffing the national airline Deutsche Lufthansa
08:29with former German air service personnel.
08:36Under the directorship of Erhard Milch, a former squadron commander and general staff officer,
08:42Lufthansa passed on to the shadow air force information on technology, navigation, and long-distance routes.
08:58The rise of National Socialism drew back the curtain on clandestine German rearmament.
09:04Between 1933 and 1936, a program of state investment fueled a massive weapons program.
09:20Hitler's vision of a resurgent and remilitarized Reich transformed every facet of German society.
09:32Under the very noses of the victorious Europeans who exacted such punitive and humiliating concessions,
09:39the Germans had established the foundations of the most effective fighting force in the world.
09:59While the Germans were formulating their operational doctrine of air warfare,
10:04in Britain, Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard dominated the Royal Air Force with a grandiose vision of strategic bombing.
10:13His belief in offensive warfare was more akin to religious doctrine than to objective analysis.
10:21As late as the mid-1930s, the RAF was still committing most of its resources to bombers.
10:33Because there was a reaction after the First World War, a sense of never again are we going to send
10:40large armies to the continent of Europe,
10:42there was an explicit recognition of the deterrent effect of air power in Britain.
10:50This view was immortalized by Stanley Baldwin, an influential member of Parliament.
10:58Baldwin, who at the time was a very prominent British politician, later he was Prime Minister of this country,
11:04he told the House of Commons in 1932 that the bomber will always get through, and people believed him.
11:11Bombers were so powerful and so fast that biplane fighters could hardly keep up with them.
11:17You've got a much more efficient bomber, and it can carry a much heavier load.
11:22Bomb loads go up by a factor of four in the early 1930s.
11:27So not only are the bombers much more difficult to stop, but they can be much more destructive with the
11:32weapons that they carry.
11:34While bombers were becoming increasingly capable in terms of payload and range, fighter aircraft were also evolving.
11:43The enormously popular Schneider Trophy races encouraged development of high-performance single engine monoplanes.
11:51Between 1929 and 1931, the British designer R.J. Mitchell teamed his Supermarine Airframe with Rolls-Royce engines,
12:00creating a design that would later become an icon of the Battle of Britain, the Spitfire.
12:07If you look at the history of fighter aircraft in the 30s and 40s, it's this constant leapfrogging of technologies.
12:14Very often the technology would be there before the requirement, and that, I think, is an unusual state.
12:23In 1936, civil war broke out in Spain between the socialist government and fascist rebels.
12:31Within months of the first crack of gunfire,
12:34German aircraft and airmen of the Condor Legion weren't in place to assist in General Francisco Franco's rebellion.
12:43During the next three years, Germany rotated thousands of so-called volunteers through Spain to gain combat experience.
12:56The Iberian Peninsula became a laboratory for German air warfare doctrine.
13:01New aircraft designs such as the Heinkel 111 bomber and the Junkers 87 Stuka made their operational debut in the
13:10clear Mediterranean skies.
13:15The Condor Legion perfected techniques of dive bombing and horizontal bombing.
13:20The vulnerability of civilian populations to indiscriminate attack was graphically demonstrated,
13:26recalling the dark prophecies of Dewey and Mitchell.
13:35The slender and powerful Measuresmet 109 streaked into combat for the first time over Spain.
13:43Three years later, it would do battle against RAF Spitfires and Hurricanes.
13:51Adolf Galland, later a high-scoring ace and commander of Luftwaffe fighter squadrons,
13:57found the Me 109 superior to the Russian-made I-16 Moskva, flown by the Republicans.
14:04But he missed some of the attributes of open cockpit biplanes.
14:11A fighter pilot in a closed cockpit is an impossible thing, because you should smell the enemy.
14:20You could smell them because of the oil they were burning.
14:26Due to a shortage of fighter aircraft in Spain, the Germans improvised a tactic that would later play havoc with
14:32the RAF in the skies over southern England.
14:36It was called the Finger Four.
14:40If you could imagine an aircraft at each of your fingertips,
14:45and imagine those four fighters being, say, 100 to 150 yards apart,
14:50then each man is able to look round and up and down and guard his comrades
14:55by giving them plenty of warning when other aircraft are about.
14:59In action, the Finger Four broke into two pairs, the rotter.
15:05In the rotter, you had a leader and a wingman.
15:08The leader's job was to go after the enemy.
15:10The wingman's job was to protect the leader's time.
15:15Meanwhile, in Britain, RAF Doctrine was in a conflicted state.
15:21There was still a tremendous amount of infighting within the Air Force itself.
15:26There was a real dichotomy that the British faced here,
15:30of the long-range bomber and the short-range air defense fighter.
15:34By Royal Command, the demonstration brings home what sky warfare means today.
15:39A giant bomber is attacked by swifter fighting planes, and the crew bails out for dear life.
15:45In 1936, RAF Fighter Command was created.
15:50The man chosen to head the new organization, unlike most of his contemporaries,
15:54believed that the bomber could and must be stopped.
15:59Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding was an intense and humorless man.
16:04He was also something of a visionary.
16:09Dowding is often portrayed as a fuddy-duddy, not much of a fighter leader.
16:15But in fact, he was the first technocrat in history.
16:19Most people are not aware that Dowding, in the early 1930s,
16:23he was on the Air Council of the Royal Air Force as the air member for Supply and Development.
16:28And in that office, his department actually drafted the specifications
16:32which led to the Spitfire and the Hurricane fighters.
16:36Fighter Command joined in development of what would become Britain's most important secret.
16:44In 1934, under intense pressure to do something about the bomber threat,
16:49a committee chaired by Sir Henry Tezard
16:51had approached an engineer at the National Physical Laboratory named Robert Watson Watt.
17:00The Tezard Committee inquired almost in desperation as to the substance of reports of death rays which could destroy aircraft.
17:10The death ray speculation was soon put to rest,
17:13but the inquiry did result in the secret development of radar by the British government,
17:19under the cover name of Radio Direction Finding, RDF.
17:27What do you need for a radar? You need a high-powered transmitter, you need an ultra-sensitive receiver,
17:31you need some form of directional antenna, and you need some form of presentation system,
17:38in other words, a cathode ray tube.
17:39Now, by the early 1930s, all of those things were well within the current technology,
17:44and people were playing around with them.
17:46As a result, we get radar being invented quite independently in Great Britain, the USA,
17:54Japan, Russia, and in Germany, and each nation thought that it alone had this secret.
18:01Appeasement had failed to stop Hitler's expansionist agenda.
18:05The desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again.
18:15After the Munich crisis of 1938, Germany stood astride Europe like a schoolyard bully.
18:23Once again, the continent was marching to the drumbeat of impending war.
18:30In Britain, RAF Fighter Command and the scientific community raced to protect, in Doubting's words,
18:37the home base from the coming reign of destruction.
18:4910th of May, 1940, the Germans committed some 4,000 aircraft to the invasion of France in the Low Countries.
18:57The Dutch and Belgian air forces were virtually wiped out within hours.
19:03Hundreds of French aircraft were caught on the ground.
19:11War had also come to the Royal Air Force.
19:15The RAF sent over a component force to support our land forces and to support the French land forces on
19:24the Western Front in 1940.
19:27The French air force, we'd hoped, would be able to defend themselves.
19:32But the French air force was hopelessly outdated, and I'm afraid to say that when war came, they didn't fight
19:37very well.
19:39So the bulk of fighting fell upon the RAF.
19:47The British pilots fought bravely, but were overwhelmed by superior numbers and tactics.
19:55Within five days of the assault, without impeding the German advance, the RAF had lost over 200 aircraft.
20:07There was no real integration between the British air force, the Royal Air Force that were sent to France, and
20:12their French counterparts.
20:13So there was nothing there to really integrate the air defenses so that they could contain the Luftwaffe, even for
20:21a short period of time.
20:23During the frantic, confusing fighting in France, signal intelligence did provide some insight into the enemy's objectives.
20:33Soon after the opening of the German campaign in the West, the British government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley
20:40Park successfully cracked the codes encrypted on the German Enigma cipher machine and began reading Luftwaffe message traffic.
20:54Eventually, decrypts of those signals called ultra within the British intelligence community revealed that Hitler intended to finish off France
21:03before turning his attention across the channel.
21:09The threat of invasion, if not eliminated, was at least delayed.
21:15Enigma decrypts also confirmed the swiftness of the French collapse.
21:20The information stiffened the British refusal to send over more fighter aircraft.
21:27The French were being nearly beaten, and in the British phrase, you don't throw bad money after good, and therefore
21:33the planes were kept in this country.
21:36They operated over France during Dunkirk, but they operated from bases in this country.
21:45Another source of signal intelligence during the Battle of France was deciphered Morse code from German bombers and voice transmissions
21:53from fighter aircraft broadcasting on the new VHF, or very high frequency radio range.
22:03There was a creation of the Y service, which was a generic term for many of the radio transmission interceptions.
22:10Basically, you try and build up a picture of what was happening, and then relay that with other intelligence sources
22:18and create a much wider picture.
22:21Once the ME-109 and ME-110 fighter squadrons had relocated to occupied France, their clear VHF transmissions fell within
22:32range of listening posts in southern Britain.
22:36The RAF quickly realized it had too few German-speaking operators, and with many of the men posted to other
22:43military units, personnel were recruited from the Women's Auxiliary Air Force and the Women's Royal Naval Service.
22:53By the 22nd of June, when the French surrendered, the RAF had lost 1,000 aircraft.
23:02435 pilots were killed or missing.
23:05Only 66 of the 261 hurricane fighters sent to France returned.
23:14The speed and finality of the German victory had taken even the optimistic Hitler by surprise.
23:21In the weeks following the collapse of the Western Front, he expected Britain to see the obvious futility of continued
23:28fighting.
23:30Resistance by the obstinate British could interfere with Hitler's grand obsession, moving east into Russia.
23:41Since May of 1939, clans had been prepared to wage long-term economic warfare against Britain, using the Luftwaffe and
23:50the Navy to sever vital supply lines.
23:58In light of the swiftness of the French collapse, the idea of a similar brief campaign against Britain grew increasingly
24:06attractive to Hitler.
24:07But he still held out hope for a negotiated settlement.
24:12He believed that the war was virtually over at the end of June 1940.
24:17So did a lot of other people.
24:19Mussolini believed it.
24:21The American ambassador, Joseph Kennedy, in London believed it.
24:24And a lot of other people thought that we would make terms with Hitler.
24:28That seemed to be the common sense thing to do.
24:31Hitler made quite generous overtures to Britain.
24:34He wasn't going to take our colonies off us all around the world, which the Germans thought was a very
24:40generous thing since we'd stolen all of theirs at the end of the First World War.
24:44So Hitler could afford to be very generous.
24:46He really didn't want to come, he didn't want to invade France, he didn't want to invade Britain.
24:50He wanted to get on with his Lebensraum policy to invade Russia.
24:54That was what he was after.
24:57And he needed time.
24:59As disastrous as the fall of France was for the British, the Germans did not emerge unscathed.
25:07We should remember that, although the Battle of France was lost, the Luftwaffe suffered significant attrition of, for example, its
25:15Messerschmitt Me 109s.
25:17And they were not able to replace those easily.
25:21They had quite heavy losses in that battle.
25:24They've got to reform a lot of their units, they've got to move into new airfields in France.
25:29There were hardly any airfields in the Pas de Calais area.
25:31The Germans had to carve all those out with their construction troops to make a clutch of fighter airfields there.
25:39As the diplomatic clock ran down, the German general staff began tentative planning for a cross-channel invasion,
25:47dusting off five-month-old contingency plans.
25:52In June, signal intelligence from the British Y service substantiated what aerial reconnaissance had first discovered.
26:01Preparations for intensive flight operations from airfields in northern France.
26:08The Germans were getting ready for a major new offensive.
26:12What was not clear was how and when it would come.
26:17The flow of ultra-material had declined with the occupation of France,
26:21since most German communications were done over landline telephone.
26:28But in July, an ultra-decrypt revealed an order to Luftwaffe squadrons.
26:34Do not bomb the channel ports.
26:37Here, at last, was strong evidence that an invasion was being planned.
26:42The Germans would need these ports to disembark men and equipment.
26:47On the 16th of July, Hitler issued a directive to his commanders
26:51to prepare for landing operations against England.
26:55It went by the code name Sea Lion.
26:59Six days later, the British government rejected the Führer's latest peace proposal.
27:06The window of good weather in the channel was getting smaller, three months at most, and Russia beckoned.
27:16Many people think that Hitler had everything planned like a railway timetable.
27:21He certainly didn't have the Battle of Britain planned.
27:23But it was left to the Luftwaffe, first to destroy the Royal Air Force, especially fighter command,
27:30and then would follow Operation Sea Lion, the German invasion of this country.
27:35And in Goring's view, Goring said,
27:37if my boys do their job properly, there won't be any need for an invasion.
27:42Any fool can see that Germany has won the war.
27:45The Brits might need a little bit of encouragement to come round to that point of view,
27:49but it's quite clear, heck, we've defeated France.
27:51We just walk right through these guys.
27:53I mean, we're top of the world. We're great.
28:00We're great.
28:07We're great.
28:09We're good.
28:52The confident Luftwaffe aircrews winging their way across the channel to carry out Hermann Gehring's promise to Hitler to force
29:00England to sue for peace were soon disabused of their enthusiasm.
29:09On the 16th of July, the eve of the start of the air campaign, and the same day that Hitler
29:15ordered preparations for Operation Sea Lion, the head of the Luftwaffe intelligence, Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Beppo Schmidt, issued an assessment
29:24of Royal Air Force capabilities.
29:26It was seriously flawed.
29:34One of the amazing things about this intelligence assessment is that it identifies most of the British strengths as weaknesses,
29:43and most of the British weaknesses as strengths.
29:50It also had something to do with the ideological background of the high command of the Luftwaffe.
29:55They convinced themselves that the German Luftwaffe, in conjunction with the organization of the people, the Volksgemeinschaft, was superior to
30:05Western democracies.
30:10Schmidt's report stated that British aircraft production could easily be knocked out, that mid-level RAF leadership was ineffectual, and
30:21that many of those commanders were not even flyers.
30:25The production of Spitfires and hurricane fighters actually increased during the Battle of Britain, and all RAF commanders were rated
30:34pilots.
30:36Schmidt's most egregious error, however, was in failing to even mention the British radar defense system.
30:44The Germans knew from pre-war days that we had radar, yes, but inside the Luftwaffe there were something like
30:50eight intelligence departments.
30:52Each part of German intelligence liked to keep its own knowledge to itself.
30:58The Germans, using an obsolete Graf Zeppelin, had spied on British radar experiments in 1939.
31:06The British designs were considered amateurish, so the Germans wrote them off as strictly experimental.
31:14Germany had developed a workable radar much earlier, but due to its cult of the offensive, only belatedly employed the
31:22technology.
31:25The secrets of the British radar system escaped the Luftwaffe for over a year, with disastrous results.
31:38Since his appointment to fighter command in 1936, Air Chief Marshal Dowding had been racing to establish a secret chain
31:46of radar sites that could provide the essential element of time.
31:51Time to react to an incoming threat.
31:54It was called Chain Home.
32:00Douding wanted about 60 miles of extra range. If he had 60 miles, he could get his fighters into position
32:05before the bombers reached London.
32:07If you could protect London, you could protect anywhere in England, but London was the prime target.
32:15Doubting got much more.
32:17In reality, Chain Home could detect incoming aircraft up to 30,000 feet and 100 miles away.
32:24And could give the bearing, the approximate altitude, and number of aircraft in an approaching formation.
32:33By the outbreak of the war, 20 of the transmitter and receiver masts had become a feature of the landscape
32:40along the eastern and southern coasts.
32:45These sites were supplemented by Chain Home Low, specially designed to detect aircraft flying below 3,000 feet.
32:57Local residents knew of these mysterious storing powers only as air ministry experimental stations and were smart enough to inquire
33:06no further.
33:09Tracking incoming aircraft was only part of the air defense system.
33:14Fighter command needed to know the position of its own aircraft in order to direct them to the intruders.
33:22They had a system called Pipsqueak, which was one aircraft in each formation, for 15 seconds of every minute, it
33:30would transmit a homing signal.
33:33And this could be triangulated on the ground, so that you knew where the fighter formations were.
33:40Once an incoming formation had reached the British coastline, a network of ground observers phoned more precise visual information up
33:49the command ladder.
33:54Phone lines from ground observers, chain home stations, the Y service, all streamed artery-like into the heart of the
34:01system.
34:02At Bentley Priory, RAF fighter command headquarters outside of London.
34:11From this most unwarlike setting, Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding orchestrated the air defense of Great Britain.
34:21In an underground command post called the Filter Center, information was collated and analyzed to produce at any given moment
34:30a snapshot of the aerial situation over all of Britain.
34:38Warnings of incoming formations were phoned to one of four fighter command groups into whose area of responsibility the Germans
34:45were flying.
34:48Operations rooms at the group level, like this one, would further monitor the path of the intruders.
34:54From there, the information went to sector stations and then to individual squadrons, where another phone would ring.
35:03Dowding built up the first integrated air defense system in the world.
35:07It just had to be good enough.
35:08He wasn't going to go after high tech for its own sake.
35:28The Royal Air Force fighter pilots did not know that the information that they were getting came from radar.
35:33It didn't matter, they were told to vector to a certain position and they did it.
35:39Any mention of radar or details of the doubting system was forbidden.
35:46Instead, the public was offered reassuring news of other equally complex air defense schemes.
35:53Newsreels of May 1940 extolled the virtues of aerial patrols.
35:59The Royal Air Force, spurred by impending Nazi invasion, increases its home patrol, maintains a 24-hour sky vigil.
36:08In reality, a wasteful concept reviled by fighter command and made obsolete by radar.
36:19And recreated on a motion picture sound stage, this elaborate group operations plotting room, had the feel of the real
36:28thing.
36:28But it made no reference to radar.
36:31Instead, the discarded technique of sound detection provided early warning.
36:41In July of 1940, as the battle was joined, the strengths and weaknesses of the opposing forces were somewhat balanced.
36:53The Luftwaffe had almost 3,000 aircraft, of which 1,000 were ME-109 fighters, compared to the RAF's 800
37:02Hurricanes and Spitfires.
37:06But the Luftwaffe had no plan for a strategic air campaign against Britain.
37:12Furthermore, the RAF, unlike the Luftwaffe's earlier opponents, was a modern air force, defending its own territory.
37:22Fighter command was committed to the battle for which it had been preparing since 1936.
37:30The British integrated air defense system was a wonder of applied technology.
37:35To use a modern term, it was a force multiplier.
37:39It laid the foundation for modern command and control, and provided the critical margin in the fight to defend the
37:47home base.
37:58The Battle of Britain did not begin on any particular day in July of 1940, nor did it end decisively
38:06in October.
38:08Nevertheless, it has been popularized, mythologized, and misrepresented.
38:26The enemy was not vanquished.
38:29He withdrew to fight another day on another front.
38:34However, Britain remained a beacon of democracy to the world, and the legend of the fuel was born.
38:45The fighting started with night-probing raids and attacks on coastal shipping, primarily to draw out fighter command and test
38:54its mettle.
38:57By mid-August, the weight of the Luftwaffe offensive moved to British airfields, factories, and radar stations in the south.
39:09Adler Tag, or Eagle Day, was the code name for what was to have been the start of a crushing
39:14blow to the RAF.
39:20By the 13th of August, the first day of the offensive, Bletchley Park was familiar with the term, Adler Tag.
39:30They didn't know what this code name, Adler Tag, meant, but there were many, many references to it in the
39:36ultra signals that they were picking up.
39:38Of course, it was only after the Germans start their large-scale attack on Great Britain that suddenly they realized
39:44just what Adler Tag was.
39:45And it does show how limited was the value of the ultra information at that time.
39:52The major advantage during the Battle of Britain of having ultra was that it enabled the British to make more
40:00accurate assessments of German air force strength and deployment,
40:06but not tactically to assess when or where a raid was going to arrive.
40:17From mid-August to the 6th of September, the most intense fighting took place between Fighter Command and the Luftwaffe.
40:33Basically, the Battle of Britain was a fighter battle. It was a battle between two sets of single-seater, low
40:41-wing, monoplane fighters. On the German side, the Messerschmitt 109, and on the British side, the Spitfire and the Hurricane.
40:50The three aircraft shared similar development backgrounds as bomber destroyers during the 1930s.
41:00They were not designed to go dogfighting around the sky with enemy fighters.
41:04They had to be very fast to get into a maneuver, into a firing position to engage an enemy bomber.
41:09That was what they were there for.
41:12Just prior to the Battle of Britain in late May 1940, pilots flying hurricanes and Spitfires were surprised to experience
41:20a sudden boost in the rate of climb of their Merlin engines.
41:28The standard aviation fuel of the Luftwaffe and RAF at the outbreak of war was 87 octane.
41:35Under a top-secret agreement with American oil companies, the British Air Ministry had acquired supplies of 100 octane gas,
41:44already in use with the U.S. Army Air Corps since 1938.
41:52The increased performance of the British planes remained a mystery to Luftwaffe fighter pilots until late August, when a forced
42:01down Spitfire was carefully analyzed and the higher octane fuel was discovered.
42:11As powerful as the Merlin engine was, it was handicapped by a conventional carburetor in float mechanism, as opposed to
42:18the fuel-injected Daimler engine of the ME 109.
42:24The Merlin had a tendency to stall out in inverted flight, most embarrassing during a dogfight.
42:33This problem was solved by a woman, a woman engineer quite remarkable in her time, Miss Beatrice Schilling.
42:41Miss Beatrice Schilling was at the Royal Aeronautical Establishment at Farnborough, and she worked there in one of the departments
42:50that had to deal with this problem.
42:52And she dealt with it by, in the float of the carburetor, she put a small device to stop it
42:58cutting out.
42:59And she herself went round with other people fitting them into RAF aircraft.
43:04And RAF pilots, with their typical RAF humour, call this Miss Schilling's orifice.
43:12However modified, the Spitfire and Hurricane squadron suffered under adherence to outmoded air combat tactics.
43:21Vectored into position by the efficient Dowding system, RAF pilots frequently lost the advantage due to 1930s manoeuvres developed to
43:31counter the threat of unescorted bombers.
43:37You see, British tactics were based on the battle that was perceived was going to come, as opposed to the
43:44battle in reality that came.
43:46The RAF were trained to fly in what were called Vic-3s, that is a triangle of aircraft, with a
43:52leader and two wingmen.
43:54The two wingmen spent nearly all of their time making sure they didn't hit the leader's tail, and they didn't
43:59touch wingtips with each other.
44:01So the whole of their vision was inward looking, where they should have been looking round the sky.
44:09The degree to which more flexible tactics, such as the Finger 4, were adopted depended on the initiative of individual
44:18squadron leaders and group commanders.
44:21New RAF pilots were reaching the squadrons with as little as 20 hours of flight time in Spitfires and Hurricanes.
44:31Many were killed on their first operational sortie.
44:37But the flow of men and machines into fighter command continued at a sufficient rate to replace losses.
44:44In the brutal calculus of war, the RAF and the Luftwaffe had reached a state of deadly equilibrium.
44:55Frustrated by continued losses attacking military and industrial targets, on the 7th of September, Hermann Goering initiated a campaign of
45:04terror against the people of London.
45:08In one of the war's bitter ironies, this act of retribution, in fact, relieved fighter command from the defense of
45:16its own airfields.
45:19And the predictability of the German attacks increased their vulnerability.
45:27The operational results of air combat during the battle were consistently overstated by both sides, either for propaganda purposes or
45:37just out of the confusion of combat.
45:41Both intelligence organizations seriously overestimated the number of enemy aircraft they shot down.
45:49The Germans, by a factor, are between three and four.
45:52The British didn't correctly identify the problem, which was that a German aircraft shot down was often claimed by more
45:59than one pilot.
46:02Out of death-laden skies come British fighters who've helped drive off Nazi raiders over London.
46:07Here's a typical RAF report.
46:09Hello.
46:10Hello.
46:10Well, any luck?
46:12Yes.
46:13We ran into a bunch of about 50 of them today.
46:15What sort?
46:17Well, about 30 bombers and about 20 escorting fighters, actually.
46:22Yes, lovely.
46:23One cigarette on.
46:25Just nice.
46:25What to do?
46:26Did you get anything?
46:27Well, we were detailed for the fighters, actually, up above.
46:31And, uh, I got a search 110.
46:34Oh, nice work.
46:35Saw the two checks bail out.
46:37Mm-hmm.
46:37And one of their parachutes, unfortunately, or fortunately, didn't open.
46:44Aha.
46:44Well, we were over London quite a bit, and I don't think the old place has changed a lot.
46:49There's plenty of balloons still left around there, and I think, uh, Jerry's gonna have a pretty tough time to,
46:57uh, make a real mess of it.
47:00Well, I think a cup of tea is indicated now, aren't you?
47:05I remember the great day of the Battle of Britain when, uh, the 15th of September, Sunday the 15th of
47:11September, we were told at the end of it that 185 German planes had been shot down.
47:17The true figure was about 54 German planes.
47:20The Germans did the same.
47:22They felt, by the 15th of September, they had almost wiped out fighter command.
47:28German planes came over here and were met by two or three hundred fighters.
47:33They could not believe it.
47:35Two days later, on the 17th of September, an ultra decrypt revealed the order to begin dismantling invasion transport facilities
47:45in Holland.
47:48Operation Sea Lion was called off.
47:51The weather window had closed.
47:53And by now, Hitler had turned his attention back to Russia.
47:59The failure to establish air supremacy over Britain and the heavy losses of September 1940 were Germany's first major setbacks
48:07over World War II.
48:12Fighter command had prevailed in the daylight battle of Britain at a cost of more than 500 pilots killed or
48:19missing.
48:20Their youthful faces captured forever in time.
48:26Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
48:40It is often said that the battle of Britain was won by a narrow margin.
48:44But in fact, at the end of the battle, fighter command was as strong numerically, both in aircraft and in
48:50pilots, as it was at the beginning of the battle.
48:53Moreover, the Luftwaffe was still powerful and the air assault in Britain was not yet over.
49:00London was on the verge of enduring a nine-month ordeal, the Night Blitz.
49:08In fact, the war had a lot longer to run.
49:10And there was a lot more resilience in the German armed forces than was appreciated.
49:17Whether Hitler ever actually intended to invade Britain or even if he had the physical means to do so will
49:24continue to be debated by historians.
49:27But what cannot be argued is what was accomplished, both in real and in psychological terms.
49:36The inexorable advance of fascism had finally been stemmed.
49:41For the first time since 1934, the German military machine had failed to impose the will of the Führer on
49:51a European power.
49:55It was a battle that thousands of people actually could watch.
49:58Here were hundreds of thousands of British people standing on the ground, cheering on, a little bit like cheering your
50:05team on.
50:06And actually seeing what was happening right above them and knowing what was at stake.
50:16Soon, the skies over Kent and East Anglia, once defended by diminutive spitfires and hurricanes, would throb with the sound
50:25of vast air armadas heading eastward towards fortress Europe.
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51:57Transcription by CastingWords
52:00CastingWords
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