The Battle Of Britain: The Dowding System

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Observer Corps. This is Biggin Hill, Controller.
Yes, it is a bit hectic. Group, think they're making for us, so keep your tracks going, will you? You're doing very well at the moment.

Now, Ops B, I want you to ring all dispersals and tell them to get everything into the air that's a serviceable. I don't want any aircraft to be caught on the ground.
Right away, sir.

Group controller? Biggin here. Sir? I've ordered all other serviceable aircraft into the air, as it looks pretty certain now that these rays are heading for us.

By the way, sir, I did tell you that our three squadrons are airborne. Right.
Thank you, sir. Sergeant Bryce, how about 72 squadron? Have they had any joy yet? Not yet, sir.
They're very close.

Any moment now, I think. Hello, shotjack, tennis leader calling.
Tully ho, tally-ho! A gaggle of Heinkels with one of nine, stand ahead. Hell, tennis squadron, B-flight, take the bombers.

A-flight, take the fighters with me. A-flight, line astern.
Go! Guns! Tennis squadron are now engaging hostile 132, so warn the guns of friendly fighters, will you? How about 32 Squadron?

Sergeant Norris, are they into the others yet? Nearly there, sir. Hello, Keita Leader.
Bandits 12 o'clock, 15 miles now heading north. Watch out for top-flight fighter cover.

This is Keita Leader, understood. Don't try yet.
Keep your eyes skinned, chaps, and don't straggle. Hello, Shortjack.
Keeta Leader calling. Telly ho, telehoe.

Hell of a lot of Heinkels and Yugos 88s with fighter escort.

Wow.

We were there, Jim. I don't know about you.
I was transported, weren't you?

Yeah.

Welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk with me, Al Murray and James Holland, and our Battle of Britain series, Tennis Leader Out.

Anyway, that's the verbatim transcript of Biggin Hill Opsrum during one particular day in September 1946. Exactly.

You hear a snapshot of how the system works and what's going on and what the RAF and the British have come up with, which is a way of directing people to the action, to intercept.

Because after all, the bomber will always get through is the motto of the 1930s. But the British fighter commander devised a way to make sure that that isn't the case.
Well, yes.

So in terms of preparation for

this big Adler Angriff, the clash of the eagles that's going to come, there's two major areas of preparation for the RAF.

First is the air defense system, and the second is processing enough pilots and aircraft. And in this episode, we're going to look at both those things for the RAF.

And we're also going to see what the Luftwaffe is doing on the other other side of the channel as well. So the system, it's important because it's the world's first.
That's the bottom line.

I think the interesting thing is that at the beginning of July, it's still kind of largely untested, isn't it? But the point is, it's got lots and lots of different components.

And perhaps the first one to consider is RDF. And you've told me off many times about this.
Don't

radar. It's not radar.
Radar is an American acronym that comes in later in the war. It's anachronistic to call it radar.
It is radio direction finding.

It has such an amazing genesis, this technology, doesn't it? Because there's death rays involved. That's what I mean to say.
It's just amazing. Well, exactly.

It's a direct product of science fiction because radio, after all, is brand new. Radio is, at this point, is newer than the internet is to us, right?

You know, we've had the internet a couple of decades now. Radio is literally just been created and discovered and its potential.

You know, the government doesn't want there to be a BBC because they want to use radio for themselves, for military purposes, all this sort of thing.

So there's this great sort of science fiction-y thing around radio and radio waves, and

there's a guy at this time who's going around offering a death ray that can kill a sheep at 30 paces and explode machinery and all sort of thing. So, there is an occasion

where a civil servant has to stand in front of the death ray and it's fired at him because nothing happens to him. It's so funny.

But, what this results in is the director of the scientific research and scientific research department of the air ministry, a fellow called Harold Wimpris, as a committee. Which is also funny.

He's the sort of person you expect to be a

scientific civil servant. Absolutely.

And he sets up a committee under the physicist Henry Tizard to investigate the possibilities offered by science for air defense, and they do consider the possibility of the death rate. I just think.

Now, look here, Watson Watt. We've heard about

this chap here who's claiming he's created a death rate. What do you think of that? I think that's probably unlikely.
Exactly. Is Robert Watson Watts' response.

but robert watson watts says what he says well you know i might not have got a death ray but i do think there is a a way of of using radio wave reflections to detect rather than destroy aircraft and he puts forward these theories on detection and location of aircraft by radio methods to the tizard committee And he's already been involved in what becomes basically transponders in ships and stuff that's been invented already, where you can use radio waves to triangulate the position of, or radio receivers to triangulate the position of ships and stuff, which he's obviously got a military application to come.

This is right on the edge of what tech technology is capable of, absolutely cutting edge.

And he says that, you know, you send out a shortwave radio pulse, bounces back, you catch that, you measure how long that takes, you measure the, you know, you triangulate with more than one station, you can figure out where something is, how fast it's moving, roughly how high it is, and all this stuff because it's these.

And you can track this on a cathode ray tube. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
A television screen, in fact. When they test it, they use a BBC shortwave radio transmission because the BBC is brand new.

It has an aerial. You know, because they need an aerial.

Once they've got the money, in February of 1935, a pilot from RAF Hayford flies along a railway line to a point 20 miles away and then he comes back again.

They don't get him the first time, but the second time. He does it a few more times.
Yeah, they catch him, they track him.

And the guy running this, in charge of all of this, overseeing this is Hugh Dowding, who is an RAF through and through fellow who's clearly is looking at the science.

And the thing about we've got to remember the RAF at this point is what, 17 years old in 1935. It's looking for a role in peacetime.

They've had success with dealing with colonial policing using aircraft. There's all the talk of bombers, but this is the RAF beginning to get whiff of what, well, what can we do about the bombers?

What can we do to defend? And dowding is absolutely central. Yes, because if the bomber's always going to get through, which after all, Stanley Baldwin is.
The Prime Minister said in 1932.

But anyway, you know, he said it before this point. So if the bomb is always going to get through, how do you make sure that it doesn't get through?

Which is why Dowding at the time is air marshal and is the man at the air ministry in charge of research and development and scientific research.

There's lots of people coming up with wacky ideas, whether it be death rays or whatever. And you can't just sort of chuck, throw lots of money at all sorts of things.

So this pilot flying from RF Hayford near Daventry to do this first test is basically to see whether it is worth backing. And when it works, that's when the money is forthcoming.

And so Watson Watt, Robert Watson Watt, who's invented it, is told to set himself up on the the Suffolk coast at a place called Bordsey, and within six months, he can detect aircraft 40 miles out to sea.

Amazing, isn't it? But the big thing is, is that one radio mask can't assess the bearing. So more radio masks are needed.

And this allows the simple geometry to work out the bearing of an aircraft on which it's heading. So then five RDF stations are ordered.
And by 1936, aircraft are being detected 62 miles away.

So this is getting better and better and better.

And there's lots of snags and it takes time and Downing's getting impatient and why can't we get this all sorted out quicker but an rdf training school is set up at boardsee in early 1937 and boardsey opens operationally in may that year as well and so suddenly you've got the dover chain home following in july 1937 and then canudon in august so suddenly you've got three chains on what has become chain home and fighter command exercises can start that month yeah you know in late august 1937 yeah getting out there testing it seeing how it works reacting to things that the whole thing because this is all about directing the fighters to the bombers before the bombers get to wherever they're going it's the important things to strike them before the bombs land if you're defending england that's what you've got to do it's by no means perfect and if you're thinking of a of a radar and rather than rdf then you're probably thinking of something or maybe a thing spinning round and round and round and round it's none of that it's sort of pylons with with cables strung between them sending out this short wave oh they're 360 foot high it's extraordinary these great big masts with antenna wires and then receiving masts that catch the reflected signal.

They don't work over land, which is a bit of a drawback, as we might see. Well, they work in the direction in which they're pointing.
They work in an arc in front of them.

So you're pointing them out to sea. So if you put them on the coast and you point and then you point them out to sea, then that's the arc.
There's a sort of concentric ring. Yeah, basically.

And you've got enough overlapping. It means that when an aircraft is sending echoes to three or four of these stations, you can actually figure out exactly where it is.

Then the second one, which is a chain home low, which is to cover the possibility of aircraft flying in low under the main chain home transmission, it's more like a searchlight.

But basically, this means by the autumn of 1939, you've got chain home and chain home low in place, which is incredible given the radar testing, you know, or RDF testing is three years, four years previously.

It's extraordinary. Well, and the interesting thing is that Chain Home Low has a shorter range, but it's actually more detailed.
It's more accurate.

So actually together they work pretty well because Chain Home, the big tall mass, they can do their kind of, you know, 120 miles or whatever.

And then Chain Home Low picks them up as they're closing to the, towards the coast and offers a bit more detail, really.

Chain Home Low is only implemented in the autumn of 1939, which is why Dowding is a bit sort of apprehensive about everything, because this is all running quite close to the wire, to put it mildly.

This is all part of Chamberlain's Fortress Britain build-up, is that you make Britain impregnable as a deterrent to the German.

By the summer, Dowding's really pushed hard to make sure that this gets done and that the red tape gets cut. And he's really like a dog with a bone about this.

There is a system basically in place in the nick of time, right? Yeah, but this is the point. You know, the war has begun, and they're still honing this.
They're still creating more radar stations.

RDF stations, sorry. It is not the finished article in September 1939.
This is like sort of putting on a play, and the set is still being painted on the morning of the first performance.

But the other point is that by the third week of June, when the strategic earthquake happens and France is surrendering, it hasn't really been tested.

And radar, RDF, radar direction finding is only one part of the COG in this complex system.

So we should talk about the other parts that make the system the system, because it's not just RDF detection alone. Yeah.
So key to this is the filter room.

Which is, I mean, it's very interesting, this, that everything.

in the whole of chain home in the whole of chain hello goes to one place the entire chain goes to one single facility at bentley priory in west north west london near stanmore which is the headquarters of fighter command yeah which is actually the ahq and they've got a great big map table like in the movies right and a dais coloured rings spreading out from each of the radar the rdf chains oh you made me do it now jim you made me say radar each of the rdf chains and each station is given a different number and that way as the enemy aircraft approach they can plot them with the rings they update the info continually they range cut as it's called where what they do is they triangulate on the basis of the information as they're getting it, the height, the speed, the expected number of the size of the formation.

And all the different radar chains, RDF chains, have a different colour. Yeah, exactly.
And they all cross over and interconnect like a big Venn diagram, don't they?

You can plot the bombers before it gets through. But then there's the next stage, because as we said, this only looks out to sea.

So once the aircraft are in land, oh, well, once they're within the view of the coast, what happens next?

You've got the high-tech, the ultimate high-tech of the RDF, chain home, chain low, and then you've got the Mark I eyeball basically in the form of the observer core, which is people looking at the planes, taking with a sort of theodolite, with a kind of a thing like a sextant.

A pantograph. Yes, they call it a pantograph, don't they? Which marks on a chart exactly where you're where these aircraft are.

And every single one of these observer core stations, you know, has been properly actually surveyed and marked. So they know exactly where it is.
And they're roughly kind of every five miles.

It means that you can by sight track the aircraft as they come in. It's an extraordinary system, isn't it? It really is.

And by the beginning of July 1940, there's a thousand Observer Corps posts and 30,000 observers. They're all volunteers.

They trained in the evenings, even though they've been mobilized, obviously, on the 24th of August, 1939. And from then on, they're expected to mount 24-hour manning of the posts.

But they do come under the direct control of the air ministry, and pay has been introduced.

But apart from tin hats, they don't have any uniform not until 1941, when actually that's when they finally become the Royal Observer Corps. 1940, they are just the Observer Corps.

And each are divided into groups. So each group has a number of posts with concentric rings around the post, which then overlap with the neighbours.

So each part of the sky is covered by more than one post. And each post is given a letter and a number, such as sort of, I don't know, R2, B7, J3, whatever it might be.

There's usually 30 to 34 posts in a group, and each is manned by... 14 to 20 observers on rotation to ensure around the clock coverage.

And each post has its own little hut with a telephone pair of binoculars tea making facilities obviously really important and this pantograph this the odder light thing that you were talking about and so they're literally everywhere and everyone's seen the image of it someone with a binos with a tin hat on in his civvies surrounded by sandbags in a dug-in position normally yeah and then someone looking through the through the pantograph taking the bearing on the aircraft and they get the elevation and then they get the eyes on and try and count the number of aircraft.

It's sort of as simple as that, but that information is also sent on to the filter room. So that's added to the information that they're gathering, right?

Yeah, so each post sends its information to its group center, so the Observer Corps group, which is then forwarded to the operations rooms both at Bentley Prairie, the command, you know, the headquarters of Fighter Command, the group headquarters, such as 11 Group, 12 Group, 10 Group, 13 Group, and the sector stations, of which we'll get onto in a minute.

The Observer Corps can manage over a million different reports in a 24-hour period. And it's updated all the time.
Absolutely. That's the point.

But obviously, there has to be a place where this information is collated. So you've got the information from the RDF chain going to the filter room.

The filter room then passes that out to the operations room.

And the key thing about the operations room is these are standardized and you would have operations rooms at fighter command headquarters at Bentley Priory.

You also have them at group level headquarters and at sector level. So fighter command, it divides the land mass of Great Britain into groups.

So there's 11 group, which we've talked about before, which is South East England and London. There's 12 group, which is central England.
There's 10 group, which is southwest England.

And then 13 group is the northern England and Scotland. Then these groups are then divided into sectors.

So each sector would have a main sector station, which would be at a large airfield, such as Bigen Hill or Duxford. These airfields then have satellite airfields.

So each sector station has an operations room, just as the group headquarters has an operations room, and just as Bentley Prarry has an operations room.

And they're all based on the absolute same design. So there is a dais, a sort of, you know, a raised platform on which the controller sits with his fellow controllers.

There's a large map table below and a tote board on the wall opposite. And it's called a tote board because it looks like one of those betting boards that they have at the races.

And it's a visual map of the sky from which a huge amount of information can be seen at a glance. That's the point.
So plots of enemy and friendly aircraft are moved onto the map table.

On the wall opposite, on on the tote board, is the squadron readiness with coloured lights for each section, blue, red, yellow, and green. And then the plots are moved by plotters.

These are usually WAFs, so female members of the RAF, known rather misogynistically as the Beauty Corps.

This then means that the controllers, once they've decided what they're going to do with the aircraft they've got, they speak directly to the pilots and the pilots speak directly to each other using radio telegraphy.

The different squadrons can't speak to one another, so that means, but the controller can speak to everyone, essentially. No, the

controller can speak to the squadrons in his sector. Yes, that's right.
So what you have is this extraordinary system that is centralized and devolved at the same time.

There is extraordinary redundancy built into this and flexibility. And of course, for every control room, there is a substitute control room for if anything goes wrong.

But the point is, is that you have this redundancy, centralized, yet devolved information system for vectoring planes onto the bombers. And that's how it works.
That's how it's designed to work.

And that's how it works. Well, yes.
And for those of you who were listening to the opening bit of verbatim recording that we had, you had the controller talking to cater leader, antennas leader.

So he is talking to two different squadron leaders at the same time. And that's what you can do.

And it's really, really clever because pilots have the radio, which enables them to listen to the ground controllers.

But there's also further networks of antennae radio receivers on the ground picking up transmissions from the pilot.

So cables run from these antennae to the operations rooms, where on yet another CAFO ray tube, we really need lots of those, the direction of the transmission can be picked up.

So with the receivers at the center of the screen, a line would then light up from the transmissions from the pilot, which would then indicate what bearing he was on.

And this is known as high-frequency direction finding or HFDF, better known as Huff Duff. Huff Duff.

This is the military application of the thing Watson Watt had invented for ships in the interwar years. This is exactly that.

What you're doing is you're keeping track of people's radio transmissions and triangulating them wherever they go.

As well as the Observer Corps having its eyes on a squadron and relaying what it's seeing. So as well as the HuffDuff telling you where people are, you've got Observer Corps eyes on.

So the idea is, and you've got Pip Squeak, which is the core sending out the automatic transmission.

So basically, the idea is, once you know where the bombers are, and if they change course, you can carry on vectoring your fighters because you know where your fighters are onto that bomber force or onto the enemy aircraft.

But it's amazing that you can do this through the combination of pip squeak, which is this transmission which gets pulsed out every 14 seconds but you can also do it from huffduff you know so so it's like a again it's more redundancy you know it's it's it's there's extra means of finding these guys everyone's trained in this system everyone's trained in a way that everyone's got redundancy built into them is the thing everyone knows what they've got to do everyone knows what they've got to do there's about eight people on a sector ops room dias so you have the senior control at the center who's controlling the squadrons in the air in his sector so you know that might be three airborne at one time it might be two as in the case of the example that we had at the beginning of this episode, where it might be four.

And then he has an assistant controller next to him and two deputy controllers. And either side of them is ops A and Ops B.
And you may remember again that we had Ops A and Ops B in that opening bit.

And they're ringing through to squadron dispersal. You then...

On the weatherboard opposite underneath the squadron readiness, you have the weather, you have the height of cloud, you have lists of parish balloon squadrons, and you also have lists of pilots and planes available at that moment to each squadron.

So it really is a sort of incredibly huge amount of information that you can just see at a glance.

And the great point about it is, it doesn't matter where you are, you know, you could be in Drem near Edinburgh, or you could be in Bigin Hill, it's all the same. That's the point.

That's the big idea. It's standardized, but it's flexible.
Yeah. And the language is standardized as well, which is really interesting.
Yeah. Scramble, scramble.
Sounds exactly the same.

Scramble, orbit. Vector 231, 230,

angels, bandits, snappers. These are all words and phrases devised to be broadcast through not necessarily brilliant RT, isn't it, James? Well, apart from three, you don't have a TH anywhere.

That's the point.

You know, you don't have words that could be mistaken for something else. Yeah, but that's not all.

Another transmitter in all REF aircraft that gives off a thing that the RDF, like a radar reflector, that basically will, when they come on the RDF, it's obvious they're an REF aircraft.

That kind of comes online as the Battle of Britain goes, doesn't it? It's not all in place at the start, but it's a thing. They've got yet another thing that they've got up their sleeve.

It's absolutely extraordinary technological effort here. And then the General Post Office, of course, the GPO, pull their weight in the Second World War.

Not only are they supplying all of this system with communications cable, but Tommy Flowers invents the Colossus for Christ's sake. So, you know, and he works the GPO.
What the heck?

As soon as the RDF chain is starting to be in place, they're thinking, cracky, okay, well, we've got to get there's no point having this information coming if we can't then get it out beyond the RDF chain.

So we're going to have to phone it through. So that requires lots of telephone cable to these pretty remote places.
So huge amounts of telephone cable are laid.

Again, with plenty of redundancy as well. Lines have to be connected to neighbouring stations and to Bentley Priory.

Everything then goes through the Stanmore Exchange, which is at the bottom of the hill beneath Bentley Priory. But they also have a backup exchange.

Take note of this, Heathrow Airport, at Bushley Exchange as well. So, and that's not all either, is it, Al?

Because they also have the defence teleprinter network, the DTN, which is exactly what it says as a teleprinter. That links and serves all three RAF commands, but is also maintained by the GPOs.

And there's also anti-aircraft command with 1204 heavy and 581 light anti-aircraft guns, which isn't the complement they're meant to have. And there's barrage balloons.

There's the Admiralty also has its eyes on all of this stuff. But basically, what you have is this system, which has...
great of flexibility built into it.

The flexibility comes from the standardization. I think what's really interesting about it, it may all look the same, but that's exactly the point because then anyone can work anywhere in the system.

So if a station's knocked out, you can bring in personnel from somewhere else, replace them instantly. And anyway, there's a reserve ops room as well.

So the whole point, it's completely interchangeable, completely flexible, but it's untested, is the truth at the start of July 1940.

So, too, flexibility for the pilots as well, because you can move pilots again from Scotland to 12 group to 11 group to 10 group.

You can move them from Exeter to Hawking to Duxford to Acklington, you know, in a day. And everything's standardized.

The way they're organized, the way these air filters are organized, they're all exactly the same. And so that's key to the whole thing.

And it means you can rotate squadrons and operations staff at the same time or separately or in any way how you like. But you're right.
You know, it is untested at the beginning of July.

This is brand spanking new technology. No one's ever put this, no one has ever developed an air defense system.
It is the world's first fully functioning air defense system.

There was nothing like this over Poland, nothing like this over Scandinavia, the Low Countries, or in France, which is why the Luftwaffe have got a bit cocky, to be put it mildly.

And this is why, when Gunther Roll from JG 52 was flying over Dover and was suddenly being attacked by 501 and 64 squadron, he couldn't understand where they came from.

That's because he's never come up against that air defense system before. In the next part, we will look at other elements that go into the British air defense system.

The aircraft, aircraft repair, aircraft production, pilot training, because there are so many cogs in this incredible machine that we can't squeeze them all into one part. We'll see in a moment.

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Welcome back to We Have Ways of Make You Talk with me, Al Murray and James on the

sharp-eared amongst you who aren't watching this in our new video format will notice that the sound has changed slightly for part two. And those of you watching will have realized we've

done a rent ghost.

We've held our nose and blinked. Exactly.
We've evaporated elsewhere for the Harriet Potter fan. Right, so

we've looked at the downing system and the complexity of it, but also the sort of forethought that's gone into it. But none of this will work without pilots, right? All planes.
All planes.

Yeah, exactly. So processing of pilots is quite a thing.
And, you know, the bottom line is you can only train so many. You can certainly only train so many in a northern European country.
Yeah.

Which is the same from both sides, but of course, the Lutheroff have started earlier. So that's the problem.
It's weather dependent.

And yes, you can train 365, you know, 24-7 and all that kind of stuff.

But you can't really, because when the weather comes in, which it does tend to, and as everyone knows, winters weren't great at that time of our history,

you know, that restricts what you can do. And training takes about nine months.
Well, and if training is incredibly intense, it's lengthy and also quite failable.

And people are falling by the wayside the whole time.

So not only is this very, very time-consuming, but it's people consuming because you have people coming in to the REF who then don't make the grade because

they don't make the grade and they also kill themselves. Well, and people killing themselves.
So they doubly don't make the grade.

But this emphasis is the sort of the danger at the core of it, as well as also of the hundred people you may have on the first parade to fly,

you're whittling down to half that number probably

by the time they're getting into single-engine fighter planes on squadrons. One of the most dangerous things of all is when you go to your OTU.

So how it works is you do your initial training wing, you do initial training, that's square mashing and all the rest of it, and a bit of book, you know,

learning and stuff in the classroom then you do your first flights and all the rest of it then you do secondary training then you finally get your wings if you're good enough and lots of people don't yeah this is your point and if you have survived that long and that includes sort of unbelievably terrifying kind of night flights and things where you're blinded by the kind of the exhaust fuse when you you know the exhaust stubs of flame coming out of it when you first power it up and then you go to your OTU, your operational training unit, which is where you convert from, say, Harvards, which you've been to the last bit of your training on, which, by the way, are also incredibly dangerous.

But then you go go to your operational training unit where you would then be converted onto Spitfires or Hurricanes.

And that moment, you know, they are single engine, single pilot aircraft, and it's a leap of faith. You're going from a sort of 400 horsepower aircraft to, you know, 1100.
Yeah. It's quite a big leap.

And you've got to take off in it, fly it around, stooge about for a bit, and then land. So.

Shortage of pilots, this most precious of all commodities, is a problem.

And it's particularly a problem because they've lost about 300 of them in France. And then having enough airframes is also obviously really, really important.
Yes. Because,

I mean, we've touched on it really there. The pilots are the thing that is truly irreplaceable.

Airframes, though, if you can keep the production numbers up, if you can keep the churn going, you're probably going to be all right if you can keep the attrition rate under control.

So this is the balancing act that's really, really important. And the Chamberlain government has already initiated a series of shadow factories.
Yes. It's boosting production.

I mean, it's buying the fighters in the first place,

stimulating industry by...

well, yes, and it's also Vickers Aviation buying out Supermarine. That's all happened beforehand, so you've got a bigger conglomeration of, you know, bigger enterprise controlling it.

I mean, you know, the naresayers that say, oh, it wasn't anything to do with Lord Beaverbrook. It was all to do with, you know, Lord Swinton, who came before and all the rest of it.

That just isn't true.

I mean, it is true that Swinton plays a huge part in all this. Yeah, yeah.

But the person who really kickstarts massive production is unquestionably Lord Beaverbrook, who is appointed to the head of the new Ministry of Aircraft Production, which is brand new, hasn't been created yet because aircraft production has been in the hands of the air ministry up until this point.

I mean, he's an astonishing appointment, though. Yes.
I mean, people don't know who Beaverbrook is.

Beaverbrook is a Canadian press baron who's made his money in the world of finance in Canada before he comes to London because it's the Imperial Centre.

He was a real thorn in the side of the government during the First World War with his newspapers.

Really driving stuff and leaping onto causes and causing the Liberal government all sorts of problems during the First World War. Yeah, it's fair to say that he's sort of right of center.
Yeah.

Well, and he's an absolutely

die-hard imperialist. The thing he cares about is the British Empire.
And he cares about the British Empire because he's Canadian. It's the one thing that will keep the Americans down.

So he's very much of that stripe of imperialist. But he's a pal of Churchill.
He's a pal of Churchill. He's a businessman.
And Churchill wants to have his...

He wants the people running the war effort to be a bunch of tech crats and his cronies. And, you know, he's very sensible in that approach.

I mean, you know, it's not not entirely democratic perhaps but but it's a very sensible approach i mean the other thing i'd say about lord swinton is is lord swinton and the air ministry before them have also built up huge supplies of aluminium and steel and perspex and all the rest of it so they've got they've got a lot of the stuff in in place the big thing that that max pieverberg does is that he turbocharges the aircraft production so everything's in place but what it needs is it needs rocket fuel to go in and just go okay we've got all the tools now we just need to make it happen that's what he provides this incredible scale of energy he also immediately says right you forget any other type we're going to produce five types everything else we've just been mothballed for the time being which has longer term consequences for say the lancaster yeah four engine heavy bombers yeah and the mosquito and all the rest of it but but it's about what do we need to do now we need to streamline this but it's quite interesting though because there's a fundamental difference here between say germany and britain at this point is he can say that but what will actually happen in britain is a load of people go well we've been told to pause this type but you know what we'll we'll just keep trickling on because the jet engine is one of the things one of the things where he says, stop on that.

But it trickles away. But it trickles away and Rolls-Royce makes sure they carry on with that way.

Yeah, exactly.

Whereas in Germany, this sort of thing, say the sort of dive bomber, insistence on dive bombers, is an actual impediment to types and development.

It isn't quite in Britain. It's good because...

you've a free basically one's one of those societies is freer than the other and so people are going to yeah yeah yeah don't worry boss we're on it and actually to have land carry on developing the mosquitoes well because it's made absolutely clear that this is a temporary measure this this is This is right now.

Doesn't mean to say you're not going to need it in the future. But it's really interesting.
You know, he doesn't like committees, he doesn't like FAF at all.

So rather than sort of sending a letter, which was the traditional way, forget that, he just gets on the telephone.

If it can't be sorted out by the telephone, he sends one of the map people on the Ministry of Aircraft Production down to hand-sort it out

and kick butt. And he expects incredibly long hours.
You know, this is not a concession to workers' rights by any stretch of imagination. You know, people are working literally 24/7.

He also sacks Lord Nuffield, who might have been very adept at running the Morris Motor Corporation, but is absolutely useless at running aircraft production.

So he sends Sir Richard Ferry of Ferry Aircraft Company to the new Spitfire factory at Castle Bromwich to see why, after two years of it being in operation, literally nothing is coming out at all.

And Ferry finds that mismanagement is rife, that people are slack, that they haven't got the right machine tools. The whole thing is just a complete shower.

So Vickers immediately takes over the entire operation at Beaverbrook's insistence. And things start to improve really quickly.

He also speaks to Beaverbrook and to Keith Park, who is the not to Lee Mallory incidentally, but he speaks to Keith Park every single night. Really?

And dowding and says, What do you need? How's it all going? But the big thing he does is he turns around

the systems and the ways of operating to speed up production as much as possible. So he makes what's in place work, basically.
He makes what's in place.

So what is in place has been set up by Lord Swinton and by others, you know, and that's why they deserve the credit they deserve.

But as I say, the man who puts kind of, you know, rocket fuel into this process is Beaverbrook.

beaverbrook and in the first week you know of him being in charge there's 130 new types of all aircraft by the third week of may that's risen to 200 and by the last week of may that's 280.

yeah you know so that's a significant more than double yeah weekly production is around 25300 the new types um in june you know so that's improving a week of the second to the eighth of june for example 80 hurricanes and 22 spitfires are built but in june alone 446 new fighters are built In July, that figure is 496.

I think the really interesting thing he does is the civilian repair organization. Well, he takes it from the air ministry.
Yeah. So everything gets taken.

So stores and supplies and all the rest of it, he goes around changing all the padlocks. So the air ministry can't do it.

He's just moved quicker. So he goes, right, I'm taking all of it out of this.
Knows that the air ministry is going to go splutter and go, you can't possibly do that.

So he just goes around and just opens all the stores, changes all the padlocks. So when the air ministry gets there, you know, he's already changed that a week ago.

He changes the recategoriser, you know, recategorizes recategorizes everything. So, so there used to be levels one, two, and three, now there's levels four, five, and six.

Level four is now aircraft that can be repaired in 36 hours, yeah, you know, on the spot. Yeah, level five are aircraft which are safe to fly lightly, so fly-in repairs.

So, you could take them from you know, Big Inhill and take them to some repair depot. Um, and then level six is gonna are those that would take more than 36 hours and might need to be moved by road.

And responsibility for transporting these to depots and civilian repair units.

So, there's a civilian repair organization, which is CRO, to civilian repair units, which is a CRU, is left to number 50 maintenance units.

So these are the guys with the trucks and all the rest of it. Again, indoctrinated with speed, pace of action, long hours, all the rest of it.
And the transformation is incredible.

And again, the contrast with the Germans here is German damaged types have to go back to Germany. Well, because they've got brand new airfields, they haven't got enough kit.

That's another example of the home advantage. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But, you know, by July 1940, production of new aircraft has risen by 62%. New engines by 32%.

But the repaired aircraft has risen by 186%. That's amazing.
The repaired engines by 159%. So that is just amazing.

But, you know, you think that Fighter Command alone has 331 Spitfires and Hurricanes after the losses in France on the 1st of June, 1940. By the 30th of June, it's got 587 Spitfires and Hurricanes.

By the temperature rise, it's got around 640. That's amazing.
That is truly incredible. Well,

we should talk about the planes. Although, I think it's fair to say that you know probably that the hurricane is clad in fabric.

We understand that you know it's essentially the end of the biplane technology. It's a hawker fury without the top wing.
But let's still perv on these planes anyway, because they're fantastic.

First, 6th of November 1935 of the Hurricane. Yep.
Thick wings. Yep.
Stable gun platform. But the weaknesses are...
It's slow. Well, and also it's got a very easy stall, very quick stall.

You can't see it coming. So normally when you're about to stall, you have pre-stall buffeting.

buffeting where the well well let's explain let's basically explain what a stall is because i think we're talking about a stall like we know that's the point where the plane stops flying yes it no longer has enough thrust to keep it airborne well or enough lift enough lift yeah enough lift and thrust in combination to keep it going and keep it airborne it literally drops out the sky but the problem with that is that in the hurricane is you don't get much warning in a spitfire you get lots of pre pre-stall buffeting where it shakes you don't get much of that so hurricane pilots tend to underfly it because they don't want to suddenly be caught out.

Yes, yes, it has a great turning circle, but only if you absolutely cane it. But no one's going to cane it because they don't want to.

When it does all, it drops a wing and it starts going into spiral. It's very, very hard to get out of it.
This instability built into how they work. Yes, into how they fly.

One of the other problems is that you've got the, one of the good things is that you've got...

four machine guns side by side on one wing four machine guns in the other and you harmonize them so that they come to a point at a certain distance the flip side of that is you've got fuel tanks at the foot of the wings the base of the wings and if you've already fired your guns and you get heat the wind as you're flying goes into those gun ports and fans the flames up into the cockpit which basically means you've got about three or four seconds and you've also got an enormous fuel tank in front of you right in front of you the other problem is it's got this sort of cage like canopy a bit like the uh one on the mesh slit 109 basically sort of you know the visibility isn't great the other big problem that they said that there was um it had a sort of habit of leaking oil from one of the seals around the propeller so you you could be flying along suddenly you're just spreak with oil on the front of the windscreen you can't see anything so that wasn't great.

But we do love the hurricane, love the hurricane, make no mistake, stable gun courage, it's a very stable gun platform, and that's what that's what's special about it.

And then it's more glamorous cousin. I mean, actually, the thing that makes these two planes viable is the Merlin engine, anyway.

Yes, it's the time and money spent on developing the Merlin engine, which means, although it's got its problems with the carburettor in particular, but the Spitfire is the sort of it's brand new, it's brand spanking new, it looks sexy, it is sexy, you know, all those sort of things.

First flies fifth of March 1926, of course.

But in the first part of the battle breton you know in june and july it hasn't got variable pitch propeller which which changes automatic so so the the angle of the blades on the propeller change as you're you know it's a bit like changing gear effectively yeah you know you want to be in fifth gear and it affects how

fast you can climb yes it that's the big and the the rear that is the this is all about climbing fast because the hurricane can climb relatively quickly for an aircraft of its time but the spitfire is once it's got the proper propeller on it really can climb quickly yes so that's the big thing.

But there's no fuel injection either on the on the Spitfire Mark I or the Hurricane.

And what that means is when you, if you haven't got fuel injection, that means you can't control the carburetor in the same way.

So when you, when you suddenly dive, you create negative gravity, and that forces a fuel to the top of the float chamber in the carburetor, which then becomes flooded, very briefly cuts out, and it regains itself, but that can lose you a couple of seconds worth of diving.

It's an extraordinary oversight in the design of the Merlin engine. Yeah, they quickly rectify it.
I know, but

they rectify it because suddenly it's a problem, but that no one's foreseen that is kind of amazing.

But also, it has very low wing loading, which basically wing loading is the weight of the plane divided by the wing area. So it's 25 pounds per square foot on the Spitfun.

I think it's 32 or something on the Mester Smith 109. And that is comparatively low.
That's the big elliptical wing. It has a tight turning circle of 696 feet.

But both of Spitfire and Hurricane only have 300 rounds of ammunition. And it's rifle caliber ammunition.

This is one of the great vast mysteries of the Air Ministry's decision-making process is to equip its intercept fighter aircraft with such poor weaponry. It doesn't add up as a decision at all.

In the 1920s, they've decided it's a bad idea. 1926, there was a paper saying, saying, I would not recommend this under any circumstances.
It's like cheating of a P-sheet.

And yet, here we are with four 303s. Maybe one of the reasons, certainly the reason the British Army retains 303 303 ammunition is they bought so much in the first football.

There's an awful lot of it, right? There's tons of it. I would suspect that's got a high factor in it.
Make do a men.

But the net result of this is it means they've only got 14.7 seconds worth of collective firing. It's not each machine gun firing in turn.
They're all firing together.

And it doesn't take long to get around through 300 rounds. And famously, 74 Squadron in the Battle of Britain fire 7,000 rounds at a Dornier team and still don't shoot it down.

They're too far away. You know, the prescribed distance of which you harmonise your guns is about 450 yards.
That changes 400. And as the battle progresses, it changes.

And we need to explain what that means. So you're harmonizing your guns, it's basically you angle them so that they will converge into a cone.
Into a cone of bullets.

So if you've, I mean, literally, you've got the four guns across the wing, pointing them so they converge. And what happens is this, this great argument about the distance at which they converge.
And

by the time the battle button's properly going and words got round, you get as close as you can. So you converge your guns as close as you can make them.

yeah right so on end of july it's prescribed at 250 yards from 400 450 before that you know but tom neal for example who was in 249 squadron you know he sets his guns to 150 yards yeah that's that's kind of sort of more like it but we should talk about the luftwaffe they have also developed their own version of rdf designata telegrafia dt yeah or déte telegraphie designata telegraphie the thing is is they figured out the same thing but the conclusions they've arrived at are quite different so it is spinning radar like you'd like the first

because of that they can't they can't recognize RDF well they think it's something similar some kind of version they do call them DT masts.

Yeah, so they recognize that it is that it is a radio detection mast but their kind of comparatively primitive nature of what's and what's masts actually lull the Luftwaffe into sort of being a bit complacent about them, which is a good thing.

Radar DT is developed by the Kriegsmarina rather than the Luftwaffe and as we all know they don't really talk to each other very much.

So they have Würzburg and Freya on the coasts of northern France and the Low Countries, but they're not there to help the Luftwaffe in any shape or form.

What we talked about a lot, talking about the doubting system, is the fact that everything's joined up. You've got lots of radio.
The idea is that everyone knows what's going on.

The information could be spread really easily. The Germans are not keen on radio telegraphy at all at this stage of the world.
There's no ground control at all. Yeah.

So you take off, you can communicate in your schnaffel.

You might even be able to communicate in your groupen, your group of three shtaffel but you certainly can't communicate with the bombers you're supposed to escort you know you're told when to form up where to form up and off you go and so all those instructions are handed out before the mission takes place so the mission has to take place according to the instructions or else you're on your own yeah i mean the thing is is this this then means a squadron a snaffle leader or a group of leader is trying to conduct the battle yeah so if he gets lost they all get lost yes and if he attacks the wrong airfield if he attacks the wrong airfield it will attack the wrong airfield if he fails to meet up with the bombers he's meant to be escorting,

they all fail to meet up with the bombers.

But it's not that there aren't people who don't understand the value of radios. There are, and it's really interesting.

So there's this amazing memoir by this guy called Ulrich Steinhilber, who's a young Leutnant in JG52. And his immediate boss is Adolf Galland in 1940.

And in 1939, Steinhilber was made Nachrichten Officier, which is a sort of communications officer, in what at the time is the first group of Jag Gestwada 433, then becomes JG52.

And Steinhelpen learns that he's supposed to be having 75 men under him equipped and trained to operate radio stations and mounted on trucks with kind of sort of mobile radio telegraphy and all the rest of it.

But he discovers actually he's only got about 20 men. They just haven't appeared.
There's no one there. No one's organizing.
No one's ever bothered with it.

Gallon's not in the slightest bit interested in this.

doesn't encourage him whatsoever but he thinks no you know this is this is i can see this is this is going to be a benefit so he he tries to encourage the group to use ground control but makes himself thoroughly unpopular in the process.

Largely because Galland's a kind of my way on the highway type, he doesn't really like it.

So eventually, he organises this huge great exercise using ground observers and mobile radio teams to connect to the pilots.

And watching this is General Hugo Sperler, who's one of the flotter commanders for the Battle of Britain. And in the debrief afterwards, it's hardly mentioned.

And eventually, Steinhilbert puts his hands up and says, says,

you know, what did you think of the radio communications? Galland immediately cuts him off and goes, Good Steinhilper, you've reminded me. You were talking far too much.

You were just bothering us all the time. As I've always told you, it'd be best to throw out all of these damn radios.
We don't need them. And that's that.
Oh dear. Well, I mean, and good.

You know, speaking from a British perspective here, the crummier the Luftwaffe's effort is, the better.

So we should just very, very briefly just explain how they're organized. So Luftwaffe is organized into Gestwada and to groups.
It's like an RAF group, and a group is like an RAF wing. Yeah.

And within a a group is three staffel which is kind of a squadron yeah so a gestvader has three groupen um each groupen has three staffel yeah and yes a staffel is is sort of like a squadron and they have air fleets they don't have commands so each fleet is like an army you know so it has its various component parts as fighters and bombers and stookers and reconnaissance and and so on so it's a tactical air force that's the bottom line it's a tactical air force yeah rather than a than a strategic air force yeah just to remind people tactical air force was one which is designed to support ground operations.

A strategic air force is one which operates independently of any other unit. Although, I mean, it's theoretically one, isn't it? That's the idea.
Yes.

What the Germans have done with the Luftwaffe is they've had the conception of a tactical air force and they've delivered it in practice.

But that means they've not thought about anything else much.

And certainly not having practice with anything else much, which is what then is part of the confusion. for them for the Battle of Britain.
And then, I mean, the Staffeln is 12 aircraft and pilots.

So rather than the over-manning thing that the RAF has, which means you can rotate pilots, you can rest people, everyone has to go every time with an aircraft.

Well, yes, and there's a difference between establishment and serviceability on any given moment. So establishment is 12, but in reality, they hardly ever have 12 available.
They usually, you know,

on a good day, you might have nine or ten. Yeah.
But you're almost certainly never going to have 12 because, you know, someone's got an instrument that's got this.

And then in terms of producing aircraft, because obviously we've emphasized how important that is for the British, the Germans are sort of, it's tailing off and and part well it started earlier yeah yeah well they started earlier but part of the issue in germany isn't it is there there was a wariness on the part of the german government to commit to the idea that this is a full bore war that's going to last a really long time you know the whole point is we'll get it done now we're not going to need to produce small aircraft and also there's real limits on what they can actually produce yeah the german wear of wars do it really quickly yeah yeah so it's not for a long war so but but they have lost a third of their operational strength since the 10th of may and it is amazing i mean it's just worth reminding people of this statistic of 354 aircraft lost on the 10th of May.

It's the single worst day for Luftwaffe in the entire war.

I mean, we've talked about this bit for the Hurricane, and we have to say that the ME-109 is a better plane than either of them, isn't it, Jim? Well, it is at this point. I mean,

it just is. There's no getting away from it.
As Tom Neil says, it could do the three things required of a fighter aircraft in 1940 better than any other.

It could climb faster, die faster, and pack a greater punch in the combat zone.

The canopy is awful because it's like a door, so it opens up on hinges and opens up to the side, you know, rather than pushing back and forward, which is difficult to get out of at high speeds.

One of the interesting things about it, though, is the reason it exists, or it's the reason it's the type that the Germans pick, is because of news of the Spitfire. Yeah, that is really.

They've got a procurement competition going on, the Germans in the world. Yeah, and everyone's expecting it to be the Heinkel 112.
Yeah, which has elliptical wings, wind undercarriage,

and has incredible range. Arguably a better plane, but they hear word of the Spitfire and

they opt for the 109. Because

it's fractionally faster than that Heinkel Hancock 112 and it can climb faster than the Hankel 112.

So it does, you know, by the time it has the Daimler Ben 601, it's got supercharger, it's got fuel injection, it's got electrical variable pitch propeller, you know, all of which become standard on any fighter plane by the end of 1940.

The plane they're flying in 1940 is the E, it's the fifth variant. And they've been flying that a little bit more.
The Mark 1. Yeah, exactly.
The Mark 1 Spitfire and the 1As and 1Bs that come on.

What you've actually got here is the fruits of the Spanish Civil War and Poland and their experience with what they need to tune fine-tune on the fighter. So

that's why they're into their fifth type at this point in the war. And it has very high wing loading, as I said earlier on.
It's got 32 pounds per square foot.

So that means the wings are much smaller.

That means less drag, so greater speed, you know, but it also means a higher stalling speed. But the ME-109 gets around that by having slats at the front of the wings as well as at the back,

which you can, which will come out automatically at a certain speed, which means in theory, it can actually out-turn the Spitfire.

I think the really important thing is because, you know, these fighters are neck and neck in this regard, essentially.

What we're really looking at here, though, is the armament, because we've said how both British fighters, Spitfun Hurricane, have been equipped with peaceers, with rifle ammunition.

The Meshersmith has a cannon that fires an exploding.

There's different varieties of the ME109E. And some have kind of, you know, one cannon and four machine guns, one has to do with the guns.
But the cannon is

the point. Because the round explodes on contact with its target.
That's a completely different deal to firing bullets at something.

Yeah, and also the interesting thing is that the Merlin, Boswell's Merlin, is made of magnesium alloy. So if it gets hit by a cannon, that's good night Charlie to that engine.

Whereas the DB601 is made out of steel. And if a 0.303 hits that, it sort of squashes it like a PM.

Whereas

a cannon round would have a greater effect. Yeah, but you have also,

the machine guns have trumps of a thousand rounds rather than 300. So they have 55 seconds worth of firing rather than 14.7 seconds of firing.
That's a huge, huge difference.

And obviously, you've only got 60, you've got very few cannons because it's chunky and big and there's, you know, it's got small wings. So it hasn't got much room.

So it has 60 rounds, but your machine guns have tracer, which is sort of, you know, fluorescence on every fifth bullet or whatever.

So the really skilled marksman, what it can do is he can get his aim with his thousand rounds of machine gun bullets. And then you only press one of cannon and you've hit it.

And then there's this, it's Chunkier Brother, the 110, Zastora,

which is a twin-engine plane. This is a plane with flying across the North Sea and attacking Britain in mind, isn't it? Yeah, as a fighter escort.

Because it's got tremendous range, very long legs, does 300 miles per hour. But the problem is

very, very powerful armament. But its problem is...

because it's a twin-engine plane it's not as maneuverable it's not as quick and because it's big you can't dive quicker yeah the great usp of the 109 is you can dive quicker than anything else so actually turning circles are irrelevant because if you're suddenly being being attacked by someone you've got some 100 you chuck the stick forward and down you go, you're going to outrun them.

So you don't need Lardi-Daw fancy aerobatics. But in a 110, you don't have that luxury.

And then the bombers that the Germans have, you know, there's the Stuka, the JU-87, which is which shows it's a tactical air force. That is a tactical battlefield weapon, isn't it? Yep, Stuka.

It's for attacking armies, attacking bunkers, that sort of thing, which is used to incredible effect in France and the Netherlands and in Poland as well, with its Lemgreit on the wing that's a siren that makes a noise to scare

Jesus out of you. It's sort of synonymous with Blitzkrieg, that plane.

But the battle that's coming isn't blitzkrieg. So for all its strengths and advantages.

You'd start a dive at around sort of 8,000 feet typically, and you do about 85% gradient. So it's virtually kind of vertical.

And at some point, you pull out, there's air brakes, you drop your bomb, there's a little bit of perspex, and the bomb aiming at, you know, the pilot can see through the target.

Yeah, there's a window in the floor of the bomb.

So you can see where the bomb's going and all the the rest of it's got you know it's all quite clever quite well thought out so the the problem with this is that as you're coming out of your dive you're you're virtually stationary you're very slow it's got a fixed undercarriage so it's not not fast it's not very maneuverable and anyone hovering above you you know you're you're easy meet it's very very difficult to be accurate it's fine lengthways but it's not you know i mean so for example you know if you're attacking a 250 yard long ship and let's face it most destroyers for example are only about 120 yards you know a stuker would have 1.5 second window in which to release a bomb but if you're doing a cross attack attack, it's a quarter of a second.

So, you know, it's literally nothing. And it makes it very difficult to attack accurately if your target is moving.
Yeah. And B, if you have the enemy above you.

And then their medium bombers, although they haven't got a heavy one. So their medium bombers are their heavy bombers, as it were.
The Heichel 111 and the Dornier DO-17 flying down.

Yeah, and they're both developed in the early 1930s. I mean, this is the point.
And, you know, both of them have only got, they can only carry about a ton each.

And the JU-88 is the third type that the Germans have got, which is a newer, supposedly a faster bomber

but has been diverted in its development with the dive bombing. Well, yeah, they keep sort of insisting it has dive bombing potentials.

You know, and the good folk at Juncker's kind of sort of teeth suck a lot. So, well, yeah, we can do that, but you know, it's going to cost you.
It's going to cost you in terms of financial costs.

It's going to cost you in terms of time, and it's going to cost you in terms of performance.

So, what's a super fast kind of 300-mile-an-hour twin-engine bomber with huge range becomes a bomber that can basically fly the same speed as a Dornier and a Highfield, but maybe a little bit faster.

But it's interesting, you know, I mean, you know, the Luftwaffe's arsenal is therefore a very mixed bag of the flawed, the aging, and of course, the brilliant.

But also, it's a mixed bag of aircraft suited to a completely different task.

This is, in the end, the encounter in the Battle of Britain is a tactical air force tries to take on a fighter defence system.

Were the Luftwaffe a strategic air force with that fighter system in mind, maybe it would have a better chance. But the fact is, it isn't, and it doesn't even know that this system exists.

No, exactly. So, so, so it's starting its battle seriously.

Disadvantage. Disadvantaged.
It's worth looking at. So, on the 3rd of August, 1940, this is the arsenal that the Luftwaffe has.
And there's authorized strength, which is what it's supposed to have.

There's actual strength. Yep.
Then there's combat ready. And then there's combat ready with air crew.
So authorized strength of single-engine fighters is 1,171.

Actual strength, 1,065.

Yeah. Combat ready, 878.

Combat ready with pilots ready to fight England, 760.

Yes. Okay.
Twin engine fighters, authorized strength, 332.

Actual strength, 310.

Combat ready, 240.

Combat ready with crew, 230.

Bombers. Okay, so this is really interesting.
Yeah, come on. Bombers, authorized strength, 1638.

Actual strength, 1,458.

Combat ready, 818.

That's 50%.

Yeah. Combat ready with air crew,

somewhere between 700 and 800, can't quite sure. 45%.
And the problem is, if you're going to Hitler, you go, we have 1,171

fighters on our establishment, Mein Fuhrer. And he goes, wonderful, carry on.
Then you go back to your headquarters and go, yeah, but we can only get, you know, two-thirds of those in the air.

You don't tell him that, do you? And this is

their other problem. It's because as the battle proceeds, there is a question of claiming and over-claiming, and everyone lying about the numbers of planes shot down.

The thing to compare those numbers with is then, as the battle proceeds, between the 3rd of August and

28th of September, the Germans lose 719 bombers. And you've just said that they're basically their combat ready with pilot strength is 700 to 800 bombers.
They lose the lot.

And, you know, they lose 400 crew.

That's a serious bite out of their capability. And they lose 97 dive bombers to the point where the dive bombers, where the stookers are stood down.

So the point is, as the battle begins, the balance sheet, if you take it at a glance, favours the Luftwaffe.

But the circumstances are tactical air force being asked to do a strategic task against a fighter defense system. that's untested, yes, but that the Germans don't even appreciate exists.

So we've looked at Canal Camp, we've looked at phase one of the Battle of Britain, we've looked at the system,

the two sides, what they've got, assets and pluses and minuses and all the rest of it. Now we are getting ready for Adler Angriff.
Exactly. The attack of the eagles.
Luftschlacht und Enklamt.

Yes, exactly. This is the second phase, people, of the Battle of Britain.
That's what we're going to be looking at in episode three.

So join us in our next episode of We Have Ways of Making You Talk for episode three. Should we call it Luftschlacht und Enklamt? Yes.
or we can just call it more easily Attack of the Eagles.

Okay, we'll call it Attack of the Eagles then. You can choose to either subscribe to our Patreon, in which case you'll hear this without adverts and get extra episodes and nuggets along the way.

Thanks for listening. I'll see you again.
Cheer up.