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    The Battle of Britain
    The Battle of Britain
    The Battle of Britain
    Ebook194 pages1 hour

    The Battle of Britain

    By Nigel Cawthorne

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    About this ebook

    "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few" - Churchill on the RAF.

    The fate of Britain was balanced on a knife edge after Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to destroy the RAF. German aircraft outnumbered Britain's forces four to one, and the Luftwaffe was inexorably gaining the upper hand. It was touch and go whether the nation could survive.

    This landscape-format book presents an incredible pictorial history of the Battle of Britain. Over 200 full-page photographs reveal the twists and turns of this momentous air battle and the men and women who fought for their nation.

    Images feature:
    • The courageous 'Few' who fought from the skies, including Douglas Bader and Johnnie Johnson.
    • Local defence volunteers who prepared on the ground
    • The various aircraft that defined this battle, featuring the iconic Spitfire, the Hurricane and the German Messerschmitt Bf 109.
    • Scenes of tragedy and jubilation, including the London Blitz and final VE day celebrations in Trafalgar square.

    These spectacular photographs are accompanied by fascinating captions and chapter text which narrates the action. Emphasising the human side to this battle, The Battle of Britain is a moving tribute to a men and women who pulled together in the face of overwhelming odds and pushed back against Adolf Hitler.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArcturus Publishing
    Release dateMay 22, 2013
    ISBN9781782126690
    The Battle of Britain
    Author

    Nigel Cawthorne

    Nigel Cawthorne started his career as a journalist at the Financial Times and has since written bestselling books on Prince Philip, Princess Diana, and the history of the royal family, as well as provided royal news comment on national and international broadcasters.

    Read more from Nigel Cawthorne

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      Book preview

      The Battle of Britain - Nigel Cawthorne

      INTRODUCTION

      BEFORE THE STORM

      BRITAIN was not ready to go to war in September 1939. Eleven months before, the British prime minister Neville Chamberlain had made a peace deal with Adolf Hitler at a conference in Munich and had flown home proclaiming peace for our time. However, it was clear that Hitler could not be trusted when he said he had no further territorial demands in Europe as, in March 1939, he swallowed the rest of Czechoslovakia. Two weeks later Britain and France had guaranteed the independence of Poland. But in August, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with a secret clause agreeing the division of Poland. Then on 1 September 1939, fifty-five German divisions rolled over the Polish border and Britain and France declared war.

      Little could be done to aid Poland. The French launched an offensive into Saarland, but halted it after ten days. Six months of relative inaction followed. Meanwhile, Britain prepared itself for war and sent an Expeditionary Force to France. In April 1940, Hitler invaded Denmark. Then, as the German army stormed into Belgium and the Netherlands, Chamberlain resigned and Winston Churchill became Prime Minister.

      The main attack on France came on 10 May. Some 1,500,000 men with over 1,500 tanks pushed through the dense and hilly forest of the Ardennes, which the French had thought unsuitable for large-scale operations. Defences there were rudimentary. The German thrust was supported by a thousand planes. The French had just a handful aloft.

      German troops enter the Polish town of Lodz and are greeted by members of the town’s considerable ethnic German community, September 1939.

      A knocked out French Char 2C tank lies in the shattered Belgium town of Beaumont. The French tanks were outclassed by the German Panzer units.

      German troops were greeted by crowds when they reached Amsterdam after the Dutch Army decided further fighting would be futile.

      The German advance split the French Army in two. It then turned west towards the Channel coast, encircling the British Army, which fell back on the port of Dunkirk. For reasons still obscure, Hitler halted the Panzers for two days. This gave the British time to consolidate their defences and evacuate some 340,000 men, many of them on small craft whose owners had volunteered for the Channel crossing. Another 220,000 Allied troops were later rescued by British ships from Cherbourg, Saint-Malo, Brest, and Saint-Nazaire in north-western France. In just three weeks, the Germans had taken more than a million men prisoner. But the bulk of Britain’s most experienced troops had been saved, seemingly by a miracle. This withdrawal was regarded as a reprieve by the British.

      A British Cruiser Mk IV tank on the back of a Scammell tank transporter gets caught up in civilian traffic fleeing the German advance at Le Neubourg during the retreat to the coast in June 1940.

      Although most of the British Expeditionary Force was now safely back in Britain, the Battle of France was not over. On 5 June the German Army turned south. Two days later, they broke through at Rouen. On 12 June, the French commander General Maxime Weygand told prime minister Paul Reynaud that the Battle of France was lost. On 14 June, the Germans entered Paris and drove on rapidly to the south. The French government fled to Tours then to Bordeaux, where Reynaud resigned on 16 June. He was replaced by his deputy, the elderly Marshal Philippe Pétain, France’s most honoured soldier in World War I. That night, Pétain’s government requested an armistice. While the two sides discussed terms, the German advance continued until it had swallowed two-thirds of the country.

      On 22 June 1940, the representatives of Germany and France met at Compiègne, the site of the headquarters of the invading German Army in World War I where the armistice ending the war was signed in 1918. Hitler attended personally to see a new armistice being signed, taking France out of the war.

      The situation looked dire for Britain. Hitler was now master of the Continent. Churchill summed up the situation when he addressed the House of Commons on 18 June:

      "What General Weygand has called the Battle of France is over: the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink

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