Fighter Airfields And Radar Stations example essay topic

The Battle of Britain The Battle of Britain began to become intense on July 10, 1940, with German dive-bombers attacking convoys off the South and East coast of England and with raids on coastal towns from Dover to Plymouth. The RAF's seven hundred fighters faced four times that number of enemy fighters and bombers. Shipping losses increased but the real objective of destroying British fighters in combat was not achieved. At the end of the first week in August the RAF had lost ninety-six fighters and the Germans one hundred and ninety-two aircraft.

The second phase of the Battle began on the 8th of August, when the Luftwaffe intensified its attacks and also struck at fighter airfields and radar stations. A week later the Germans mounted their greatest effort in a series of attacks from Northumberland to Dorset, losing seventy-five aircraft to the RAF's thirty four. Pressure was maintained until August 18 but bad weather for the following five days gave RAF pilots a much-needed rest. Over the next two weeks, the third phase, the Luftwaffe continued its attacks on fighter airfields, with a daily average of a thousand or more aircraft taking part. The proportion of fighters to bombers was increased to 3 to 1 in the attacking German formations and the defending RAF squadrons had their most difficult period, losing two hundred and eighty-six fighters to the Luftwaffe's three hundred and eighty. This wearing down process was having a serious effect on Fighter Command and had the attacks on airfields continued the outcome of the Battle might have been very different.

Suddenly on the 7th of September the Germans switched their attacks to London itself, in both day and night raids, know as the "Blitz". On the 15th (now celebrated as Battle of Britain Day), over a thousand enemy aircraft were involved of which fifty-six were lost. It is interesting to note that the RAF claimed 185 aircraft destroyed but later research has reduced that number to 56. Throughout September London was the main target and many battles were fought in the skies above it. Hitler abandoned his invasion plans until further notice.

This was predicted by Goring's promise that the Luftwaffe could defeat Britain without any help from the Army or Navy. The air battles continued throughout October, by the 31st, was the official end of the Battle. Nearly 500 pilots and aircrew had been killed, 500 more were wounded and 915 aircraft were destroyed. The up till then undefeated Luftwaffe had been beaten and lost 1733 aircraft and crews in the process.

There are 2950 names on the official list of 'The Few'. Churchill made a speech on August 20th saying, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few". Over the course of June and July 1940, it became obvious that Britain was not going to lay down to the Luftwaffe. The Germans recognized that the destruction of the Royal Air Force had now become essential to the achievement of their strategic plans.

On 1 August 1940, Hitler issued his Fundamental Directive No 17 for the "Conduct of the Air and Sea War against England". The Luftwaffe was to use all means to overpower the Royal Air Force in the shortest time possible. Attacks were to be directed primarily at flying units, their ground installations, and their supply organization as well as the aircraft industry in order to "establish the necessary conditions for the final conquest of England". To try and achieve this aim, the Luftwaffe had to produce around 3,358 aircraft. Fighter Command was outnumbered more than 3: 1 overall.

RAF Spitfire fighter plane Single-Seat Fighter Production Germany Great Britain 1939 1,541 1,324 1940 1,870 4,283 1941 2,852 7,064 1942 4,542 9,849 1943 9,626 10,727 Hurricane Wastage During the Battle of France Hurricanes Returned 15% Abandoned 39% Destroyed In Air Combat 17% Los to Enemy 29% Luftwaffe Order of Battle -- August 1940 Establishment Strength Serviceability Bombers 1,569 1,481 998 Dive-bombers 348 327 261 Single-engine fighters 1,011 934 805 Twin-engine fighters 301 289 224 Reconnaissance 246 195 151 Ground attack 40 39 31 Coastal 94 93 80 Total 3,609 3,358 2,550 Fighter Command Order of Battle -- 11 August 1940 Establishment Strength Serviceability Hurricanes 723 721 656 Spitfires 366 374 334 Total 1,089 1,095 990 On Aug. 15 the RAF shot down half the German planes it engaged in combat that day. On the Aug. 17th Hitler delayed his invasion of Britain indefinitely. One of the most decorated of German fighter aces, Gunther Rail, later said, "The RAF had broken the Luftwaffe's back". The Germans had accomplished nothing and had lost their top pilots as well as 1,700 aircraft to Britain's 915.

"I think it would have been all over if the RAF had failed" says Ron Dick, retired RAF air vice marshal, "If the United Kingdom had been defeated in the Battle of Britain, the whole course of the war and the world in which we live would be a very different place". Dick grew up in southeast London, where his 9-year-old world collapsed as he saw the front of his house fall off, bombed by the Luftwaffe. "It felt like all the oxygen had been taken out of the air". He looked to the bare skies in that instant, saw Hurricanes engaging the German Luftwaffe and imagined himself as a pilot. That was the moment he decided to join the RAF. The airmen who fought over London were not much older than me.

"Young men felt you had to serve your country in your spare time" says David Young, who joined the RAF in 1937. Fighter pilot training was my "university". He says, "The corporals didn't just train us to be pilots. They trained us to be men".

When the unavoidable war broke out, David joined the 87th. He was considered old and seasoned at age 21, among colleagues often as young as 18. Young today serves as historian to the Battle of Britain Fighter Pilot Association. His father, an official in the British National Guard, knew that the wave of war without doubt would sweep over England. Either Young could be crushed by Hitler's wrath or join the RAF and fight to save his country.

"I knew if I didn't join I'd get called up anyway, so when the RAF offered me a commission I joined."I was briefed in July 1939 about my job and got on with it". Lack of training increased the dangers of battle. Young had never flown as a fighter pilot when he was assigned to operate a Hurricane. As the battle progressed, this situation became increasingly common. "Can you imagine, most of the kids were 18 and came out to battle when they had only eight hours on a Hurricane?"The English don't give in easily", he says. "When they bombed my mother in southwest London, "I thought, what right have these people with these big black crosses got to come and drop bombs on my mother?" Thoughts of his home, and a promise to his Welsh grandmother that "a lot of nice chaps" would "look after" her from the skies fueled an hatred that continued him in battle.

Fortunately for Britain, the development of radar in England had begun in the nick of time before the outbreak of war. As early as January 1935, Sir Robert Watson-Watt and Arnold F. (Skip) Wilkins had realized the possibility that radio waves might be useful in detecting the presence of aircraft. Yet between the start of development in 1935 and the declaration of war in 1939 there were a lot of problems that needed to be solved and a lot of kinks that needed to be worked out. The biggest problem that needed to be worked out by Watson-Watt and Wilkins was the design of the radar transmitters and receivers, the enlistment of manufacturers to produce them in secrecy, and the training of Royal Air Force personnel to operate them. Then came the construction of clusters of steel latticed towers, some as high as 360 ft, in a ring around the entire south and east coast of England and Scotland on which they could mount the separate radar antennas to transmit and receive. This would not be an easy task but the RAF knew that this kind of technology could be a huge advantage over Hitler and the Luftwaffe.

When completed they were to cover all the approaches from across the English Channel and the North Sea. By the time war was declared, 18 of these had been placed in operation, and by August 1940, approximately 47 were in service. Called Chain Home Stations, they could detect high flying aircraft at ranges up to 100 mi. The bearing of the aircraft was determined by comparing the way the echo was received by two aerials set up at right angles to each other and could be read off a calibrated dial, or goniometer, developed by Watson-Watt. The operator could read the range directly from the radarscope, and similarly judge the approximate size of the raid. Its height was determined by switching the dial to two aerials set at different heights above the ground from which an early electric calculator gave the height to the nearest 500 ft.

The Chain Home radars proved to be unable to detect low-flying aircraft because of severe ground interference, interfering with the reception. A second set of different transmitters was mounted on lower towers and called Chain Home Low. These towers were designed and installed to detect low-flying targets. The RAF had a problem distinguishing between radar signals from friendly aircraft and enemy aircraft. Designing, manufacturing, and installing identification equipment on all RAF aircraft, solved this problem.

These were transponders that sent a special signal to the radar receivers whenever triggered by the radar waves. Since the radar towers were in fixed positions on the coast facing outward across the Channel and the North Sea, there was the problem of how to track the airborne fighters from inland stations behind the radar to make sure they were on the proper vectors to complete an interception successfully. To help with this problem fighters were equipped with a device called "Pipsqueak" attached to their VHF radios. When it was turned on, it automatically emitted a distinctive radio signal for 15 seconds of every minute. Radio direction-finding stations on the ground could pick this up.

And, by automatic triangulation from two or more stations, the position of the fighters could be determined. Important as all of these inventions were, they would have been very little use if had not the RAF and the Air Ministry realized that they had to make all of these inventions into a workable operations system. This is where they had a great advantage over the Germans who had radar themselves well in advance of the British, but were not organized to use it effectively. The RAF at the time was organized in a number of different commands; they were the Fighter, Bomber and Coastal Commands. With the approach of war, Air Chief Marshall Sir Hugh Dowding was appointed to head Fighter Command with the responsibility of defending Britain from air attack. As early as May 1937, Dowding had designed the system the Fighter Command was to use in the defense of Britain.

His headquarters were located deeply underground at Bentley Priory, west of London. His force; were divided into four numbered groups, each commanded by an air vice marshall: Sir Quentin Brand for 10 Group in the Southwest, Sir Keith Park for 11 Group in the "hot corner" of the Southeast, Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory for 12 Group in central England and Richard Saul for 13 Group in the North and Scotland. Each group was subdivided into several sectors in which the various fighter squadrons were based. The system was devised to make the most of the radar information. Each radar station in the Chain Home and Chain Home Low ring around the coast was connected by direct telephone line to the Command Operations Center at Bentley Priory. Below ground, a filter room and the operations room collected the reports from each radar station, resolved discrepancies and inaccuracies as best they could, and plotted the course of each raid and that of each intercepting RAF flight on a huge map of England.

From a balcony looking down on the massive plotting table, officers decided which radar stations were to follow which raids and which squadrons were best situated to make an interception. Vertical tote boards were mounted on one of the walls of the room to give these officers a visual report of the state of readiness of the pilots and planes in each available squadron. As the plots progressed across the table they were combined with visual sightings of the Observer Corps on the ground, and passed immediately by telephone to similar Operations Rooms in each group and sector headquarters, which maintained their own plots. To intercept an air raid, headquarters would assign it to one or more sector headquarters that would scramble the fighters and give them vectors by voice radio to the point of interception. Throughout this women played key roles. They operated the radars on site (often during intense enemy raids to try to knock down the towers) and called in the ranges, bearings, altitudes and sizes of their targets to the command, group and sector operations rooms where their sister WAAF's did the plotting.

The code-breaking machine was also a valuable peace of equipment for the British, and it was also very top secret. The machine was kept so secret that even Dowding's secondary commanders did not even know about it. The machine enabled the British to intercept and break complex German codes, allowing them to estimate the Luftwaffe's intended targets and the number of aircraft that would carry out these tasks. In Conclusion The Battle of Britain was the finest hour for the British but the first defeat of the war for the Germans.

Though Germany was favored in the invasion the tables turned and Britain proved to be committed and determined in the defense of their country and it worked. Due to every innovative inventions and even more making them work to the best of their capabilities was tremendous in helping the British win the battle. The Battle of Britain ended up setting the stage for D-Day, the demise of the Reich, and the end of World War Two. To this day the Battle of Britain is the only strategic air battle fought purely between two air forces without aid from any other military branches. The expectation of a short war by Hitler meant that the Luftwaffe did not have the industrial resources nor the necessary logistics equipment in place to continue operations in the face of a determined enemy.

These shortcomings were never properly resolved. With the RAF having these important resources available, would ultimately seal the Luftwaffe's fate.