Battle of Britain The battle of Britain was sometimes referred to as the greatest war of World War II. It started on July 10, 1940. It was the biggest air battle ever fought during the War. The leading commanders were Churchill for the British and Hitler for the Germans. To avoid the massive destruction from the Germans the British set up plans to protect and save lives. The Germans attacked Britain in two phases, the first being the Luftwaffe, German fighter planes bombed the inland air fields, and second phase, they blitzed London and other civilian centers.The British people knew war would come quickly, and they knew that because their country was small, the Germans could easily bomb it.They prepared for this by setting up a new device called ?radar.? Radar used radio waves to find out how far away certain objects like German fighter planes were located. The British also prepared by figuring out ways to save lives from the bombing raids they knew would come. The main way of doing this was evacuation, or moving large numbers of people out of the cities. Most of the people evacuated were kids from ages 0-15. Their moms and dads weren?t allowed to come along with them when they were evacuated to the countryside. Out in the country, the kids lived with host families, who took the kids in and gave them a place to sleep and food to eat.Some British kids were even evacuated out of the country. Many went to the United States and Canada (Internet 2.) By the middle of 1940, 1.25 million people had been evacuated from Britain?s big cities. Some people decided not to evacuate, though. To get away from the bombing, they slept in fields on the outskirts of the cities or in subway tunnels. Some people camped just outside London and could look over at the city and see the bombs exploding in their hometown. People in Portsmouth and Hull had buses that took civilians out to the countryside at night to sleep in fields and ditches. In the morning, they would get back in the bus and go back to their homes in the city, if they were lucky enough to have escaped bomb damage. German bombs destroyed much of London. They even managed to hit Buckingham Palace, where England?s king lives. The town of Clydebank had 12,000 homes at the beginning of the battle. At the end, only seven were left. The Germans kept dropping more and more bombs, hoping that the bombings would both destroy parts of Britain and, more importantly, make the British people want to give up. The big raids continued until May 1941. Smaller raids followed, but by this time, Hitler had turned his eyes west to the Soviet Union. In 1941, he started a fight with the Soviets and needed more of his planes to attack them. The British would continue to play an important role in the war after the Battle of Britain. Their nation would serve as the launching pad for the Allied invasion of Europe in 1944, and their harbors were needed to get supplies and men between there and America, but in 1940, the British gave their all to last out the fire that fell from the sky.The Germans moved in on the British air, the Royal Air Force (RAF) destroyed the German planes at such a crippling rate that the Germans were unable to replace bombers and fighters as fast as the British were shooting them down ( Internet 2.). Yet it was a total of only 2,500 Royal Air Force pilots that saved Britain from being bombed into submission--prompting Churchill's remark: 'Never have so many owed so much to so few."(Comptons Encycl.). The Germans lost about 600 bombers, and this loss turned the tide of battle. During most of the war the British were at a 2 to 1 scale for every plane for British that went down, they would destroy 2 of the Germans. Hitler called off Operation Sea Lion, his proposed naval invasion across the English Channel The second phase consist of the bombing and blitz of London and other cities. The blitz first occurred on September 7th. London was the main target and many battles were fought in the skies above it. The British retaliated by bombing Berlin. This made Hitler furious, so he staged large-scale attacks on British cities, and forgot the airfields. This enabled the R.A.F. to get back to full strength and shoot the bombers down in large numbers.The battle of Britain was a victory that ranked in importance with the defeat of the Spanish Armada. Its navy and its air force saved Britain from invasion. British and Commonwealth troops fought on the far-flung battlefields of this war, and British leaders played a strong role in the formation of the United Nations. Thus, the battle ranked as the biggest air battle fought. In the end the Britain and its Royal Air Force won the battle.
