Remembering ‘The Few’: A Detailed Examination of the Battle of Britain

Ed Note: Today (Sept. 15) is the 85th anniversary of one of the most famous air battles in the brief history of aerial warfare. AvBrief subscriber Graeme Smith has been preparing a class for the “Circle of Scholars” program at Salve Regina University in Rhode Island in the autumn/fall of 2025 based on the following detailed research of the Battle of Britain. He kindly shared it with us for presentation to our audience.

85 years ago today, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill visited the Headquarters of 11 Group Fighter Command. The weather that Sunday had been fair and the German Luftwaffe had made two maximum effort attacks on London. 11 Group and its squadrons of defending fighters stood between the French coast and London. That evening Churchill recorded in his diary:

“Presently the red bulbs showed that the majority of our squadrons were engaged. In a little while, all our squadrons were fighting and some had already begun to return for fuel. All were in the air. The lower line of bulbs was out. There was not one squadron left in reserve.”

The bulbs Churchill referred to were on the “tote board.” Columns of lights on the wall of the control room that showed if squadrons were stood down, on standby, available, scrambled, enemy in sight, engaged, landing or rearming and refueling. At the height of the engagement— Keith Park, Commander of 11 Group—had nothing left. All the bulbs on the “Available” rows were out.

It is hard to explain to non-U.K. citizens just how much the Battle of Britain remains deep in the British cultural identity. Ask the British youth of today about World War I or II, Korea, Vietnam, even the more recent Falklands War and you will likely draw a blank. Mention the Battle of Britain and you are likely to get at least a flicker of recognition. You might even get “When the Spitfires beat the Germans.”

This because despite defense budget constraints, the current Royal Air Force maintains the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight. They fly Spitfires, Hurricanes and a Lancaster bomber. The RAF formation team The Red Arrows, flying modern BAe Hawk jets, fly a formation called “The Spitfire” representing the planform of the famous fighter. Both teams fly full seasons appearing at airshows, flypasts and national events. And though made in 1969, the movie The Battle of Britain still gets
regular outings. With no CGI, the producers scraped together the last airworthy British and German aircraft of the era and flew them behind a camera plane and accidentally kickstarted the modern warbird movement. It is hard to live in the U.K. today and not hear about the Battle of Britain a few times a year.

If you probe a U.K. citizen a little further and ask how the battle was won you might be told “radar and Spitfires and very few pilots.” The reality is a lot more nuanced.

The British started to develop Radio Direction Finding (later called Radar) in 1935. Early experiments turned into a chain of RDF stations looking outwards from the British coast. Under the leadership of Air Marshal Hugh Dowding, systems and procedures were developed to use the information provided by the radar sets. If the system was to succeed it needed to provide timely and accurate information about location, speed, height and course of aircraft. This would allow conservation of fighters on the ground till launched to intercept an incoming raid.

Early RDF could only operate looking out to sea. It could not “see” behind its back into the ground clutter inland. The system was complimented with “Huff-Duff”—high-frequency direction finding by triangulating on aircraft transmissions. An early “transponder” fitted to British aircraft was called Pipsqueak. Using one of the spare channels on the aircraft VHF transceiver it transmitted a 1-kHz tone for 14 seconds in every minute. This allowed the ground stations to discriminate friend from foe. The pilot could not use his radio during these 14 seconds. Though not a true radar modulator like a modern aircraft transponder it was an early form of Identify Friend or Foe (IFF).

It was so secret and so important that it not fall into German hands to be copied that the control unit was under a red flap at the pilot’s side in the cockpit. If bailing out the pilot was expected to lift the red flap—which discharged two shotgun cartridges into the unit, hopefully shredding it. Even when true radar transponders became available in early 1940—”Pipsqueak” was retained as it still worked inland in the RDF ground clutter.

Radio waves were augmented by the Observer Corps, later the Royal Observer Corps. Thousands of trained civilians spread across the country with rudimentary height measuring instruments, some training in aircraft identification and a telephone. They would call in what they could see above and around them. In effect they negated the ground clutter and allowed the system to “see” inland. Other signal intelligence came in the form of listening posts based along the south coast of England with Hallicrafter Ultra Skyrider radios that arrived from the USA “just in time.” German radio discipline was very poor and a lot of valuable information could be gleaned about immediate intentions just by listening in to the chatter.

Modern post-1986 research has also shown that the breaking of the German Enigma coding machine to produce ULTRA intelligence also played a strategic part in the battle. Though not broken fast enough for tactical decisions, sometimes the German orders of the day were broken early enough to give an overall sense of German intentions. More importantly, the reading of German orders for aircraft and pilot replacements as well as reports of unit readiness showed the declining state of the German Order of Battle. This gave British commanders confidence in their own strategy.

All through the late 1930s Hugh Dowding drilled and refined this “Dowding System” into the world’s first integrated air defense command and control system. Mock air raids would be launched against Britain by some RAF squadrons. Controllers, who were pilots themselves, would create plots of what was going on and then try and send other squadrons to intercept them. Lessons quickly learned included that the huge mass of information flowing into the system over thousands of telephone lines quickly overwhelmed it.

To help resolve this, information was timestamped in five-minute increments using repeating sequences of Red / Yellow / Blue to prefix the information. All information passed through a “filter room” at Fighter Command HQ at Bentley Priory where it was sorted and cleaned up. A master plot was laid out on a huge table map of the U.K. The five-minute timestamps meant the “refresh rate” of the system was approximately once every three to five minutes.

The “plot” was then transmitted by coded spoken voice over telephones down to four geographical group headquarters. Each group was also split into sectors with their own copy of the plot. The sectors controlled the squadrons on the fighter airfields. Groups were also responsible for ordering the raising of barrage balloons over cities, alerting anti-aircraft gun sites and the sounding of air raid alarms. From a raid first being detected to the launching of fighters was never more than seven minutes and if everything worked well could be as short as three minutes. This gave the defending fighters the precious time they needed to climb to 25,000 feet to have a chance of diving onto the raid. However, even in perfect detection and launch conditions, fighters in the extreme south closest to France often found they were still climbing into a raid as they intercepted it.

The phone lines that connected the whole system were both a blessing and a curse. The blessing was that they were immune to interception by the Germans. The curse was they were easily damaged by bombing. Through the course of the Battle, civilian post office engineers performed feats of enormous heroism splicing lines back together. They were often under fire or, in one notable case at Biggin Hill airfield, identifying and splicing back together 60-plus phone lines at the bottom of a bomb crater full of gasoline. In pre-war practice the system achieved successful interceptions about 50% of the time.

With Germany rearming throughout the 1930s, the other European nations hoped a policy of appeasement would prevent a repeat of the horrors of WWI trench warfare. In particular, the difference in birth rates between Germany and France meant the French understood they were falling behind the Germans when it came to their population of young men of fighting age. This led to their decision to create the Maginot Line of fortifications along their shared border in the hope this would deter the Germans.

After the debacle at Dunkirk over the winter of 1939 and 1940, the Germans set their sights on Britain with a massive air invasion. The German objective was to pressure the British to sue for peace. Failing that, to gain air superiority for an invasion. The available German aircraft outnumbered the Royal Air Force aircraft approximately 2,400 to 600.

There has been much revisionist history of the event, but it may be summarized as follows:

1. In late May the Germans started probing British defenses. Air raids on ports along the south coast and aircraft production factories.
2. In June they switched to bombing coastal shipping convoys in the English Channel and ports along the coast. The intent was to put further pressure on the British to come to terms or to destroy protecting British fighters defending the vital convoys of small ships that made up much of the British bulk transport system that supported her industries. During this period the much-vaunted Ju-87 “Stuka” dive bomber was shown to be horribly vulnerable in contested airspace and was withdrawn.
3. With no response from the British except a stiff defense and increasing British air raids into German territories at night on Aug. 13 the Germans switched to attacking RAF RDF stations and airfields to suppress RAF operations and destroy defending aircraft. During the rest of August, they came close gaining local air superiority south of London—but they never secured the airspace. This delayed their invasion.
   
   At the same time as the Battle taking place over Britain—the British mounted significant raids with their medium bomber force against concentrations of barges in French ports to be used for invasion. With no fighters to spare to escort them, the British raids routinely suffered a 30% loss rate. On one occasion 90% of a Bristol Blenheim squadron failed to return. A series of 15 raids was also carried out at night during July and August by the heavy bomber force against the Münster Aqueducts over the Dortmund-Ems canal. The aim was to drop the aqueducts into the canal and so “choke” a major route the Germans were using to bring barges to France. The RAF finally dropped the aqueducts into the canal with a raid on the night of Aug. 12-13.
4. Hitler had forbidden the bombing of London, still hoping the British would come to terms. On Aug. 24 a German bomber, lost over London at night, and under heavy anti-aircraft fire, jettisoned its bombs to get home. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered the bombing of Berlin in retaliation and a small British force managed to do so a few nights later. On Sept. 7, erroneously believing that the British were down to their “last 50 fighters,” the Germans switched away from airfields to attacking London by day and by night to try and panic the population and draw up the last of the RAF to destroy them. The British initially missed the switch of target from their airfields but on Sept. 15 the “Dowding System” excelled itself. During a morning and an afternoon raid, large German forces were harried by freshly reorganized 11 Group fighters as they crossed the south coast all the way to London. The bombers were stripped of their fighter cover as the German fighters ran short of fuel and had to disengage. Over London more of 11 Group and a large force from 12 Group to the north of London engaged the bombers with heavy losses to the attacking force. More than 30 squadrons comprising 350 fighters had engaged the Germans in long-running battles during the two raids. Severely demoralized German aircrews returned and their command’s will to continue the attacks by day faltered. Difficulty in replacing aircraft and pilot losses were becoming a significant factor. Sept. 15 was recognized as the turning point for the British and hence is celebrated as “Battle of Britain Day.”
5. In October the Germans were reduced to providing disproportionately large fighter cover with their remaining fighters for far fewer bombers. Some small tactical success was achieved with fighters fitted with single bombs slipping in under the radar cover at high speed—but it was of no real effect. By the end of October the Germans had “postponed” their invasion plans and stopped raiding by day. Effectively, the Battle of Britain was won.
6. The Germans called the campaign the Luftschlacht um England, which translates literally to “Air Battle for England.” They consider a sixth phase, which was the night bombing of British shipyards, factories and cities through the winter of 1940-41, which the British called “The Blitz.” It was too little, too late for the Germans. Luftwaffe redeployed to the east for the invasion of Russia in 1941 and the pressure was off the British.

Many factors influenced the battle on a daily level and contributed to the final result.

Factors for the British

1. A Command-and-Control System that successfully vectored small units of defending aircraft onto German aircraft on a continuous basis, meaning the Germans were harried throughout the process of a raid. Though it only worked about 50% of the time in prewar drills, during the Battle the system achieved amazing interception rates of 70-90% and on some days 100%. This gave the British an enormous edge, not having to fly wasteful standing patrols just in case a raid flew by.
2. The British also had enough of the robust modern Hurricane, the real winner for the British. It outnumbered the more famous Spitfire 3:2 most days. Despite losses, British production kept up with and even exceeded losses and the British finished the battle with more aircraft than they started with. Subcontracting production to small shops all over the country to boost production also accidentally offered resiliency when the Germans bombed aircraft factories. Production continued at the subcontractors. Civilian repair organizations also scoured the country to salvage damaged aircraft and three wrecks could usually be rebuilt into one operational fighter.
3. There was also the relative ease with which British fighter types could be flown allowing barely trained pilots to have a marginal chance of success. This contrasted with the difficulties of flying the Messerschmitt Bf109, Germany’s main fighter. It took careful ground handling and was a handful for rookie pilots.
4. The British devolved responsibility to Sector Offices and fighter leaders. This meant that outmoded and pre-war practiced tactics were quickly recognized as outdated. Fighter leaders changed tactics on their own responsibility.
5. The British also prioritized the recovery of shot down British pilots over their own territory, allowing them to fly again if
   they survived.
6. Dowding rotated pilots out of the combat area for a “rest,” even though desperately short of pilots in the front line. Experience was shared among other pilots to the rear. The practice also meant there was no area without some experienced pilots covering the coast, a fact that shocked the Germans on occasions when they probed from other directions. When raiding across the North Sea from Norway they were significantly rebuffed.
7. The Germans failed to realize the importance of RDF. They tried to initially knock out the stations and had some success. Built-in redundancy and designed overlaps in the coverage, portable emergency RDF sets and poor German evaluation of the true importance of the potential of the system meant they did not pursue this target, which remained operational.
8. The switch to bombing London allowed the British time to regroup and defend again in force.
9. The British adopted a “Back to the Wall” mentality. It took enormous courage for a 19-year-old rookie fighter pilot to dive into a formation of German fighters and bombers facing local odds of 25 to 1 against. But they did. Time and again. Often 5 times a day. Some pilots would taxi in and as the adrenaline wore off would literally fall asleep at the controls. Their ground crews had to shut down the engine and get them out the aircraft.

Factors Against the British

1. There was infighting within the command between Group commanders as to the best air tactics to oppose German attacks. 12 Group was expected to face the brunt of German bombing raids from across the North Sea. But when France fell the whole Dowding System had to pivot to face the south. The Southern 11 Group was severely mauled on many occasions and had infrastructure destroyed when 12 Group took too long to cover their airfields for them. 12 Group tactics that might have worked with the time afforded by detecting a raid over the North Sea failed when the demands of short notice point interception from the south were needed. Dowding’s failure to knock his commanders’ heads together to resolve this was a contributing factor to him being retired after the battle.
2. The desperate shortage of pilots meant that some new pilots were flying with only 10 hours (or less) training in how to fly their combat aircraft after 40-50 hours Ab Initio training. Often, they had no actual combat training. The losses amongst these pilots were significant.
3. The RAF of the period is often portrayed as a university elite. Post-war analysis shows this to not be the case. All British social classes were well represented as pilots. But the RAF did suffer from latent racism in the command. They failed to appreciate early enough the significant reinforcement offered by escaped French, Czech and Polish pilots and sidelined them to learn English far longer than they should have. When allowed to fight the Poles went on to have the highest kill ratio of any nationality during the entire battle.
4. The British failed to analyze German Spanish Civil War tactics and the tactics used against the RAF in France. The RAF flew outdated combat tactics in the early part of the battle.
5. Dowding fought to get armor plate behind the pilot seats and bulletproof glass on the front of their windshields and this undoubtedly saved lives. However, the lack of self-sealing fuel tanks and particularly poor tank placement and protection in the Hurricane meant too many pilots found themselves sitting in a pool of burning fuel after getting hit. When they opened their canopies to bail out, they found themselves sitting in an air blast/chimney/flamethrower that severely burned them and took them out the fight if they did manage to bail out.
6. Oxygen systems barely had enough oxygen for one mission and leaked condensation that froze all over the inside of the canopy at altitude, obscuring the pilot’s view.
7. At the outset of the Battle no provision had been made for rescuing shot down pilots from the English Channel. The RAF blue/green life preserver made it extraordinarily difficult for fishing boats and lifeboats to find pilots in the water and far too many were lost. Later yellow life preservers and high-speed launches improved the situation.

Factors For the Germans:

They had a well-trained and combat-hardened air force that had fought in Spain, Poland, France, Belgium and Holland. They also had relatively modern aircraft that were as good as or slightly better than RAF types at the start of the battle.

Factors Against the Germans

1. Though numerically superior on paper, after their campaigns in Norway and Western Europe the Luftwaffe had a 40% unserviceability rate at the start of the Battle. They never made up for it and their commanders failed to appreciate they were not as strong as they appeared on paper.
2. Aircraft production and pilot training failed to keep up with losses. By the end of the Battle the Luftwaffe had lost at least 20% of its strength.
3. The Luftwaffe was trained for close ground support operations. Longer range operations over water at the limits of fuel endurance (for the fighters) was not in their playbook and had to be developed as they operated.
4. A shortage of air-to-air radios meant often only leaders had radios and relied on hand signals to direct their charges. Lack of frequency coordination meant bombers and their fighter escort were often unable to communicate with each other.
5. Lost pilots were killed or became prisoners so, as the RAF’s experience increased, the Germans’ experience decreased.
6. Poor intelligence and overconfident evaluation of losses they were inflicting on the RAF led to mistaken strategic decisions.
7. The Germans failed to appreciate RDF worked and that the British Command and Control system was conserving limited British resources.
8. Single point, hierarchical management was implemented by the Luftwaffe leader Hermann Goering. He ordered strategic and tactical changes, often at odds with the realities of combat in the field.
9. Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to switch bombing to London and away from RAF infrastructure when it was on the point of breaking. After switching to London, German fighter aircraft were operating at extreme range and had precious little spare stores for prolonged fighting, leaving their bombing force unprotected as it was attacked by husbanded British fighters.
10. The Germans had morale problem. German pilots started to suffer from “Kanalkrankheit” (Channel sickness), essentially combat fatigue from rarely being rested. They routinely carried pistols in case they were wounded and likely to crash in the English Channel and drown, a real fear for them. In September and October there was a significant uptick in suicides with 79 pilots attempting or succeeding. Principal reasons were combat fatigue or feelings of shame that they had not accomplished what they had set out to do.

By the end of September the Germans paused their invasion plans. Oct. 31, when the Germans stopped raiding by day, is the “official” end of the Battle in the RAF Diary.

The Battle was not quite the gentlemanly “Knights of the Air” affair portrayed in post-war accounts and most movies. There were some instances of German pilots shooting at British pilots in their parachutes. Likewise, Dowding had no compunction about ordering British pilots to sink German rescue buoys located in the English Channel and shoot down their air/sea rescue aircraft, both conspicuously marked with Red Crosses. Technically the pre-war Hague convention didn’t cover the point and the Luftwaffe were suspected of using their air/sea rescue planes for reconnaissance. More to the point, Dowding needed to reduce the German pilot count by any means possible to level the odds. The Germans complained in the international press. No one seemed to take any notice.

Sustained air warfare continued over Britain through the winter of 1940 / 41 as the Germans progressively bombed British cities, seaports and centers of industrial production by night, something that the RAF, initially without effective airborne RADAR or night fighters, could not yet counter. Nonetheless the Battle of Britain was won and is an example of how a carefully organized and well-briefed and led inferior force can fight a superior force to a standstill.

The Few

Sources vary as to precise numbers but a total of 2946 pilots are recognized as having flown at least one combat mission in the battle between July 10 and Oct. 31. They were not all British. Countries of the British Empire sent pilots, principally Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Those who escaped from Europe fought. Some neutral Irish decided not to remain neutral. There are known to have been 11 Americans who risked the loss of their citizenship to fight. Modern research that has suggested that some of the “Canadians” might not have been so Canadian either!

537 pilots died in combat or from wounds received. 200+ pilots were severely burned when bailing out their aircraft. 791 of the pilots who fought in the Battle died serving during the rest of WWII. In 1945 at the end of WWII about half the pilots who fought in the battle survived the war. John “Paddy” Hemingway, the last surviving pilot of the Battle of Britain, passed away peacefully on 17 March 2025 at the age of 105.

After one of the worst days of German raiding in August with airfields in tatters, Winston Churchill, the U.K.’s wartime Prime Minister, offered:
”Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”

There is not one of “The Few” who would not also have added the aircraft factory workers, delivery pilots (some women), signal intelligence, radar, observer corps, aircraft fitters, lifeboatmen and fishermen, telephone engineers, and the civilians who “took it” while the pilots were up there trying to “give it out.”

This story has been developed from a class the author is presenting to the “Circle of Scholars” program at Salve Regina University in Rhode Island in the autumn/fall of 2025

Bibliography

Battle of Britain: The Experience
A Short Bibliography

Wartime publications:

Pilot Notes – General
Royal Air Force 4^th Edition – AP2095

Technical Manual – Air Navigation
War Department (UK) 1940 TM 1-205

Instruments – Repair, Overhaul, Testing and Calibration of Aircraft and Aero-Engine Instruments
Pitman and Sons 4^th Edition 1941
R W Sloley

Reading

There are small hundreds of books about the battle written between the 1940s and 70s. Most relate the same timeline with slightly different details. A well-researched representative example:

Battle Over Britain: A history of the German air assaults on Great Britain, 1917-18 and July-December 1940, and the development of Britain’s air defenses between the World Wars
Doubleday and Company 1969, ISBN 978-0901928009
Francis K. Mason

More modern viewpoints with access to material that was classified prior to the 1970s and that have a more academic viewpoint:

The Most Dangerous Enemy: An Illustrated History of the Battle of Britain
Zenith Press July 4, 2010 Edition ISBN 978-0760339367
Stephen Bungay
A modern interpretation of archive material and probably the best analysis of the resource management that allowed the RAF to fight the Luftwaffe to a standstill.

Eagle Days – Life and Death for the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain
Head of Zeus 2025, ISBN 978-1804549995
Dr Victoria Taylor
A modern analysis of Luftwaffe combatants’ experiences and review of how it affected operations.

Pilot Accounts or Biography

Again there are hundreds to choose from. These give a flavor:

Scramble
Amberly Publishing 2015, ISBN 978 1445649511
Tom Neil

His account of being a new 19-year-old pilot at the start of the battle. Also includes his account of his time defending Malta in the Mediterranean later in the war. Almost a repeat of the Battle of Britain in a different location.

Spitfire! The Experiences of a Fighter Pilot 
Originally 1942
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform 2016 Edition ISBN-13‏: ‎978-1539492481
B. J. Ellan (pen name of Brian Lane)

One of the few contemporaneous accounts of the Battle published during the war and subject to minimal wartime censorship. Lane went MIA over the North Sea in December 1942.

Fighter Pilot
Amberly Books 2015 ISBN – 978-1445646114
Helen Doe
Helen’s father Bob—aged 20—was the third most successful British pilot in the battle with 14 kills. His subsequent agonies and wartime operations with undiagnosed PTSD (as it is now understood) are discussed.

The First and The Last
Champlin Fighter Museum 1987 ISBN -‎ 978-0912173108
Adolph Galland
Covers Galland’s Luftwaffe career from the Spanish Civil War through 1945 including the Battle. It conveys a sense of “Knights of the Air” rising above politics. Which in Galland’s case is unlikely. Nonetheless it is one of the few accounts from the German perspective and technically is of merit.

Cinema

Battle of Britain
United Artists 1969

Documents the events of the Battle of Britain, the war for aerial supremacy between the German Luftwaffe and the defending Royal Air Force waged over British skies during summer of 1940. The film endeavored to be a generally accurate account of the Battle of Britain and used actual aircraft from the period. With no CGI in 1969, real aircraft were flown behind a camera plane flying tactics similar to the actual battle. The film is considered a bit rambling—that was the nature of the actual battle. The saving and restoration of the aircraft for the movie started the modern warbird preservation movement worldwide.

The Blu-Ray release has the most accurate subtitle translations of the German. Earlier DVDs less so!

Dunkirk
Ealing Studios 1958 (U.K. version and not the “cut” version for the U.S. market).

A dramatization of the British Expeditionary Force’s 1940 retreat to the beaches of France and the extraordinary seaborne evacuation. Of value as it uses prototypical equipment and many of the actors took part in the actual events. 

Why We Fight #4 – The Battle of Britain
U.S. War Department Special Service Division and the Corp of Signals – 1942
Director: Frank Capra, Anthony Veiller. 

An official World War II U.S. government account of Great Britain’s stand against the Nazi war machine after the Dunkirk evacuation. While of a propaganda nature—the footage used is from the actual battle and the U.K. during the period. Thus of interest from a visual viewpoint.

Can be viewed on YouTube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V74GV98xpoA

Battle of Britain – Making of a Film
Pan Books – 1969 – ISBN 330023578
Leonard Mosley

Account of the making of the 1969 film and the difficulties and adaptions made to meet available resources. For context it includes vignette references to the actual events.