Unit 4 Lesson 4: The Battle of Britain: A Document Analysis

The Battle of Britain was a key turning point in the early part of the Second World War. If Britain failed to hold, would have controlled all of Europe and there would be not have been a safe place for the Allied armies to launch their offensive on Western Europe in 1944. It is because of the importance of this key point in World War II that you will be conducting a document analysis to determine why the British were able to hold back the German aerial attack thus thwarting the planned invasion of Britain. The Question: At the end of the Battle of Britain, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, in one of his famous speeches, declared that, “The gratitude of every home in our island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

The “few” was the name given to the (RAF) pilots who fought against the German in the Battle of Britain. Using the background information and the following thirteen documents explain whether you believe Churchill’s statement was an accurate analysis of the defeat of Germany during the Battle of Britain. Be sure to indicate where you found the evidence to support your thesis. (Documents 1, 2, 3 etc. – cite as D1, D2, D3, etc.) Try to use as many of the documents as possible.

The Response: Write a 1500-word formal essay that answers the above question. Your 1500-word essay needs to use the following format:

• Size 12 Times New Roman font • Double spaced • Have numbered pages • First sentence is indented • Be written in formal essay style which means no personal pronouns such as “I” or “me.” • Provided below is a mockup of how I would like you to format the first page of your essay. Imagine the text box is a full sheet of paper

Sally Smith CHY 4U Mr. Booker September 19th, 2018

Title of Essay

______

______

______

Please note that the 1500-word count is an approximation. When a word count is given it is often done to provide the student with a sense of how much detail and elaboration they need to provide. In short it prevents students from writing too much or too little. The general rule is that the writer can be under or be over the word count by 10%. I don’t count words and use this to give you a sense of how much explanation you need to provide.

Referencing The in-text referencing method that you will be using for this essay is a method that is sometimes encountered on document based exams in university. In these types of exams, documents are included in the exam but instead of using a formal referencing style, like the Chicago-Turabian Style that was used in your first essay of this course, an exam specific method is provided. For this assignment the method of referencing that you are expected to use is as follows:

• Each Background Document has been assigned a number. When you cite from these background sources of information you will format your citation as follows (B1). The B stands for Background Documents and the number is which of the Background Documents you are citing. • The other category of information provided is referred to as Documents. When you cite from these documents you will format your citation as follows: (D1). The D stands for Document and the number is which of the Documents you are citing.

In both above examples, the citation will be placed at the end of the sentence where the information was being used.

Example:

August 1940 was the costliest point of the Battle of Britain as one thousand and eleven aircraft were destroyed. (D3)

Evaluation (worth 15% of the culminating unit mark)

Criteria Mark Format • title page (title/student name/course code/teacher/date submitted) • proper referencing has been used in the essay • typography (neatly typed, 12 pitch Times New Roman/dbl. Spaced/ page 10 numbers/no corrections)

Organization • introduction (clearly states the body paragraph arguments/clearly states thesis) • logical development of thesis (all body paragraphs support thesis 10 throughout essay) • conclusion (summarizes paper/restates thesis/meets minimum-maximum essay length requirements)

Analysis • factual/historical accuracy • selection and application of data (no bias/hearsay evidence) • depth of analysis (goes beyond simple description/no 20 generalizations/analysis supported with evidence) • develop proof of thesis/force of argument or interpretation (no indications of uncertainty – “probably”)

Writing Skills • paragraphing (sentences arranged in logically organized paragraphs) • sentence structure (no evidence of disjointed, awkward, fragmentary sentences; compound sentences developed) 10 • spelling and grammar (no personal pronouns/proofread/error free/proper punctuation) • writing style (ideas flow smoothly sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph)

Due Date: This assignment is due on Wednesday January 23, 2019 @ 11:59 p.m. EST. Please submit in the appropriate section of the Unit 4 Dropbox.

Background Documents (B):

Background Document # 1

Battle of Britain: Timeline of Events

1940 Battle of Britain Hitler decreed the Battle of Britain with the command "The German Air August 1st Force is to overcome the British Air Force with all means at its disposal, and as soon as possible." "Eagle Day". The Luftwaffe launched its offensive against Britain, with August 13th 1,485 sorties. The Germans lost 45 'planes and the RAF 13. A day of intense attacks. The Luftwaffe launched a total of 1,790 sorties August 15th and lose 75 'planes. The RAF lost 34. The Germans established an 'operational area' around Britain. In it, any August 17th ship was to be sunk without warning. August 25th The RAF launched its first raid on Berlin. September 7th Some 300 German bombers, escorted by 600 fighters, attack London. The RAF claimed to have shot down 183 German 'planes - a figure later September 15th found to be inflated. September 17th Hitler postponed "Operation Sealion" until further notice. October 12th "Operation Sealion" postponed until 1941.

Background Document # 2

Excerpt from Winston Churchill’s Speech to the House of Commons – August 20, 1940 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ynq9Aikz36Q

Background Document # 3

World War II in Colour: Britain at Bay (from 00:00 to 21:00) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdS10UfMNuA

Background Document # 4

“The Battle of Britain” from The Second World War (John Keegan)(PDF)

Documents (D):

Document Document Description # 1 Fuhrer Directives # 16 & 17 2 Map of Battle of Britain 3 Total Losses of Aircraft in the Battle of Britain 4 Pilot Losses in the Battle of Britain 5 Production of Aircraft Factories during Battle of Britain 6 Principal Planes used by RAF and Luftwaffe/Reflection of Douglas Bader/Reflection of Alan Deer 7 Basil Embry ~ Reflection of the Battle of Britain 8 Winston Churchill Reflection of the Battle of Britain 9 Manchester Guardian ~ Article 10 RAF aces of Battle of Britain/A Pilot’s Reflection of the Battle of Britain 11 Civilians take shelter in Elephant and Castle Underground Station in south London during an air raid in November 1940. 12 Troops of 9th Battalion, The Hampshire Regiment, clear bomb damage in Hull sustained during the Blitz. 13 Picture of a young boy placing a Union flag into the remains of his home, which was destroyed in an air raid on London in 1940.

Document 1

Adolf Hitler, Directive No. 16 (16th July, 1940)

As England, despite her hopeless military situation, still shows no sign of willingness to come to terms, I have decided to prepare, and if necessary to carry out, a landing operation against her. The aim of this operation is to eliminate the English motherland as a base from which war against Germany can be continued and, if necessary, to occupy completely.

Adolf Hitler, Directive No. 17 (1st August, 1940)

The Luftwaffe will use all the forces at its disposal to destroy the British air force as quickly as possible. August 5th is the first day on which this intensified air war may begin, but the exact date is to be left to the Luftwaffe and will depend on how soon its preparations are complete, and on the weather situation. Document 2

Document 3 Total losses of aircraft in the Battle of Britain

Month RAF Luftwaffe

July (from10th) 90 165

August 399 612

September 416 554

October 182 321

Total 1087 1652

Document 4 Battle of Britain Pilot Losses – August

Pilots Killed Pilots Missing Pilots Wounded Royal Air Force 139 7 110 Luftwaffe 193 302 69

Document 5

Production of aircraft factories during the Battle of Britain

Month Great Britain Germany

June 446 164

July 496 220

August 476 173

September 467 218

October 469 200

Total 2354 975 Document 6

Principal planes used by Great Britain

Plane Type Maximum speed Weapons

Spitfire Fighter 361 mph 8 x .303 machine guns

Hurricane Fighter 328 mph 8 x .303 machine guns

Principle planes used by Germany

Plane Type Maximum speed Weapons Messerschmitt Fighter 357 mph 2 x 7.9 mm machine guns

109 1 x 20 mm cannon Messerschmitt Fighter* 349 mph 2 x 20 mm cannon

110 4 x 7.9 mm machine guns 1 x 7.9 mm free mounted machine gun Junkers 87 Bomber 217 mph 1 x 1,,102 lbs. bomb (Stuka) 4 x 110 lbs. bombs

Junkers 88 Bomber 292 mph 5,510 lbs. of bombs

Heinkel 111 Bomber 258 mph 5,510 lbs. of bombs

Dornier 17 Bomber 270 mph 2,210 lbs. of bombs Dornier 215 Bomber 311 mph 2,215 lbs. of bombs

Douglas Bader compared the performance of the Spitfire, Hurricane and the Messerschmitt Bf109 in his autobiography, Fight for the Sky (1974)

The advantage of the Spitfire and the Hurricane in individual combat with the Me 109 was that both British aeroplanes could out-turn the German one which was why, when surprised from behind, the enemy's defensive manoeuvre was to push the stick forward into a dive which, in 1940, we could not follow. If we were surprised, our defence was to turn quickly and keep turning because the Me 109's radius of turn was bigger than that of a Spitfire or Hurricane and thus he could not keep you in his sights. If he was inexperienced enough to try, he would find the British fighter behind him after a couple of circuits.

After being involved in a dogfight with a German pilot Alan Deere wrote a report on the relative merits of the Spitfire, Hawker Hurricane, and Messerschmitt Bf109.

In my written report on the combat I stated that in my opinion the Spitfire was superior overall to the Me 109, except in the initial climb and dive; however this was an opinion contrary to the belief of the so- called experts. Their judgement was of course based on intelligence assessments and the performance of the 109 in combat with the Hurricane in France. In fact, the Hurricane, though vastly more manoeuvrable than either the Spitfire or the Me 109, was so sadly lacking in speed and rate of climb, that its too-short combat experience against the 109 was not a valid yardstick for comparison. The Spitfire, however, possessed these two attributes to such a degree that, coupled with a better rate of turn than the Me 109, it had the edge overall in combat. There may have been scepticism by some about my claim for the Spitfire, but I had no doubts on the score; nor did my fellow pilots in 54 Squadron. Later events, particularly in the Battle of Britain, were to prove me right. Document 7

Basil Embry, a sector commander in Flight Command, wrote about the Battle of Britain in his autobiography, Mission Completed (1956).

Active air defence by day or night is a question of identifying the enemy, tracking his flight path and then intercepting and destroying him. At the start of the Battle of Britain we could identify and track the enemy by radar as far as the coast, but once he crossed it we had to depend entirely on visual observation reports from the Royal Observer Corps. Under clear-day conditions the track reports were accurate, but at night and in bad weather by day when cloud obscured visual observation, tracking and height finding were bound to be inaccurate and interception under such conditions a matter of luck. Guns and searchlights depended on sound locators to indicate the enemy's height and position. With slow-flying aeroplanes at medium altitude, this worked reasonably well; but the higher-performance aircraft of 1939-40 meant there was little or no possibility of successful engagement with guns at heights of 20,000 feet and above.

Document 8

Winston Churchill, The Second World War (1950)

The plans for the air defence of Great Britain had as early as the autumn of 1937 been rewritten round the assumption that the promises made by our scientists for the still unproven Radar would be kept. The first five stations of the coastal Radar chain, the five guarding the Thames estuary, had watched Mr. Chamberlain's aeroplane go and come on its peace missions of September 1938. Eighteen stations from Dundee to Portsmouth began in the spring of 1939 a twenty-four- hour watch, not to be interrupted in the next six years. These stations were the watchdogs of the air-raid warning service; they spared us alike grave losses in war production and intolerable burdens on our Civil Defence workers. They spared the anti-aircraft gun crews needless and tiring hours at action stations.

They saved us from the exhaustion of man and machine that would have doomed our matchless but slender fighter force had it been compelled to maintain standing patrols. They could not give the accuracy required for night-time interception, but they enabled the day fighters to await their prey at the most favourable altitudes and aspects for attack. In their decisive contribution to victory in the day battles they were supported and supplemented by other stations of new technical design, which gave warning - all too brief, but invaluable - of the approach of the low fliers.

Document 9

The Manchester Guardian (9th September, 1940)

Children sleeping in perambulators and mothers with babies in their arms were killed when a bomb exploded on a crowded shelter in an East London district during Saturday night's raids. By what is described as "a million-to-one chance" the bomb fell directly on to a ventilator shaft measuring only about three feet by one foot.

It was the only vulnerable place in a powerfully protected underground shelter accommodating over 1,000 people. The rest of the roof is well protected by three feet of brickwork, earth, and other defences, but over the ventilator shaft there were only corrugated iron sheets.

The bomb fell just as scores of families were settling down in the shelter to sleep there for the night. Three or four roof-support pillars were torn down and about fourteen people were killed and some forty injured. In one family three children were killed, but their parents escaped.

Although explosions could be heard in all directions and the scene was illuminated by the glow of the East End fires civil defence workers laboured fearlessly among the wreckage seeking the wounded, carrying them to safer places, and attending to their wounds before the ambulances arrived.

Document 10

• Of 2,332 Allied pilots who flew fighters in the Battle, 38.85 percent could claim some success in terms of enemy aircraft shot down. • The number of pilots claiming more than one victim amounted to no more than 15 per cent of the total RAF pilots involved. • To be proclaimed an "ace" a pilot had to have five confirmed victories. During the Battle of Britain just 188 RAF pilots achieved that distinction - eight per cent of the total involved.

In the summer of 1940, twenty-one-year-old Pilot Officer John Beard was a member of a squadron of Hurricanes based near London. Waiting on the airfield while his plane is rearmed and refueled, Beard receives word of a large German attack force making its way up the Thames River towards London. The afternoon sun illuminates a cloudless blue sky as Beard and his fellow pilots lift their planes off the grass airstrip and climb to meet the enemy. The defenders level off at 15,000 feet and wait for the attackers to appear:

"Minutes went by. Green fields and roads were now beneath us. I scanned the sky and the horizon for the first glimpse of the Germans. A new vector came through on the R.T. [radio telephone] and we swung round with the sun behind us. Swift on the heels of this I heard Yellow flight leader call through the earphones. I looked quickly toward Yellow's position, and there they were!

It was really a terrific sight and quite beautiful. First they seemed just a cloud of light as the sun caught the many glistening chromium parts of their engines, their windshields, and the spin of their airscrew discs. Then, as our squadron hurtled nearer, the details stood out. I could see the bright-yellow noses of Messerschmitt fighters sandwiching the bombers, and could even pick out some of the types. The sky seemed full of them, packed in layers thousands of feet deep. They came on steadily, wavering up and down along the horizon. 'Oh, golly,' I thought, 'golly, golly . . .'

And then any tension I had felt on the way suddenly left me. I was elated but very calm. I leaned over and switched on my reflector sight, flicked the catch on the gun button from 'Safe' to 'Fire,' and lowered my seat till the circle and dot on the reflector sight shone darkly red in front of my eyes.

The squadron leader's voice came through the earphones, giving tactical orders. We swung round in a great circle to attack on their beam-into the thick of them. Then, on the order, down we went. I took my hand from the throttle lever so as to get both hands on the stick, and my thumb played neatly across the gun button. You have to steady a fighter just as you have to steady a rifle before you fire it.

My Merlin [the airplane's engine] screamed as I went down in a steeply banked dive on to the tail of a forward line of Heinkels. I knew the air was full of aircraft flinging themselves about in all directions, but, hunched and snuggled down behind my sight, I was conscious only of the Heinkel I had picked out. As the angle of my dive increased, the enemy machine loomed larger in the sight field, heaved toward the red dot, and then he was there!

I had an instant's flash of amazement at the Heinkel proceeding so regularly on its way with a fighter on its tail. 'Why doesn't the fool move?' I thought, and actually caught myself flexing my muscles into the action I would have taken had I been he.

When he was square across the sight I pressed the button. There was a smooth trembling of my Hurricane as the eight-gun squirt shot out. I gave him a two-second burst and then another. Cordite fumes blew back into the cockpit, making an acrid mixture with the smell of hot oil and the air-compressors.

I saw my first burst go in and, just as I was on top of him and turning away, I noticed a red glow inside the bomber. I turned tightly into position again and now saw several short tongues of flame lick out along the fuselage. Then he went down in a spin, blanketed with smoke and with pieces flying off.

I left him plummeting down and, horsing back on my stick, climbed up again for more. The sky was clearing, but ahead toward London I saw a small, tight formation of bombers completely encircled by a ring of Messerschmitts. They were still heading north. As I raced forward, three flights of Spitfires came zooming up from beneath them in a sort of Prince-of -Wales's-feathers maneuver. They burst through upward and outward, their guns going all the time. They must have each got one, for an instant later I saw the most extraordinary sight of eight German bombers and fighters diving earthward together in flames.

I turned away again and streaked after some distant specks ahead. Diving down, I noticed that the running progress of the battle had brought me over London again. I could see the network of streets with the green space of Kensington Gardens, and I had an instant's glimpse of the Round Pond, where I sailed boats when I was a child. In that moment, and as I was rapidly overhauling the Germans ahead, a Dornier 17 sped right across my line of flight, closely pursued by a Hurricane. And behind the Hurricane came two Messerschmitts. He was too intent to have seen them and they had not seen me! They were coming slightly toward me. It was perfect. A kick at the rudder and I swung in toward them, thumbed the gun button, and let them have it. The first burst was placed just the right distance ahead of the leading Messerschmitt. He ran slap into it and he simply came to pieces in the air. His companion, with one of the speediest and most brilliant 'get-outs' I have ever seen, went right away in a half Immelmann turn. I missed him completely. He must almost have been hit by the pieces of the leader but he got away. I hand it to him. At that moment some instinct made me glance up at my rear-view mirror and spot two Messerschmitts closing in on my tail. Instantly I hauled back on the stick and streaked upward. And just in time. For as I flicked into the climb, I saw, the tracer streaks pass beneath me. As I turned I had a quick look round the "office" [cockpit]. My fuel reserve was running out and I had only about a second's supply of ammunition left. I was certainly in no condition to take on two Messerschrnitts. But they seemed no more eager than I was. Perhaps they were in the same position, for they turned away for home. I put my nose down and did likewise."

Document 11: Civilians take shelter in Elephant and Castle Underground Station in south London during an air raid in November 1940.

Document 12: Troops of 9th Battalion, The Hampshire Regiment, clear bomb damage in Hull sustained during the Blitz.

Document 13: Picture of a young boy placing a Union flag into the remains of his home, which was destroyed in an air raid on London in 1940.