Home Guard
Office workers, truck drivers, bricklayers.
All able men called to duty. No kids.
The war suddenly becomes one of
defending your own home.
Royal Navy on station.
So long as there are British planes flying over
the Channel there will be ships of the Royal Navy
sending Hitler's triumphant army into the drink.
Guaranteed.
Democracy's last stand in Europe.
The first desperate weeks of June was a time of
improvisation by the British army. Make do with
what you have to protect England from invading
Nazis. With time the army becomes more mobile,
more efficient in their plans of crushing a German
assault on the beach. Churchill and his generals
know Germany's forces have no idea what it takes
to succeed in an amphibious landing. If Hitler is
reckless enough to try a Channel invasion,
Churchill is confident of victory.
Hitler's inner circle.
Generals close enough to Hitler to know his plans
for Britain's defeat have concluded the exercise
is a bluff. Germany does not have the fleet of
vessels it would take to ferry and supply a large
invasion army. In a couple months the weather
will turn bad. There isn't time to train the troops
to execute this complex and risky assault.
So it turns out the Luftwaffe, Hitler's air force,
is the only tool available to force his will upon
Churchill and England.
Dowding's state of the art System.
The Germans knew of radar. They just didn't appreciate
how decisive its use could be. Why would they?
Their plans were aggressive - all about taking land
from others. Radar has to do with defense.
Here's how Dowding's system dealt with a typical
scenario.
Once a German bomber is detected by radar
it has twenty minutes to make it to its target.
An RAF fighter then has sixteen minutes to
intercept the raiding party.
That leaves four minutes for the people
manning this defense system to decide the
proper response for the attack.
Spitfire
As good as anything the German's had, meaning
the Messerschmidt 109. They mixed it up daily
over the Channel and across the southern English
countryside. During the course of the Battle of Britain
there were about twenty-five Luftwaffe aircraft falling
out of the sky each day onto the rural landscape.
It made for poor morale among Luftwaffe flyers.
* * * * *
OVER EASY
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