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, Nazi Germany 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 Royal Air Force (RAF) pilots who fought against the German

Luftwaffe 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

numbers/no corrections)

10

Organization

• introduction (clearly states the body paragraph arguments/clearly states

thesis)

• logical development of thesis (all body paragraphs support thesis

throughout essay)

• conclusion (summarizes paper/restates thesis/meets minimum-maximum

essay length requirements)

10

Analysis

• factual/historical accuracy

• selection and application of data (no bias/hearsay evidence)

• depth of analysis (goes beyond simple description/no

generalizations/analysis supported with evidence)

• develop proof of thesis/force of argument or interpretation (no indications

of uncertainty – “probably”)

20

Writing Skills

• paragraphing (sentences arranged in logically organized paragraphs)

• sentence structure (no evidence of disjointed, awkward, fragmentary

sentences; compound sentences developed)

• spelling and grammar (no personal pronouns/proofread/error free/proper

punctuation)

• writing style (ideas flow smoothly sentence to sentence, paragraph to

paragraph)

10

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

August 1st Hitler decreed the Battle of Britain with the command "The German Air Force is to overcome the British Air Force with all means at its disposal, and as soon as possible."

August 13th "Eagle Day". The Luftwaffe launched its offensive against Britain, with 1,485 sorties. The Germans lost 45 'planes and the RAF 13.

August 15th A day of intense attacks. The Luftwaffe launched a total of 1,790 sorties and lose 75 'planes. The RAF lost 34.

August 17th The Germans established an 'operational area' around Britain. In it, any 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.

September 15th The RAF claimed to have shot down 183 German 'planes - a figure later 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

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 RAF Luftwaffe

July (from10th) 90 165

August 399 612

September 416 554

October 182 321

Total 1087 1652

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

109

Fighter 357 mph 2 x 7.9 mm machine guns

1 x 20 mm cannon Messerschmitt

110

Fighter* 349 mph 2 x 20 mm cannon

4 x 7.9 mm machine guns

1 x 7.9 mm free mounted machine gun Junkers 87

(Stuka) Bomber 217 mph 1 x 1,,102 lbs. bomb

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.