Battle of Britain

A young RAF pilot rushes towards his spitfire after the signal to scramble to intercept the Luftwaffe over the skies of southern Britain . After the German blitzkrieg had conquered Belgium, Holland and France and had forced the British troops out of Europe with the rescue of 330,000 men from the beaches of Dunkirk, Britain was next to be invaded by Hitler's Germany.

Codenamed Operation Sealion by Hitler, the plan to invade Britain involved firstly the defeat of the RAF before any landings by the army could take place, and so the Battle of Britain started in the summer of 1940.

British civilians witnessed dogfights high in the sky between the RAF and the Luftwaffe throughout the summer as they fought for air superiority. The RAF were helped greatly by their new secret weapon, RADAR. This struggle in the skies above Britain lingered on until October, when the German High Command finally decided that daylight attacks were too costly switching to mainly night bombing raids on British cities. The invasion plans of Britain were eventually abandoned and Hitler set his sights on the invasion of Russia .

The British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, summed up the importance of the victory gained by the RAF in his famous speech, ‘Never in the field of conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.'