Turning points: the Battle of Britain

Heinkel 111s

For my third Turning Points talk for ABC New England radio, I chose a topic I ought to know something about: the Battle of Britain! In some ways it's an obvious choice, and not only for the obvious reason; there are few years in history as dramatic as 1940, and Hitler's conquest of Britain has long been a favoured topic for wargames and alternate histories. But in other ways it's not obvious, because I'm of the school of thought which argues that the Luftwaffe never really had much chance of defeating the RAF, and that even if it did then the Kriegsmarine had even less chance against the Royal Navy, and that whatever remnants of the Wehrmacht managed to get ashore after all that would not have got very far against the British Army. So how can I claim the Battle of Britain was a turning point? Well, have a listen...

Image source: Wikimedia.

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3 thoughts on “Turning points: the Battle of Britain

  1. Very good effort, Brett! Salient points, caveats, current historical views and context all in a tight time-span. If only it had Moar Zepp, but otherwise great.

  2. Post author

    Cheers, Errol and JDK! I did think about discussing Graf Zeppelin's prewar ELINT missions against the nascent RDF network... but figured there was just enough aircrafty stuff in this one to scrape by!

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