![]() ![]() The Spitfire was fast, sleek and very agile – but it was outnumbered two to one by another fighter, one often ignored in the popular retelling of the battle. The aircraft defending London that day were spearheaded by the Supermarine Spitfire, an iconic single-seat fighter plane which had only entered service a few months before the start of World War Two. The record-breaking jet which haunts a country.The last time a force this powerful had threatened England was the Spanish Armada, 500 years before. It was so large – nearly 1,100 planes – that it covered 800 square miles (2,072 sq km). From airfields across France, wave after wave of German bombers and fighters took to the air, forming up into one enormous formation over the English Channel. It started on 7 September.ĭuring the early afternoon, British radar observers hunched over their screens started seeing something massive taking shape. The Luftwaffe decided to throw every available aircraft into the offensive. German invasion barges were waiting on the other side of the channel for just such a moment.īut then Germans then turned their attention – mystifyingly – to Britain’s cities, hoping that indiscriminate bombing would cause widespread panic and force Britain to surrender. If the attacks had carried on with the same intensity for a few more weeks, the RAF might have collapsed completely. A particularly brutal offensive against its airfields and the factories producing its fighter planes over the weeks before had left it dangerously close to running out of both planes and pilots. Already severely depleted from the heavy fighting during the invasion of France, the RAF had buckled several times under the strain. Over the previous three months, the aircraft of Germany’s Luftwaffe had tried to break the resistance of Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF). On 7 September 1940, southern England suffered what was then the biggest air raid the world had ever seen. ![]()
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