This is Trent Park in North London -
today part of Middlesex University.
In the Battle of Britain, every single German pilot shot down over this country was brought here.
They were allowed to live here in some comfort,
completely unaware that every word they said was secretly bugged by British Intelligence.
Throughout the battle, these overheard conversations
were a direct line into what the Germans were thinking.
The transcripts survive.
And what these men said has completely changed MY mind
about what really happened in the Battle of Britain.
..That is what I am afraid of.
Reading through these transcripts, you realise that there were two sides to the story,
a one that has never been properly investigated.
Could it be that after all these years, there are still new things to be said about the Battle of Britain?
The story is a famous one.
Just a handful of pilots - all that lay between Britain and annihilation.
It's part of our national legend.
I want to show that it's more complex.
That the real story is richer, and even more extraordinary.
I absolutely love places like this, crammed full of jackets and guns, and bits of old aircraft.
And, of course, the machines themselves.
Even now, standing next to this real Spitfire
still gives me quite a thrill.
And I think it's that image of Spitfires and Hurricanes,
of The Few and of those huge battles over southern England in 1940
that encapsulates the Battle of Britain that I grew up with.
But it's only one part of the story.
This is the familiar story - Nazi Germany, a military colossus crushing all before it.
Amateurish Britain, on her knees, her army defeated.
Hitler's forces - superbly trained, highly efficient.
I don't want to debunk the Battle of Britain or dismiss the rousing words of Churchill.
'Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty,
'and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire
'and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years,
'men will still say,
'"This was their finest hour."'
It may have been our finest hour, but it extends beyond The Few.
The problem is that the myth misses so much of the detail.
Detail that reveals a quite different story.
The familiar picture is that by June 1940, Britain was isolated,
with Nazi and Fascist powers in control from the Arctic all the way to West Africa.
But was Britain really alone?
Even from the white cliffs above Dover, the Channel was a formidable obstacle.
If you're a German, and you're standing on the cliff tops over there
looking at the United Kingdom, then you forget that it's not just Britain that you're up against.
It's the British Empire and all their friends.
And you haven't got all the time in the world,
you certainly don't have all the resources in the world,
to continue this fight.
'Peter Caddick-Adams is a historian from the Defence Academy at Shrivenham.
'He's always believed that Britain's position in 1940 was not nearly so hopeless as is generally thought.'
One of the criticisms we can make of Hitler is that in the First World War he served as a corporal.
And he's a land man, he only thinks in terms of a land campaign.
And even then, only at the tactical level.
So his view of fighting a World War is purely in his own mind
in terms of the land battle at the tactical level.
He knows and understands nothing about maritime warfare
and he understands very little about aerial warfare.
He has advisors who will tell him - Goering, Raeder, whoever the top generals are.
They will tell him what he should be doing.
And so, when you come up against a campaign -
the invasion of England - that requires a large maritime element, that requires an aerial battle,
he's way out of his comfort zone.
And often people who are uncomfortable with a decision that they have to make,
that they have no personal expertise or experience of, they delay.
They fritter, while they sum up the options.
And that's exactly what's happening in the summer of 1940.
Saturday, July 6th.
After completing his stunning victory over France, Hitler paraded in triumph through Berlin.
TRANSLATION:
The soldiers were marching through the Brandenburg Gate
and everyone was cheering.
That was really something.
There was this victorious mood and everybody got swept up in it.
And when we turned on England, well, we thought, "We can do this!"
Hitler had most of Europe at his feet.
His power had never been greater.
Surely, he told himself, Britain would now do the sensible thing and sue for peace.
They came home victorious, and we young girls could finally go dancing again.
When the war started, dancing was prohibited.
And I lived for dancing.
And while Britain anxiously feared an invasion, Germany had relaxed.
Amidst jubilant scenes, total victory seemed just a formality.
If anything, it's the German nation that needs to be keeping an eye on the clock.
Because sooner or later, they will run out of time.
With all the other grand ideas they've got.
And they're in danger of a fleeting opportunity
to cross the Channel and go and defeat England, and then it will be gone.
'This wasn't the Germany famed for its efficiency.
'In fact, uncertainty was already compromising its effectiveness.
'Over here, the army may have been defeated, Europe may have fallen,
'but Britain still had crucial strengths.'
The Royal Navy was the biggest in the world, far eclipsing the size of the Kriegsmarine.
Britain also controlled a third of the world's merchant shipping.
And the contribution of the Little Ships did not stop at Dunkirk.
In the summer of 1940, far from being weak and isolated, Britain was a marine superpower.
For me, the Battle of Britain has always been about so much more
than just RAF Fighter Command against the Luftwaffe.
It's a giant clash of Great Britain against Germany, which involves a war on land, in the air and on sea.
That's why I've come here to Portsmouth, to see Steve Prince,
head of the Royal Navy's Historical Branch.
You've got great national determination,
particularly after Dunkirk.
But that's also buttressed by the wider maritime connected world that
the Germans, as a land power, have great difficulty in understanding.
So, you have all the Commonwealth forces who are here both in the RAF, obviously in the Battle of Britain,
budding Canadian, Australian and New Zealand forces who are available for anti-invasion work.
We think of the Small Ships as being involved at Dunkirk,
but many of the ships, often many of the same vessels,
are involved in this auxiliary patrol service, which is along the coast of the UK.
And while Fighter Command are operating very largely by day,
this patrol service are operating very largely by night.
Yeah, and I love the idea of these fishing crews in converted trawlers turned into minesweepers,
given a very small gun and a couple of machine guns,
and off you go. It's an amazing kind of ingenuity, isn't it? Just making it up on the spot a bit?
Yes, it's an improvisation that relies on Britain's very large - at the time - sea-faring community
that's available, and their willingness to serve.
And there was more to the RAF than Fighters.
There were Coastal and Bomber Commands.
The traditional view is that the early efforts of Bomber Command were ineffective.
The truth is that, from as early as mid-May,
they were already making daily strikes against Germany,
hitting its navy, industry and airfields.
My hometown, Kiel, was bombed in June 1940,
and they were 40 or 60 people dead.
As civilian.
So, we were prepared to do the same.
The material impact of Bomber Command's efforts may have been slight,
but the psychological impact - particularly on those in the Nazi High Command - was considerable.
Despite this, Hitler resisted calls to strike back at Britain's cities.
For the time being, his principal aim was to cut off
Britain's lifelines and starve her into submission.
This was the period known as Kanalkampf -
the fighting over the Channel.
By the middle of July, Luftwaffe attacks on British shipping were having an alarming effect.
500,000 tons of vital supplies had been sunk.
Hitler needed Britain out of the war, one way or the other.
If his victories in Europe weren't enough to persuade Britain to the peace table,
maybe the threat of starvation would.
Hitler had retreated to the Berghof - his house in Bavaria.
He was already eyeing the invasion of Russia, but needed Britain out of the way first.
And here he was receiving conflicting advice.
Hermann Goering, the Commander in Chief of the Luftwaffe, was optimistic.
He promised Hitler the RAF could be destroyed in just four clear days, paving the way to invasion.
But the Kriegsmarine, the German navy, was not so sure.
It maintained the best way to win the war was by choking off
the supply lines, and for this the U-boat was ideally suited.
Before the war, Germany had planned to build a vast navy, to include over 230 U-boats.
But this had been fantasy.
In the summer of 1940, no more than 14 were ever operational.
These alone were destroying vast amounts of shipping. Had they had 100, or even 50,
Hitler might well have prevailed.
There was a gulf between German plans and what could be realistically achieved.
The German navy had another terrifying weapon causing havoc in 1940.
Good to see you. Great seeing you. I've got something to show you. Fantastic.
'Like the U-boats, S-boats had enormous potential,
'which is why I've come to Cornwall to see one for myself.'
OK, James. Oh, wow! Look at that.
Welcome to S-130, the last surviving German Schnellboot of the Second World War.
And, as you can see, we're dealing with something here which is a monumental piece of engineering.
She can go at over 40 knots, that's over 50 mph.
In fact, so fast could this vessel go she actually has to slow down in order to fire a torpedo.
And because they've got a wooden hull, they can go over any magnetic minefield they choose?
Yeah, this thing is the equivalent of a kind of bespoke Rolls Royce.
This is a Savile Row suit in ship form.
And yet what's clear is that Hitler and the Kriegsmarine are missing a trick here, aren't they?
Because, what have we got? Three flotillas, a couple of dozen at max, aren't we?
Of course, the problems for the Germans is that
they're insisting on such high quality when it comes to the Schnellboot,
they don't have the capacity to put 50 boats in the water.
It takes a long time to build an S-boat. They just don't have the infrastructure.
Too much emphasis on quality, not enough on quantity, perhaps.
This was the strange paradox about the Germans in 1940.
They had the knowhow, the science.
What they lacked was the application of that science.
In contrast, Churchill knew exactly where Britain's priorities lay.
In May 1940, the Prime Minister put his good friend, the Canadian press baron Lord Beaverbrook,
in charge of aircraft production.
Beaverbrook ensured repaired and new aircraft were arriving at a rate never seen before.
His impact was immediate.
Beaverbrook's masterstroke was to concentrate production on just five types of aircraft -
three bombers and two fighters.
The Hurricane and The Spitfire.
The whole country was gripped by this sense of urgency.
And with the men in uniform, more and more it was the women who were doing the work.
16-year-old Joyce Reeves was working six days a week in an ammunition factory in Gosport.
You started on Cordite.
It was like spaghetti, only orange.
You turned yellow with the stuff.
You turned yellow.
You had to weigh so much till you had enough to fill a 4.5 shell.
And then it was put in the shell, with an igniter at the bottom, and a fuse at the top.
And then it was sent off to the guns.
In Germany, production was stalling.
Hermann Goering was in charge of both the Luftwaffe and the German economy.
Just as Churchill had put Beaverbrook in charge of airplane production,
so Goring turned to his friend, the former ace and famous stunt pilot Ernst Udet.
Udet poured all his resources into the development of new dive-bombers,
which had already revealed fatal shortcomings over Dunkirk.
Meanwhile, other areas of aircraft production were neglected.
July 1940 was the most productive month all year
for single-seater fighters.
Just 237 were built.
The German effort contrasted with the 496 British fighters produced in the same period -
more than double.
It was a ratio that would not improve for the Luftwaffe.
This failure to deploy their technological genius in a coherent plan
would have even more dramatic results in a crucial scientific development.
Radar.
Today, not much remains of the coast-long radar chain that once protected Britain.
Just two out of six towers here at Dover.
Despite the legend, it's not true that radar was a British invention.
German radar technology was years ahead.
When the Germans examined a captured mobile British set, they laughed at its primitive simplicity.
Yet radar was vital to Britain's defence.
Astonishingly, there was no radar whatsoever helping the Luftwaffe as they prepared to attack.
When the Germans compared these huge static towers with their own smaller, 360-degree rotating radars,
they felt convinced they could only be of limited effectiveness.
What the Germans completely failed to understand was that not only were these towers
Britain's eyes out across the Channel,
they were also just one part of Dowding's air defence system.
Air Marshall Sir Hugh Dowding, Commander in Chief of RAF Fighter Command,
had worked tirelessly, not only to build up his early warning and deployment system,
but had also fought hard to preserve and strengthen his fighter forces.
British technology may not have been the best in the world, but unlike the Germans,
Dowding managed to harness the best of the resources available to him.
A hostile raid, sir.
BELL RINGS
The net result was that his fighter force was able to intercept
enemy aircraft with unprecedented speed and accuracy.
Dowding's system can still be best understood
by looking at the surviving Operations Room at RAF Uxbridge...
..in 1940, the Headquarters of Fighter Command's 11 Group.
The system had a number of different cogs - the radar chain, the 30,000-strong observer corps,
the GPO's telephone and teleprinter service, and of course the pilots themselves.
Its genius lay in its ability to quickly bring all this information together
at Fighter Command headquarters,
then equally rapidly feed it back out again to the various operations rooms,
which, like this one at Uxbridge, were almost exactly the same at every level of the chain.
Throughout July, as German raids built up across the Channel,
Dowding was able to iron out glitches in the system.
The size and direction of Luftwaffe formations were carefully monitored
with detail being added as more information poured in.
What we have here is a graphic representation of a rapidly unfolding situation, which enabled
any of the controllers to see, with a single sweep of the eye, exactly what was going on.
In other words, co-ordination and standardisation were the key.
What Dowding had created was the world's first ever fully co-ordinated air defence system.
And the Germans had nothing like it, nothing like it at all.
The Channel, mid-July.
Despite continued attacks on shipping and coastal targets,
the air fighting had been comparatively light.
In the whole month, both sides would lose fewer aircraft than they had over Dunkirk.
The real battle was yet to begin.
On 16th July, from the Berghof, Hitler issued Fuhrer Directive Number 16.
Preparations For A Landing Against England.
Codename: Sea Lion.
Three days later, he made a final peace offer which, he hoped, Britain could not refuse.
Churchill refused.
The stage was set for the biggest air battle in history.
It would be a battle of modern combat aircraft and the young men who flew them.
In Germany and Britain, these men and machines were the source of intense pride.
On both sides, the airmen were seen as young, handsome and brave -
a romantic expression of the national ideal.
For some of those still alive, the memories remain vividly clear.
Hans Ekkehard Bob is one of the last survivors.
In 1940, he was a pilot with the fighter group, JG 54, based at Guines, near Calais.
Today, he is 93, and, incredibly, still flying.
The plane he's strapping himself into is a Messerschmitt 108,
a contemporary of the one he flew in the Battle of Britain.
Last time he was flying over this airfield at North Weald was at the battle's height.
HE SPEAKS GERMAN
TRANSLATION: My mother told me once, that when I was five I said,
"I want to be a pilot. With my right hand, I will fly the plane.
"And with my left hand I will catch eagles."
In 1940, the situation was still very positive for the Germans.
We were certain of victory.
Spirits were high.
It's clear that because we already had experience from previous missions,
we probably had an advantage over the British at the time.
Because we already had Poland and France under our belts.
The British rather were just getting started.
That's the way it was.
Now I want to see a British ace -
one of The Few.
Well, this is where Billy Drake lives. And Group Captain Drake, as I should call him,
is one of the toughest fighter leaders we ever produced.
He had an extraordinary career,
one that began with cloth-covered biplanes before the war, and ended on fast jets.
Imagine having a career like that!
'Billy remembers when the RAF were still flying the feebly armed Hawker Fury biplanes,
'and attending a top secret briefing about the latest German fighter, the Messerschmitt 109.'
It was a very frightening lecture,
because we were told all about the 109s,
and there we were with the Furies, and we said, "Well, if we can't shoot them down, what do we do?"
He said, "You'll have to ram them, old boy!"
And that was his statement.
Luckily, we got the Hurricanes in time.
Fewer than 100 RAF pilots from the Battle of Britain are still alive.
Those from the Luftwaffe can be counted on two hands.
But one of the best sources for how pilots were thinking at the time are the diaries some of them kept.
There's one in particular that I want to see, here at the German Diary Archive in Emmendingen.
Siegfried Bethke. A staffel commander in JG 2 throughout
the whole of the Battle of France and all of the Battle of Britain.
And... Good-looking chap, really.
I think there is sometimes a tendency still in England, for us
to view Germans very much as sort of Commando-comic-book villains, sort of Aryan automatons or something.
But what's so wonderful about these diaries
is the real human person emerges very, very clearly.
And this is really fantastic,
because there's a dedication in the front of this diary from
his girlfriend, who later becomes his wife, Hedi.
And she says, "My dear Siegfried, in these great times one must keep a diary.
"What will all be written here?"
Well, I can tell her, quite a lot because this is one of the best
personal testimonies I've ever come across about the Battle of Britain.
And it's from a Luftwaffe fighter pilot.
Bethke's diary gives us a vivid picture of what was happening at the new airfields being built
along the Channel coast in northern France.
These entries are unfamiliar territory
because they show just how much time the Germans spent protecting their bases from British bombers,
rather than attacking England.
Here he says, "Cockpit Readiness.
"One day off. Quiet.
"The next day cockpit readiness."
And here he is saying, "This is why I get up at 4:15am."
5am to 22:30 in his cockpit, and he finally gets to bed at 23:30.
Now, that's a long day to be sitting in your cockpit.
The reason he's sitting in his cockpit is because he's guarding
the airfield against enemy raiders, British raiders, bombers coming in
and attacking the airfield. What is startling about this diary is just how many references
there are to bombers, Blenheim bombers, coming over and bombing them, or being attacked by them.
But not over England, but over the continental coast.
On Wednesday 31st July, Hitler finally authorised an all-out attack on Britain.
In the days that followed, the Luftwaffe made its final preparations.
Goering now had his air forces ready - some 2,500 aircraft,
flying against the 650 fighters and few hundred bombers of the RAF.
In the front line were 11 Group, commanded by Dowding's right-hand man
and tactical innovator, Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park.
By the beginning of August, Britain had had
two months in which to recover from the humiliation at Dunkirk.
Over there, across the water, the French coast was now full
of newly completed airfields, all crammed with aircraft.
The mood amongst the Luftwaffe was buoyant. Confidence was high.
While Britain waited for the inevitable onslaught, all Goering
believed he needed was just four good days of clear weather.
AIR RAID SIREN WAILS
According to the weather forecasts, a ridge of high pressure was moving in from 12th August.
Preliminary raids were sent over to destroy the British radar chain and attack ports along the South Coast.
At 10 o'clock, we heard this noise and my brother said, "What is that?"
So we went out and it was covered with planes, upstairs,
in the sky, black, and I thought, "Oh, dear, something wrong here." So we went into the shelter.
We heard all the bombing, and all the machine guns.
I saw the parachutists coming down in flames cos they were hit, and then it eased off.
So when we came out of the house to see what had happened, midday,
all along Mortimer Road where we lived, was bullets and the cartridge cases and the shrapnel.
So we run down the road and by heck, they came back!
So of course we ran like mad back to the shelter, terrified. I thought it was our last day on Earth.
BELL RINGS
The all-out attack on Britain had begun.
Tom Neil had just celebrated his 20th birthday, and was a fighter pilot throughout the battle.
From Control you will learn there are 30 enemy
forming up over France, 60, 90, 100, 150, 250, 400!
Oh, my God! 400?! And there's only 12 of us!
You know, that sort of attitude.
That was the time when you really felt apprehensive, but once you were airborne...no problem.
The operation against the RAF was codenamed Adlerangriff, the Attack Of The Eagles.
In the five days following its launch, Fighter Command lost 118 aircraft.
But the Luftwaffe lost more...
251.
Sunday, 18th August became known as the hardest day as both sides threw all they had
into an increasingly ferocious air battle.
According to Goering's pre-battle plan, he should already have cleared the skies of British planes.
Yet the RAF was still meeting every raid the Luftwaffe sent over.
Both nations had placed great faith in their fighter aircraft. But which was the best?
The German pilots who survived being shot down were hastily taken into custody.
Before being take to prison camp, they were sent to Trent Park in North London,
where their conversations were secretly bugged by Denys Felkin and his team in Air Intelligence.
It was immediately apparent that the German airmen felt their aircraft gave them the upper hand.
The 109 is superior to the Spitfire if it has a pilot who knows how to fly it well.
It is incomprehensible how frightened many airmen are of the Spitfire.
I'd always prefer a 109 to the Spitfire.
You have to fly in long wide curves and the Spitfire can't keep up!
Not a surprising judgement from the German pilots,
but there were English airmen who agreed about the 109.
It was a small aeroplane, with a very weighty engine.
And it could dive very quickly, and it escaped very quickly.
So tactics were largely determined by them.
And time and time again, we used to watch them coming, but there was nothing we could do about it.
And they would dive away, quite freely, without us being able to catch them.
In a Spitfire, I always felt that given ten seconds to work up a bit of speed, you could cope with them.
But initially, the 109 was a more effective fighter.
The Messerschmitt 109 was acknowledged to be a trickier machine to handle.
But once mastered, it had a number of key advantages.
Hans Ekkehard Bob had been flying the 109 since 1938.
TRANSLATION: Personally, I was always able to outmanoeuvre the Spitfire.
That means in dogfights I was able to get behind the Spitfire
and get into the firing position.
We were, of course, convinced that the ME-109E was the best plane to be used in missions at the time.
The argument over who had the best aircraft has been raging ever since the battle.
I want to resolve this once and for all.
Now this is the real thing, a Messerschmitt 109E as flown in the Battle of Britain.
There's only two proper Messerschmitts
flying in the world today and this, when it's finished, will be the third.
All the others you can see are post-war 1950s, Spanish-built Bouchons,
not the same thing at all, but this is the real McCoy.
One key difference lay in the engines.
Our engines had carburretors, whereas the Germans always had
direct injection, which we have in our cars nowadays.
In a carburettor, it all depends on a little chamber in the carburettor, and the float that goes up and down.
And when the demands of the engine are such, the float goes up and more fuel is allowed in the engine.
In an aircraft, when you push the nose down, the float
flies to the top of the cylinder, you get the fuel whether you like it or not and the engine stops.
Now, masses of black smoke used to come out of the exhaust.
And the engine would stop for as long as you kept on negative G,
which could be up to 2, 3, 4, 5 seconds.
By which time, of course, your enemy had escaped.
He was halfway home to France.
And in a dogfight, there was another equally vital factor.
The enormous advantage of the 109 for low-flying attacks is the terrific power of its armament.
You make one attack and it does an enormous amount of damage.
The British pilots couldn't feel so confident in their firepower.
In a Spitfire or a Hurricane you had 14.7 seconds of fire,
of really peashooter ammunition.
And the 109 had 55 seconds of machine-gun fire, nearly four times as long.
You can argue all you like about manoeuvrability and performance,
but I think it really boils down to this - firepower.
Now, Spitfires and Hurricanes were armed with .303 Browning machine guns, which fired these.
This is the bit that hits the enemy plane. It's pretty small.
Now, here we've got a bit of German fuselage from a 109 that was hit during the Battle of Britain,
and repaired, and as you can see here's the hole, pretty neat and not an awful lot of damage.
So we've got that.
Germans also have machine guns, but in addition they've got 20mm cannon shells.
Now, this is a high-explosive cannon shell so it hits the aircraft and then explodes.
They also had armour-piercing shells.
Now if you put this together with a 303, there's absolutely no comparison at all
and if I was flying in the Battle of Britain, I know which I'd rather have - cannons.
For me, there is no doubt that the Messerschmitt 109 was the better plane in 1940.
55 seconds of firepower was a colossal edge.
That was on top of its other advantages.
Tom Neil faced the 109 in combat.
The 109s had the supreme ability to catch us whenever they wanted,
to get away whenever they wanted, and to knock us down whenever they want.
Cos they had big 20mm cannons, we had peashooters by comparison.
And they could knock us down with three shots.
The ME-109E might have been the better aircraft,
but it was being forced to operate at a number of disadvantages.
The first was fuel -
flying over from France, they had only around 10 minutes
in the combat zone, before they had to head for home.
If they didn't, they risked ending up in the Channel.
And, whilst it may look like a narrow river from the air,
the reality of being a lone airman, lost adrift in that vast expanse at sea level,
held true terrors for the German pilots.
The second disadvantage was tactical -
preventing its pilots from fulfilling its basic design function
was unthinkably, unimaginably stupid.
Despite earlier insisting the 109s operate freely to make the most of their advantages,
Goering then reversed the order, demanding his fighters escort the dive-bombers at all times.
The 109 was designed to fly at speed, not so slowly.
Its pilots were struggling to keep it airborne.
TRANSLATION: When that order came from Goering it caused a huge stir.
We fighter pilots were furious.
We were shocked that a commander in chief
could issue such a ridiculous order as that.
We fighters hated flying in direct escort.
No-one wanted to do it because you were helpless.
You flew next to the bombers in normal formation.
You couldn't defend yourself or attack or anything.
You could do nothing.
You just stayed still until you were shot down -
that was what it amounted to.
Because the 109s couldn't operate so effectively at such low speeds,
they were less able to protect the Stukas, which were now decimated.
On 25th August, the Stukas were withdrawn from the battle for good.
The most lauded part of the German bomber force was gone.
And the Channel wasn't getting any smaller.
'Flying his 109 on sorties every day from Normandy to England's South Coast
'was starting to worry Siegfried Bethke.'
He's obviously, clearly, pretty nervous, and why wouldn't you be?
But one of the things that really worried them was the distance across the Channel they had to fly.
This was a problem going across the Channel at the Dover Straits from Calais and the Pas-De-Calais,
but this was quite another going from Cherbourg all the way to the South Coast of England
to Portland and Weymouth and so on.
And here he's admitting to his nerves quite clearly and he says,
"I have to admit that the thought of the Channel and everything behind it
"made my stomach churn during the briefing,
"a feeling I did not get before the battle against France."
And then he goes on a little bit, he talks a bit more, and then he says,
"I am a little bit unsure of myself."
I think that's rather a nice human touch.
The war took a sinister turn on the night of Sunday 25th August, when, on Churchill's insistence,
around 50 RAF bombers set off to attack Berlin.
The night before, German bombers had mistakenly dropped bombs on London, something Hitler had forbidden.
TRANSLATION: There was a building
next to the commuter line in Charlottenburg
and it was destroyed and everybody came and stared at it,
like some sort of miracle.
Everybody went there and looked at it to see what a destroyed building looks like.
Hermann Goering said, "You can call me Meier if a plane ever drops bombs on Germany."
Well, his name was Meier real quick, wasn't it?
The British Bomber Command had already begun to bomb Germany,
six times in August 1940.
There was no real cause to do that, to go to Berlin.
We were very enraged to do the same to London.
Incensed, Hitler ordered retaliatory attacks on London, as the British government knew he must.
For some, this change of tactics,
from attacking airfields to British cities,
was the decisive moment in the battle.
The best general we ever had was Hitler himself.
He suddenly stopped the destruction of our airfields.
He lost his temper and said to Goering,
"Send all the bombers to London and teach them a lesson."
That, probably, made the Battle of Britain a success on our part.
If the Luftwaffe's core aim was to destroy the RAF in advance of an invasion,
it's hard to see how they would achieve it by bombing London.
But I'm not convinced the bombing of airfields had been that successful anyway.
This is Manston in Kent,
one of Fighter Command's frontline airfields in 1940.
During the Battle of Britain, it was attacked numerous times as were other airfields in southern England.
We've been told that by the beginning of September Fighter Command was on its knees -
it isn't true. Of all the RAF's airfields,
this was the only one to be knocked out for more than one day.
And this is the point -
to destroy a large, grass airfield took an awful lot more bombs
than the Luftwaffe were dropping on them.
The truth is, that although the skies were thick with enemy aircraft,
and although the rising number of pilot casualties was causing concern for Dowding and Park,
when the Luftwaffe turned on London,
the RAF were still a long way from defeat.
'Air Ministry communique. The biggest yet. End of message.'
Both sides greatly exaggerated claims of aircraft shot down.
Neither side, however, had a clear idea of exactly what was happening.
One person uniquely qualified to examine the intelligence failings on both sides is Sebastian Cox,
the RAF's official historian.
The RAF grossly overestimates the strength of the Luftwaffe,
but the Luftwaffe,
not only do they overestimate the number of planes they shoot down,
but they seriously underestimate the capacity of the RAF
to replace planes that they have lost
and that has a serious effect on the way the Germans fight the battle.
Both sides had a problem,
because they assumed the basic military unit of planes
was the same in each air force.
But in the RAF, a fighter squadron was about 20 planes.
In the Luftwaffe, the staffel was only roughly 12 planes.
The RAF don't correctly understand the structure of the German units,
and they think that there are more German aeroplanes in each of these units
than is actually the case.
And so the simple arithmetic of multiplying the number of units by the wrong number of aeroplanes
gives them an excessive strength for the Luftwaffe.
Because of this simple mistake alone, the RAF thought the Luftwaffe was 50% bigger than it actually was.
At the same time, the Luftwaffe thought the RAF was smaller than it really was.
Presumably, overestimating the strength of your enemy is probably no bad thing,
but it's a serious problem if you underestimate it, isn't it?
If you are on the defensive and you overestimate the strength of the enemy who's going to attack you
that's not necessarily going to be disastrous.
Whereas if you're on the offensive and you underestimate the defensive strength of the enemy,
that can lead you into serious difficulties, which is what happens with the Luftwaffe.
By the beginning of September, Luftwaffe pilots were showing signs of strain.
Judging from what Bethke's saying in this diary, for the Luftwaffe, things were pretty bad.
For example, he talks on the 2nd of September, he says,
"We can almost never surprise them,"
and this is why he feels, fighting from Normandy,
he's never going to get the kind of scores
that some of these other pilots are now amassing on the Luftwaffe.
He says "Because you can never surprise them," they're always higher than him.
I mean, we're always taught beware the Hun in the sun,
but from Bethke's diary it's clear that you have to beware the Spitfire in the sun.
If we began in July, we had losses from 50% or so.
And this was, of course,
a very, very hard job
and we were not very enthusiastic about it.
"I'm afraid that our fighter escorts are considerably weakened, you notice that now."
"I know a staffel which has only two aircraft left."
"Once, for a whole week we always reported number of aircraft fit for service, nil."
By 7th September, the Luftwaffe had lost 721 aircraft since the attack had been launched.
Fighter Command, 405.
But the real difference was that the RAF was replacing its losses.
One of the important points which is very seldom mentioned
is the efficiency of our organisation,
which provided aircraft when we lost them.
And time and time again, if we flew for three, four times a day
we'd be down to five aircraft out of 18.
And suddenly, miraculously, by lunchtime the following day, we were at full strength again.
Where they came from, nobody knows, they just appeared.
Billy Drake had been shot down back in May,
and after a spell as an instructor training new pilots,
he returned to the front line.
And when you became operational again, can you recall there ever being a shortage of aircraft?
No... No!
It was replacing pilots that was more of a worry.
But Keith Park now came up with a brilliant solution.
Exhausted squadrons were rotated to regain strength,
while new pilots were allowed to gain flying experience away from the front line.
Because of the flexibility of Dowding's system, this could be implemented immediately.
It was simple, effective, saved lives, and gave Britain an invaluable advantage.
Billy Drake appreciated the effectiveness of Park's ideas.
Those responsible for assessing the operational capability said,
"These squadrons are not capable of being accepted as operational,
"and therefore, we'll send them up north,
"away from the main theatre above Britain, to recoup."
Once again, the Germans had no comparable system.
Experienced pilots flew on and on.
New ones were flung straight into the battle.
By mid-September, Dowding's defences were holding firm.
Around Britain's coast, more than 1,000 ships patrolled her waters.
And convoys WERE getting through.
Britain was as strong as ever.
The operations room here at Uxbridge has been set up
to represent the situation as it was on 15th of September 1940,
and it's absolutely full of information about the state of the squadrons.
Now over here we have the Biggin Hill sector,
and there were three single-engine fighter squadrons - 92, 72 and 66.
What Park and Dowding were looking for was to have 12 operational aircraft on any one given day,
and then roughly double the amount of pilots as a cushion.
So what we've got here is P for pilots, 92 squadron and A for aircraft, 19 and 12.
And then in 72 squadron, we've got 20 pilots and 11 aircraft.
66 squadron - 19 pilots and 10 aircraft.
So they've got plenty of pilots and only 66 squadron is seriously under strength in any way.
In other words, the situation is pretty healthy.
The contrast with across the Channel, with the Luftwaffe's fighter situation,
could not have been greater.
Not that Goering understood this.
Armed with increasingly fantastical Intelligence reports, he believed the RAF was now all but destroyed.
All that was needed, he reassured Hitler, was one final push.
On Sunday the 15th of September, a huge air battle took place.
Although much smaller than originally claimed, the toll was still high.
The Germans lost 61 aircraft and 93 men.
For the British it was 31 and 16.
But far more important than the figures
was the fact the Luftwaffe was as far away from beating the RAF as ever.
Yet some German pilots still thought the invasion was imminent.
It's quite interesting, but Siegfried Bethke doesn't make an entry on 15th of September 1940,
the day we've come to know as the Battle of Britain Day.
But he does put an entry in on the 16th, the next day,
and in which, funnily enough, he still thinks the invasion's a goer.
He reckons it's going to happen in the next few weeks and certainly within the next month.
And the reason he thinks that is because his squadron, his staffel,
has just been placed up in the Pas-De-Calais,
and he's flown over and seen all the invasion barges.
It's true that by mid-September the barges were ready.
Hitler's invasion plans were complete.
The army was ready, so too the navy.
But the Germans still hadn't beaten the RAF.
From the start, they knew that without air superiority the plan would be doomed.
Today, we can piece together the events of that world-changing summer
in a way that those who lived through it never could.
We now know that the battle was fought on a much broader front,
that beyond The Few were the men of Bomber Command and the rest of the RAF,
and the full weight of a great maritime nation.
This, combined with Dowding's ingenious defence system and plentiful aircraft,
ensured that Britain was a far stronger enemy than Germany had ever expected.
And it was, of course, a battle of two sides, not one.
The result was as much to do with German failings as it was Britain's achievements.
If anyone had been amateurish, it was the Germans.
Hitler knew that time was now running out.
The Luftwaffe had failed.
The captured pilots at Trent Park were coming to the same conclusion.
"If they don't come in three weeks, then they'll not be coming across this year."
"Either the landing will come very soon in this good weather, or will probably not come at all."
"They simply must start the attack this winter or we'll have no fighters left."
"We have missed the best moment for the invasion."
September moved into October, and summer turned to autumn.
Just a few months earlier, victory had seemed inevitable and Hitler had had the world in his grasp.
Now it was slipping away.
On the 12th of October, he postponed the invasion indefinitely, effectively ending the battle.
Britain had won.
When you really look at the complexity and detail of the real story,
it becomes even more dramatic and exciting than the one we've all grown up with.
Hitler's plans now lay in tatters.
Britain's victory ensured the war would continue.
While there was relief that her sovereignty had been saved, the celebrations would have to wait.
But the genesis of victory that came five long years later
can be found in the summer of 1940 in the Battle of Britain.
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