A ‘Diary’ of the Most Critical Ten Days of the Battle of Britain

Written by a prolific author – who started back when there were many veterans available for interviews – this book is the fifth of a multi-volume history of the Battle of Britain, a fact that does not appear on the title page, dust jacket, or front cover. This book is not written as a stand-alone account of the climactic period of the Battle of Britain. While such an account would have to address the tactics, technologies, organizations and aircraft that provide the subject’s context, rather, the book presents itself as “a diary” of the ten late-summer days when the Germans initiated, sustained and – after the air battle of 15 September – curtailed their daylight air offensive against London.

The narrative focuses on RAF’s Fighter Command and is drawn largely from Operational Record Books and combat reports held by the UK’s National Archives, supplemented by excerpts from postwar memoirs and oral histories, including those by RAF ground staff, civilians, first responders, and, unsurprisingly, Winston Churchill. The narrative approach means that each chapter, covering a day’s operations, consists of a series of air-to-air or air-to-ground engagements which, the author points out, does not add up to a complete picture, especially of the 15 September battles. But the lack of source notes means that the reader does not know whether these words quoted were those dictated to an intelligence officer minutes after landing or were written down decades later, filtered through years of wartime experience and peacetime reunions. Luftwaffe General Adolf Galland was one Battle of Britain veteran that took to heart the fighter pilot’s maxim, “if you can’t win the fight, get home first and win the debrief”.

This approach means that the voices the reader hears in the narrative are almost all British. There is enough provided on the German side for the author to show that they were improvising with scant direction and uncertain strategy. The quantity and quality of extant first-person Luftwaffe accounts of the Battle of Britain is limited, but the bibliography includes few German-language published sources and no specifics as to which archival or online sources were used, while individual National Archives files used are identified by number (useful to enable readers to access them on their website). There is now a considerable amount of information available on the Internet. These include Luftflotte 3’s mission reports (available on the German BA/MA website) and the Luftwaffe Western Front Daily Operations Reports (available on the TsAMO website). More is available in the British ULTRA decrypts and the Air Ministry Daily W/T Intelligence Summaries, along with microfilmed records held in the UK, US and Germany.

The chapters together form a coherent narrative, but the descriptions of air battles are somewhat repetitive. While the author’s writing is generally clear and readable, attempts to avoid re-using words to describe repetitive events needed application of an editor’s red pen.

Linking the battle accounts, the author supports the assessment that Fighter Command’s immediate crisis was not a shortage of aircraft but of trained fighter pilots. The “big wing” controversy in Fighter Command tactics started long before the ten days covered here and involved powerful clashing personalities. The author cannot tell the full story here, but he shows how overclaiming victories in air combat – when applied to specific units rather than force-wide – helped skew RAF decisions. The operations of RAF Bomber Command and Coastal Command on each day are summarized (though not so that of ground-based air defenses, who are also omitted from the first-person accounts included).

This book includes no maps at all. There is, in the illustration section, a full-page photograph of a map that provides help to readers (with keen eyesight) that may be weak on airfield locations or England’s geography. But when, on the afternoon of 15 September 1940, the Luftwaffe launched the afternoon mass raid on London, it would have been good to have shown the route this attack and its escorts took and where and when they encountered the fighters that intercepted them. Similarly, the absence of tables and charts is a drawback in telling a story where the attrition (and exhaustion) of aircrew and aircraft alike could decide the issue.

There has been much published on the Battle of Britain and it is likely to remain a subject that will be continually re-examined from different aspects. This is not a re-assessment and the narrative aims at breadth – describing combat using UK archival material – rather than looking at a particular action or facet of the Battle in depth. While this particular volume does not present a unique or new approach or provide revelations from fresh sources, it does present the battles and their impact effectively.

What happened on 15 September 1940? For years, English-language sources presented the culmination of the German daylight bomber offensive against London as one of the great battles of history, saving not just Britain but civilization from what Churchill had famously called “a new dark age, potentially more protracted due to the use of perverted science.” The march of conquest from the Rhineland to the Anschluss to Paris and beyond was stopped for the first time over London. Hitler’s 17 September decision not to launch an invasion was seen as a direct result. On the other hand, the German move to less costly night bombing – already underway in the period covered here –has also been characterized as a successful tactical adaptation in the overall offensive air campaign against Britain that continued, unabated, until the Germans transferred their bombers eastwards in May 1941. The Luftwaffe’s switch from day to night bombing tactics – which the author points out was already in progress in the ten days covered here -- has been repeated in many successful offensive air campaigns. This includes the US XXI Bomber Command’s operations against Japan and, in 1991, the US Air Force’s 1991 decision, after a single day of losses to its F-16s, to stop daylight attacks by non-stealth aircraft against Baghdad.

The questions raised by the air battles in 1940 are the same as unanswered in today’s newspapers. In the spring of 2025, a US air campaign was launched against the Houthi rebels, occupying much of Yemen. The offensive halted when the Houthis reportedly agreed to cease attacks against US maritime targets. The campaign did not include the loss in combat of any manned US aircraft. Did this campaign constitute an effective act of compelling an opponent through by airpower? That was what the Germans failed to achieve against Britain in 1940 and the US Air Force claims to have achieved against North Vietnam in 1972-73.

Was compelling Britain through air power even possible in the summer of 1940? If it was, over London and in daylight was the place to attempt it. The Germans found this out when, in March 1944, the US Eighth Air Force made repeated attacks on Berlin. Even though the Luftwaffe was still strong enough to inflict the heaviest losses the Eighth was to suffer in a single mission, within a few days, Goering, standing outside his Berlin headquarters, watched a squadron of US P-51 escort fighters pass overhead. A one-time fighter pilot, he saw their intact formation as evidence that they had not had to fight to fly over Berlin. The sight of these single-engine fighters unopposed was, Goering later recalled, what convinced him that ultimate defeat was simply a matter of time. In September 1940, the Luftwaffe failed to demonstrate the power of its airpower in a similar convincing way.

Battle of Britain: Target London does not answer these questions. The author may be waiting for a concluding volume to sum up the events he describes in detail. Bottom-line judgments may not be possible but, given the scope of these volumes’ sources, especially on the RAF side, it would have the potential to make this a valuable reassessment. The importance of the ten day period covered in this book gives it value, even if read without the accompaniment of the other volumes.

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Our Reviewer: David Isby, a veteran historian, defense analyst, and war game designer, covered the Soviet-Afghan War from the front lines. His books include The Decisive Duel: Spitfire vs. 109 (London: Little Brown, 2012), Afghanistan: Graveyard of Empires: A New History of the Borderland (New York: Pegasus, 2011, and Jane’s Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress (London: Harper Collins, 1999). and Fighter Combat in the Jet Age (London: Harper Collins, 1997), and he is the author of articles for Air International, Air Forces Monthly and other magazines. A pilot, he has flown B-17s. His previous reviews include The Eastern Fleet and the Indian Ocean, A History of the Mediterranean Air War, 1940-45, Volume Five, From the Fall of Rome to the End of the War, 1944-1945, The Mighty Eighth, Under the Southern Cross: The South Pacific Air Campaign Against Rabaul, Rearming the RAF for the Second World War , Red Dragon 'Flankers': China's Prolific 'Flanker' Family, The Cactus Air Force, Eagles Overhead, Bomber Command, Brotherhood of the Flying Coffin, Victory to Defeat: The British Army 1918–40, To Do the Work of Men, Churchill, Chamberlain and Appeasement, The US Eighth Air Force in World War II, Churchill's Eagles, and The Mighty A.

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Note: Battle of Britain: Target London is also available in e-editions.

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