Foreign perspectives on the Battle of Britain

[Njaco]

That 41-2 restriction was due mostly to having to deliberately place the sweeps at a tactical disdavantage to try and get the Luftwaffe to come up. The individual operational plans of course varied greatly from operation to operation, but if I were to generalise, it gnerally took the form of small groups of bobers, under close escort of most fighters in the group, followed by an "ambush group, either further behind, or in front, trying to trap and gain advantage over thye German interecptors. Sometimes it worked, often it did not, and IMO as time progressed, the germans got wise to RAF tricks and ruses.

In the first half of 1941, according to Foreman, the exchange rate wasnt too badly against the RAF In the second half it swung quite badly against the RAF.

IMHO Allied didn't learn that from BoB, if we look the escort systems used by RAF in 41-42 during the Circuses, most of the fighters were strictly tied with the bombers.

Juha

Depending on the operation - Circus, Ramrod, Rhubarb, Rodeo, Ranger. All were very different in terms of using bombers and fighters.

 

[parsifal]

Depending on the operation - Circus, Ramrod, Rhubarb, Rodeo, Ranger. All were very different in terms of using bombers and fighters.

Agreed, I would also say that the LW defensive operations of 41-2 are very different to the way operations were conducted by the LW over SE England in 1940.

In 1941 the LW did not try to interecpt every RAF raid, in fact large numbers of RAF attacks went completely unparried. The RAF never employed large numbers of bombers in these attacks, and many attacks were undertaken at night (whereas, for the LW in the beginning at least, most raids were daylight raids).

By comparison, the RAF in 1940 attempted to intercpt every German strike...there were no unparried strikes.

Its very hard to draw any meaningful conclusions about all of this. RAF suffered a higher loss rate compared to the LW/RAF loss rate in 1941 (the latter half at least). During the BoB, Axis losses were about 1800 a/c to about 1000 RAF fighters. AA over England in 1940 was not very effective....about 400 kills for the entire year. In the first half of 1941, the british loss rates in the western European TO were about the same as the Germans had been in the previous year...that is, they were losing about 1.5 to 2 aircraft for every 1 German lost. In the second half, over france losses shot up to about 4 British losses for every one German lost, though it needs to be stated that more than 50% of the RAF losses were due to ground fire (according to westermann).

so there are fundamental difference between the operations in 1940, and those in 1941.