There are plenty of combat reports from the BoB of fighting over 20,000ft, be as picky as you want the F4F isn't going to cut it.
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I've been writing a concise day by day account of the Battle elsewhere since July and this is simply not the case. I don't even know how many combat reports, squadron diary entries, ORBs, intelligence reports, etc. I have read over the last two months. It's one of the few upsides of having your livelihood removed by the corona-bollocks. Yes, escorts were sometimes engaged at such altitudes, particularly in the current period, but the bomber formations, which were the primary targets did not usually arrive at such altitudes.
On 7th September, when the bombers were stacked up to 6,500 m (near enough 21,000 feet) this increased altitude was noticed and remarked upon. The Luftwaffe did this to reduce the length of the formations, this reason was
explicitly stated in Goering's orders for the day.
"By using vertical separation, the length of formations is to be kept down as much as possible."
The increase in altitude was pertinent because this very morning, before leaving for a conference at Bentley Priory, Park had sent a directive to his controllers. On one occasion the previous day just seven of the eighteen squadrons dispatched had made successful interceptions. It had come to his notice that some Sector controllers were ordering their squadrons to altitudes a couple of thousand feet above that ordered by their Group controllers. In fear of being 'bounced' the squadron leaders were also adding a few thousand feet. As a result, the intercepting fighters were running directly into the escorting fighters, provoking exactly the fighter v fighter combat that Park was keen to avoid. The real targets, the bombers, were getting through, unmolested, below and only being intercepted after they had bombed, which was unacceptable. Just as Park was ordering his controllers to ensure that their fighters were to be vectored to raids at an altitude where they could intercept the bombers, some of the bombers started to fly slightly higher.
On 1 October Kesselring and Sperrle withdrew all the Luftwaffe's twin engine medium bombers from daylight action, unless they could operate with the protection of cloud, and hence, by definition, not in large formations. It was from this period that much smaller formations of Bf 109s and Bf 110s raided at much, much higher altitudes. The German aircraft commonly arrived as high as 30,000 feet. You may have seen October referred to as 'Messerschmitt month' in some British sources and this is why.
A Combat Report from late November has nothing to do with the tactics used by the Luftwaffe in July, August and September and that is not being 'picky'.
