The Battle of Britain news in the Times is kind of disappointing, but that’s the nature of the air war. The correspondent isn’t in the air with the pilots and they are not in any of the sector stations to see the plots. So we aren’t getting a very good picture of how the battle is progressing. We only get the reports of the sporadic bombing of the inhabited areas, and not reports of the raids on the airfields, which is where this fight is really being waged.
The next two weeks is as close as the Germans will come to winning the battle. Their attacks on No. 11 Group airfields in southeast England are wearing down fighter command. German losses are heavy, but they can bear theirs while over the long term, the British cannot. We are not getting a sense of this in the reports, although the news reports are always going to have some delay in reporting what the situation really is. I recall the news stories on the Battle for France. The reader of the Times only got glimpses of how bad the fight was going for the French, and those were obscured by favorable reports.
Sorry I haven’t participated as much lately, but finishing a basement is really time consuming. Don’t do it unless you are really bored or just like aggravating yourself to no end.
This was the turning point of the war.
The Germans were having success with their tactical bombing, but their response to the bombing of Berlin was a change to terror bombing of civilian targets, which gave relief to the military installations.
Big mistake.
The air operations are definately harder for follow. Like you said, its not practical to have a reporter up in the air with the aircraft and reporting is reduced to targets on ground hit, and distorted numbers of planes shot down. The land battles are always easier to follow if for nothing else, there is a tangible line of progress. You can draw on a map where the battle lines are and the progress of the units in the battle. It’s a task that is just impossible in the air. Naval engagements have a similar problem, but with them there are smaller numbers of larger craft that makes grasping the scope of “ships sunk” in terms of progress towards victory or defeat. When a report of 5 ships being sunk comes across, that’s significant, but when there’s a report of 42 aircraft being shot down the reader is left wondering what that means.
Good luck finishing up that basement. We don’t have one to deal with here thankfully.
Glad you're back. I was afraid we had offended you somehow. I'm glad it was just the basement.
I have a friend who looked at his basement wall (this house is built against a hillside.) and envisioned a home theatre. So he took a maul and shovel and dug a new underground room, which he eventually finished as a spiffy theatre. He had to move the dirt by wheelbarrow about a hundred yards down the road to dump it. I suspect his wheelbarrow may be a little unbalanced, if you get my meaning.