Read Online The Battle of Britain by Bickers Richard Townshend - Free Book Online

Bucks, was divided into Groups according to the type of aicraft they flew. The operationalGroups were: No. 1, equipped with Battles, Headquarters at Hucknall, Notts; No. 2, Blenheims, HQ Huntingdon; No. 3, Wellingtons, HQ Exning, near Newmarket; No. 4, Whitleys, HQ York; No. 5, Hampdens, HQ Grantham, Lincolnshire. The Operational Training Groups were No. 5, HQ Abingdon, and No. 7, HQ Brampton, Huntingdon. For convenience, the stations in each Group were situated in as close proximity as possible. Portal had joined No. 8 Squadron as an observer in 1915 before converting to pilot. From C-in-C Bomber Command he went to Air Ministry as Chief of Air Staff until the Armistice. A wise and competent commander, he exercised much influence over Churchill.
    Coastal Command was under ACM Sir Frederick Bowhill, who had joined the Navy in 1904, obtained his pilot’s licence in 1913 and entered the Royal Naval Air Service. With his understanding of naval needs, he was ideally fitted for his new post. His Command, which operated closely with the Navy, consisted of No. 15 Group, HQ Plymouth; No. 16, HQ Chatham; No. 17, HQ Gosport; No. 18, Pitreavie Castle, Scotland. None of these was related to any particular type of aircraft. Only No. 18 Group had any geographical connotation: its squadrons were all based in the north, mostly in Scotland and the Shetlands, with one in Iceland and two in Yorkshire.
    Training Command had been split, in May 1940, into Technical Training and Flying Training Commands.
    While Britain designed and built a wide variety of fighters and bombers in the two decades between the world wars, armament received scant attention. Most aircraft carried the rifle-calibre (.303 inch) Vickers gun of 1914–1918. The other RAF weapon, dating from 1916, was the American 0.3 inch Browning adapted for rimmed .303 ammunition. Fighters usually had two Vickers machine guns. The Gladiator, which entered squadron service in February 1937 and was the RAF’s last biplane fighter, was the first to be armed with a battery of four machine guns: they were Brownings. Its immediate successor, the Mk I Hurricane, entered service in December 1937 with eight Brownings, as did the Mk I Spitfire when delivered to its first squadron in June 1938.
    These measures were not accompanied by an equally rational training programme for fighter pilots. The individual combat techniques developed in World War I were discarded. Combat practice was reduced to six set attacks made in section, flight or squadron strength. Air-to-air firingexercises were carried out on a drogue towed behind a comparatively slow aeroplane flying straight and level.
    At the outbreak of World War II the RAF was highly efficient technically in both flying and maintaining its aircraft. It was experienced in the swift movement of squadrons from one country or continent to another. Among those who had served in World War I there reposed a substantial fund of expertise in full-scale war. In the Spitfire it had the world’s best fighter and in the Hurricane another that was in many other respects better than the enemy’s. But its numbers were comparatively small and its fighter combat training had been dangerously inflexible.
    Numerical weakness was compensated for by possession of a unique adjunct to the country’s defence: a chain of radar stations that gave early warning of air raids. The word ‘radar’, standing for ‘radio direction and ranging’, was coined by the Americans and adopted by the RAF in 1943. Originally, it was called ‘RDF’, meaning ‘range and direction finding’, which was also good security; the process was thought to be concerned solely with radio direction finding as an aircraft navigation aid, which attracted little curiosity.
    Development was carried out during the 1930s and exceeded the expectation of the Air Defence Sub-Committee of the Committee for Imperial Defence. On September 16, 1935, these bodies agreed