"Crucial points in the Battle of Britain?" Topic

I'm trying to help my daughter with her history homework which has asked her for the crucial points of the Battle of Britain.I have a fair idea of the Battle of Britain but I'm not sure I can pinpoint crucial turning points.

What would you say are the turning points where it was won for the Allies or lost for the Axis?

September 7, 1940: The Germans stopped bombing the RAF airfields and started bombing London.

Start reading here:

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then maybe here:

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and here:

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British strategic pullback of fighters from France (teacher may not agree).

Canal raids.

First attack on Britain.

Eagle Day.

Abandonment of the attacks on the airfields.

Bombing London.

Switching almost totally to the night bombing raids.

Not necessarily in that order.

Stop thinking logically, like a wargamer….. think more like how a mostly uninformed, uninterested educator "wants"this question answered.

Google up some dates

Thanks for that guys. I managed to think of a few myself as well.

It was a case of me just coming through the door after a day at work being ambushed by homework needing doing tonight.

Also…when Goring ordered his fighters to stick close to the bombers.
Also, when the Germans decided not to use low level fighter sweeps of British airfields as they had done in France.

Good luck with the project!

When Hitler decided Goering's pilots couldn't win, so abandoned Sealion, and looked to invade Russia, instead.

Whoever decided not to fit the Me109 with a drop tank did the RAF a great favour. That demonstrated flawed tactics right from the outset. The Luftwaffe had poor intelligence supplied to them and it's probably fair to say they were over confident and underestimated what they were up against. Tactical blunders compounded this.

UK manufacturing was able to keep up supplies and replaced losses and production increased during the battle.

Had the airfields been bombed increasingly I'm sure greater dispersal would have been used. After all for a long time they were bombing the wrong airfields…

However, you could also argue that the Battle of Britain was won in the Atlantic ocean.

I think it was September 15 when the Big Wing tactic paid off – that is reported to be the breaking of the Luftwaffe's morale. How true that is I don't know.

I'm intrigued how the OPs daughter got on. Sometimes it doesn't pay to be too smart and show up the teacher!

So – can we have an AAR on 'operation homework' ASAP?

Refusal to send Spitfires to france.

The Germans lost the BoB because they were unable to counter RADAR, even when they did break the chain, mobile stations were quickly able to cover the gaps.

Britains problem in the BoB was not production of planes, it was pilots. The airbase denial system of the Luftwaffe was working to a point, but could not win the Battle strategically, only tactically.

If nothing else the BoB was lost in the German command structure that didn't actually have a single plan of campaign for it.

The weakness of the Bf109's undercarriage meant there were a lot of accidents during take off & landing, reducing the number available for the battle.
Was it a mistake to only have one type of single engined fighter?

Overall the British were fighting a defensive battle over their own territory. Pilots bailing out over England either were back in the cockpit or a prisoner cage.
Moral of the German fighter pilots went quite low after the first month or so, loosing so many trained pilots.
As stated earlier, the switch from bombing airfields to London was the real turning point.