n 7 September 1940, southern England suffered what was then the biggest air raid the world had ever seen.
Over the previous three months, the aircraft of Germany’s Luftwaffe had tried to break the resistance of Britain’s Royal Air Force (RAF). Already severely depleted from the heavy fighting during the invasion of France, the RAF had buckled several times under the strain. A particularly brutal offensive against its airfields and the factories producing its fighter planes over the weeks before had left it dangerously close to running out of both planes and pilots.
If the attacks had carried on with the same intensity for a few more weeks, the RAF might have collapsed completely. German invasion barges were waiting on the other side of the channel for just such a moment.
But then Germans then turned their attention – mystifyingly – to Britain’s cities, hoping that indiscriminate bombing would cause widespread panic and force Britain to surrender. The Luftwaffe decided to throw every available aircraft into the offensive. It started on 7 September.
