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One of the last Battle of Britain fighter pilots Paul Farnes dies at 101

Many years ago at the Air & Space Museum, in DC, there was a Battle of Britain exhibit. The thing I remember most was a special issue necktie authorized only to be worn by the participants. I can’t find an image online.
 
Very sad to realize I'll be alive to see the last of the WWII veterans pass away.
 
Two men, both survivors of the Battle of Britain remain, Flight Lieutenant William Clark and Flying Officer John Hemmingway.
 
On February 14, 1945, a soviet pilot from the Warsaw aviation regiment of the Polish army, Matveev, sent his downed plane into a cluster of german tanks. The feat of Matveev made in the district of Shnaydemyl (after the war –Pila, Poland), where monument was erected in his honor. Now dismantled by an ungrateful bastards.

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Konstantin Feokistov, born Feb 7/1926, key space engineer and first civilian in space. Carried out WWII reconnaissance missions at age 16, was captured by Nazi troops and shot. Survived despite neck wound, crawled out of the mass grave, and swam across the river to go home.

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A brave man and a sad loss.

But the notion of Britain being saved by "the few" is a myth.
 
Rexedgar said:
Not if Goering couldn’t clear the skies.....
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It was never going to happen, period.

Sealion was beyond German capacity; she had neither the logistical capacity to afford a sufficient transportation fleet nor did the Kriegsmarine have the ability to secure the channel from the Royal Navy.

Even if the Germans had achieved air superiority (a big if given how badly the bungled their performance in the Battle of Britain), it wouldn't be enough to actually support an invasion. Numerous wargames and exercises have shown that the very best the Germans could have mustered was a handful of divisions which would have been annihilated shortly after landing; and that was with everything going the Germans way.
 
Jredbaron96 said:
It was never going to happen, period.

Sealion was beyond German capacity; she had neither the logistical capacity to afford a sufficient transportation fleet nor did the Kriegsmarine have the ability to secure the channel from the Royal Navy.

Even if the Germans had achieved air superiority (a big if given how badly the bungled their performance in the Battle of Britain), it wouldn't be enough to actually support an invasion. Numerous wargames and exercises have shown that the very best the Germans could have mustered was a handful of divisions which would have been annihilated shortly after landing; and that was with everything going the Germans way.
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England didn’t have the luxury of eighty years of hindsight in the summer of 1940.
 
Rexedgar said:
England didn’t have the luxury of eighty years of hindsight in the summer of 1940.
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Oh, Churchill knew the threat of German invasion wasn't really that great. He admitted so in private, even while publicly warning the British people against the possibility. Telling them they had nothing really to worry about while wanting to continue the war would have been dumb.
 
Sisters who were separated during the war 78 years ago found each other in Chelyabinsk, Russia. The last time Julia and Rosa Kharitonov saw each other was as they were children. During the war years, the sisters lived together in Stalingrad, but during the bombing in 1942, they were evacuated to different cities. Julia thought all her life that her sister was dead — on the day of the evacuation, the shop where Rosa worked was destroyed by an enemy shell. However, the sister was alive. She was taken to Chelyabinsk, and Yulia and her mother ended up in Central Asia. Having lived all their lives with the hope of finding their relatives, the sisters met again thanks to the indifference of the Chelyabinsk police officer, who actively joined the search and helped the family reunite.

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True. In the late summer of 1940 a Spitfire landed in the field behind the house where we were living in Clandon, near Guildford. The pilot, badly wounded, was collected by ambulance quite soon. A memory for life.

We children and all the adults around believed the British - and the Czechs, Poles, Australian, Canadian - pilots were valiantly defending us from defeat. Whether they were or not now seems quite besides the point.
 
Rexedgar said:
England didn’t have the luxury of eighty years of hindsight in the summer of 1940.
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Privately senior British commanders hoped the Germans would launch an invasion and take a severe beating in the process.


A speculative fiction that's rarely explored is what happens to Barbarossa, if Sea Lion is launched and the Germans suffer a severe mauling to their land and air forces.
 
Rich2018 said:
Irrelevant.


Goering didn't even try to destroy the RAF, most of it was untouched.
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The RAF was on the ropes in Aug-Sep 1940. When the Luftwaffe changed from military only targets, they gave much needed relief to the RAF to refit and repair airfields and equipment.
 
Rich2018 said:
Irrelevant.


Goering didn't even try to destroy the RAF, most of it was untouched.
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That is not accurate. His campaign of bombing RAF infrastructure had the RAF on its knees. The mistake it made was changing its focus to night raids with a focus on disrupting food stocks and manufacturing infrastructure.
 
Higgins86 said:
That is not accurate. His campaign of bombing RAF infrastructure had the RAF on its knees. The mistake it made was changing its focus to night raids with a focus on disrupting food stocks and manufacturing infrastructure.
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Actually he is right. In only two weeks during the entire battle of Britain did the Luftwaffe succeed in destroying more planes than the RAF replaced. They needed to do that for six months in order to destroy the RAF, but they wouldn't have survived it for six weeks. The RAF started the battle with 600 and actually gained more planes as the battle went on; British plane production was moving far faster than the Germans were shooting them down.

On July 6 the RAF had 1,259 Pilots, and on 2 November they had 1,796. By comparison, between August to December in 1940 the Germans lost nearly a third of their fighters and a quarter of their bombers. The Germans were in fact badly losing the battle of Britian; they were hemorrhaging pilots and plains faster than they could replace them (Adolf Gallad, famed German pilot, even at point apparently said the Luftwaffe never recovered from Britian; it had lost too many experienced crews and pilots), so the decision to switch to city bombing wasn't a mistake. It was a desperate attempt to salvage a strategic victory from what had otherwise been a complete failure. It worked kind of, Luftwaffe casualties slowed down because escorting single big raids was easier than a bunch of little ones, but in the end Luftwaffe never really came close to beating the RAF.

Could they have, possibly? Maybe, but too much would have had to change for the Germans for it to be realistic.
 
Jredbaron96 said:
Actually he is right. In only two weeks during the entire battle of Britain did the Luftwaffe succeed in destroying more planes than the RAF replaced. They needed to do that for six months in order to destroy the RAF, but they wouldn't have survived it for six weeks. The RAF started the battle with 600 and actually gained more planes as the battle went on; British plane production was moving far faster than the Germans were shooting them down.

On July 6 the RAF had 1,259 Pilots, and on 2 November they had 1,796. By comparison, between August to December in 1940 the Germans lost nearly a third of their fighters and a quarter of their bombers. The Germans were in fact badly losing the battle of Britian; they were hemorrhaging pilots and plains faster than they could replace them (Adolf Gallad, famed German pilot, even at point apparently said the Luftwaffe never recovered from Britian; it had lost too many experienced crews and pilots), so the decision to switch to city bombing wasn't a mistake. It was a desperate attempt to salvage a strategic victory from what had otherwise been a complete failure. It worked kind of, Luftwaffe casualties slowed down because escorting single big raids was easier than a bunch of little ones, but in the end Luftwaffe never really came close to beating the RAF.

Could they have, possibly? Maybe, but too much would have had to change for the Germans for it to be realistic.
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I disagree Fighter Command was said to be pretty close to collapse and it wasn't because of aircraft it was the loss of experienced pilots.

What the Luftwaffe needed to do was to keep hitting 11 Group air fields. Bomb craters were a problem, but could be filled in, but the hangers, fuel depots, repair workshops, and other support facilities could not be as easily repaired. And without these facilities, 11 Group could not keep flying.

11 Group might have to pull back north of London taking it beyond effective range of the Luftwaffe’s Me-109 fighters which were needed to escort the bombers on daylight raids. Withdrawing 11 Group north of London would have meant the Germans could have achieved air superiority over the invasion beaches which was their goal. It would have also exposed London to the full fury of the Luftwaffe.
 
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