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CALLING The Battle of Britain: Divine Intervention
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s an eight-year-old boy in 1940, my late father-in-law watched in awe as the Battle of Britain raged over southern England. The air battle was for Britain’s very survival, and brave pilots struggled to prevent invasion. The valiant efforts of airmen—the few, in their finest hour—ultimately turned the course of World War II for the many. Planning and preparation were key, but history also tells us of a now-neglected power working even at the national level to accomplish the seemingly impossible victory. Considering 1940’s decisive events in the light of God’s word, what lessons can we learn and apply today? The advancing German army’s blitzkrieg occupation of France, Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg in the early summer of 1940 meant that Britain was next. A seaborne assault across the English Channel seemed imminent. Britain was about to become the last defence against what Prime Minister Winston Churchill called “the menace of tyranny.” The German High Command decided that supremacy in the air was essential for their victory, and in August 1940, they expected to gain it by destroying the Royal Air Force (RAF) in a matter of 14 to 28 days.
Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free.… Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”
What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation.…
Churchill’s effective use of the English language motivated the whole nation to rise to the occasion. “The country responded in its own way to the exceptional sacrifices that the airmen were making: ground staff serviced planes round the clock, whilst civilians contributed to Spitfire Funds, voluntary donations that ran at about £1 million a month in 1940, to build more planes” (Simon Schama, A History of Britain, volume 3, p. 522, 2002). Planning and foresight amongst the RAF leadership had enabled sound preparations to be made under Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding. Newly developed radar towers positioned at tracking stations along England’s east and south coasts facilitated aircraft detection, providing warning of approaching planes before they even crossed the Channel. Members of the Royal Observer Corps at the coast then visually confirmed numbers and other details. This information was passed directly to Fighter Command Headquarters to coordinate the response from different fighter groups. This “Dowding system” ensured that more than 75 percent of fighter aircraft scrambled from the ground found their assigned targets in the air. By late August 1940, daylight raids proving less effective than expected, a major German tactical decision was made to ignore airfields and focus on bombing London instead. Thus, a few hundred RAF fighter pilots
16 Tomorrow’s World | September-October 2020
TomorrowsWorld.org
“He Will Have to Break Us in This Island” The Battle of Britain, fought from July 10 to October 31 that year, is distinctive in part because its name comes from a speech Churchill gave before the conflict even started. On June 18, 1940, Churchill declared,
