Battle of Britain

The Battle of Britain was the first great air battle in history, beginning in July 1940 as Hitler’s Luftwaffe crossed the Channel to bomb British ports, airfields, and London. The Royal Air Force’s Spitfires and Hurricanes rose to meet the German aircraft; as the raids intensified, the battle became both a sustained assault on British cities and a struggle witnessed at a distance through American reporting and radio broadcasts.

A Poem Before the Battle

The account introduces the battle through a striking earlier image: in his last year of high school, Harry S. Truman had copied lines from Tennyson’s Locksley Hall describing aerial fleets grappling in the sky. He still carried the neatly folded poem in his wallet. When warplanes met above Britain, the verse seemed to anticipate the new kind of warfare—though the actual raids, with their attacks on cities and mounting devastation, exceeded its imagined vision.

Raids and Escalation

The fighting began in July, with German aircraft crossing the Channel to strike British ports, airfields, and London as Royal Air Force fighters went up in defense. On September 7, an unprecedented force of 375 German bombers raided London. Night raids followed, and incendiary bombs spread destruction through the city. Hitler boasted that the air Blitz would break the English people’s will; on December 29, London endured its most savage bombing yet, with more than a thousand fires burning across the city.

American Witness and Wider Significance

For Americans, the battle’s violence arrived through newspaper dispatches and radio. Correspondents Robert Bunnelle and Helen Kirkpatrick reported on the destruction, while Edward R. Murrow described London’s fires in a broadcast from the city. On the night of December 29, as London burned, Franklin Roosevelt delivered his Arsenal of Democracy address by radio from the White House. He warned of the Nazi threat and called for massive American production to supply nations under attack. In the account, the battle thus marks not only a defense fought in the air over Britain but also a moment when the danger to Britain became an urgent argument for American preparation.