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    Luftwaffe Bombers in the Battle of Britain
    Luftwaffe Bombers in the Battle of Britain
    Luftwaffe Bombers in the Battle of Britain
    Ebook190 pages44 minutes

    Luftwaffe Bombers in the Battle of Britain

    By Andy Saunders

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    About this ebook

    Luftwaffe Bombers in the Battle of Britain will contains some 140-150 images of German bomber aircraft during the summer of 1940. The images will cover the entirety of the battle and will depict losses across Britain during this period. Each picture will tell its own story, and will be fully captioned with historical detail.Each section will have a short introduction and the images will include those of shot down aircraft, including relatively intact machines, badly damaged/destroyed wreckages, photographs of pilots and other related illustrations. All images are from the author's unique collection of wartime photographs of Luftwaffe losses, collected from a variety of sources across some thirty-five years of research.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateJun 30, 2014
    ISBN9781473837317
    Luftwaffe Bombers in the Battle of Britain
    Author

    Andy Saunders

    Andy Saunders has been involved with historic aviation for over thirty-five years and is well known in the aircraft preservation and restoration field. His specialist area of interest is in the air war over Europe, 1939-1945. One of the co-founders of Tangmere Aviation Museum, and its first curator, Andy is also respected as a serious researcher, author, and editor and is a prolific contributor to the aviation press. He is passionate about flying and history, regularly travelling in search of historic aircraft and artefacts. He also acts as adviser or consultant to film and television companies and was past editor of Britain at War.

    Read more from Andy Saunders

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      Book preview

      Luftwaffe Bombers in the Battle of Britain - Andy Saunders

      all.

      Introduction

      The story of the Battle of Britain is well known and recorded in very considerable detail in countless books on the subject. It is not my intention to re-tell that story here. In this volume we will take a pictorial look at the cost to the Luftwaffe bomber force of waging war against the British Isles during the summer of 1940.

      What we now know as the Battle of Britain was fought between 10 July and 31 October 1940, although those were artificial dates created post-war by the Air Ministry and were set as being the ‘official’ period during which the major part of that campaign was fought. However, and in order to set the scene, I have looked briefly at the run-up to the commencement of ‘battle proper’ but have then examined pictorially each month from July to October 1940. Whilst the cut-off date for the cessation of the battle is officially 31 October 1940, this was not the cessation of German air attacks against Britain. Far from it. It was only the end of the ‘official’ period of the Battle of Britain. Then the German air assault melded and changed from the mainly daylight campaign, into the day and night blitz, and then to the blitz by night only, followed later in the war by tip-and-run attacks and various periods of other raids employing a variety of tactics, aircraft and weapons. So, whilst this particular volume looks at Luftwaffe bomber actions and their related losses during the Battle of Britain there will be other follow-up titles by the same author in this series and these will cover all other elements and periods of Luftwaffe attacks on Britain, right up until the cessation of hostilities.

      The photographs used in this work are drawn from my private archive and provide a fair representation of the losses sustained in terms of aircraft type and geographic location. The majority of action during the Battle of Britain was across the south of England, predominantly in Kent, Sussex, Hampshire, Essex and London, and it is therefore inevitable that the picture content reflects a geographic ‘bias’ towards the Home County region. However, where photographs are to hand of losses in other parts of the British Isles, a conscious effort has been made to include them.

      For the most part, the pictures used in this book were taken by official photographers working for regional and national newspapers or by photo agencies and their contracted photographers. Some were taken by photographers working for the RAF or the Air Ministry. In many cases, the organisations concerned are long defunct, but the images taken by or for such organisations have been collected and preserved across many years by enthusiasts, researchers and historians. Some of the photographs used are from the original official prints, others are from illegally-taken pictures by civilians or military personnel – it being contrary to the Control of Photography Order 1939 for unauthorised persons to take photographs of military subjects. Quite apart from the wartime shortages of film and materials, private photographers faced the danger that if they took their films to chemists or photographic stores, the subject matter might be reported to the Police. Additionally, some photographs used here are from the collections of Luftwaffe participants in the Battle of Britain. In many cases, the photographs will not have been widely seen, if at all, before publication in this volume.

      It is true to say that for the first time in modern history the British public were exposed during the Second World War to the frontline realities of war and it was inevitable that photographers would seize upon the opportunity to record the myriad scenes that unfolded. Mostly, photographers were on the spot some while after the initial drama of an enemy aircraft crash, although the scenes they recorded were often powerful and certainly historically important. Without a doubt, the Battle of Britain has become very much a part of the British psyche – fact, fiction, folklore and legend. Here, though, we see the recorded ‘fact’ of contemporary scenes photographed during that epic summer of 1940. Whilst much that has been written or recorded of the Battle of Britain is subject to debate, discussion, revisionism or even the creation and debunking of myths and misconceptions, there is one simple inescapable fact: the camera never lies. This, then, is a photographic glimpse of the Luftwaffe bomber force during the Battle of Britain, some of the losses the force sustained during the campaign, and some of the faces of the men themselves.

      Andy Saunders

      East Sussex, October 2013

      Chapter One

      Prelude to Battle: October 1939 to June 1940

      When the air raid sirens sounded across the British Isles at the declaration of war on Sunday, 3 September 1939 there was an expectation by many that the country would immediately be subjected to mass air attack by German bombers. Although that fear was not realised, it didn’t take long for the Luftwaffe to commence air operations against Britain. The Germans didn’t yet have bases in France, Belgium, Holland or Norway from which attacks could be mounted, but their bomber aircraft, operating from bases in northern Germany, had the range to reach targets in Scotland and the north of England. For the greater part, though, these regions would be spared the heavy air assault to which the south of the British Isles would be

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