Battle of Britain

[mitchy]

Hello; I am new to the forum, in fact to all types of forums.

I am helping my Middle School daughter work on a report on the Battle of Britain. We have searched what seems like 100's of sites and gotten some very good information, plus realizing how important this Battle was to the war effort.

For her presentation she has to discuss the Germans side about the Blitz during the Battle, and needs to know how many bombing missions were flown by the Germans? We got the figure of 35,000 tons of munitions (12,000 alone over London) but need to know how many missions a day and some idea of the number of planes (one sight said on 1 particular day over a 1,000 planes flew)

Can anyone help with the answer or know where to go?

thanks

Mitch

[angie999]

I hope the teacher knows the answer, which means that s/he must be using a fairly readily available source which I don't know of, because this looks to to me like the sort of research that would be a challenge to a High School student.

I know that fairly detailed German unit records exist. For instance, this local history site gives detailed information about German bombing raids in the Bristol area throughout WWII:

http://www.fishponds.freeuk.com/

However, the number of raids, the number of sorties, the bombloads, etc. down to this level of detail is entering the realm of specialist military historians, not a Middle School project.

If you want more help, it may take some time and some effort, so can you please define Battle of Britain a bit more. You use the term Blitz, but this is the name more commonly given to the night bombing campaign which went on into the spring of 1941.

What is more traditionally thought of as the Battle of Britain is itself divided into three phases:

1. Up to 11 August, attacks on coastal shipping and air battles over the English Channel.
2. 12 August to 6 September, attacks on British defences, notably RAF airfields - the first week of this was called the Adlerangriff (Eagle Attack) by the Germans.
3. From 7 September, attacks centred on London, which developed into the night Blitz and continied on under that name into 1941.

The critical period in this was the second one when the RAF was under attack.

As a general pointer though, I think you will need to concentrate on German sources. In the heat of battle, you could not rely on British sources to fully reflect German operations, precise numbers of aircraft involved, etc.