"England is invincible": How the Luftwaffe lost the Battle of Britain

When the Battle of Britain erupted, many Luftwaffe pilots anticipated a swift victory. Yet soon that confidence had been replaced by chronic fatigue and a crippling fear of drowning in “dirty water”. Victoria Taylor charts the mental disintegration of Hitler’s flyers

Two pilots dressed in military uniform sit in the cockpit of a small war plane. Both are looking out the window the right of the picture

Published: July 2, 2025 at 9:00 AM

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On a muggy night in late August 1940, Hinnerk Waller’s fraying tether had finally snapped. Relentlessly deployed in the Battle of Britain as part of the Luftwaffe fighter wing JG 52, Waller was paying for every nerve-wracking sortie with his sanity. Snatching hold of his Walther pistol, he sprinted into some nearby woods with the grim intention of killing himself. A few concerned airmen rose up to stop him, but their Staffelkapitän, Helmut Kühle, bade them to resume their seats. “He was a shrewd judge of character,” as Waller’s friend Ulrich Steinhilper later recalled, “and as we all sat waiting for what we thought was the inevitable shot, nothing happened.”

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Steinhilper added that this “was our first case of Kanalkrankheit [‘Channel Sickness’] – a combination of chronic stress and acute fatigue” that was brought on by constantly flying in the Battle of Britain. That this dramatic episode came only two months into the Luftschlacht um England (‘Air Battle for England’) – the German name for the Battle of Britain and the Blitz – highlights just how frenetic this aerial campaign had become for the Luftwaffe. Just four days after his suicidal crisis, Waller was unceremoniously flung back onto the frontline.

What is most important to observe about his breakdown, however, is that it happened when the Luftwaffe was actually in its most successful phase of the aerial campaign against the RAF. Waller’s mental anguish, then, starkly demonstrates that military success and heightened morale do not necessarily go hand in hand. It also demonstrates that we should be wary about imposing British perspectives on the Luftwaffe’s mentality during the Battle of Britain.

The enemy’s flaws

Pointing out that the German air force was not as indefatigable as it is often presented is certainly not to downplay the monumental achievement of the RAF’s ‘Few’ in denying the necessary air supremacy and build-up of invasion barges for the Wehrmacht to invade Britain in Operation Sealion. On the contrary, to wear the aggressors down to their last nerve is testimony to the hellacious fight that the RAF put up during the campaign.

Yet, if we are to recount faithfully why the Battle of Britain unfolded as it did, we must pinpoint how the Luftwaffe’s internal doubts and weaknesses rapidly conspired to erode its seemingly unflappable fighting spirit. Thoroughly fleshing out the Luftwaffe’s hopes and hangups allows us to transform its historical role in the RAF’s ‘Finest Hour’ from a cartoonish antagonist to a multidimensional, flawed yet formidable opponent. This makes it even more remarkable and crucial that the RAF managed to repel its aerial onslaught.

Mood of jubilation

During the spring and early summer of 1940, Nazi Germany had captured Norway, Denmark, the Low Countries and France. With much of Europe sunken under the swastika, the Luftwaffe’s general mood was one of jubilation. Yet, for as long as Britain remained in the war, the Germans were unable to bask in their continental victories.

The Luftwaffe had started to ponder clearing the English Channel for an invasion, but they mainly hoped that Britain could be pressured into suing for peace by throttling its essential shipping lines and maritime assets. Thus, on 2 July 1940, Hermann Göring directed Wolfram von Richthofen’s VIII Air Corps to begin attacking “Channel sea traffic”. The first phase of the Battle of Britain – the Channel Battle – was now under way.

The German fighter pilot Günther Rall wrote optimistically of needing “a few more days, and the strait will be impassable. Then an essential prerequisite for the invasion will be created.”

Yet Adolf Galland, who was more experienced than Rall, noted how “the German pilots thought that the [Nazi] propaganda about England being unprepared was wrong. It annoyed us. We found the English well prepared. Not an easy job. We were not hopeful of victory.” He added that “many pilots feared the water – the small, dirty water. All Channel Flyers felt this. I emphasise: the ‘Shite Kanal’ did as much damage to our morale as the English fighters.”

As a Luftwaffe Soldat attached to an airfield operations company wrote on 20 July 1940, “We have a big victory behind us, but the biggest fight is still ahead of us. We don’t have earth beneath us, but water – that’s more dangerous. We hope for the best and wish to return to our homes as victorious soldiers.”

“The ‘Shite Kanal’ did as much damage to our morale as the English fighters,” said one Luftwaffe pilot

British radar, too, was rattling the Luftwaffe. The German fighter pilot Hans-Ekkehard Bob noted of a sortie gone wrong over Britain in late July 1940 that “it was incomprehensible how this [Spitfire] formation could reach us in the rear without any sight in such a good attack position.

“Later,” he continued, “we learnt that the British were at that time already in the possession of a kind of radar that could lead exactly in height and direction.”

The RAF incorporated radar into the highly sophisticated ‘Dowding System’. Spearheaded by Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the system included radar transmitters, receivers and stations as part of Chain Home and Chain Home Low, the latter of which was optimised for detecting incoming Luftwaffe aircraft at lower altitudes. This not only gave the RAF an advance warning of up to 20 minutes as the Luftwaffe passed over the Channel, but it also constituted a huge blow to the German airmen who feared coming up as a blip on British radar.

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An operating room of the coastal chain of British radar stations that were codenamed ‘Chain Home’ (Image by Getty Images)

In the face of this increasing military resistance, Göring instigated Operation Eagle Attack, which was devised to sock the knockout blow to Britain. RAF flying units, ground installations (including radar), supply organisations, and the British aircraft industry would all come under intense attack in this next phase of the Battle of Britain.

Göring had made Adolf Hitler the rather lofty promise that the RAF could be subdued within five weeks – spanning from 8 August to 15 September – ahead of the amphibious Wehrmacht invasion on ‘Sealion Day’. After a bout of patchy weather, the Eagle Attack was finally earmarked to commence on 13 August 1940, codenamed Adlertag (‘Eagle Day’). Yet, that same day, a junior doctor with the Luftwaffe bomber wing KG 2 wrote a most forlorn letter to his wife:

“Here in France, we are all slowly going crazy. If we don’t get relieved in the autumn, I think almost all of our men will be nervous and exhausted. What has been asked of us for years is too much. God grant us that the last stroke of violence succeeds. As a doctor, I see how things are with us. People gather their last strength to win. The last few days have brought us some terrible experiences. We have lost many brave and loyal comrades and are immensely sad.”

The junior doctor’s observations suggest that the Luftwaffe was in a far worse psychological state early into the campaign than is often acknowledged. To add to the operational strain, the morning of Adlertag opened with disaster for the Luftwaffe. Several unescorted bomber units did not receive Göring’s early postponement order due to the poor weather, as their radio crystals had not been updated to be compatible with the fighter units’ communication system.

As the weather cleared up in the afternoon, the Luftwaffe went on to launch 1,485 sorties, hitting RAF Detling and Eastchurch especially hard. Nevertheless, with much of the German bomber crews striking at the wrong targets, Adlertag exacted too heavy a price for what was achieved. The Luftwaffe lost 42 aircraft, along with 89 pilots and aircrew killed or captured – 13 per cent of its striking force. On 15 August, Göring hastily organised a staff conference to dissect the air force’s mistakes.

On this same day, the Germans suffered their heaviest losses of the battle so far – a day they dubbed ‘Black Thursday’ and the RAF hailed ‘The Greatest Day’. Then, on 18 August 1940, came ‘The Hardest Day’, due to the fact that it saw the highest number of combined RAF and Luftwaffe aircraft losses in a single day. By late August, the Eagle Attack began to swing in favour of the Germans, who had managed to bring the kill tallies on both sides to a more even ratio on its best days.

Five planes fly in formation against a cloudy sky. They are all flying towards the left of the image

A propaganda photo of Hawker Hurricanes. These fighters accounted for more than 60 per cent of German losses during the Battle of Britain (Image by Alamy)

Yet, in a reflection of how their hunger for medals and victories could sometimes get the better of them, a captured Leutnant and Oberleutnant were overheard discussing in September 1940 how, “We underrated the English fighters. Recently everyone who wanted a few easy additions to his bag flew over, but they got a surprise.”

By late August, Ulrich Steinhilper had become greatly disillusioned with this opportunism: “The picture looked grim. I was thinking we were all fighting to rid the sky of the RAF, and what was really developing was that many individuals were using this battle as a stage upon which they could further their own careers and personal scores, while apparently giving little consideration to the overall tactics or the losses of their men who were behind them. There were times when my morale took severe knocks.”

IN NUMBERS: THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN

The Blitz begins

Things were about to get even more complicated. On the night of 24–25 August 1940, stray German bombs were unintentionally dropped over civilian boroughs in East Ham and Bethnal Green. On 7 September, after the British prime minister Winston Churchill immediately greenlit a retaliatory blow from Bomber Command against Berlin, an enraged Göring launched his first major strike against the British capital.

The opening day of the Blitz killed 448 civilians and wounded 1,337 more, marking the start of the campaign’s longest phase – one that would run until May 1941. For some Luftwaffe personnel, the Blitz was seen as a natural escalation of the Luftschlacht um England.

One Soldat wrote confidently on 8 September 1940 that: “I have a lot of work these days. There is no longer any ‘closing time’ at all. Unfortunately, I cannot write to you about our special tasks. But you will have already heard on the radio in detail about the extensive destruction in England and especially in London caused by our bombers. We’ll soften up the English. Our planes all returned from combat missions yesterday…”

Hans-Ekkehard Bob, on the other hand, claimed that “as far as I could learn, the RAF had by accident bombed Berlin. The supreme command retaliated and ordered to bomb London. We, the fighter pilots, were told at that time that strategic aims in the district of London were attacked. The bombing of civilians was out of the question for us.”

A black and white photograph shows a group of children huddled together in a trench, all looking up to the sky

Children shelter in a trench in hop fields in Kent in September 1940, while RAF fighters engage with Luftwaffe bombers on the way to attack London (Image by AKG)

Not all Luftwaffe airmen, however, shared Bob’s sentiments when it came to attacking non-military targets. One captured Luftwaffe prisoner reportedly said of bombing British hospitals: “Well, the people are half dead anyway, and if the hospitals are bombed, no fresh casualties can be admitted.” Another had tried to bomb Hyde Park because “he knew there were a lot of air raid shelters there”.

In a bugged conversation between three captured fighter pilots from September 1940, one claimed that “England is invincible. That is the mentality of the people here, and if every civilian defends his home stubbornly, then it’s a difficult matter.” His colleague replied: “They’ll simply be shot.” Thus, even the German fighter pilots – who are often portrayed as a noble adversary to Fighter Command in British histories – were hardly blind to the criminal nature of the regime they were fighting for, nor the deadly repercussions of a Luftwaffe victory for Britain.

On 15 September 1940, the Luftwaffe launched a major raid on London, Portsmouth and Southampton. Benefiting from the lull in attacks on RAF airfields during the Blitz, however, a revitalised Fighter Command shot down 56 German planes – two for every British fighter lost. The RAF would hail this day as ‘Battle of Britain Day’; the Luftwaffe would remember it as a disaster. The bomber pilot Otto Bechtle said of his men’s losses that “the whole Gruppe was nearly demoralised. It was a drunken party, weeping for comrades. The survivors sang: ‘The steel wings are flashing; the Tommy has given us a hiding.’”

The German fighter pilots were hardly blind to the criminal nature of the regime they were fighting for

This defiant counterattack stunned Hitler into postponing Sealion indefinitely on 17 September 1940. From July until the end of October, the Germans lost around 1,887 aircraft of all types. The Luftwaffe’s nerves were now so on edge that an unprecedented number of 79 suicides and suicide attempts was reached among its personnel between mid-September and October 1940. By 1941, the Luftwaffe surgeon-general even had to issue a special directive that dealt with the prevention of suicide within the organisation.

The impact of losses

Towards the end of 1940, however, it was not just the Luftwaffe’s mental wellbeing that was suffering. The German air force’s lack of a proper reserve compared to that of the RAF meant that, as the senior Luftwaffe psychologist Dr Siegfried Gerathewohl put it, “even the totally unsuitable were accepted for training”. Inexperienced and overzealous recruits posed a risk not just to themselves, but also to their more senior commanders. Oberst Johannes Fink, who was Kommodore of the bomber wing KG 2, witnessed the disconcerting combination of operational naivety and night-time flying during the Blitz.

A man stands smoking a cigarette in front of a plane

A German pilot in front of his Messerschmitt Me 109 at an airfield in France. By the end of 1940, the Luftwaffe was suffering significant losses (Image by Getty Images)

“On the way back from London, I saw the flight mechanic of a plane ahead fire wildly and shoot holes in his own tail. In my aircraft, all the crew were wounded. No pilot in my aircraft – I flew the machine myself, had only the observer/bomb aimer up front with me. All except me were wounded, mostly splinters. I had a map in my hand – a bullet went through the map. When we got back to the airfield, the flight mechanic of the machine ahead was excitedly pointing to all the holes in the tail of his aircraft and saying what a narrow escape he’d had: ‘Look at all the hits we’ve had.’ I walked up to him and said: ‘That was you.’”

More alarming still for the Luftwaffe was the number of airmen being lost in crashes in the darkness, as well as those forced to bale out over the English Channel during the perishing autumn and winter months. In November 1940, a British intelligence report documented that “a total of 158 German air force personnel were reported, as either PoW or dead, by this section. Of these, 54 were living and 104 dead, which is a considerable reversal of the proportions previously encountered.”

The Luftwaffe that headed into 1941 had been badly affected in both the quantity of its aircraft and quality of its aircrews

Throughout the Blitz, the Luftwaffe haemorrhaged a further 600 bombers on top of its previous losses in the main Battle of Britain – resulting in a total of 2,487 German aircraft lost across the entire Luftschlacht um England. Nearly 2,000 members of its flying crews were killed and a further 2,600 had gone missing during its full 10-month assault on Britain. Although the Luftwaffe’s bomber crews had succeeded in leaving scores of British cities in rubble, the country’s overall wartime production had not been greatly affected in return for the considerable strain of launching nearly 30,000 sorties during the Blitz alone.

Some Luftwaffe veterans later tried to downplay the long-term detrimental effects of the British campaign on its operational strength, with Walter Lehweß-Litzmann – who later became the Kommodore of a Luftwaffe bomber wing – claiming that “the Luftwaffe was by no means weakened as it moved east, as its superior initial effectiveness subsequently demonstrated. The crew losses over England were offset by the combat experience gained by the units and commanders, of which I was a member.”

In reality, however, the Luftwaffe that headed into 1941 had been badly affected in both the quantity of its aircraft and quality of its aircrews.

A group of men in military uniform stand around a map, with two men in the front bent over it, discussing things

A Luftwaffe unit receives a briefing. By late 1941, the losses incurred in the Battle of Britain had blunted the German air force’s firepower (Image by Alamy)

The butterfly effect

The Germans knew that a failure to subdue the British in 1940–41 would now have negative repercussions for the war in the Mediterranean and north Africa, with the Luftwaffe having been assigned to protect General Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps in February 1941. And, with the Luftwaffe failing to replace its earlier losses over Britain, the further depletion of its operational bomber strength during the six-month struggle of ‘Barbarossa’ – the titanic invasion of the Soviet Union – was acutely felt. By the time that the USA entered the war in December 1941, the Luftwaffe theoretically fielded only 47 per cent of its intended bomber strength. And, with roughly half of these aircraft actually being in commission, the Luftwaffe possessed just 468 serviceable operational bombers by the first week of December 1941.

The true importance of the Luftwaffe failing to knock the British out of the war during the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, then, lies in the potent butterfly effect that this failure triggered. Its disappointing aerial campaign over Britain may not have guaranteed Nazi Germany’s eventual defeat, but the unfavourable outcome had certainly robbed the Axis of being able to secure a swift, decisive and straightforward victory by 1941.

Thus, as Herbert Rieckhoff – formerly the Geschwaderkommodore of the bomber wing KG 30 – later confirmed, “the first blow from which [the Luftwaffe] never recovered came in the late summer of 1940, during the fight against England. This was followed by the Blitz against England in 1940/41, in which it slowly continued to bleed out.”

Fighter Command, then, had not only saved Britain from going down the darkest of timelines. It had also helped to wear down the German airmen’s resources and resolve. In doing so, it helped set a crucial precedent for the Luftwaffe’s chronic overexertion during the latter half of the Second World War.

A crowd of people look around in a pile of rubble with ruined buildings in the background

Survivors in the ruins of Earl Street after the intense and devastating Coventry Blitz of November 1940 (Image by Getty Images)

Timeline: The Luftwaffe's assault on Britain

10 July 1940

The Battle of Britain begins

The intensification of German air attacks against Allied shipping in the English Channel marks the opening of the ‘Channel Battle’. The Luftwaffe flies more than 1,300 sorties during this five-week phase. 13 August

Hitler ramps up the pressure

‘Eagle Day’ sees the Luftwaffe beginning a full-scale assault on RAF airfields, radar installations and other critical defence infra-

structure. The Germans lose 48 aircraft in the air, compared to 13 for the British. 15 August

A black day for the Luftwaffe

The Luftwaffe loses a further 75 aircraft on what it dubs ‘Black Thursday’. Fighter Command, which sustains less than half of the losses incurred by the Germans, hails this ‘The Greatest Day’. 18 August

‘The Hardest Day’

Fierce air battles over southern England, including RAF Kenley and Biggin Hill, result in Fighter Command losing 68 fighters to 69 Luftwaffe aircraft downed – the heaviest daily combined loss for both sides. 24/25 August

Britain bombs Berlin

Perceiving stray German bombs that accidentally hit residential London areas on 24 August to be deliberate, Winston Churchill greenlights a retaliatory blow against Berlin on 25 August.  7 September

London is hit hard

Göring launches his first thunderous attack on London and other neighbouring cities, describing it as “a stroke right into the enemy’s heart”. A total of 448 British civilians are killed and 1,337 are injured. 17 September

Hitler shelves invasion plans

During a raid on London, Portsmouth and Southampton on 15 September, the Luftwaffe loses two aircraft for every British fighter lost. Two days later, Hitler postpones Operation Sealion indefinitely. 31 October

The Battle of Britain comes to an end

The Germans launch their final daylight raid before the solely nocturnal phase of the Blitz gets under way. This signals the end of the Battle of Britain. 14-15 November

Coventry takes a pounding

The Luftwaffe inflicts a deadly raid on Coventry. The bombing kills 554, while a third of the city’s houses are destroyed and Coventry Cathedral is razed to the ground. 10-11 May 1941

The last major raid

With 1,500 civilians killed, 10–11 May marks London’s ‘Hardest Night’ of the Blitz. By the end of the Blitz that month, around 43,000 British civilians have lost their lives.

Victoria Taylor is an aviation historian. Her new book, Eagle Days: Life and Death for the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain, is out now, published by Apollo

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This column was first published in the July 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine

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