The Army Air Forces in World War II, Vol. 1 (archived PDF)

T H E A R M Y A I R F O R C E S I N W O R L D W A R I 1
had failed to achieve its objectives, and the aerial blitz was gradually
reduced to intermittent attacks which continued throughout the spring
of 1941. The Luftwaffe had sustained its first major defeat and
Britain had been saved, for an invasion was contingent first of all upon
defeat of the RAF.
It will take no credit from the RAF’s outnumbered “few” to sug-
gest that the Luftwaffe had been unprepared for the opportunity
offered in the summer of 1940. Except for a few raids against French
factories, the force had never been employed in a strategic effort of
its own. Trained and equipped for another mission, the Lufnvaffe
lacked a heavily armed long-range bomber capable of carrying large
bomb loads; * it tended to underestimate the bomb weight required
to accomplish its ends; its fighters were not only technically inferior
to the British but were at times misused; and faulty strategic planning
was reflected in a tendency to shift targets before the completion of
a sufficiently prolonged and concentrated effort.
The effect which the Battle of Britain had on subsequent planning
of the German and British air forces was both characteristic and
prophetic. True to their belief in the essentially tactical and support-
ing role of air power, the German army leaders felt that the results
of the Lufnvaffe’s independent effort over Britain vindicated their
position, and with this opinion Hitler seems to have agreed. No in-
sistent demand was made for new and improved types of aircraft, nor
was there any immediate program for increased plane production or
pilot training.35 Organizationally, the Luftwaff e continued to hold its
independent position among the German armed forces, but opera-
tionally it remained an auxiliary arm, For a time the German Air
Force intensified its operations against shipping in the eastern Atlantic
and in the Irish and North seas. The attempted air blockade achieved
a moderate degree of success, but the action of British fighter patrols
and the arming of merchant vessels by mid-1941 appeared to be in-
terfering considerably with Luftwaff e plans. Moreover, intensification
of German air activity on other fronts in 1941 resulted in withdrawal
of much of the Lufnvaffe strength from the west.
For some months, Axis operations in North Africa, the Mediter-
ranean, and eastern Europe received far more attention than did the
dwindling assault on the British Isles, and the Luftwaffe and the RAF
* Its four-engine FW-ZOO(military version of the Focke-Wulf Condor) was em-
ployed almost exclusively in antishipping patrol.
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