Watching the battle overhead

3rd August 1940: The people of southern England are spectators to the great aerial battle unfolding in the summer sky

Paul Nash’s famous ‘The Battle of Britain’, a War Artists Advisory Committee Commission, 1941.

The Germans still did not have a coherent plan for their attack on Britain. The first air raids had been on the ports and coastal convoys. However, they had no firm plans on where they might land in any invasion and disrupting coal supplies to the power stations was not going to bring Britain ‘to its knees’. Attacks on aircraft factories and on RAF airfields had the more cogent purpose of reducing the strength of the RAF, even if they had little intelligence by which to assess what they were achieving.

Faint bursts of machine-gun fire would reach our ears

As the Luftwaffe stepped up its assault on Britain, it gradually shifted from the attacks on convoys in the English Channel to more targets inland. Increasingly, people living in the south-east of Britain became witnesses to the conflict.