Thirty-one years ago this week, on July 25, 1909, a speck low in the air over the English Channel approached the Dover chalk cliffs from the French shore. Larger & larger it grew until watchers on the British side could clearly distinguish a man steering a gimcrack monoplane. He landed safely, and the British rushed to join the world in congratulating Aeronaut Louis Bleriot upon passing one of aviation's epochal milestones.
Last week watchers on Britain's south and east headlands scarcely needed to look up to identify skein after skein of German aircraft which, from bases in Nazified France, swept over the Channel and swooped upon British shipping or soared on over Britain to bomb inland objectives. So experienced had many a British "spotter" become that by ear he could tell a squadron of death-pregnant German Heinkels, going out to work, from a flight of British Blenheims returning from work. Meanwhile the Germans adopted new technique: sending a swift, lone leader at high altitude to lay a smoke trail to the objective, which the bombers followed at out-of-sight altitude. This technique was doubtless devised primarily for the benefit of new, sketchily trained German pilots who are sent out en masse with only rudimentary flight instruments simply to follow-their-leader, get home as best they can after unloading over assigned targets.
When British fighters repeatedly broke up their bomber formations prematurely (on one occasion six Hurricanes dispersed 40 Dorniers attended by 40 Messerschmitts),the Germans tried the system of sending ships over singly or in groups of two and three, striking at numerous places the same day. This plan thinned out Germany's casualties but it also thinned her bombing.
Closely as they scanned the sky toward Germany, the British scanned even more closely the water and the harbors across it from which Adolf Hitler's invasion attempt might come. The July moon waxed full. The tides were just right (flood after midnight). By press and radio Germany threatened invasion ever more loudly and instantly. Still it did not come. Some guessers said that, after disagreement in his High Command, Hitler was waiting for the weekend of Aug. 4, anniversary of Britain's 1914 declaration of war, when the moon would be dark. Only troop move he made last week was to occupy, unopposed, the islet of Ushant off the tip of Brittany, westernmost fragment of France, 125 miles south of England's southwest tip, Land's End.
Britain consoled herself last week that invasion was not yet imminent because of the nonarrival of Germany's Air Force in daily waves of thousands instead of scores. Such mass bombing was a prerequisite for landing troops in Britain by any means. Britain now had at least 2,000 first-line fighting planes and perhaps twice as many bombers. These must be removed from the air, preferably by smashing them on the ground, or by so devastating their fields, fuel bases and shops that they could not rise. To extinguish Poland's large but surprised Air Force took 5,000 planes of the Luftwaffe less than 48 hours. To knock out 300 Dutch and 200 Belgian airplanes took less than 24 hours. The French Air Force (5,500 planes) gradually disintegrated during twelve days of bombing in the Battle of France.