Aug. 15 was the date set by Adolf Hitler for the completion of his conquest of Great Britain. Last week, as that date approached, Britain's Over-Seas League planned a monster Aug. 15 tea party in London for His Majesty's forces from overseas. Before the week was out Britons were certain that Adolf Hitler had decided to crash the party. Huge German air assaults lasting from dawn to dusk began; 400 or 500 Nazi raiders came over Britain every day; no hour was without its dogfight. Finally, after holding it back for several hours, the British censor released a dispatch reporting that heavy explosions, believed to be caused by shells, not bombs, had occurred on the southeast coast—presumably the work of Nazi guns across the Channel.
First big Nazi air attack began on Aug. 8 near Dover. Before daybreak a flotilla of Nazi motor torpedo boats darted into a Channel convoy of 20 small coastal ships, sank three. The convoy continued westward down the Channel. About 9 a.m., 50 Junkers dive bombers, with Messerschmitt fighters swarming above them, swooped out of the morning sun. Some of the ships were towing barrage balloons which the Germans had to shoot down before they could dive-bomb. Anti-aircraft fire and squadrons of angry British Spitfires and Hurricanes hurtled up from the British coast. The sky spun crazily with dogfights, plummeting wrecks, cripples smoking off for home. At noon an even larger formation of Germans struck again at the convoy, and between 4 and 5 p.m. yet another. Not less than 400 planes of the Luftwaffe were counted during the successive attacks. When R. A. F. added up its score it claimed 61 sure kills (a record) to only 16 British planes lost. The Admiralty said only two of the convoyed ships were lost by bombing, in addition to the three torpedoed. Germany's claim for all seas that day (probably unreliable*) was 28 ships sunk or struck, 49 British planes shot down, twelve German planes lost. German pilots said they wrecked Dover's balloon barrage.
Willard Garfield Weston, wealthy Canadian baker now an English M. P., got so excited reading the news ticker at the House of Commons that he promised £100,000 ($400,000) to Lord Beaverbrook's Ministry for Aircraft Production, to replace that day's plane losses. Prime Minister Churchill conveyed the War Cabinet's special compliments to R. A. F.
For two days afterwards German planes ranged widely over the British Isles on scattered raids in small formations. They said they smashed the runway at the Bristol airport, the Pobjoy airplane-engine works at Rochester, an explosives factory at Faversham, docks and shipyards at Newcastle, Sheerness, Chatham. On the third day they staged another big show, beginning at 7:30 a.m., on Dover's repaired balloon barrage.