British Strategy
There was a debate which raged within Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain. It centred around what strategy to pursue against the Luftwaffe. AOC Hugh Dowding and AOC 11 Group Keith Park favoured a strategy of non-attrition. From their perspective, the RAF had to remain intact to win the battle, rather than decimate the Luftwaffe. Both felt that trying to fight a battle of attrition would give the numerically superior enemy the chance to destroy large parts of the Command in one go, thus playing into Göring's hands. Therefore Park and Dowding advocated the tactic of sending small numbers of fighters to intercept every raid; providing opposition to every raid offered the chance of inflicting continued attrition on German formations while avoiding decisive damage to Fighter Command.
Park's equivalent and another of Dowding's commanders, AOC 12 Group Trafford Leigh-Mallory, held the opposite view. For him, large forces would win the battle by destroying large numbers of the enemy. This attrition strategy would use the concept of the Big Wing as its basis.
Read more about this topic: Battle Of Britain Day
Famous quotes containing the words british and/or strategy:
“There is not a more disgusting spectacle under the sun than our subserviency to British criticism. It is disgusting, first, because it is truckling, servile, pusillanimoussecondly, because of its gross irrationality. We know the British to bear us little but ill willwe know that, in no case do they utter unbiased opinions of American books ... we know all this, and yet, day after day, submit our necks to the degrading yoke of the crudest opinion that emanates from the fatherland.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (18091845)
“To a first approximation, the intentional strategy consists of treating the object whose behavior you want to predict as a rational agent with beliefs and desires and other mental states exhibiting what Brentano and others call intentionality.”
—Daniel Clement Dennett (b. 1942)