Air Chief Marshal Dowding Myth

One of the enduring myths the movie perpetuates is the myth of the brave few RAF fighters hopelessly outmatched in number by the unstoppable Luftwaffe. During the movie, a concerned Air Chief Marshal Dowding is shown professing that the RAF is outnumbered 650 – 2500 . Dowding says," our young men will have to shoot down their young men at a rate of four to one just to keep pace."

In fact, at the beginning of the battle, there was almost parity between the numbers of single seat fighter planes between the opposing sides. As attrition begin to take its toll the aircraft production of the British gave the Royal Air Force a big advantage in the last weeks of the battle. According to Michael Lyon, British aircraft production outpaced German output

The idea of producing more bombers to conduct this counterattack was emphasized from the speech by Stanley Baldwin in 1932 in which everyone remembers his praise" the bomber will always get through." Baldwin reiterated that "The only defense is offense which means you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourself." In the movie the importance of radar is portrayed as air chief marshal Dowding tells one of his subordinate officers' that he will "trust in God, and pray to radar", instead of the other way around. Dowding recognize the importance of radar and made it the centerpiece of what came to be called the Dowding system. He developed a chain of 21 radar stations along England's southern and eastern coast.

The average range for effective radar use was around 80 miles over the channel, but it could not yet work for planes flying below 1000 feet or inland over the English landmass. To make up for this deficiency, and Observer Corps was created. 30,000 observers were deployed at 1000 observation post and they were on duty 24 hours around the clock. The Observer Corps was trained in aircraft recognition in height estimations. Just as radar had its limitations, the Observer Corps was often hampered by low hanging cloud cover and