How victory in the Battle of Britain hinged on one man

The Battle of Britain has always been dedicated to the courage of The Few – but victory may have boiled down to the tactics of just one man.

In a new book exploring the alternative outcomes of pivotal military events, a team of mathematicians and historians have modelled the battle and claimed that triumph was by no means assured. 

The authors suggest that success largely hinged on Sir Keith Park’s views on how to fight the battle, which proved to be the best way to grind down the Luftwaffe.

When war broke out, Park was Air Vice Marshal in command of No 11 Group of the RAF, whose job was to defend South East England and London.

At the time, military strategy suggested that outnumbering the enemy was the key to victory, but Park believed that taking time to assemble large aerial formations would leave England dangerously undefended. 

Instead he sent his pilots up as soon as they were available, dispatching one or two squadrons to pick off the Luftwaffe fighters in a type of guerilla warfare, before they could bomb Britain’s airfields or London.

“Park fought the battle, mathematically speaking, just right,” explained Dr Christopher Price, a historian at York St John University.

“The idea at the time was you had to concentrate force against the Germans, hurling everything you had at the enemy, but that took ages to get into shape and by then they had already bombed the target.

“Park sent his guys straight up, tearing straight through them, which felt counterintuitive to pilots, but over time this was a better attritional result.

“Although we were doing this higher level analysis, we found that individuals matter, which has been discredited in favour of historical forces, but people can have profound effects on outcomes.”

The Nazis’ crucial error

Although Park was initially credited as the saviour of London, his approach fell out of favour shortly after the battle and he was replaced with Trafford Leigh-Mallory, who championed the “big wing” strategy of meeting the Luftwaffe with huge numbers.

The team re-ran the Battle of Britain hundreds of thousands of times using different parameters and found that the Germans could have won if they had made critical changes to their strategy.

For instance, the shift from attacking airfields to targeting London proved to be a grave misstep for the Nazis. Had they stuck to disabling Britain’s air capability, the probability of a British victory would have ranged from 63.7 per cent to 9.1 per cent. 

Similarly, if the Luftwaffe had initiated their assault immediately after Dunkirk in June 1940, the chance of a German loss would have decreased to a mere 18 to 0.3 per cent.

Dr Price added: “They could have won, but it depends on Goering and Hitler being entirely different people and behaving out of character.

“The suggestion is they would have had a much higher chance of victory if they went straight to Britain after Dunkirk, rather than flapping around for a month, but people forget that they were still fighting the battle for France.

“It’s more likely that it was down to individuals. If Park had been sacked earlier that would have helped the Germans.”

The book, Quantifying Counterfactual Military History, published by Routledge, was written by mathematicians Dr Brennen Fagan, Professor Niall MacKay, and Professor Jamie Wood of York University, and historians Dr Ian Horwood, and Dr Price of York St John. 

Writing in the book, the authors conclude: “If Leigh-Mallory had been in Park’s position, how much worse would the British have fared? Almost certainly much worse.”

The added: “In writing history, it must always be remembered that a historical fact is simply one of numberless possibilities until the historical actor moves, or an event occurs, at which point it becomes real.”