Originally Posted by
pr00ne
Finningley Boy
The fact that the outcome at the time was nowhere near as vital as we thought does nothing to discredit the enormous morale boost it gave us at the time, and that warm glow persisted for about 20 years. It has cooled and hardened now as we see the true perspective.
If it was as important to Hitler as we thought at the time then he could have come back in 1941 or 42 and, FW190 vs Spitfire V etc, could well have won. Or, as someone else above pointed out, he could have concentrated 100% on the night blitz that we were lising badly, or, as Danny42C pointed out, concentrated on a blockade and starved us to defeat.
He did none of these things as we simply were nit that important to him and his eyes were always looking greedily and eagerly eastward, and THAT really lost him the war.
pr00ne,
I certainly take your point about revisionist history largely being a revelation which corrects understanding of previous events. There are of course some, on both sides of the fence, who do seize upon small qualified changes, which come to light later which do change the popular impression a little. As for FW190s v Spitfire Vs, by the time we got there, Hitler was, of course, charging across the plains of the western USSR. Not only that, the RAF bombing campaign, while not yet what it became under Harris, was becoming more of a problem for the Germans not to mention the trouble Hitler had gotten into in the Western Desert where the Afrika Korps had to redress the situation between ourselves and the Italian Army. Hitler's invasion of the USSR was doubtless launched too late and he had had to split his available resources due to both UK continued resistance, resistance movements and the reportedly poor performance of the Italian Forces, I suspect the latter problem was due more to the lack of loyalty to Mussolini rather than anything else.
FB