Let’s begin with the protagonists. We have two well-armed, if numerically unequal, parties. This is the first experience so far of large-scale, serious air war.

The Germans’ advantages: great numerical superiority (3:1 at the beginning) and the proximity of bases to targets (150–200 km from the airfields in northern France and Belgium to London).

The advantages of the British: better quality of aircraft materials, better petrol quality, a longer period of pilot training, the war is ‘at home’, which means that the British planes shot down fall on their own territory and nearly half of the pilots save themselves with parachutes.

The large scale of the war is reflected in the fact that many hundreds of planes are engaged in the raids every day. The maximum number of German planes, 1,000, was recorded on 15 August. The raids come in waves, with intervals of several hours. The attacks are not concentrated on one specific city or even a specific part of London. They are of a somewhat superficial, scattered nature. London has been the focus of attack since 7 September. The Germans have been increasingly switching from daytime to night-time sorties. Two to three hundred bombers attack systematically every night from dusk till dawn, but that quantity of machines cannot do serious damage to such a giant metropolis as London.

The efficacy of the German air offensive in respect of military targets is strangely negligible. The damage inflicted on industrial facilities, ports, railways, airfields, etc. does not exceed 5–10% of their capacity countrywide. Human losses are not great: no more than 20,000 killed and 40–50,000 gravely wounded over three months.

The reason for this low efficacy lies in the strength of British resistance. Fighters should be mentioned first. As this three-month experience shows, fighters are the main means of repelling air attacks: 85–90% of crashed German planes were brought down by fighters. Fighters, furthermore, do not allow German bombers to stay long in the air, forcing them to drop bombs in a rush from high altitude. Fighters also prevent bombers from diving and disrupt the formations of the attack squadrons. British fighters render the Germans powerless in daylight. They tried to change their tactics (at first the bombers were accompanied by an equal number of fighters, then the number of escorting fighters was increased to 8:1, and then fighters accompanied by fighter escorts replaced bombers), but nothing came of it. Following the decision to stop using bombers in daylight, German losses have decreased in the last two weeks (no more than 15–20 planes daily), but the strike power of the attacks has been considerably weakened, since a fighter can carry merely 10% of a bomber’s load. On the other hand, the British are powerless at night, when fighters are practically useless. The British have yet to find another means of dealing with night raids (although they are working on this problem intensively). That is why the Germans are increasingly focusing on night raids on London.

The role of anti-aircraft artillery in repelling air attacks proves rather limited. Anti-aircraft guns hit merely 10–15% of all the German planes brought down. However, anti-aircraft defensive fire has two positive effects. First, it forces the Germans to remain at an altitude of 5–7 km, which seriously affects bombing accuracy. Second, it bolsters the morale of the London population.

Barrage balloons play a useful, but auxiliary role. They play on the pilot’s mind and make dive bombing still more difficult. The higher the balloons are raised the better. So it is better to fill the balloons with helium rather than with hydrogen.

The defence lines between the coast and London (fighters, anti-aircraft artillery, barrage balloons) are very important. The distance between Dover and London is about 100 km as the crow flies, but thanks to the effective lines of defence no more than 10–15% of German raiders manage to break through to London in daylight hours. These defence lines prove effective (albeit to a far lesser degree) at night as well.

The statistics of British and German losses in air combat published by the British are in general quite realistic. I have had occasion to verify this more than once.

By all appearances, in the second half of September, when the low efficacy of the air offensive from the point of view of an invasion became apparent, the Germans gambled on undermining the population’s and government’s morale. Curiously, in London, they bombed mainly the city centre (to scare the bourgeoisie) and workers’ districts (to spur the masses to protest against the war).

Nonetheless, the experience of these three months shows beyond doubt that, given a firm government, a relatively solid home front, effective resistance to the enemy, and those shelters that have been put up, albeit imperfectly, in London and other cities, it is not enough to launch an air offensive alone, in the forms and dimensions we have observed hitherto (gas has not yet been used), to undermine the morale of the population.

One more conclusion suggests itself: aviation combined with land (especially mechanized) forces is massively powerful. As the experience of Poland and France has shown, this combination can decide a war. Aircraft alone, when unaccompanied by armies on the ground and when met with more or less serious resistance in the air, has relatively limited potential. Aviation alone is not decisive. That is why ‘stalemate in the air’ has been reached after the three-month air war between England and Germany. Neither party has succeeded in achieving mastery of the skies.