If Hitler wasn't completely out of his mind. He hated allied bombings so much that he forgot to bomb english airfields. He stated that if allies bomb our cities, germans will bomb every human soul in Britain to death. Thought if he bombed military targets BOB might have a different end or atleast allies would have major difficulties to attack europe.
I remember reading that if the Luftwaffe had paid more attention to military targets, the outcome of the Battle of Britain might have been a little different. Would it have had a major impact on the rest of the war? Who knows, but had England been knocked down just a little further, the possibilities are mind-boggling!
The first "phase" of the Battle of Britain was, in fact, devoted a;most entirely to attacks on Fighter Command airfields. Luftwaffe intelligence was notoriously poor. They failed to identify the principle airfields, mistook some types of airfield for others, and could not accurately assess the damage they were supposed to be achieving. Luftwaffe intelligence had a habit of simply "crossing off" an airfield once it was bombed, only to find that same airfield would be operational again days later. Despite these intelligence anomalies, RAF fighter command was stretched. Losses of pilots outnumbered new replacements, personel at airfields were, in some cases, refusing to repair damage due to the possibility of "follow-up" raids, and the numerical inferiority that Fighter command began the battle with became more pronounced as time wore on. The switch from airfields/harbours to industrial targets and London represents a turning point in the battle that only Fighter command was really aware of at the time. It was not clear exactly what sort of damage had been done to the command from the German perspective. London became a target more by accident than design, followed by it's adoption as official policy. In this sence, the Lufwaffe were taking on a role for which their aircraft and equipment was neither designed for nor suitable for modification. The Kreigsmarine had been half-hearted about "Seelowe" right from the start. Their losses in Norway, particularly of destroyers, began to bite, when it was realised that these were exactly the type of workhorse ship needed to prosecute a successful operation. Planning and training was therefore very "half-hearted". Politically, the German Army saw no reason to be in a hurry. The talk was that Britain would seek a compromise peace anyhow....wasn't it all but over? Few observers at the time held out much hope for Britain's continued survival without some kind of outside help.....And "Barbarossa" loomed on the horizion.... Victory in "Barbarossa" would have handed Germany a "win" by virtue of their being no other continental power to support Britain.....It is suggested that British access to Japanese Naval and diplomatic codes foresaw operation Barbarossa, but Hitler himself had made "Lebensraum" and "Drang Nach Osten" NATIONAL POLICY....It was easy to see what was coming next from a diplomatic point of view, especially a politician like Churchill with excellent information of Japanese intentions. Germany's next move had been talked about by Hitler since Landsberg prison and "Mein Kampf". Only Stalin refused to see the writing on the wall, more distrustful of his own "internal enemies", and the Western Allies, than he was of the nation they had been co-operating with militarily since 1924....GERMANY. Churchill moved American opinion from isolation to outright participation by pulling the Japanese into their attack on the United States. He achieved this by simply lobbying the Americans to cut off their oil, forcing them to act against their diplomatic protagonists. America, too, had been pouring money into China and had no wish to see future markets disappear with a sucessful Japanese war in China itself. Churchill was fully aware of Japanese reluctance to attack Russian territory from his own codebreaking services. If he could present Japan with a 'fait-accompli', they would either do one of two things...attack to guarantee their oil, or back down and withdraw from China where they were winning. Anyone who knows anything about public opinion in Japan will be able to tell you what the Japanese were going to do....and it wasn't "backing down" from something that was already succeeding. The Japanese, he surmised, would stay out of Russia's sphere of influence if their ability to bring their Chinese conflict to a conclusion was jeopardized by the actions of the Unitied States. The rest is simple, and direct....American policy in China is only now bearing fruit....having played both sides against the middle, the United States had worked itself into a position where it did not strictly matter which side won the Civil War in China, so long as Japanese interests were kept OUT. Intelligence and codebreaking were Britain's principal contributions to the Allied War effort. Japanese codes, both diplomatic and military, had been compromised by MAY 1940, 3 months before the Battle of Britain, and at the height of the French debacle. This may well explain Britain's half-hearted commitment to the fighting in France, something the French have always accused them of. And Winston Churchill had been on an inspection tour of France, and was a fluent French speaker. His ascendancy to the office of Prime Minister allowed him to put his grand strategic design into practice....but first, the British Army had to extract itself from France....and then wait for the two Dictators that were left, (Hitler & Stalin) to 'turn' on one another....It worked exactly as Churchill surmised....codebreaking did the rest...... It is for these reasons that the Battle of Britain is seen by many historians as the TRUE "turning point of World War Two". Intelligence failure in the Battle of Britain robbed the Luftwaffe's intelligence service of it's "eyes" to tell them if they were winning it or not. The constant re-appearence of British fighters convinced Goering to switch to breaking the will of the British people, something that had not been tried before, and who's chances of success were only a theory. Britain, too, made the same error, assuming that German "will" could be broken by bombardment from the air...
From the 2nd of January 1941 the Luftwaffe did indeed switch to more strategic targets under direct orders from the Fuehrer. Docks and Ports became a major priority with the aim of causing the maximum amount of damage to British imports. This combined with the U-Boat campaign was designed to starve Great Britain into submission. Indeed a large amount of damage was caused to places like Liverpool, Plymouth, Soyhampton and the London docklands.
