Battle of Britain (1940): France falls · 266

Fighter Command under Dowding, with Park's 11 Group in the southeast, used Chain Home radar and a ground-controlled interception system that was as important as any Spitfire silhouette. RAF aircrew dead in the battle period are usually counted in the high hundreds; Luftwaffe aircrew losses were higher. Civilian deaths belong mainly to the Blitz ledger that overlapped and outlasted the official battle.

Churchill's "Few" sentence made this the British civic air war. English-speaking memory sometimes treats it as the war; it was a necessary 1940 survival, not 1945. Korean readers should hear it beside the later UN air war in 1950-53: radar and fighters as a defensive system, not as a how-to of interception.

Radar, groups, and a political turn to London The battle was an organisational win -- Dowding's system -- as much as a pilot-hero story, and it leaked into the Blitz the moment London burned. June 1940 left Britain expecting invasion. The Channel was a moat only if the air above it was contested. Sea Lion was a sketch that needed a sky.