Hello everyone welcome back to the history hit World Wars podcast I'm your host James Rogers and in this episode

we're immersing ourselves in the history of the Battle of Britain over 80 years ago in

September 1940 the Lufwaffe made a gigantic aerial assault on London in the

belief that the RAF was down to its last few fighters.

They hoped this would be the decisive clash that finished them off and would bring Britain to the negotiating table.

To find out more, Dan went to Bentley Priory, the HQ of R.E.F. Fighter Command, and he met with historian Stephen Bunge, who explains

exactly why the R.E.F. won the Battle of Britain. This is headquarters fighter command and one of the key things that happened here was

processing information that came in from radar.

But the way it worked is absolutely brilliant, conceptually far ahead of the time.

This system is in fact the ancestor of the internet we know today. This is Dowdings

headquarters, his office, his telephones, chair he sat in, not the original I suspect, but this is where the man who

masterminded all of this spent his time.

And so he didn't, what's exciting about this space is he built and designed this system and then he operated it all from here from this desk.

Yeah, well he made big calls, I suppose. He kept himself out of day to day operations he made sure that they were

working properly his main job in the summer of 1940 was making sure that fight command was

properly resourced you know getting pilots from elsewhere

from training command beating up the training units

to provide them, making sure that aircraft production supply

were working, but they weren't really a problem. And then working on new problems

so he was as it were thinking about the next battle while other people were fighting this

one and he spent an inordinate amount of time on night air defense and working out how to do that because at the time in the summer

of 90 faulty we were helpless at night we had absolutely nothing.

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