8. The Battle Included One of the Earliest Uses of Radar in Combat
The battle of Britain, amidst other things, was a platform for testing the superiority of the radar technology; which was still very new at the time. The Germans did not have a good understanding of radar and how it worked, so they did not understand the advantage that it offered the RAF. The British had built a number of radar sites around the coastline and they could have been easily destroyed by the Luftwaffe, but the Germans never saw them as valuable targets. This was a fatal error by the Germans because even though Radar was still new and very primitive by today’s standards, it was able to give the RAF warning of many of the German attacks. This, coupled with a Civilian Observer Corps to spot low flying aircraft, made the Germans lose the element of surprise, which is a vital part of every war.
There were some drawbacks as British fighter pilots occasionally found themselves in dangerous situations because the interpreter would misconstrue information from the signal thereby sending inaccurate info on enemy aircraft’s height and strength. But even though Radar had trouble spotting low flying craft and the signal was not always clear as to the size of the craft, it proved its worth during the Battle of Britain. It allowed the RAF to have the upper hand and shows Hitler’s folly in not updating and operating the German Radar system.
The Luftwaffe was then forced to do bombing missions at night or in poor weather because while the Radar would still pick up the plane, there was little the RAF could do about it without pilots making visual contact.