On This Day: RAF claims victory in Battle of Britain after climactic day

SEPT 15, 1940: The RAF claimed victory in the Battle of Britain after shooting down a record 60 Luftwaffe planes in a 24-hour period on this day in 1940.

The repulsed attacks – at a cost of 26 British aircraft – effectively ensured the Nazis could no longer threaten the UK’s air supremacy and launch a seaborne invasion.

Two days later, Adolf Hitler ordered the postponement of preparations to land troops – giving Britain, which then stood alone against the Nazis, vital time to reinforce.

Since then, September 15 has been commemorated annually as Battle of Britain Day to honour the 2,927 airmen who had fought in the battle and the 510 who died.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill praised these men, who included 574 pilots from the Commonwealth and exiles from Nazi-occupied countries, as 'The Few'.

'Never, in the field of human conflict, was so much owed by so many to so few,' he famously said on August 20 during the height of the battle.

The Luftwaffe, whose attacks are shown in a British Pathé newsreel, had started the battle on July 10, 1940, three weeks after the fall of France.

Initially they had had some success attacking RAF airfields in the south of England, but the British were aided by a device they had recently developed called Radar.

Hitler’s biggest blunder was diverting resources so that he could launch a bombing campaign on London on September 7 in retaliation for British air raids on Berlin.

The Luftwaffe bombers also initially attacked during the daytime and so were easy to pick off by Britain’s nimble Spitfire and Hurricane fighter planes.

[On This Day: Britain declares war on Germany to begin World War II]

[On This Day: HG Wells predicts outbreak of World War Two]

The tactic, which was nicknamed the Blitz allowed the RAF, which had lost more than 1,500 aircraft, to reinforce and so maintain vital air supremacy.

But civilians paid a huge price for air raids, which began with the Germans bombing London for 57 consecutive nights and then later devastating other British cities.

On the first day alone, more than 430 people were killed with 1,600 badly injured after a 12-hour attack by 348 Luftwaffe bombers that were escorted by 617 fighters.

And, by the end of the Blitz, a total of 43,000 civilians had been killed and thousands of buildings had been destroyed and left many British cities in ruins.

Yet none of this caused the collapse of civilian morale that Hitler had hoped for.

In a bid to reduce the death toll, 3.5million children – including 1.4million from London – were evacuated to the countryside.

In November, Germany began bombing elsewhere in Britain – with 16 cities being hit by major raids where more than 100 tonnes of bombs were dropped in a single night.

Outside London, Liverpool – the main cargo port during the war - was the worst hit, with a death toll of more than 4,000.

Birmingham and Plymouth also suffered eight major air raids, with Bristol heavily targeted on six nights, Glasgow five, Southampton four and Portsmouth three.

But the Luftwaffe chose Coventry as the location to inflict its most devastating attack of the war when 515 bombers attacked it on November 14, 1940.

The industrial city, which had previously suffered 17 small raids, saw two thirds of its buildings and a third of its factories destroyed during a massive firestorm.

In London, which accounted for half of the Blitz’s death toll following 71 major raids, some of the worst incidents took place in shelters.

Such tragedies drove increasing numbers of people to seek refuge in Underground stations, but even these deep tunnels did not guarantee safety.

The Blitz ended in May 1941 after the Luftwaffe withdrew all but one of its squadrons as the Germans prepared to invade Russia instead.

But bombing continued throughout the war, albeit on a smaller scale and even today unexploded bombs are still routinely found in Britain’s cities.