Each year in Britain, 15th September is commemorated as 'Battle of Britain Day'. Dr Alfred Price's Battle of Britain Day: 15 September 1940 explains why. The Battle of Britain had been raging across the skies for two months when on 15 September 1940, the Luftwaffe launched two massive daylight raids on London. Based on both interviews with the people involved and official records, historian Dr Alfred Price's definitive book is the only full-scale work devoted to the events of that pivotal day. Aiming to establish air superiority prior to an invasion of England, Luftwaffe pilots flew 1260 sorties in just twenty-four hours. Faulty intelligence led them to expect little resistance, but though perilously close to defeat, successive waves of British aircraft proved a formidable defence, and inflicted a grave blow on German morale. Both sides immediately over-claimed their success that day; yet it was not the physical damage that made this battle a decisive turning point. Instead it demonstrated to the German High Command their failure to gain air superiority over the Channel. Without this, the German invasion of England became untenable, and it would never be attempted again. vWriting about what this very special day meant to him, Dr Alfred Price says: "I was born three years before the outbreak of World War II and brought up in Ewell, Surrey, on the southern edge of the London conurbation. So my formative years coincided with World War II. Like many of my generation, I took a strong personal interest in the air actions taking place over my home. For an unimaginative youngster, with no real concept of the potential dangers to myself, those were exciting times. In my book Battle of Britain Day I have tried to convey some of the childhood excitement I felt for the subject. But I tempered this with descriptions illustrating the grim realities of what happens when military targets embedded in a large city come under air attack. At that time the term 'collateral damage' did not exist, but we were all too well aware of its consequences. During the research for this book I collected every relevant document, official and unofficial, and every contemporary newspaper account I could find relating to the air action on 15 September 1940. I also conducted detailed interviews with 67 of those, on both sides, who participated in the action or observed it from the ground. The story that unfolded on the events of 15 September 1940 differs in significant respects from those that have appeared in the many other books on the Battle of Britain. But that is to be expected. After all, none of those other accounts had the benefit of two years of research on that one day." Dr Alfred Price served as an aircrew officer in the RAF, specialising in air fighting tactics. Now a full-time historian, he has written many books on aviation subjects, including The Luftwaffe Data Book, Battle over the Reich and One Day in a Long War. Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 92 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 by Greenhill Books This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com