The Blackboard in the Map Room

Inevitably, very few pictures were taken during the war in the top secret Map Room, but among the rare pictures that exist from the final days of the war, one shows the ‘score board’ for the Battle of Britain, permanently painted up by the Map Room officers to denote the data on the Battle as published on 15 September. This day is considered by many to be the turning point in the war. It was on this day that Hitler’s Luftwaffe gradually began to lose the battle. Unable to knock out Britain’s air defences, his plans to send his invasion force across the exposed waters of the English Channel were suddenly rendered impractical and extremely risky. Hitler chose to redirect his effort to his plans for invading the Soviet Union and, after May 1941, vastly reduced the number of air attacks on the UK mainland. This gave Britain the breathing space it needed to re-group and, with her American allies, to plan their invasion of continental Europe in 1944.