Ok, let's go with the facts:

• The Luftwaffe did attack RAF airbases. This put the RAF bases in southern England under duress
• Most of those RAF bases were dirt fields, and were put back into order within 24 hours
• Germany consistently underestimated RAF numbers, both fighters and pilots. For their part, the UK overestimated Luftwaffe numbers of both fighters and pilots. As a result, Germany consistently thought they were very close to wiping out the RAF and the UK consistently thought it was on the verge of collapse
• RAF fighter production and pilot availability went up through the Battle of Britain

And now, a somewhat quick discussion of estimates, British options, and my conclusions:

---

Estimates

Consistently, the Germans underestimated the British in terms of planes available and production of replacement aircraft. On the other hand, the British overestimated German fighter strength and production. As a result, the Germans always thought they were quite close to a victory, and the British thought they were just barely hanging on. It's true that the Germans started with more planes, and that the battle was always going to be a battle of attrition. However, German production of aircraft never matched British production over the course of the Battle of Britain. This website is admittedly poorly sourced, but it gives the below table of aircraft production which I cannot find on a moment's notice from my other sources.

Month/British/German

June 446 164

July 496 220

August 476 173

September 467 218

October 469 200

Total 2354 975

A better source is Max Hastings, Inferno.

Through August the Luftwaffe progressively increased the intensity of its assaults, attacking Fighter Command Airfields--though only briefly radar stations. Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, C-in-C of Fighter Command, began the battle with an average of 600 aircraft available for action, while the Germans deployed a daily average of around 750 serviceable bombers, 250 dive-bombers, and over 600 single-engined and 150 twin-engined fighters, organized in three air fleets. Souteast England was the main battleground, but Dowding was also obliged to defend the northeast and southwest from long-range attacks. (Pg 85)

Both air forces wildly overestimated the damage they inflected on each other. But the Germans’ intelligence failure was far more serious, because it sustained their delusion that they were winning. Fighter Command’s stations were targeted by forty Luftwaffe raids during August and early September, yet only two—Manston and Lympne on the Kent coast—were put out of action for more than a few hours, and the radar recievers were largely spared from attention. By late August the Luftwaffe believed Fighter Command’s first-line strength had been halved, to 300 aircraft. In reality, however, Dowding still deployed around twice that number: attrition was working to the advantage of the British. Between 8 and 23 August, the RAF lost 204 aircraft, but during that month 476 new fighters were built, and many more repaired. The Luftwaffe lost 397, of which 181 were fighters, while only 313 Bf-109s and Bf-110s were produced by German factories. Fighter Command lost 104 pilots killed in the middle fortnight of August, against 623 Luftwafffe airmen dead or captured. (Pg 85-86, emphasis mine)

This source gives another statistic that bolsters the argument that the RAF was winning the battle of attrition.

The war of attrition took its toll from July 1940 to the end of the battle in early October. German fighter strength fell from 725 to 275. With production outpacing losses, RAF fighter planes rose from 644 to 732.

The Battle of Britain was a battle of attrition, but it was being won by the British.

British options

Many narratives make an assumption that is unwarranted—the British had to continue their defense as they began it. This is simply not true. At any point, the British could have moved their fighter bases further north—out of the reach of the Germans’ ability to make escorted attacks. The RAF was hard pressed in the Battle of Britain, but had they needed a breather—and it turns out the Germans needed one far worse—they could have relocated their bases to the north and played for time. So long as the RAF was not defeated, an invasion of Britain was going to be incredibly difficult. The British chose to defend as far forward as they could so that they could do as much damage as possible to the Luftwaffe and so they could try to spare some of their island from harm. A more northerly defense would have meant more damage to British cities and less damage to the Luftwaffe, but it would have also preserved the RAF from being hurt on the ground.

My conclusions

In my opinion, the German error in the Battle of Britain was attacking an enemy that they had no way of knocking out of the war and who had greater aircraft production. Since neither the Kriegsmarine nor the Luftwaffe could make an invasion of the British Isles possible and there was no capability to starve the British, the Germans never had the capacity to defeat the UK. None of this should detract from the heroism of “the few,” but despite how desperate it seemed at the time the British were winning the Battle of Britain from the outset.

---

Okay, back to the facts:

• Luftwaffe bombers hit London on August 24, but they were aiming for RAF airfields and missed their target
• Churchill ordered a retaliatory strike the next night
• The Luftwaffe thought the RAF was nearly spent, and German command thought that attacks on London would force the RAF into a final battle as well as force the UK to surrender
• The shift from attacking RAF bases to bombing cities did relieve some pressure on the RAF, but the Luftwaffe was hemorrhaging pilots and aircraft from the very beginning while the RAF was under duress but holding its own (though the British may have felt like they were under more duress than they actually were due to intelligence missteps)
• The plan for the German invasion of England required the RAF to be destroyed, the Royal Navy to be neutralized, a large army to be transported for an amphibious invasion, and this army to be supplied as it advanced. None of those requirements were anywhere close to being met

---

In conclusion, the thumbnail sketch you received had some bits of history in it, but was well off in its conclusions as well as some facts along the way. Fact or fiction? Some facts, whole lot of fiction.

(EDIT: Thank you for the gold, as well as the compliments! Followup questions are always encouraged, and other answers are more than welcome as well!)

I'm reading Chester Wilmot's Struggle for Europe right now and he covers this in the opening few chapters. He claims that the Luftwaffe increased the strain on the RAF by bombing their fields and installations. While yes they were very fast to repair them each successive raid takes it toll and apparently just as they were breaking the Germans, believing that the RAF was close to finish, switched to bombing cities. The switch in tactics was due to a belief that by going after the civilian population they could wipe out the remainder of the RAF.

I'll go home and read it again just to update this post.

RAF had over a hundred air bases in East Anglia alone. Taking out a significant portion of bases in all of the south of England would have been almost impossible given the limited number of bombers available to the Luftwaffe.

http://www.naylandandwiston.net/History/CharlesGumm/PictureIndex.php?do=4a

I always read the questions and jump into the comments because it seems very interesting but then I quickly leave cause I'm scared of long responses

Just to speculate, if the Germans were not occupied on other fronts (and subsequently defeated) the battle of Britain would have taken a very different shape with the German development of rockets.

i did EXACTLY this, word for word, for my history final in 12'th grade years ago, the answer is no, the germans where fucked due to a lot of reasons.