No.

One of the important things to realize about the Battle of Britain is that despite its role in British patriotic memory, there was no real way for the RAF to lose it. The Luftwaffe's air attacks obstinately were to aid the Germans to undertake Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of southern England, but Luftwaffe's air staff was largely skeptical of the operation. Luftwaffe air attacks sought to break British war-making potential, destroy the RAF, and break Britons' morale leading to a change in government more amenable to peace. If the Luftwaffe was unenthusiastic about operations leading to an invasion, then the Kriegsmarine was decidedly pessimistic about them. Naval Chief Erich Raeder had spent a good deal of July 1940 explaining to Hitler that Sea Lion was unsound and that the earliest the Kriegsmarine could possibly ferry German troops to southern England was mid-September. Privately, the Kreigsmarine's staff envisioned possibly pushing for an invasion in 1941. In the meantime, they half-heartedly prepared for Sea Lion in the hope that the Luftwaffe would manage to wrest a victory on its own. The Heer was slightly more gung-ho for an invasion compared to its sister services, but this was a low bar especially and enthusiasm waned as it became clear that the Kriegsmarine could not ferry enough troops and their equipment across the Channel. So two of the major components of Sea Lion- the army and the navy- placed most of their hopes on winning through airpower alone. This strategic situation made British victory something of a foregone conclusion.

The problem facing the Germans in 1940 was that airpower alone could not force a victory by itself. Subsequent experience with Anglo-American bomber offensives, which were far better planned and more capable than their Luftwaffe counterparts in the summer of 1940, showed that it was difficult to use bombing to break enemy morale and industrial economies are very resilient against bombing. The Luftwaffe's attacks against the RAF did manage to put the British air establishment under a good deal of strain, but the campaign against southern England's airfields was in and of itself irrelevant to the big picture. Denuding Fighter Command of pilots and planes would not resolve the problems of Sea Lion such as the shortages of suitable transport ships of the complete lack of support vessels. And while the Luftwaffe's offensive in the earlier phases of the Battle did manage to put Fighter Command on edge, the Germans did not enjoy the type of air superiority Anglo-American and Soviet forces enjoyed in their great offensives of 1944. And even Fighter Command at its most dire numbers in the Battle was still able to contest the Luftwaffe for control of the skies. The RAF never reached the nadirs that the Luftwaffe did in defeat, such as the latter's paltry response to the Overlord invasion on 6 June 1944.

The continued resistance of Fighter Command throughout the Battle was one of the factors that forced the Germans to call off and postpone Sea Lion on 17 September. For all of its victories in France and the Low Countries, the Luftwaffe suffered quite dearly for them. German industry could only barely cover operational losses and the same could be said of the Luftwaffe's training establishment. Victory over France had vindicated the use of airpower, but now the Luftwaffe found itself facing a hard ceiling on its expansion. German training of replacements and manufacturing of new planes lagged behind these losses. The Battle added a bigger hole that the Luftwaffe could not refill. The switch from attacks on airfields to London accelerated losses as German fighter escort doctrine was inadequate to protect German bombers and London was at the extreme range of the Bf-109's operational radius. Continued operations, which had begun in the spring, wore out both men and equipment, adding to the Luftwaffe's replacement crisis.

The strong British response to the German air attacks on 15 September (aka Battle of Britain Day) shocked the Luftwaffe's upper echelons as it proved that the RAF was far from a defeated force. But Park's "Big Wings" defending London were at best a contributing factor for the German's postponement of Sea Lion. Many of the Luftflottes' units were absorbing losses they could not sustain. Although Göring retained a degree of confidence that his pilots could destroy the RAF, there was less enthusiasm for continuing to fight within the lower echelons of the Luftwaffe's command. Such skepticism extended to Hitler and Raeder, who proposed that Sea Lion could take place as late as 8 October if the Luftwaffe could secure victory conditions, in effect pinning the failure for the operation to even take place on the air force and away from the navy.

These clear dates- the air battles of 15 September and Hitler's 17 September postponement of Sea Lion- though belie the continued air operations over the British isles. Luftwaffe day attacks continued after a fashion in the weeks after BoB Day; there were large daylight raids on London with heavy fighter escorts in the last weeks of September. Additionally, the Luftwaffe rejiggered its bombing strategy to minimize losses by spreading out its attacks on the British isles. This also included nighttime attacks on London and other metropolitan areas, a period known as the Blitz, in which the Luftwaffe sought to disrupt British industry and weaken morale. As mentioned above, the Blitz failed at both of these objectives and losses coupled with the need of other theaters, especially the newly opened Eastern Front against the USSR, forced the end of the Blitz by 1941. Nighttime terror bombing might have solved the issue of losses from fighter aircraft, but the Blitz was counterproductive over the long-term in that accident rates naturally climbed up, further weakening the bomber force so it actually conducted operations in 1941 as a numerically weaker force by some 200 machines than it was in April 1940.

The neat chronology of July to September 1940 obscures some of the key facets of the Battle of Britain. For one thing, the Germans were attempting to achieve with airpower something that was unfeasible. To be fair to Göring, this was still a new form of warfare and a number of Allied air officers displayed some of the same confidence in the ability of airpower to secure victory on its own. British resistance was important not only for the psychological perception that the war would continue, but also that it exacted losses on the Luftwaffe it could ill-afford to sustain. German abandonment of Sea Lion proceeded in drips and drabs throughout the summer of 1940 as a number of officers in the three services realized that a landing on the southern English coast was unfeasible. Göring himself was under-involved in Sea Lion's planning, which was an odd omission given that the Luftwaffe would have to do a significant amount of heavy lifting to make the operation even remotely feasible. The RAF's resistance forced the Luftwaffe to acknowledge that it could not sustain daylight operations en masse over the British Isles. The Luftwaffe did adjust their attacks in the weeks and months after 15 September, but these were likewise dead-ends that could not deliver the victories their planners promised.

Sources

Bungay, Stephen. The Most Dangerous Enemy: A History of the Battle of Britain. London: Aurum Press, 2001.

Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt. Germany and the Second World War Volume II: Germany's Initial Conquests in Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

Murray, Williamson. Strategy for Defeat: The Luftwaffe 1933-1945. Secaucus, N.J.: Chartwell Books, 1986.