Why Göring Believed the RAF Was Already Finished

WW2, from the records. https://warshelf.com/ July 16, 1940. Beppo Schmid, chief of Luftwaffe intelligence and a personal friend of Hermann Göring, puts his appreciation of the RAF on paper. The fighter count is about right. The rest is wrong: British factories, he writes, are building 180 to 300 fighters a month and falling, and he has almost nothing to say about radar or the system behind it. They build 496 in July. Over the next weeks German pilots claim more than three RAF aircraft for every one destroyed, repaired machines return to the line inside a week, and the radar campaign is called off after three days. Every subtraction comes off a Fighter Command that keeps refilling. By the end of August, Schmid's own reports have Dowding down to a hundred fighters, while Dowding still holds hundreds more.