Fagan, Brennen, Horwood, Ian, MacKay, Niall, Price, Christopher, Richards, Ed and Wood, A. Jamie (2020) Bootstrapping the Battle of Britain. Journal of Military History, 84 (1). pp. 151-186.

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Abstract

The Battle of Britain is the focus of much historical controversy. We show here how the statistical technique of weighted bootstrapping can be used to create a new quantitative basis to help address such controversies. Bootstrapping facilitates the exploration of alternative campaign possibilities with different tactics. This results in comparative probabilities of “victory” for the actual and various counterfactual campaigns, providing a quantified assessment of the likelihood of German achievement of air superiority, thereby facilitating invasion. We find this more likely had the Luftwaffe targeted airfields more heavily, and greatly more likely had Germany brought forward its air campaign.

Item Type:	Article
Status:	Published
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D731 World War II D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D901 Europe (General)
School/Department:	School of Humanities
URI:	https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/3874

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