Hello, I am progressing, with no little effort I must say, in my Churchill translation.

Sunday 15 September saw one of the major air battles of the era, with the Luftwaffe sending 100 bombers and 400 fighters over south-eastern England. My doubt concerns these 40 plus, 60 plus, etc.
Does anyone know if they mean that the RAF Command Room in Uxbridge was receiving information that 40, 60, 80 new german planes were arriving? I wouldn't say that makes much sense, since Churchill quote below says that "there was even an 80 plus", which should not be that astonishing considering the huge presence of not less than 500 enemy planes.
Would it mean, alternatively, that there were moments in which the numerical superiority of the German air forces was in the order of 40 to 1; 60 to 1; even 80 to 1? I wish I knew the correct interpretation, so as making sense of my rendering.


One after another signals came in, ‘40 plus’, ‘60 plus’; there was even an ‘80 plus’ . . . Presently the red bulbs showed that the majority of our squadrons were engaged . . . I became conscious of the anxiety of the Commander, who now stood still behind his subordinate’s chair. Hitherto I had watched in silence. I now asked: ‘What other reserves have we?’ ‘There are none,’ said Air Vice-Marshal Park.* In an account which he wrote about it afterwards he said that at this I ‘looked grave’. Well I might. What losses should we not suffer if our refuelling planes were caught on the ground by further raids of ‘40 plus’ or ‘50 plus’! The odds were great; our margins small; the stakes infinite





Thanks a lot for your help and attention.


Best wishes,


CM

Surely it just means "at least" as in "estimated to be at least 40, or a few more". And so no, Churchill is not talking about ratios, but simple numbers. Bear in mind that these were not the total of enemy aircraft attacking but simply the numbers in each of the successive waves coming in. I think official aircraft spotters were encouraged to estimate the number of enemy aircraft in any formation to the nearest ten (which would approximate to a squadron) and then round up, so that "40 plus" just meant roughly 40-50 aircraft, and so probably four or five squadrons. 

So when Churchill says there was "even an 80 plus" raid I take that to mean that he was impressed/horrified that the Luftwaffe was able to coordinate a single formation of some eight or nine squadrons - which must have taken off from several different airfields over quite some time, managed to rendez-vous into a single unit, and then attack together as a single wave. Note that it was not necessarily the total number of bombers attacking that was critical but rather how intensive the bombing was, as the interval between the successive waves of bombers determined how effective RAF fighter defence, ground-based AA guns, firefighting, casualty evacuation etc, could be. The more intense the bombing in a period of time, the more effective it was ... compared to the same number of bombs dropped but over a longer period, thereby giving more time for the defenders to react, refuel, rearm, recover and recuperate.

I see. I understand it all now. It's impressive that there's a technique in all this. It's not go-drop-leave. You have sophisticated my vision of an air attack.
Very interesting. The point of different airfields being involved and the need to coordinate the coming together of those planes from various bases is particularly illuminating.

Thanks a lot.

I actually think Churchill was being a little dim in that passage ... Park wrote his own account of events just after the war and also mentioned the occasion when Churchill insisted on hanging around the command centre all day getting in the way, which was - as Churchill also related - probably the most critical one in what became known as The Battle of Britain. In Park's version of events he also related how attack waves were coming so thick and fast that everyone at the command centre resorted to shorthand references when relaying their formation, location, direction and reported speed (all required to be processed as quickly as possible to try and work out each wave's most likely destination). He didn't actually say which terms became abbreviated, but he does alternate between "number plus" and "number plus fighter escort" in his own account - so I reckon that's what Churchill heard repeatedly and took it to mean "number in excess of", which as a layman would be exactly what it means in normal vernacular.

From the defence point of view on the day the presence of fighter escort was critical in assessing how any bomber formation would be tackled, or even if it should be tackled at all. Those with heavy escort had to either have that escort targeted (if the scrambled resources were up to it) or avoided altogether (if the scrambled planes were simply vacating their airfield in advance of an attack but were ill-equipped to do much else), meaning in effect that the bombers in either case could reach their target and deliver their payloads as planned. Fighter escort numbers were themselves almost impossible to quantify from observation or radar, so all that those scrambled to encounter them could really be given as a heads-up was that they were there at all and needed to be tackled first if the defending fighters were up to it. A wave with little or no escort (normally those on the same trajectory as earlier pathfinders), on the day that was in it, became the primary targets for an increasingly desperate and poorly equipped defence force.

EDIT / PS: Of course I could be reading way too much into Park's language too. If I were doing the translation I'd stick with MM's suggestion that Churchill meant "plus" exactly as most people would ("in excess of"), at least when he wrote down what remembered he'd heard eight years later. Google tells me that would be "más" in Spanish, but then Google tells me my name means "worm, son of the lake".