WW1 Paved the Way for the Battle of Britain.

[Blakduk]

It's quite silly to question the LW as being the preeminent airforce in the world in 1940- they were better equipped and better led in tactics than then RAF. During the BoB the RAF learned some very hard lessons, the ill-conceived Defiant and 'Vic' formations are prime examples. In 1941 the RAF's performance over France was pathetic- the attrition in Spitfires alone was almost criminally negligent.
The BoB campaign was really aimed at imposing a cost on the British and challenging the will of their citizens to continue hostilities against Germany when they were cast out of the continent of Europe. The intransigence of Churchill and the unexpected resilience of the populace were what thwarted the German offensive.
The British failed to learn the lesson however and made exactly the same mistakes against the Germans when they started to take the offensive in the air. The Germans developed a coordinated air defence, chose which raids to confront, and the German people displayed the same stoicism as the British had when bombs fell on their cities. The RAF performance during the Dieppe raid was a travesty.
What the Germans didn't do however was gear their industry for full war production until Speer took over in late 1943- far too late. The LW never acquired a large enough strategic reserve and each pilot basically flew until he was dead, captured or crippled.

The attrition finished them in the end- their men were men after all, not ubermensch.

[Blakduk]

Kurfurst- the Germans knew about the British radar, but it was so far inferior to the German's that they dismissed it. They failed to realise how the radar information was used as part of an integrated intelligence gathering network to give the RAF dispatchers an almost real-time picture of what was happening.
The British mistakenly overestimated the LW capabilities and geared production to match it- they believed the German propoganda!

[Blakduk]

Back on topic- the fact that the Germans invested a lot of energy into developing the Knickebein radio guidance system may have been stimulated by their difficulties finding targets in WW1. I can't find a direct reference that suggests that but it seems reasonable.

[609_Huetz]

Maybe a bit got lost in translation here: of course Schmidt, Goering and the LW were aware of radar, that's why they initially focused their raids on those as well.

What they did underestimate was the effectiveness of the RAF as long as they could fly intercept missions only and did not have to waste fuel and their pilot's strenght by sending up patrol after patrol in anticipation of the big one.

In addition, the LW didn't seem to be aware what they had to do in order to keep radar down.

Back OT, I do not think that the Germans learned much from their Gotha and Zeppeling raids on Britain, except (as pointed out by Blakduk) the need for targeting systems to increase precision of navigation and bombing.

What they did not learn is that in order to keep up a strategic bombing campaign you will have to find a cure for the disease, not the symptoms. That means you can not excpect to win such a campaign by only bombing airfields and forcing the enemy to fight it out, that's when the airwar is starting to resemble the worst battles of attrition in the trenches of WW1.

What the USAAF and Bomber Command did very well during the later stages (despite bombing the cities) was their choice of targets. A/C factories, fuel depots, training facilities etc..