Fought during the summer and early autumn of 1940, the Battle of Britain was one of the most crucial stages of the Second World War. But what if the RAF had been defeated?

Would a German invasion have soon followed? Would it have been successful? The University of Kent's Dr Charlie Hall predicts what could have happened next.

The Battle of Britain was one of the most significant and dramatic events of the Second World War.

Fought in the skies over Kent and southern England between the German Luftwaffe, which sought to secure air supremacy over the British Isles, as a necessary precursor to invasion, and the Royal Air Force.

The RAF was ultimately victorious and forced the Luftwaffe to change tactics, moving away from the targeting of airfields and aircraft factories and instead beginning the heavy bombardment of major cities, known as the Blitz.

Early in the morning of Sunday 7 December 1941, hundreds of Japanese aircraft launched a suprise assault on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, killing more than 2,400 Americans. Jonny Wilkes talks to Professor Robert Cribb about whether the United States would still have entered World War II without, as their president put it, a “date which will live in infamy”

Each month BBC History Revealed asks a historical expert for their take on what might have happened if a key moment in the past had turned out differently. This time, Jonny Wilkes talks to Professor Robert Cribb about what might had happened had Japan not bomed the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in 1941

Sunday, 7 December 1941: a day that changed the course of World War II. Japan launched a daring surprise strike on the chief US naval base in the Pacific at Pearl Harbor –…

Napoleon Bonaparte's final bid for power came to end with defeat at Waterloo in Belgium on 18 June 1815 at the hands of the Seventh Coalition – but what if he had won? Jonny Wilkes talks to Professor Alan Forrest about whether Napoleon's victory at Waterloo would have been enough to secure a remarkable return to power – or if it would only have delayed the inevitable

The Battle of Waterloo was over. A bloody battle. A dirty battle. A shifting battle, where both sides gained and lost momentum and the result could have gone either way. By the end of the day on 18 June 1815, thousands of men lay dead, and when the smoke cleared, it was Napoleon Bonaparte looking out across the battlefield as the victor. His army had defeated the Duke of Wellington’s British-led forces on one side and Field Marshal von Blücher’s Prussians on the…

Just for the fun of it, and because counter-factual history is now so popular in the movies, let’s consider an outrageous proposal: Would we be well blessed if Germany had won the first World War?

It could have happened this way. General Alfred von Schlieffen conceived a plan whereby his nation could defeat the French and British armies. By going through Belgium, the major German thrust would bypass forts along the French border, fight westward north of Paris and then swing south to envelop the French capital and force surrender.

The war thus might have ended only six weeks later in the year it started, 1914. There would have been no Western Front, no nearly five years of battle, no trench warfare, no poison gas. It would have been a war with casualties but nothing approaching the agonizing 20 million deaths actually suffered. The United States, which did not declare…