In the aftermath of Sunday’s air battle, Hermann Göring and his commanders confronted a defeat far worse than the RAF’s inflated public claims but still devastating by German standards. Sixty German aircraft had been lost, including thirty-four bombers, while the RAF had lost only twenty-six fighters. The damage was even more serious because many additional bombers returned crippled, with crews dead, maimed, or wounded.

These losses undermined Göring’s earlier boast that German bomber crews were braver than British crews because they attacked by day as well as by night. Faced with the scale of the damage, Göring stopped all major daylight attacks, although one more large daytime raid on London would still follow later that week. The decision marked a tacit admission that the Luftwaffe could not sustain such losses.

Field Marshal Erhard Milch later described the defeat as a case of Germany having "lost our nerve." Milch blamed the outcome on two operational failures: the bombers flew in a poor formation, and the fighter escorts failed to stay where they were needed. Because the fighters pursued their own opportunities to shoot down aircraft instead of protecting the bombers, the Luftwaffe’s lack of discipline contributed directly to the losses.

The failure was obvious throughout the German leadership, especially to Adolf Hitler. At the same time, Joseph Goebbels faced a separate crisis after the Luftwaffe’s bombing of Buckingham Palace caused international outrage. Seeking a propaganda defense, Goebbels ordered Major Rudolf Wodarg to find any military target near the palace, and if none existed, to invent claims that secret military stores were hidden nearby.