The Luftwaffe was very close to wiping out the RAF due to having superior aircraft and some of the best fighter pilots of all time. It was Hitler wanting to attack civilian targets that gave the RAF time to rebuild and fight back. Hitler had the best air force the world had ever seen and he misused it and lost.
The Luftwaffe only lasted as long as it did because the U.S. Defense Department was obsessed with the idea of bombers with gun turrets not needing fighter escort. That caused a huge delay in the rollout of the P-51, which was the only U.S. fighter that had the range to escort bombers all the way to targets over Germany. Once the Luftwaffe had to engage other fighters over Germany, it was over in a hurry.
I was talking about the Battle of Britain. By the time of the daylight bombing raids later in the war, the Luftwaffe was in shambles and had lost some of its technological edge. The Germans had some advanced/experimental stuff like the Me-262, but the P-51 was a pretty good match for the more common FW-190 and Me/BF 109. The Germans still had way, way better elite pilots (all of the top fighter aces are German) but the Americans had numerical superiority. Case in point: 352 kills, 1,404 missions, and survived 14 plane crashes. By the accounts of people who faced him this guy was an absolute machine when it came to shooting down enemy aircraft. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Hartmann This guy was so uber that when he was captured, the soviets wanted him to serve as a pilot in their air force. The best American pilots by comparison maybe scored 5-10 kills in their careers.
Take a closer look at their records and you'll see that it's overwhelmingly from the Eastern front, where the Soviets didn't even bother with much training due to the sheer size of their population. American pilots didn't get to engage much due to the fact that all of the fighters prior to the P-51 had to turn around before they were over Germany. The Luftwaffe would just wait until the bombers were unescorted and then go up. They weren't quite as eager in taking on trained fighter pilots.
If I remember my world history accurately one does not want to be on the English side of the Battle of Britain. Of course all of my knowledge of that fight comes from BattleField 1942 so I'm not sure how accurate it is but I do know those bastards on the Geman side always had the advantage! Freaking English plains were all slow and stuff. Ahh one of the greatest maps.
I'm guessing that most of the UK PVCers live outside of the M25 and are largely crater/unexploded bomb free.