Korda - With wings like eagles : a history of the Battle of Britain

A History of the Battle of Britain

For Margaret, who was there,
with all my love

And for my dear friend Jay Watnick,
whose wisdom, financial acumen, sound judgment,
and unfailing friendship, I have treasured
for more than thirty years

And in fond memory of Flying Officer Philip Sandeman,
RAF, friend, mentor, generous role model

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward Ive climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split cloudsand done a hundred things
You have not dreamed ofwheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hovring there
Ive chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up in the long delirious, burning blue,
Ive topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew
And while with silent lifting mind Ive trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

High Flight, by Pilot Officer Gillespie Magee, Jr. No. 412 Squadron, RCAF, killed December 11, 1941

The Bomber Will Always Get Through.

Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, House of Commons, 1932

F ew moments in British history are so firmly fixed in peoples minds as the summer of 1940, when, after the fall of France, fewer than 2,000 young fighter pilots seemed to be all that stood between Hitler and the victory that was almost within his grasp. Like the defeat of the Spanish Armada and Nelsons victory at Trafalgar over the combined fleets of France and Spain, it is etched deeply into the national consciousness as a moment of supreme danger when Britain, alone, courageous, defiant, without allies, defeated a more powerful and warlike enemy in the nick of time.

Today, nearly seventy years later, the Battle of Britainas it rapidly came to be called, after a phrase in one of Winston Churchills greatest war speechesunlike many other great events of World War II, has lost none of its luster. As modern warfare goes, it was, up to a point, both glamorous and gentlemanly (though, as we shall see, it involved plenty of horrors, atrocities, and suffering), and it was fought by fairly dashing young men on both sides (and on the ground, on the British side of the Channel, also by young women, the WAAFs of the Womens Auxiliary Air Force who operated the radar plotting stations and took their full share of casualties).

Of course there is, among the victors at any rate, a natural tendency to glamorize the past, but even allowing for that, the Battle of Britain still retains a certain glamour, and not just in the United Kingdomeven the Germans, who lost the battle, are still fascinated by it, to judge by the number of German-language books and Web sites on the subject, as are the Japanese, who were not even in the war at that time. In Britain it is still commemorated annually on Battle of Britain Day, September 15. Until 1959, the events of the day included the fly past, of a carefully preserved Spitfire and Hurricane, the two principal British fighter aircraft of the battle, flying low over London, weather permitting, the unfamiliar low-pitched, throbbing roar of their twelve-cylinder Rolls-Royce Merlin engines music to the ears of those old enough to have heard it before, as they passed over Buckingham Palace and climbed swiftly away. For a time, they were flown by aces who had taken part in the Battle of Britain, but soon they were too old to fly anymore.

Given time, all historical events become controversial. That is the nature of thingswe question and rewrite the past, glamorizing it or diminishing it according to our own inclinations, or the social and political views of the present. Historiansindeed whole schools of historyhave made their reputation by casting a jaundiced eye on the victories, heroes, and triumphs of their forefathers. Nobody in academe gets tenure or a reputation in the media by examining the events of the past with approval, or by praising the decisions of past statesmen and military leaders as wise and sensible.

Not surprisingly, the Battle of Britain has come in for its share of revisionary history and debunking, though given its special standing as (let us hope) the last in the series of great battles in which Britain stood alone against a tyrant threatening invasion (and seeking at the same time hegemony over the European continent), it has not come in for the kind of sharp criticism directed toward British motives and generalship in, for example, the American Revolutionary War, the Crimean War, or World War I. There is no equivalent here of General Burgoynes surrender at Saratoga, or the Charge of the Light Brigade, or the First Battle of the Somme. As at Trafalgar, the British got it triumphantly rightRAF Fighter Command made up for years of dithering, pessimism, and appeasement among the politicians between the wars (the locust years, as Churchill called them), and also of doubt in the Air Ministry that fighters could defend Britain against air attack, since the conventional view was not only that the bomber will always get through, a phrase Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had borrowed from an immensely influential book by the Italian theorist of aerial warfare Giulio Douhet, but that the only defense lay in having a bomber force big enough to deter any continental enemy. The only defense is in offense, Baldwin warned the House of Commons darkly in 1932, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.1 This was a grim prospect, which the prime minister, like most members of the House, wanted to eliminate or discourage altogether, rather than to prepare for; indeed, he was arguing against increasing military expenditure at the time.

Throughout the 1920s and the early 1930s, Fighter Command (as it eventually came to be called) was the Cinderella of the Air Ministry. Such money as was made available to the RAF by the politicians was used, according to the prevailing orthodox doctrine of air power, to build up Bomber Command. In theory, money spent on fighters was money down the drain, since the only real protection was thought to be a force of bombers large enough to scare off the Germans.

Reluctant as the British government and the air marshals were to develop an effective fighter force, it remained unclear what the role of the RAF was to be in the event that a diplomatic policy of appeasing Germany failed to prevent a war. The roots of many of the various controversies that surround the Battle of Britain may be found, as we shall see, in the prejudice against building fighters and the mistaken belief that bombers (theirs and ours) would always get through. In addition to this, there is a more recent, and growing, tendency to question whether the Battle of Britain in fact played the decisive role in discouraging Hitler from attempting to invade Britain when to his surprise the opportunity to do so suddenly presented itself after Dunkirk.