What General Weygand has called the Battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, "This was their finest hour."

Winston Churchill House of Commons, June18th 1940

For boys of my generation, born a decade after the end of World War Two, the Battle of Britain was the ultimate expression of warrior virtue. We read about it in our comics and watched the old black and white movies with titles such as 'Angels 15'. I remembered the ripple of excitement that rushed through our schoolclass when we heard the new history master had once been a Spitfire pilot. We knew all the names of the participating aircraft and their performances. Hurricane - rugged, eight Browning .303 machine-guns, able to take lots of punishment; Heinkel 111- slow, lumbering, easy to shoot down and with a pitifully small bomb load; Messerschmitt 109 - fast, dangerous especially its cannon, but hampered by a very short range that reduced its loiter time over London to just a few minutes; and of course the Spitfire which everyone agreed was the most beautiful aircraft that had ever flown. We knew the names of the aces, Douglas Bader, Robert Stamford-Tuck, Adolf Galland. In our playground games we rushed around with our arms outspread, shouting rat-at-tat and nobody wanted to be a Messerschmitt. Everyone wanted to be a Spitfire or Hurricane for we instinctively knew that in the Battle of Britain they were flown by the good guys.
We were probably right. By an accident of birthtime we were privileged to play games that reflected a historical and moral watershed. Some historians talk of crucial battles where the right man in the right place at the right time can alter the course of history. Others say that the forces of history are inexorable and mere mortals can barely hope to influence, much less deflect or halt them. The Battle of Britain is very close to evidence for the former view. In the summer of 1940, the ascendant star of German Nazism flush from a string of astonishing victories and seemingly invincible, clashed with the power of a declining Britsh Empire, disillusioned by the carnage of the Great War and beginning to feel the first pangs of doubt that perhaps their imperial mission was not a mission at all but just a monstrous self-indulgence that had outlived its time. Britain stood alone without allies save the far-flung dominions - those hands across the seas that had served her so self- sacrificingly in the previous world war. Nazi invasion was imminent and the shattered remnants of the equipment-less BEF recently pulled from the beaches of Dunkirk, knew they would have little chance if Hitler's legions got ashore on the south coast of England. As ever the Royal Navy was Britain's first and last line of defence, but things had changed since Napoleon had glowered with envious eye across the Channel. The German navy was too small to hope to control that narrow strip of water long enough for an invasion fleet to cross in the face of determined Royal Naval resistance. The Luftwaffe, however, could. To destroy the Royal Navy, the Luftwaffe had to secure command of the air and that meant the neutralizing of RAF Fighter Command and in particular 11 Group that protected the airspace over southern England. On paper it seemed not to difficult. In an age when aircraft were still called machines, the Germans had many, many more of them. More important than the machines were the men to fly them and the RAF was critically short of fighter pilots. They had little more than 800 of them. Young men all, many university educated their stereotypical image shows them as having flamboyant moustaches and a penchant for silk scarves. They embodied that spirit of individual enthusiasm that had seen Britons, first as pirates, then as merchants finally as soldiers bring many foreign lands under the aegis of the British Empire. Now it was up to the pilots of the RAF to save their homeland from destruction and in this their country's greatest hour of need they were not found wanting. They weren't just Britons of course. There were Australians, Canadians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Frenchmen, Poles, Czechs and Americans; the latter showing that even if the United States is hamstrung by political considerations, some of her sons at least will know where and when democracy has to be defended and will honour their homeland by doing so.

Britain had one great advantage, radar. Invented by a Scotsman, James Watson Watt, it was still rudimentary and often unreliable but it allowed Fighter Command to have a good idea of where German attacks were heading and how strong they were. It allowed the RAF to keep its planes on the ground until they were needed and then the fighter controllers would vector them in onto the attackers. It was a less than perfect system but it was the best in the world at that time, and it worked. The Germans began by trying to destroy the radar masts and the forward airfields of 11 Group. They did great damage but the radar chain stayed intact and the airfields kept operating. Stukas, used in the first attacks, were so badly handled by the opposing Spitfires and Hurricanes that the Germans withdrew them and they never saw service over England again. It became a battle of attrition and not just in the air. The unsung heroes of Fighter Command were the ground crews who got the planes into the air, lived through the attacks on the airfields, came out and filled in the craters on the runways and were waiting for the fighters when they came back thirsty for fuel and hungry for more ammunition. Attacking the airfields was strategically and tactically the correct thing to do. Soon 11 Group was near to collapse. There were not enough pilots, not enough ground crew, never enough sleep and too many enemy planes. Then a German bomber being pursued by a British fighter jettisoned its bombload over London. Churchill ordered retaliatory raids on German cities and an incensed Adolf Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to switch its attacks to London and level the British capital. This gave the embattled 11 Group airfields a desperately needed breather. It also brought the fighters of 10 Group, based further north, into play and forced the Messerschmitts to go into combat at the extreme end of their range, something they had never been intended to do. As Londoners bore the brunt of the German bombs, the RAF regrouped and eventually repulsed the airborne assailants. As the summer drifted into autumn the tide and weather patterns changed and soon invasion was no longer a practical possibility. Hitler started to look eastwards for fresh conquests. The Luftwaffe had been given a bloody nose and never again launched an air offensive on anything like a similar scale. The RAF had been hurt but not broken. As the war progressed it grew in size and power and its bomber arm carried the war deep into the heart of Germany with greater devastation than anything ever visited on British cities.

And as for the new history master at my school, he arrived white-haired and with a flamboyant moustache. He never wore a silk scarf, however, and when we asked him how many Germans he had shot down he just smiled and changed the subject.