The Few

Today is Battle of Britain Day. For my blip, I stepped into my time machine and set the coordinates for September 15, 1940 and an airfield somewhere in southern England. I was lucky. I arrived in time to see these three Spitfires waiting for the signal to take off. I took a quick shot before anyone noticed. I didn't want to be arrested as a German spy. And I was back home in Riverside in time for afternoon tea.

To people outside Britain, the Battle of Britain may seem insignificant but it was the most decisive battle of the Second World War.

On June 18, 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons:

What General Weygand has called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. 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 freed 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.

If the Germans had managed to destroy the Royal Air Force and gained air superiority, the invasion of Britain, codenamed Operation Sea Lion, would have gone ahead. The odds are that it would have been successful given that the debacle of Dunkirk had occurred just a few months earlier.

With Britain defeated, Hitler would have had complete control of Western Europe and the British Empire would have come under the German sphere of influence. America would not have been able to intervene. There would have been no D-Day and no liberation of Europe.

It is even conceivable that Germany would have won the race to develop the atom bomb and used it to threaten the United States.

But thanks to the gallant bravery of the men of Fighter Command of the Royal Air Force, Hitler's plans were thwarted.

In a speech to the House of Commons on August 20, 1940, Churchill said:

The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of the World War by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

This blip is actually a shot of my computer screen of the DVD of The Battle of Britain (1969) film/movie directed by Guy Hamilton and starring a galaxy of British film stars. I think I should probably have cleaned the computer screen first. :-) Oh well.