I remember building my first Spitfire. Like so many of my contemporaries, I was captivated by the elliptical silhouette of the wings, by that perfect cocktail of beauty and power, “exceptionally good for aerobatics” as the Air Ministry’s Pilot’s Notes advised. Mine was not one of the 20,000 or so turned out by production lines during the aircraft’s active service. It was one of the millions of plastic scale models produced by the Airfix company, which had the status of a minor deity in boys’ homes in the 1970s. Dogfights and bombing raids were reenacted as if the Battle of Britain had only just ended. My corner of the Home Counties resounded to the shrill sounds of aerial combat, nine-year-old style.
This year is the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, officially dated between July 10 and October 31, 1940. On the face of it there is little evidence that much has changed in the way we choose to memorialise. Publishers have put up massed squadrons of new works, reprints and new editions of histories, memoirs and manuals.
Some, such as Stephen Bungay’s The Most Dangerous Enemy (Aurum, £30) and the fighter pilot Richard Hillary’s elegantly affecting memoir The Last Enemy (Vintage, £8.99), were last seen at the 60th anniversary, when more of the Few were around to help us to remember. Others, such as Dilip Sarkar’s Last of the Few (Amberley, £20) and Brian Milton’s Hurricane: The Last Witnesses (Andre Deutsch, £18.99), make explicit reference to the fact that this is the final anniversary on which the participants’ voices are likely to be heard. As Milton writes, “in April 2010, there were fewer than 100 left alive, and of them — as a survivor put it, ‘about 17 of us are still standing’ ”. Most of those were barely more than boys themselves during the battle, “kids of 19 or 20”, as Douglas Bader described them.
Bader may have been the quintessential hero of the battle (especially as played by Kenneth More in Reach for the Sky, a film that rarely seemed to be off the television in my childhood), but he was among the first to try to demythologise events, appealing for the public to recognise that this was a battle mostly fought by “ordinary blokes”, not dashing aces. And there are signs that this approach is being adopted in some of the ways that the 70th anniversary is being marked. But the generation who struggle to relinquish their unquestioning identification with the battle is not the vanishing one that fought it, or even the one that has it as a genuine childhood memory. It is the next one, the children of the 1960s and 1970s for whom the Second World War in general, and the Battle of Britain in particular, was a comic-strip epic, available in weekly parts from the conveniently exercise-book-shaped Commando or War Picture Library (each issue with its own gung-ho title: Wings of Victory, Blaze of Glory, Roar of Defiance).
For today’s schoolchildren, learning early about the greater barbarities of the Eastern Front and the Holocaust, the Second World War and the Battle of Britain look different, less heroic and frankly more realistic. The task of those faced with keeping up interest in the Battle of Britain is to reflect some of that reality without obliterating the “Finest Hour”. Nowhere is this balancing act performed with more attention than at the Royal Air Force Museum in Hendon, northwest London. Earlier this month the bronze statue of Air Vice-Marshal Sir Keith Park, the New Zealander known as the “defender of London”, which has taken its turn on the fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square, was unveiled in the Battle of Britain Hall, towering over a German bomber as he nonchalantly pulls on his flying gloves. The hall itself has undergone a makeover, with interactive exhibits and audiovisual window dressing to burnish the glory of the world’s finest collection of Second World War aircraft. There are grandiose plans to build the Battle of Britain Beacon at Hendon, promised as an “elegant and sleek structure [that] will dominate the skyline and will be visible from the centre of the city”. If that sounds indistinguishable from other “landmark” building projects that may or may not be constructed, the beacon is also supposed to incorporate the “swooping and circling forms of three iconic aircraft as they dogfight in the actual battle-space” — which is not something city skyscrapers can usually offer.
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So far, so heroic. But the museum’s less conspicuous resources have been put to innovative use by one of Britain’s finest military historians, Richard Overy. His lavishly illustrated new book, The Battle of Britain (Carlton, £30), contains removable facsimiles of maps, diaries and reports. Like a scale model, Overy’s book is a mass-produced item that gives the impression of being a rare collectible. It appeals to the same urge to inhabit the experience of the battle, if in a slightly more grown-up way. But the story it tells also represents part of the transition of the Battle of Britain from an event in the collective memory — even the received memory of those born 30 years later — to a piece of history. Overy undertakes something less than wholesale revisionism but offers a more nuanced view of the heroics.
One of the more rewarding aspects of his book, for example, is that it doesn’t let you forget that the Germans had their own experience of the battle. A narrative history by James Holland (The Battle of Britain, Bantam, £25) makes an even more concerted effort to “see both sides”, drawing heavily on German sources.
But to those, like me, who cling to childish things, the appeal of unfolding a map or turning the pages of a log book, as Overy’s presentation allows you to do, is irresistible. And Overy capitalises on that urge to tell a many-sided story, including Luftwaffe pilots’ accounts of raids on English targets. The translations of those eyewitness testimonies make for an intriguing comparison with the RAF view. In August 1940, Airman Bankhardt reports that the Germans were finding it relatively simple to attack their targets. “That was nothing chaps, we were expecting the defence to be somewhat different,” he tells the ground crew on their return.
The jauntily insouciant Luftwaffe pilot may not be a familiar figure, but what of his opposite number? In the museum, the Pilot’s Flying Log Book of Squadron Leader Eric Seabourne, DFC, is on display. Five days before Bankhardt’s account, Seabourne records an encounter with about 250 German aircraft. A dispassionate report (“Shot down 1 ME109 and 1 ME110 both confirmed. My machine disabled and set on fire. Baled out. Picked up by HMS Bulldog”) is followed by the comment, “What a party!! Have never seen so many aircraft at one time. Huns everywhere!!”
Even hero-worshipping boys knew that the battle was a deadly business for airmen. RAF Fighter Command lost 544 pilots, the Germans 2,698. But Overy reminds us that “the cost of the battle was borne more heavily by the civilian population, which was subjected to regular bombing from July 1940 onwards”. “During the period up to the middle of 1941,” he tells us, “over 43,000 people were killed.” More than half that number died before the official end of the Battle of Britain. This was at a time when, by and large, the Germans were not directly targeting the civilian population.
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A fact that my nine-year-old self would have had more difficulty grasping is that some of my beloved Spitfires and Hurricanes were flown by women. Everybody knows about WAAFs, sitting imperturbably at their posts in radar stations or operations rooms, but the women’s section of the Air Transport Auxiliary also performed the vital role of flying in new aircraft for operational use. Fifteen of these women died on active service. Heroism is not just for boys: and Giles Whittell of The Times tells their story with verve in Spitfire Women of World War Two (HarperPerennial, £8.99).
Mostly, however, the historians agree with James Holland’s verdict that the “myth does largely hold true”. Britain fought for survival in 1940 and, in prevailing, “dramatically changed the course of the war”.
As for my Spitfire, it ditched over the banister one day after an over-ambitious manoeuvre. Recently, sales of Airfix models declined so much that in 2006 the parent company went bust, but it has been reanimated under Hornby. I see that the 1:72 scale model Spitfires are currently out of stock.
David Horspool is the history editor of The TLS and the author of The English Rebel (Penguin)