4

Spitfire Summer

Tuesday 18 June 1940 was the 125th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. At the time of the Napoleonic Wars, Britain had faced the possibility of an invasion from across the Channel. Now, with France defeated, the nation faced the possibility again. The guiding hand of history was never far from Churchill’s shoulder. And on this day he felt it keenly. That afternoon, he addressed the House of Commons, reflecting on France’s stunning defeat and looking ahead to Britain’s prospects in fighting on alone. He said: ‘What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin.’ He wanted people at home and abroad to know that Britain would and could fight the battle on land, at sea and in the air. ‘I look forward confidently to the exploits of our fighter pilots,’ he told Parliament, ‘who will have the glory of saving their native, their island home, and all they love, from the most deadly of all attacks.’ He spoke of how all four dominion governments – Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa – had guaranteed their support to Britain. But there was no doubt that with such a powerful foe only twenty-one miles across the Channel from southern England, the ‘dread balance sheet’ predicted a hard-fought battle ahead. Churchill argued: ‘I see great reason for intense vigilance and exertion, but none whatsoever for panic or despair.’

He ended his address with a Shakespearean flourish, recalling Henry V’s famous speech to his troops on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt. As ever, he spoke passionately of his belief in the special role carved out for Britain and its people. Churchill said of the upcoming Battle of Britain:

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 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, and 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 a perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say ‘This was their finest hour.’¹

Churchill was persuaded to broadcast this same speech to the nation on the BBC at nine o’clock that evening. This was one of his wartime speeches that would be heard not just in the House of Commons but by millions of people. The words of his flourishing finale are among the most famous Churchill ever uttered, and are almost as well known today as they were in the summer of 1940, having been repeated in countless television documentaries since. One vital part of Churchill’s task over the next few months would be to rally public morale. Not only had he to lead Britain’s war policy, but he must also call upon all the power of words and phrases that he could muster to encourage the nation to keep up the fight, despite what many saw as overwhelming odds against Britain’s survival. The head of government had to display leadership, guidance, encouragement and the passionate inspiration to persuade the British people to fight on. This, we know, he did magnificently. Churchill really was walking with destiny now.

Ironically, to many who heard Churchill speak these famous words both in Parliament in the afternoon and then again on the radio in the evening, his radio performance came across as lacklustre. John Colville, his private secretary, thought he sounded tired and that he read the speech as though with a cigar in his mouth.² Harold Nicolson, Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Information, wrote to his wife:

How I wish Winston would not talk on the wireless unless he is feeling in good form. He hates the microphone and when we bullied him into speaking last night, he just sulked and read his House of Commons speech over again. Now, as delivered in the House of Commons, that speech was magnificent, especially the concluding sentences. But it sounded ghastly on the wireless. All the great vigour he put into it seemed to evaporate.³

Of course, Churchill’s style of oratory long predated the advent of broadcasting. He had grown to political maturity accustomed to large-scale public speaking and to debating within the chamber of the House of Commons. He never seemed comfortable on the radio. This was probably because he was used to addressing an audience and relied upon the vibrancy of a ‘live’ public address. Speaking alone in a recording studio into a small microphone must have seemed a very artificial experience to him. From the time he became Prime Minister to the end of 1940, he made only seven speeches on the radio, and some of these were quite short. Many of his most famous speeches were made only in the House of Commons. They are familiar to so many people today because he recorded them on to gramophone discs for Decca Records after the war.⁴

It is interesting to speculate whether Churchill would ever have become a persuasive television performer. Although he lived on well into the TV era, he did not use the medium much. Some rushes of different takes have survived of him delivering a party political broadcast in 1950. He is not impressive although he seems more comfortable than he did on the radio – possibly because with a film crew present at least he had an audience of sorts.

Churchill had framed the fight to come in epic terms. And it proved to be one of the decisive battles of the Second World War. There was little Churchill could do to lead the Battle of Britain itself. That really had to be left to the RAF. The government’s role was to ensure that, after years of neglect, the RAF now at this eleventh hour had enough fighting aircraft and had the correct command and control systems in place to take on the Luftwaffe. But Churchill himself had two additional tasks during the Battle of Britain. First, he had to secure and stir the determination of the British people to fight on. If the sort of defeatism that had spread among the upper classes in May 1940 before the rescue from Dunkirk had gained a widespread hold upon the nation, the political will to continue the battle might be undermined. That is why his speeches over the next few months would be so vital to the war effort. Second, he had to maximise the backing Britain received from its allies. More than anything else, this meant ensuring the support of the United States.

Churchill always favoured face-to-face discussions with friends or opponents. His five visits to France during the battle there were vital for his understanding of the French position and his reading of the differing views of the French leadership. It is no surprise then that he dedicated a large proportion of his time during the Second World War to fostering and building a direct and personal relationship with the US President, Franklin D. Roosevelt. The two men had met briefly at a dinner towards the end of the First World War, when Churchill had been Minister of Munitions and Roosevelt was Assistant Secretary of the Navy. At the time, Roosevelt was unimpressed and described Churchill as a ‘stinker … lording it all over us’.⁵ To his embarrassment, Churchill later forgot this early meeting. However, he sent Roosevelt signed copies of his Duke of Marlborough books, and Roosevelt’s son visited him at Chartwell in 1933. When Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty in September 1939, Roosevelt opened what would become a remarkable, historic correspondence. Roosevelt wrote to congratulate Churchill, saying: ‘I shall at all times welcome it if you will keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about.’⁶ This direct approach from the US President to a single government minister was highly unusual, to say the least. Roosevelt thought Churchill would soon become Britain’s wartime leader and he wanted to get his hand in early.⁷ Churchill asked the Prime Minister for permission to begin his own correspondence via telegram with the President. Chamberlain, who was keen to use any route to transmit the government’s views to the White House, agreed. So Churchill began a long correspondence with Roosevelt characterised by his jokey signature on every telegram: initially ‘Naval Person’ and from the time he became Prime Minister ‘Former Naval Person’, signifying the bond between them from the days when they were responsible for their navies.

Throughout the winter and early spring of 1939–40, Churchill telegrammed Roosevelt every few weeks to keep him up to date with British government thinking. Every message had Chamberlain’s approval. In February, Roosevelt replied to one of Churchill’s telegrams with the words: ‘I wish much that I could talk things over with you in person – but I am grateful to you for keeping me in touch, as you do.’⁸ He obviously appreciated this line of communication from a man he respected at the centre of the British government. And Churchill was well aware of their value, too. The US Ambassador in London at the time was Joseph Kennedy, the father of John, Robert and Edward. From a staunchly Irish-American clan, Kennedy was an Anglophobe who despised the British Empire and thought that British society was hopelessly antiquated. During the critical moments in 1940, he was convinced that Britain would not pull through, that its military would be defeated, and that Churchill, whom Kennedy thought epitomised everything that was old-fashioned and bad about Britain, would seek out a peace deal with Hitler. So Churchill’s direct line to Roosevelt was a way to get a very different message directly to the heart of Washington.

When Churchill became Prime Minister in May, the tone of the correspondence changed. It became more personal and over time more friendly. But Churchill still wanted to get tough messages through to the White House. He wanted Roosevelt to realise the dire consequences of the current European events for US interests. On 15 May, Churchill sent his first message to Roosevelt as Prime Minister in continuation of what he described as ‘our intimate, private correspondence’. He did not mince his words, telling the President:

If necessary, we shall continue the war alone, and we are not afraid of that. [This was in fact the first time the thought of continuing the war if France were defeated was raised.] But I trust you realise, Mr President, that the voice and force of the United States may count for nothing if they are withheld too long. You may have a completely subjugated Nazified Europe established with astonishing swiftness, and the weight may be more than we can bear.

The telegram went on to ask for the loan of forty or fifty destroyers, several hundred aircraft, anti-aircraft guns and ammunition, and a supply of steel.⁹

The American response was swift. Hundreds of aircraft, half a million rifles, and nearly one thousand 75mm guns were shipped up and sent across the Atlantic in less than a month.¹⁰

The loan of destroyers was a more complex issue, and Roosevelt thought this would need approval from Congress, which he was unlikely to get. Churchill insisted in his next message: ‘if American assistance is to play any part it must be available soon’.¹¹ Throughout the summer of 1940, Roosevelt did what he could to support the fragile British position. But he was constrained by several factors. As a neutral, under US law, he could go only so far in supplying arms to a belligerent nation without requesting the agreement of Congress. Here various US domestic factions came into play to balance out the widespread support felt for Britain. The German-American, Italian-American and even Irish-American groups were all opposed to offering aid to Britain. And Roosevelt faced a presidential election that autumn. To boost his chances he made several declarations guaranteeing that the United States would not get involved in the war raging in Europe. Churchill kept up the pressure on Roosevelt and spoke of ‘the Common Cause’ shared by the two English-speaking nations. He kept going back to request the urgent loan of destroyers, which he wanted to bolster Britain’s defences against the submarine menace and against a possible invasion by sea. His messages included phrases like ‘The need is extreme’ and ‘in the long history of the world this is a thing to do now’.¹² He was infuriated by the inability of many senior US officials to see the importance of this. Eventually, in August, Churchill’s pleading paid off and a deal was struck whereby the United States agreed to loan Britain fifty antiquated destroyers in return for a lease on eight British naval bases in the Caribbean and the Atlantic. The Americans also insisted that if Britain were defeated, it would not surrender its fleet to the Germans but would send it abroad to defend other parts of the Empire. This deal, which later formed the basis of the Lend-Lease Agreement, clearly marked a move by the US towards an alliance with Britain, and it was a sign that the US would provide extensive military aid – almost everything short of joining the war.

The critical point is that through this correspondence, a direct line between Downing Street and the Oval Office, Churchill knew that he had the sympathy of the President and military support from America as far as it could go within the terms of US law. This ‘special relationship’ would grow and blossom as the war developed. There would be nearly two thousand telegrams, several hundred phone calls, and many person-to-person meetings and summits. But in the summer of 1940, that lay in the future. For now, Churchill’s confidence, thanks to his secret correspondence, that he enjoyed Roosevelt’s support gave him the courage and resolution to carry on the fight against Hitler.

One of the things that most agitated Churchill after France’s defeat was the position of the powerful French fleet. As we have seen, Churchill had obtained a promise from Admiral Darlan the French naval commander that he would not hand the fleet over to the Germans. But Hitler had insisted on the surrender of the fleet in the terms of the armistice, and Pétain and Darlan, now Minister for the Marine in the new Vichy government, were determined to keep to the terms they had signed with the Nazis. The French Navy was scattered, and some of it was already in British hands. But a substantial battle fleet was now in Algeria, at the port of Mers el-Kebir. If this were used against Britain, it might turn the naval war almost overnight. The British Chiefs of Staff reviewed their options and offered the local French naval commander various choices: he could hand his warships over to the Royal Navy; sail to the West Indies and remove them from the war; or scuttle them. From Vichy, Darlan ordered his fleet commanders not to breech the terms of the armistice and to have no truck with the British demands. After several days of mounting crisis, an order was sent from London to Admiral Sir James Somerville, in command of Force H off Mers el-Kebir.

At 5.54 p.m. on 3 July, the heavy guns of the British battleships of Force H opened fire on the French warships in their Algerian harbour. The bombardment lasted for only about ten minutes. In that time the Royal Navy sank two French battleships and ran aground one of the newest French battle-cruisers. Elsewhere, British naval aircraft attacked French battleships, putting them out of action. In total, twelve hundred French sailors were killed. Churchill called it ‘a hateful decision’ to open fire on men who had been allies only weeks before, ‘the most unnatural and painful in which I have ever been concerned’.¹³ But no one in the War Cabinet or among the Chiefs of Staff had hesitated when it came to sending the order to open fire. The French fleet simply had to be put out of action to prevent the Nazis from using it against Britain. Around the world, and especially in Washington, governments saw the decision to destroy the fleet as a sign of the ruthlessness of the British war leadership to fight on with vigour and determination. It was a painful episode, but Churchill was convinced that it improved Britain’s standing at a time of deep national crisis.

On the same day, the Soviet Ambassador to London, Ivan Maisky, paid Churchill a visit at Downing Street. Maisky describes Churchill as being ‘full of life and energy … cheerful and fresh’. He asked the Prime Minister what was his general strategy, now that France had fallen. Churchill drew on his cigar and replied with a smile: ‘My general strategy at present is to last out the next three months.’¹⁴ Churchill knew that a German invasion could be attempted only during the summer months. Once autumn and winter set in, the opportunity would have passed. It was a modest target, to survive the next three months, but it was a realistic one. And it would not be easy.

Hitler’s success in Northern Europe had not only astonished his enemies. It had surprised even his own generals. They were now left looking across the twenty-one miles of sea that separated northern France from the cliffs of Dover, wondering what to do next. There was no military plan in place for an invasion of Britain. But on 16 July, Hitler issued Führer Directive No. 16. In this he said: ‘As England, in spite of her hopeless military situation, still shows no sign of willingness to come to terms, I have decided to prepare and if necessary to carry out, a landing operation against her.’ He ordered his Armed Forces Supreme Headquarters to prepare an invasion plan. General Franz Halder, Chief of Staff, was put in charge. He saw Operation Sealion, as the projected invasion was called, as little more than a major river crossing on a broad front. Grand Admiral Erich Raeder had a different view. After the Norway campaign, he knew he could not match the firepower of the Royal Navy. He feared British warships would wreak havoc if they got in among his invasion fleet. Precious weeks were lost while the German High Command debated their options.

It was Hermann Goering – First World War fighter ace, Reichsmarschall, and probably the second most famous figure in the Nazi Party – who persuaded Hitler which course to follow. He said simply leave it to the Luftwaffe. His planes had already started a war of attrition against the RAF. He predicted that in four weeks he could force the British to surrender. Goering’s argument helped to resolve the concerns of the German Navy. By destroying the RAF and winning air supremacy for Germany, the Luftwaffe would bring Britain to its knees. Maybe then an invasion would not even be necessary.

So, despite planning for an invasion, Hitler was confident he could force the British government to negotiate a peace deal. On 19 July, in a speech in Berlin, Hitler offered the British people a choice between peace with Germany or ‘unending suffering and misery’. The mood in Britain was now far more defiant than it had been just two months before. The War Cabinet did not even discuss the matter. When Churchill was asked if he wanted to make a response, he wrote: ‘I do not propose to say anything in reply to Herr Hitler’s speech, not being on speaking terms with him.’¹⁵

The later myth created around the Battle of Britain was that the nation stood alone, hugely outnumbered by a superior and mighty foe. This ignores the fact that Britain was then at the head of a vast empire. Much of the world map was still coloured red. And pilots from around the Empire, especially from Canada, South Africa and New Zealand, rallied to the cause and fought bravely throughout the summer of 1940. In numerical terms, the RAF was outnumbered by roughly twoto-one: the Germans could call on about 1400 bombers, 300 dive-bombers, 800 single-engined Messerschmitt Me-109 fighters and about 240 twin-engined Messerschmitt Me-110 fighters, whereas RAF Fighter Command had only about 500 serviceable Hurricanes and Spitfires. But Lord Beaverbrook, as Minister of Aircraft Production, was already making real increases in output by introducing round-the-clock shifts. And the factories in the Midlands and the South were soon producing about four hundred aircraft every month, enough not only to replace the losses but to grow the overall number of planes available. The problem would be the supply of trained pilots.

RAF Fighter Command had one vital advantage in the summer of 1940. Since Churchill had joined the secret Air Defence Research Committee in 1935, research into Radio Detection-Finding (later known by the American term ‘radar’) had developed considerably. During 1938 and 1939, British scientists based at Bawdsey on the Suffolk coast had designed and constructed a line of radar stations along the southern and eastern coasts of Britain called the ‘Chain Home system’. This was an early warning system that enabled the RAF to spot and plot the course of German bombers and their fighter escorts as they crossed the Channel. Each radar station consisted of a set of giant towers that sent radio pulses out over the sea. At the base of the towers was a receiver hut where skilled operators, often members of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), would stare at cathode-ray tubes for hours on end. They measured the time it took for the radio waves to bounce back from approaching aircraft. By assessing the line of the approaching aircraft from two or more radar stations it was possible to predict with some accuracy the route of the raiders.

In the dogfights that followed, height proved a critical factor. If the RAF fighters could be at a higher altitude than the Luftwaffe bombers when they arrived over their targets, they would have the dual advantages of speed and surprise as they swept down from above, and so were more likely to inflict serious damage on the German aircraft. It took a fighter plane between thirteen and fifteen minutes from the order to scramble to get to its optimum height. But a German bomber could cross the English Channel in about five minutes. The key advantage provided by radar was that it gave the RAF the extra minutes it needed to get its fighters into the air and above the German bombers with accurate information as to where they were heading.

But radar was not the only vital ingredient in the RAF early warning system. The technology was still very basic. It worked well over the sea but not over the contours of land. So a second line of defence was formed by building a network of more than a thousand observation posts. From these, observers armed with little more than binoculars and aircraft recognition books identified and reported movements of enemy aircraft and telephoned the information to control rooms. At the peak of the Battle of Britain, more than fifty thousand members of the Observer Corps were in action reporting vital details of German aircraft movements.

The information provided by radar stations and the Observer Corps around the country was only as good as the intelligence interpreted from it. Air Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding had been Chief of RAF Fighter Command since July 1936. His encouragement of the development of radar and his conviction that all-metal, single-wing aircraft were the way of the future helped to shape RAF fighter defences by the time of war. But, with the input from some prominent scientists, Dowding also created a command and control system in the late 1930s that was able to analyse, interpret and focus the information from radar in a brilliantly effective way. The thousands of separate reports that came in from the radar stations and ground observers were fed to the Operations Room at RAF Fighter Command headquarters at Bentley Priory, near Stanmore in north London. Here the information was processed in filter rooms and then plotted on to a huge table map of southern and eastern England. Highly trained young men and women wearing headsets would then move coloured markers around the table to represent enemy raiders and RAF interceptors.

From Bentley Priory, detailed information about enemy air raids was passed on to the four fighter Groups that each controlled a sector of the UK’s fighter defence. Each Group had its own operational command centre mirroring the one at Bentley Priory. The Group Operation Rooms held lists of fighter squadrons and their states of readiness, from two minutes to twenty minutes, and a list of units currently in the air and in action. The decision to scramble the fighters would come from Group headquarters, as would requests for reserves during heavy raids. The fighters most often in the front line were those of 11 Group, led by a tough and determined New Zealander, Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park. His Group covered the whole of south-eastern England from its headquarters at Uxbridge in west London. This was the centre of the complex mass of communication links utilising hundreds of miles of telephone cables. The structure created under Dowding’s supervision thankfully worked well during the Battle of Britain. The fate of the nation would hang on the split-second decisions made in these RAF command centres.

When all the information had been processed and the commands had been issued, it was, of course, down to the pilots and their aircraft to fight it out. RAF Fighter Command could pit two brilliant single-engined fighter aircraft against the Luftwaffe. Much has been written (and exaggerated) about the superiority of the Hawker Hurricane and the legendary Supermarine Spitfire over their German rivals. The Messerschmitt Me-109 was fast and agile, but its wings were weak and the pilots feared they would be pulled off in a fast dive or turn. This, naturally, slowed them down in combat from the maximum capable performance. The Hurricane and Spitfire were without doubt significantly more advanced than any previous British fighters. The Hurricane was a conventionally built aircraft, made of canvas stretched across a wooden frame. Its maximum speed was 330 m.p.h. – well below that of its German rival. But one of the advantages of the Hurricane was that it was easy to build and so could be produced in massive numbers. The Spitfire, by contrast, was made of stretched metal panels on an all-metal frame, which meant it was a much more complex machine to produce. Designed by R.J. Mitchell, its bird-like elliptical wings made it one of the great classics of aeronautics. The models used in the Battle of Britain could fly at 360 m.p.h., about the same speed as the Messerschmitt Me-109s, but the Spitfires were highly manoeuvrable, especially at altitude, and their pilots had better all-round vision out of the clear cockpit. Tens of thousands of words have been written arguing that the Spitfire was superior to the Hurricane, or vice versa. The truth is that the RAF needed both aircraft to fight the Battle of Britain. Often the Hurricanes would be directed at the slower-moving bombers and the Spitfires would be sent to attack the fast fighter escorts. So without the large numbers of the Hurricanes and the superb quality of the Spitfires, the outcome of the Battle of Britain would definitely have been very different.¹⁶

The RAF pilots were good, but they lacked the combat experience of their Luftwaffe rivals. And the German fighters were organised around the Schwarm – or finger-four – formation, which could easily break down into two leading planes each supported by a wingman. This gave the Luftwaffe tremendous flexibility in combat. Although the need for flexibility had been a lesson learned by both sides in First World War aerial combat, in Britain it had been lost somewhere in the inter-war years. Most RAF commanders still insisted on rigidly following the Fighter Area Attack Manual, which called for squadrons to fly in four flights of three aircraft each, in a tight V formation. Many pilots spent much of their time ensuring that they were flying in correct formation, rather than scanning the skies searching out enemy aircraft. Furthermore, RAF tactics were based upon the assumption that British fighters would be attacking bombers flying alone from bases in Germany. As soon as France and Belgium fell, the Luftwaffe transported its fighters to airbases only a few miles from the Channel coast, so they could escort the bombers over England. The RAF proved slow to adapt to the changed conditions of the actual combat they now faced. ‘We did everything wrong that we could possibly do wrong,’ said one fighter ace many years later. Rigidly adhering to outdated flying regulations cost the lives of many RAF pilots in the battle that summer.¹⁷

So, the RAF had some important advantages in intelligence, in command structure and in technology over the Luftwaffe. And most of the Luftwaffe effort in the war so far had been in ground support, attacking tactical targets set by the advancing army. This had proved fantastically effective in the invasions of Poland and France. But the Luftwaffe had not engaged in a bombing offensive before, let alone an offensive hundreds of miles from its bases across a sea. Nor did it have any four-engined bombers like those that would serve RAF Bomber Command so well later in the war. The Heinkel and Dornier bombers were good aircraft, but their bomb loads were small in comparison with the later British bombers. But the scene was now set for an intense aerial battle in which each side enjoyed some advantages over its enemy but suffered from disadvantages too.

The Battle of Britain was, by its nature, a defensive operation. But even at this stage of the war Churchill’s restless mind constantly sought out opportunities for offensive action. Italy had declared war on 10 June, and with France now defeated, Mussolini threatened British authority in the Mediterranean and Egypt. A huge Italian army of a quarter of a million men was assembling in Libya, near the Egyptian border. The commanding officer of British and imperial forces in the Middle East was General Archibald Wavell. He was in command of only some fifty thousand men in Egypt. So Churchill and the War Cabinet agreed during July to reinforce the Middle East garrison by sending shipments of light tanks to Egypt with a view to mounting a pre-emptive strike against the Italians. It was a brave move at a time when Britain itself was facing the threat of invasion. But it was typical of Churchill’s belief in the need to seek out offensive measures. But the Italians were not yet ready to go on the attack in North Africa. Wavell was recalled to London for a series of meetings with Churchill. Wavell was an unusual senior officer, something of a poet and an academic, but socially timid, and he became tongue-tied in front of Churchill. Even worse, he did not stand up to the Prime Minister, who constantly requested information and wanted to debate every aspect of a military campaign. Churchill thought the worse of him for this, and their meetings were disastrous. He even considered replacing Wavell. But the situation at home was too serious and it was several months before the war in North Africa could get under way. It had to take a lower priority.

On 10 July, the first phase of the Battle of Britain began. The Luftwaffe’s dive-bombers launched attacks on shipping in the Channel. They were led by the Junkers Ju-87, the Stuka. The siren that wailed as the plane went into its dive, which had caused such terror among troops and civilians across Poland and France, was now intended to have the same effect on Britain’s mariners. But the attacks were fiercely defended by the young pilots of the RAF, whose fighters were faster and easily outperformed the dive-bombers. The Stukas began to suffer serious losses. On the first day of this phase of the battle, over twenty German aircraft were damaged with the loss of twenty-three aircrew. The Stukas soon began to be known by their German crews as ‘flying coffins’.

Poor weather over the Channel caused something of a respite. But on 25 July visibility improved and the Luftwaffe mounted a further series of attacks on British shipping. These were intended to draw out more fighters, but Dowding was reluctant to respond as he wanted to maintain his strength for what he rightly saw as the tougher tests to come. Inspired by their war leader, the British people gritted their teeth in anticipation of the struggle ahead.

Meanwhile, in the Channel ports of France and Belgium, the Germans were busy assembling Rhine barges and other flat-bottom boats that could be used to land men and machines on the English coast. During July, RAF aerial reconnaissance flights brought back alarming evidence that huge numbers, up to about two thousand, of these barges were being assembled. At one point the photo-interpretation officer who was counting the barges threw down his equipment and said: ‘We don’t want these. They’d better give us rifles.’¹⁸ They looked threatening at the time. But four years later the Allies would find that their landings in northern France were largely dictated by the availability of the right sort of specially built landing craft. The Germans were already learning how important landing craft were and so rapidly improvised whatever suitable vessels could be found for Operation Sealion.

There’s no doubt that at this point the threat of invasion was putting Churchill under great strain. The line between cajoling and pushing his military chiefs, on the one hand, and bullying and threatening them, on the other, was always a fine one. At his best, Churchill knew how far he could push people without alienating them. But under pressure he could go too far. Such was the case at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s weekend residence in Buckinghamshire, on 26 July, when Churchill’s frustration with his military chiefs spilt over into direct rudeness. At dinner he questioned General Sir James Marshall-Cornwall about the readiness of his divisions that were stationed on the Welsh Marches. When he discovered that some of the information he had been given in a paper by the CIGS Sir John Dill was less than adequate, Churchill flew into a rage and threw the report at Dill, demanding that it be checked and returned to him the following day. After an awkward silence, Churchill turned to ‘the Prof’, Frederick Lindemann, who was a regular at the Chequers dinner table, and asked him what news he had to tell him. To the amazement of everyone at the table, Lindemann produced a Mills hand-grenade and proceeded to explain why it was an inefficient weapon. The Prof announced that he had designed a far more efficient alternative. Churchill was delighted, and with almost boyish glee he told Dill to scrap the Mills grenade immediately and introduce the Lindemann grenade. Dill, no doubt spluttering through his soup, announced that contracts had already been placed for millions of the Mills bombs in both Britain and America, and it was impossible to cancel them. Churchill must have known this was true, but he continued to berate Dill. The Prime Minister ended the evening after a further interrogation of the generals by muttering peevishly, ‘You soldiers are all alike; you have no imagination.’ The tirade seemed designed to humiliate the military men in front of Churchill’s civilian cohorts. The military chiefs probably forgave him, understanding the pressure he was under, but this was certainly the war leader at his most infantile, on his worst behaviour and displaying an ill-judged outburst to men who were themselves under great strain. General Marshall-Cornwall later described the evening as ‘The Mad Hatter’s Dinner Party’.¹⁹

At the end of July, Hitler held a military conference at his retreat in the mountains above Berchtesgaden to review plans for the invasion of Britain. Admiral Raeder once again called for a postponement to May 1941. Hitler was not happy but agreed to push back Operation Sealion to mid-September. Everything hinged on Goering and the success of the Luftwaffe. So, in early August, Goering decided to change his tactics. The thirteenth of August was set for Adlertag, ‘Eagle Day’. This marked the beginning of the next phase of the Battle of Britain. Now the focus would shift from attacking Channel shipping to an attempt to destroy the RAF either in the air or by bombing its airfields. This was a gamble by Goering, but he was confident that he would destroy the RAF and leave the British begging to surrender.

In the twenty-four hours before Eagle Day, the Luftwaffe attacked several of the radar towers along the British coast. The towers stood some 360 feet tall and were easy targets to identify. Two radar installations in Kent were attacked but survived. The station at Pevensey was hit hard and several operators were killed or wounded. At Rye in East Sussex and at Ventnor on the Isle of Wight there was severe damage. The Luftwaffe had identified the ‘eyes’ of the RAF defence system. But in a remarkable blunder by the Germans, the radar towers were not consistently targeted again. Within days, they were all back in full working order.

On Eagle Day itself, Goering sent a command to each unit: ‘Within a short period you will wipe the British Air Force from the sky. Heil Hitler.’ But the day began badly for the Luftwaffe. With thick cloud cover, Goering gave the order to recall the first assault wave. The fighters got the message and returned, but the bombers did not and carried on unescorted – to a mauling over southern England. Later in the day, however, as the skies cleared, a force of some three hundred planes headed off to strike at the RAF airfields. By the end of the day, the Luftwaffe had lost 45 planes in action. The RAF had lost 13 fighters in the air and 47 aircraft on the ground – but only one of those was a fighter.

A major failing in the Luftwaffe was its inability to assess the damage it was causing the RAF accurately. Intelligence officers too willingly believed the daredevil claims of their pilots and repeatedly overestimated the number of ‘kills’; consequently, they underestimated the number of planes the RAF could call upon. On the eve of Eagle Day, Luftwaffe intelligence officers estimated the RAF had 450 fighters left. In fact, the number was well above 600. And the Luftwaffe totally miscalculated the rate at which British factories were pouring out replacement aircraft. By late August, the Germans calculated that their enemy had barely 300 operational aircraft. In fact, the RAF had about 700 available fighters. Although Goering might have been delighted to hear the figures given by his intelligence officers, the pilots who flew daily over Britain grew to mistrust them, and this was appalling for morale.

As the battle continued to rage, with regular raids at dawn and dusk, Dowding’s principal problem was not the numbers of aircraft but the loss of skilled pilots. A week after Eagle Day, four out of five squadron commanders in Fighter Command had been killed or wounded, or were resting after continuous combat. During August, Dowding reluctantly had to reduce the operational training period to two weeks. Before the war, it had been six months. So, at the height of the Battle of Britain, novice pilots with only a few flying hours under their belts were being thrown into the thick of the action.

The Hurricane and Spitfire pilots and their ground crews were on constant stand-by from half an hour before dawn, about 4.30 a.m., until around 9.00 p.m. The one feature nearly all of the pilots who survived the summer remembered was a feeling of constant tiredness. No doubt the continuous strain of waiting for the order to scramble added further to this. Most pilots lounged around all day, playing cards or chess. Some were able to read a little, others would doze, others listened to gramophone records. When the order to scramble came they would race to their aircraft. Often the ground crew had already started the engine. Quickly kitted up with parachute, Mae West life-jacket, headgear and linked into the radio and oxygen supplies, the pilot would then throw the throttle forward and the aircraft rolled across the grass and into the air. Every second counted. On really intense days pilots would fly three, four or even five separate sorties. Between each one the hard-working ground crew had to service and refuel the aircraft, make any instant repairs and rearm the four guns in each wing, leaving the plane totally ready for the next scramble at a moment’s notice.

All the dogfights took place in full view of the civilian population below. Factory workers, farmers, mothers at home and children at school would all strain their necks and look up at the vapour trails criss-crossing the blue skies above. When planes came crashing to the ground they were quickly surrounded by the Home Guard and any enemy pilots who survived were marched off to the local police or the military, and into captivity. Sometimes even RAF pilots were pursued by over-keen crowds. Squadron Leader James Nicolson was the only fighter pilot to win a VC in the Battle of Britain. But when he crash-landed his plane, badly burned on his hands and face, he was fired on by a trigger-happy member of the Home Guard. And, of course, for young boys nothing could beat the cachet of finding and keeping a piece of a downed aircraft. To many on the ground below, the British fighter pilots became instant heroes as they fought gladiatorial battles against heavy odds.

Throughout August, Churchill busied himself with preparations for the expected invasion. He inspected defensive positions along the beaches where it might take place; he issued instructions about the roles of the Home Guard, the police and the fire brigade; and he approved plans for the defence of central London in the event of a German assault by parachute commandos. And every day he received reports on the numbers of German planes shot down, of British aircraft and pilots lost, and of the big increase in output from Britain’s aircraft factories. He visited 11 Group’s Operations Room in Uxbridge on several occasions. On 16 August, he was particularly moved watching all the markers being moved forward on the big table map as each new wave of German aircraft approached England and the markers of each of the RAF fighter squadrons as they were scrambled to intercept them. When he left in his official car, he turned to General Ismay and said: ‘Don’t speak to me; I have never been so moved.’ After about five minutes of silence, he turned again to Ismay and uttered the words, ‘Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.’ Ismay was touched by the phrase that would soon reach a far wider audience.²⁰

In the second half of August, the air battles grew more and more desperate. On Sunday the 18th, which has since been called the ‘hardest’ day, wave after wave of German bombers came over to attack the RAF airfields along with the aircraft factories. A vast force of 108 bombers escorted by several hundred fighters went for the fighter base at Kenley. Squadrons from across 11 Group were scrambled, and as further waves of bombers approached reserves from 12 Group in East Anglia, led by Air Vice-Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, were called in to help. At the end of the day, the tally recorded 69 Luftwaffe losses with another 31 aircraft badly damaged. The RAF had lost 63 fighters with another 62 damaged. However, each side claimed it had inflicted much more severe losses on its adversary. On the Luftwaffe side, these inflated figures were believed and the crews were told they were winning the battle. In Britain, the simple fact was that the RAF knew it could not go on losing this many planes. At this rate, the RAF would cease to exist in a few weeks.

On 20 August Churchill addressed the House of Commons, speaking for nearly an hour. He said that this war had not seen the ‘prodigious slaughter’ of the First World War, but was instead ‘a conflict of strategy, of organisation, of technical apparatus, of science, mechanics and morale … [and] our science is definitely ahead of theirs’. Then he spoke of the RAF pilots who had become the heroes of the hour, ‘whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day’. He said that everyone’s ‘gratitude … goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of war by their prowess and by their devotion’. Even though the Battle of Britain was by no means won by this point, Churchill reworked the words he had said in the car to Ismay just a few days before, proclaiming: ‘Never in the history of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’ Churchill ended by announcing that he had at last won US approval for the loan of the fifty destroyers in the ‘destroyers for bases’ deal. He said this would bring together the ‘two great organisations of the English-speaking democracies, the British Empire and the United States’ which he did not view ‘with any misgivings’. He concluded by saying: ‘I could not stop it if I wished; no one can stop it. Like the Mississippi, it just keeps rolling along. Let it roll. Let it roll on full flood, inexorable, irresistible, benignant, to broader lands and better days.’ As he sat down the House rose to its feet, with members cheering. Then Churchill returned to Downing Street and his private secretary recorded that he sang ‘Ol’ Man River’, out of tune, all the way back in the car.²¹

Churchill was carrying out one of his great tasks as war leader. He was rallying the nation and stirring the soul of almost everyone who heard or read the speech. And internationally, he was beginning to persuade people that Britain was not down and out, was not staring at defeat as France had done in the face of Nazi aggression, but had the determination to fight on. Also, he had provided a nickname that would stick to the RAF pilots on whom the nation’s survival depended: ‘the Few’. One friend wrote that his words would ‘live as long as words are spoken and remembered’.²² Over time, the reference to the Few became the enduring memory not only of Churchill’s speech but of the months that became known as ‘Spitfire Summer’. But that summer was by no means over yet.

On 26 August, there were three major assaults. The strains within Fighter Command were beginning to show, and at one point during the day 12 Group did not come to 11 Group’s aid when all its squadrons had been scrambled. As a consequence, the airfield at Debden was left unprotected and suffered a heavy bombing raid. Leigh-Mallory, the commander of 12 Group, was beginning to take a different view from Park as to the best strategy for defending Britain. He came to believe that his fighters were most effective when they formed mass formations of three or more squadrons. On the other hand, Park thought it best to attack at squadron level, keeping other squadrons back in order to respond to later assaults and to prevent all his forces being drawn into action too early. The argument became known as the ‘Big Wing’ controversy and it began to split the unified ethos of Fighter Command.

In early September, the Battle of Britain entered its crucial phase. The Luftwaffe was now focusing its attacks on the RAF airfields in the south-east of England in a bid to break the fighter defence of London. On 3 September, the Luftwaffe and the RAF each lost sixteen aircraft. Two days later, the RAF lost twenty-two and the Luftwaffe twenty-one. True, if a British pilot baled out and survived, he could be patched up and back in action within days – in some famous cases pilots were back flying within hours of being shot down. Whereas Luftwaffe crews who survived being shot down were usually captured, taken prisoner and represented a total loss to the German war effort. But in a two-week period the RAF lost 103 pilots killed and 128 badly wounded, with 466 Spitfires and Hurricanes lost or seriously damaged. To replace them were 260 eager but inexperienced pilots straight out of training. The RAF simply could not go on enduring this level of losses. It looked as though the Germans might soon win the Battle of Britain.

Hitler had ordered the Luftwaffe not to bomb British civilian centres, but on 24 August a small number of Heinkel He-111s became separated from their squadron and dropped their bombs, in error, on the suburbs of London. Nine civilians were killed. Churchill ordered Bomber Command to retaliate, and over the next few nights about eighty Wellingtons bombed Berlin. They caused only a tiny amount of physical damage but Berliners were outraged. Goering had said that no enemy bombers would ever fly over the capital of the Reich. Hitler was furious and lifted his ban on bombing British cities. To a small gathering in Berlin, he announced that Britain’s cities would be ‘razed to the ground’. The crowd roared with hysterical approval.

Goering called a conference of his Luftwaffe commanders in The Hague. They were still puzzled as to how the RAF was managing to put up so many fighter aircraft. According to their intelligence estimates, Fighter Command had hardly any fighters left. But almost every time they arrived over a target the German crews found dogged British pilots waiting for them. The German pilots mocked their intelligence officers by reporting back that ‘the last fifty Spitfires’ had again been waiting to intercept them. Although the Luftwaffe could endure more losses than the RAF, the battle did not seem to be going well from their perspective. Goering demanded another change in tactics – the second in less than a month. With Hitler calling for reprisals against British cities, Goering now committed the blunder that ultimately lost the Battle of Britain for Germany.

At about 3.30 p.m. on Saturday 7 September, British radar picked up the biggest force yet of German raiders about to cross the Kent coast at Deal. This vast mass of bombers and fighters filled an airspace of about eight hundred square miles. At Bentley Priory, the plotting officers looked glum as further reports came in from observers across the South-East. Park scrambled several squadrons. But what happened next amazed everyone. The raiders flew on, over the airfields they had been bombing for days. They flew on across the green fields of Kent, and over the suburbs of south-east London. They flew on towards Goering’s new target – the docks and factories of east London. Once the first wave had dropped incendiaries and created a huge inferno on the ground, the later waves came in one after another to bomb and destroy the network of warehouses and docklands below. The London docks were the heart of a vast trading empire. Enormous supplies of timber, paint, rubber, flour and dozens of other commodities were set ablaze. Firefighters struggled with fires that lit up the night sky. The bombers continued to arrive until the early hours of the following morning, and the ‘all clear’ was not sounded until 4.30 a.m.

Hundreds of acres of buildings burned to the ground. And in the densely packed streets of the East End, where most of the dockers lived, 448 civilians were killed and more than 1500 were injured. However, critically, the Luftwaffe had decided to give up attacking the RAF airfields as this didn’t seem to be bringing victory. It was now going for civilian and industrial targets to try to break the morale of the people. This was the life-saver the RAF needed. Fighter Command simply could not have survived many more days of constant bombing of its airfields. Now it was the turn of the people of London.

During the course of this same Saturday, intelligence reports came in suggesting that the Germans were about to launch the invasion. Decrypted messages along with aerial photography seemed to show that barges in the French Channel ports were being readied for use. An emergency meeting of the Chiefs of Staff was called for 5.30 p.m. It was believed that the invasion might come on the following day. As the bombs started to fall on the docks and the East End, the Chiefs of Staff ordered all defence forces in the UK to ‘stand by at immediate notice’. Just after eight o’clock that evening, General Headquarters, Home Forces, on their own initiative, sent out the code word ‘Cromwell’. This was the sign that invasion was imminent. Across the country, the defence forces and the Home Guard went on to alert, and waited. But it was a false alarm. Hitler was not ready to invade.

Churchill visited several towns that had suffered from German bombing. He was very moved during a visit to Dover and Ramsgate in late August by the plight of those whose houses had been destroyed or badly damaged. He immediately said he would browbeat the Chancellor of the Exchequer into offering full compensation to the victims of Hitler’s bombs. This policy was agreed by the War Cabinet in early September. The day after the bombing of the East End, Churchill visited the site of the heaviest devastation so far. Fires were still raging when he and his small entourage arrived. Whole rows of jerry-built houses had been reduced to piles of rubble. Tiny paper Union Jacks had been planted on some of these heaps of rubble. Today, one could imagine the survivors would turn on an authority figure and blame him for their lack of protection. But Churchill was literally mobbed. ‘Good old Winnie!’ people called out. ‘We thought you’d come and see us. We can take it. Give it ’em back.’ Churchill, who was always an emotional man, broke down in the face of this defiant response. General Ismay had the utmost difficulty escorting him through the crowd, and he heard one old woman say: ‘You see, he really cares; he’s crying.’ Churchill remained in the Docklands until it began to get dark, refusing to leave despite pleas for him to get away. Then the air-raid sirens went off and the Luftwaffe’s bombers returned. Churchill’s car got caught in a street hemmed in by bomb damage, and a stick of incendiaries landed only a short distance away. When the party finally returned to Downing Street, Ismay was told off for taking such risks with the Prime Minister’s life. He responded angrily by saying that anyone who thought they could control Churchill on jaunts like this was welcome to try on the next occasion.²³

That Sunday night, 412 more civilians were killed in the bombing raids; and 370 on the following Monday. The Blitz on London had begun in earnest. On 11 September, the RAF lost thirty-one fighters. It was clear that the Battle of Britain was reaching a climax. Four days later, the Luftwaffe attacked in two large waves. Park’s crews barely had time to refuel and rearm between the raids. But Leigh-Mallory’s Big Wing came in from the north and caused serious havoc among the German bombers.

The Prime Minister chose this Sunday to visit Park’s 11 Group headquarters at Uxbridge once again. Churchill’s wartime memoir–history makes much of the visit. He describes sitting on the top level, looking down on the plotting table below, where twenty young men and women were moving the markers representing enemy formations. It was like a ‘small theatre’, where he and Clementine had seats in the ‘Dress Circle’. He noticed the numbers of Park’s squadrons written on the blackboards as ‘Standing By’, ‘In Action’ or ‘Returning Home’. Alongside were the numbers of Leigh-Mallory’s squadrons as they came in to support. As the battle unfolded, more and more German formations moved across the big table-top map and Park ‘in a calm, low monotone’ ordered more squadrons to scramble. Everything Churchill witnessed was at the peak of efficiency in this ‘elaborate instrument of war’. But there was no doubting the intensity of the drama unfolding in front of everyone. Late in the afternoon, Churchill went over to a tense-looking Park and asked: ‘What other reserves have we?’ Park came back with the curt but chilling reply: ‘There are none.’ Churchill looked grave. He later wrote: ‘The odds were great; our margins small; the stakes infinite.’ Five minutes passed. Then the markers were moved slowly back across the big table. The Germans were returning home. As Churchill emerged from his underground theatre the ‘all clear’ was sounding. When he got back to Chequers, he was told that 183 enemy planes had been shot down for the loss of just 40 British aircraft. (The actual figures later verified for that day were 56 German losses and 27 British.) Churchill later wrote that this day was the ‘culminating date’ of the Battle of Britain, which was ‘one of the decisive battles of the war and, like the battle of Waterloo, it was on a Sunday’. The fifteenth of September has been commemorated as Battle of Britain Day ever since.²⁴

At the time, neither Churchill nor Park knew that when the Luftwaffe crews landed the German pilots reported with astonishment the news of the Big Wing attack on them from the north. Believing the RAF had almost no fighters left, they could not understand where these squadrons of Spitfires kept coming from. Dispirited, they counted their losses. Losing 56 planes and their crews was a serious blow. This rate of attrition could not go on. Two days later, realising that he had failed to win mastery of the skies, Hitler issued a secret order postponing Operation Sealion. Within weeks, he had started to plan his invasion of Russia and the next dramatic extension of the war.

Daytime raids on airfields and cities continued sporadically into October. But from now the bombing of Britain moved into a new phase known generically as the Blitz. The Luftwaffe preferred night-time raids on the cities and industrial centres. London was blitzed, with only one night’s respite, for seventy-six consecutive nights. The toll of cities across Britain being heavily bombed increased weekly – Portsmouth, Bristol, Plymouth, Birmingham and Liverpool all joined the list. The worst raid came on the night of 14 November, when Coventry was bombed. 554 civilians were killed and 1200 injured. There were so many corpses that they had to be lined up in rows for burial in mass graves. During the Blitz, the Second World War became the People’s War. In total, about 43,000 civilians were killed, well over 150,000 were injured, and a quarter of a million were made homeless

But Churchill was right: 15 September had been the decisive day. And the Battle of Britain had been won. Not in the conventional sense, by destroying the enemy: the RAF had lost 1173 aircraft, with 510 pilots killed, while the Luftwaffe had lost 1733 aircraft, with over 3300 airmen killed, wounded or taken prisoner. But the Luftwaffe was still a major force, and would remain so for at least three more years. But it was a victory for Britain because Hitler had set out to destroy the RAF, to win mastery of the skies over England and then, possibly, to invade. And he had failed. As the invasion barges were quietly redeployed and sent back to their Rhineland owners, the RAF still ruled the skies over Britain. The British people had not been brought to their knees. And, in the longer spectrum of the war, Britain had survived as a base from where, when the Allies were ready, the invasion of Europe and the final defeat of Hitler’s Third Reich could be launched.

Much has been written about the spirit that unified first Londoners and then the whole nation in the face of Hitler’s Blitz. The traditional view that ‘we was all one’ and that divisions were put aside for the duration has been severely challenged by historians in recent decades.²⁵ There is no doubt that occasionally there was panic. At times local authorities failed miserably in their attempts to manage the chaos that befell their residents, and petty-officialdom left people frustrated, angry and vulnerable. At times people flooded out of the cities in fright, even when they were told not to. At times looting of bombed houses took place before their owners had returned from the air-raid shelters. People in Britain displayed all the traits that people everywhere exhibit during bombing. Fear becomes terror, which becomes anger, which becomes exhaustion, which extends into a burning desire for revenge. But there is also no doubt that Churchill had given the nation a fillip throughout this formidable summer. His visits to the sites of bomb attacks cheered the victims in a way that is difficult to imagine in today’s more cynical age.

During the war years, British people made about twenty million visits to the cinema each week. It was a hugely popular medium for entertainment and before the main movie came the newsreel, twice-weekly compilations of news stories that were part of every cinema show. The newsreels were quite unlike today’s television news. Reliant upon 35mm film that had to be processed, developed and edited, they were always a few days out of date. Nevertheless, some of the newsreels of this period capture the popular attitude towards Churchill very clearly. Unlike the heavily stage-managed performances seen in the newsreels of Hitler and Mussolini, Churchill was usually shown visiting bomb sites or touring factories. He always wore a hat which he would wave at the crowds or put on the end of his walking stick to wave in the air if the crowds around him could not see him clearly. He always had his characteristic cigar as a prop. And he would regularly hold up his fingers in the Vfor-victory sign. He nearly always looked defiant and even when visibly moved by what he witnessed his bulldog spirit seemed to come across. These were not scenes directed by some clever news producer. This was not spin managed by the Ministry of Information or the Cabinet Office. It was just Churchill being himself. He would have made all of these visits even if the newsreel cameras had not been there to film him. And just as his spontaneous visits to victims of air raids proved popular to those who saw him in person, so the newsreel scenes projected to a much larger national audience the same message of encouragement and inspiration.

But it is for his words that Churchill is best remembered from the summer of 1940. Words had been vital to him since the beginning of his adult life. And from him came a torrent of words either performed as hundreds of speeches or dictated as dozens of books, thousands of articles, and innumerable memos, minutes and official state papers. The historian David Cannadine describes his extraordinary career as ‘one sustained, brightly lit and scarcely interrupted monologue’.²⁶ For much of his life he had been respected for his oratory, but people had still been suspicious of him. Churchill could always find a brilliant phrase, but was he right in what he said? In the 1920s, Chamberlain had said his ‘speeches are extraordinarily brilliant and men flock to hear them … The best show in London, they say. But so far as I can judge, they think of it as a show, and are not prepared at present to trust his character, still less his judgement.’²⁷ But during the summer of 1940 Churchill was perfectly attuned to the public mood. His black-and-white way of seeing things enabled him to present the struggle as a noble one between victory and defeat, freedom and tyranny, civilisation and barbarism. The vast majority of adult Britons listened to his broadcasts in 1940, nearly three out of four of the population.²⁸ Many people seem to have felt that Churchill was expressing their own feelings but in a way they could not. His speeches became weapons in the war against Hitler. When very little stood between the British people and the Luftwaffe, invasion and the great likelihood of defeat, Churchill’s defiance and his sense of history gave Britons a feeling of pride that they were living through hours that were as vital as when the Spanish Armada had sailed or when Napoleon had threatened. His speeches hardened their resolve that Britain could take it – and hit back again. Humbly, Churchill later said that it fell to him to express the will of the nation but it was the people who had ‘the lion heart. I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.’²⁹ But this is to play down his role. A New Zealand editor wrote to the BBC, saying, ‘A speech made by Mr Churchill is as good as a new battleship.’³⁰ The great American journalist Ed Murrow, who reported from London at the time, summed it up best when he observed that Churchill ‘mobilized the English language and sent it into battle’.³¹

By September 1940, Churchill had become the unchallenged leader of the people of Britain. A Gallup Poll reported an extraordinarily high 88 per cent approval rating.³² Doubts and scepticism about whether he was the right man for the job had been forgotten. All the fears of Conservatives that he could not be trusted, that he was unreliable and too much of a loose cannon, were put aside. When he had made his ‘finest hour’ speech in June, observers had noted that it was mostly the Labour benches that cheered him in the Commons. Now, the Conservatives were also behind him to a man. Never has the popularity of a prime minister risen so quickly and so dramatically as in the four historic months of the summer of 1940. It was an extraordinary turnaround. At the height of the battle, Churchill said to his dinner guests one evening that he was puzzled as to why he was so popular. Since he had come to power, ‘everything had gone wrong, and he had nothing but disasters to announce’ and his platform was only ‘blood, sweat and tears’.³³ But this suited the mood of the people. Although no one knew for sure that the threat of invasion had been lifted as the Battle of Britain merged into the Blitz, Churchill had successfully led the nation through its darkest hour. But the task of going forward to victory would be long and arduous. Churchill had yet to prove that he had the right formula, and the right people around him, to meet this challenge.