Michael Korda's brilliant work of history takes the reader back
to the summer of 1940, when fewer than three thousand young fighter
pilots of the Royal Air Force-often no more than nine hundred on
any given day-stood between Hitler and the victory that seemed
almost within his grasp.
Korda re-creates the intensity of combat in "the long,
delirious, burning blue" of the sky above southern England, and at
the same time-perhaps for the first time-traces the entire complex
web of political, diplomatic, scientific, industrial, and human
decisions during the 1930s that led inexorably to the world's
first, greatest, and most decisive air battle. Korda deftly
interweaves the critical strands of the story-the invention of
radar (the most important of Britain's military secrets); the
developments by such visionary aircraft designers as R. J.
Mitchell, Sidney Camm, and Willy Messerschmitt of the
revolutionary, all-metal, high-speed monoplane fighters the British
Spitfire and Hurricane and the German Bf 109; the rise of the
theory of air bombing as the decisive weapon of modern warfare and
the prevailing belief that "the bomber will always get through" (in
the words of British prime minister Stanley Baldwin). As Nazi
Germany rearmed swiftly after 1933, building up its bomber force,
only one man, the central figure of Korda's book, Air Chief Marshal
Sir Hugh Dowding, the eccentric, infuriating, obstinate, difficult,
and astonishingly foresighted creator and leader of RAF Fighter
Command, did not believe that the bomber would always get through
and was determined to provide Britain with a weapon few people
wanted to believe was needed or even possible. Dowding
persevered-despite opposition, shortage of funding, and
bureaucratic infighting-to perfect the British fighter force just
in time to meet and defeat the German onslaught. Korda brings to
life the extraordinary men and women on both sides of the conflict,
from such major historical figures as Winston Churchill, Neville
Chamberlain, and Reichsmarschall Herman Göring (and his
disputatious and bitterly feuding generals) to the British and
German pilots, the American airmen who joined the RAF just in time
for the Battle of Britain, the young airwomen of the RAF, the
ground crews who refueled and rearmed the fighters in the middle of
heavy German raids, and such heroic figures as Douglas Bader, Josef
Franti?ek, and the Luftwaffe aces AdolfGalland and his
archrival Werner Mölders.
Winston Churchill memorably said about the Battle of Britain,
"Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many
to so few." Here is the story of "the few," and how they prevailed
against the odds, deprived Hitler of victory, and saved the world
during three epic months in 1940.