Last year, during the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, I was privileged to be involved with some of the high-profile events taking place with veterans to mark the occasion, as I was editing a special commemorative issue of Aviation Classics. This year I decided that I would take a different look at the Battle, and opted to re-read my first edition of Winston S. Churchill’s The Second World War, Volume II — Their Finest Hour. This book embraces Mr Churchill’s first days as Prime Minister, the battle and fall of France, the evacuation from Dunkirk and that uneasy summer of 1940 when the enemy was attacking British shores daily.

Resting on the editor’s RAF Ensign is his first edition of Winston S. Churchill’s book subtitled 'Their Finest Hour', thought to be one of his greatest achievements as an historian and writer. Laid on the book is a 1939–1945 Star with Battle of Britain Clasp. To qualify for the clasp, Allied airmen had to have made at least one authorised operational flight with one of the 71 designated Fighter Command squadrons between July 10 and October 31, 1940. Credit: Jarrod Cotter

Winston Churchill led a grim and resolute people in resistance to every challenge, and his rousing wartime speeches must have been a great source of inspiration during those difficult times. With the greater understanding I now have of front-line operations during the Battle, I thought that I would better appreciate his position and mindset; and so it has proved.

One line in particular, regarding the situation faced by Britain’s authorities at the time, caught my attention: “The reader of these pages in future years should realise how dense and baffling is the veil of the unknown”. Fortunately, however, the right people were in place to prepare the country’s defences most effectively against the “unknown”, and the right people were in place to wield those defences.

On September 15, 1940, Winston Churchill was at Chequers and noted that the weather was favourable for the enemy to attack, so he drove to the 11 Group Operations Room at Uxbridge in Middlesex to observe things for himself. In the book he writes of Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park’s comment to him on his arrival: “‘I don’t know,’ said Park, as we went down, ‘whether anything will happen today.’”

But fairly soon the situation had changed, as the following brief extracts highlight: “One after another signals came in, ‘40-plus’, ‘60-plus’; there was even an ‘80-plus’.”

“The Air Marshal himself walked up and down behind, watching with vigilant eye every move in the game, supervising his junior executive hand, and only occasionally intervening with some decisive order, usually to reinforce a threatened area. In a little while all our squadrons were fighting, and some had already begun to return for fuel. All were in the air. The lower line of bulbs were out. There was not one squadron left in reserve.”

“Hitherto I had watched in silence. I now asked: ‘What other reserves have we?’ ‘There are none,’ said Air Vice-Marshal Park. In an account which he wrote about it afterwards he said that at this I ‘looked grave’. Well I might. What losses should we not suffer if our refueling planes were caught on the ground by further raids of ‘40 plus’ or ‘50 plus’! The odds were great; our margins were small; the stakes infinite.”

Be it the 70th or 71st anniversary of the Battle of Britain, the importance of annually commemorating this crucial turning point of the Second World War remains the same. In Sir Winston Churchill’s own words, again taken from his captivating book: “At the summit the stamina and valour of our fighter pilots remained unconquerable and supreme. Thus Britain was saved. Well I might say in the House of Commons: ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

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