Tomorrow, September 15th, is the 68th anniversary of the observance of the Battle of Britain. It’s celebrated on that date each year because in 1940, that was the climactic, largest-scale day of aerial fighting during the Battle.
All over Britain, celebrations and memorial services will be held, both tomorrow and on Sunday, September 21st. Pilots have been flying surviving aircraft from the Battle in preparation for fly-pasts and other ceremonies.
Of the almost 3,000 pilots who flew for the Royal Air Force during the Battle, 544 were killed, 370 were seriously wounded and 795 more were killed before the end of World War II. The rest have diminished steadily in number as the years have taken their toll. Today there are only 121 known living survivors. About 20 of them will gather at the Battle Of Britain Monument near Westminster Bridge, on the banks of the Thames, to remember their comrades.
The names of all 2,936 pilots are inscribed on bronze plaques around the monument.
That greatest of twentieth-century British leaders, Sir Winston Churchill, said of them:
The great air battle which has been in progress over this Island for the last few weeks has recently attained a high intensity. It is too soon to attempt to assign limits either to its scale or to its duration. We must certainly expect that greater efforts will be made by the enemy than any he has so far put forth. Hostile air fields are still being developed in France and the Low Countries, and the movement of squadrons and material for attacking us is still proceeding. It is quite plain that Herr Hitler could not admit defeat in his air attack on Great Britain without sustaining most serious injury. If after all his boastings and bloodcurdling threats and lurid accounts trumpeted round the world of the damage he has inflicted, of the vast numbers of our Air Force he has shot down, so he says, with so little loss to himself; if after tales of the panic-stricken British crushed in their holes cursing the plutocratic Parliament which has led them to such a plight-if after all this his whole air onslaught were forced after a while tamely to peter out, the Fuhrer’s reputation for veracity of statement might be seriously impugned. We may be sure, therefore, that he will continue as long as he has the strength to do so, and as long as any preoccupations he may have in respect of the Russian Air Force allow him to do so.
. . .
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.
An audio recording of the relevant parts of Sir Winston’s speech (delivered in the House of Commons on August 20th, 1940) is available here in MP3 format. I highly recommend listening to it. That’s History you’re hearing, with a capital H. The full text of the speech may be found here.
And, for those who think that the Battle of Britain was just a minor engagement compared to the titanic battles that still lay ahead . . . consider this. If the Royal Air Force had lost the Battle, odds are that most (if not all) of Western Europe would be speaking German today – and there wouldn’t be a Jew, Slav or other Nazi-hated minority alive on the continent.
Peter