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seventy aircraft against southern Wales dockyards. Churchill knew this was the foretaste of a heavy and protracted air assault. Two days later, he visited RAF Hurricane squadrons at Kenley. Straining to harness every aid to public morale, he demanded that military bands should play in the streets. He urged attention to gas masks, because he feared that Hitler would unleash chemical weapons. He resisted the evacuation of children from cities, and deplored the shipment of the offspring of the rich to sanctuary in the United States. He argued vigorously against overstringent rationing, and deplored pessimism wherever it was encountered. Dill, less than two months head of the army, was already provoking his mistrust: the CIGS “strikes me as tired135, disheartened and over-impressed with the might of Germany,” wrote the prime minister to Eden. In Churchill’s eyes, all through the long months which followed, defeatism was the only crime beyond forgiveness.

On July 19, Ironside was dismissed as C-in-C Home Forces, and replaced by Sir Alan Brooke. Ironside wanted to meet an invasion with a thin crust of coastal defences, and to rely chiefly upon creating strong lines inland. Brooke, by contrast, proposed swift counterattacks with mobile forces. Brooke and Churchill were surely correct in perceiving that if the Germans secured a lodgement and airfields in southeast England, the battle for Britain would be irretrievably lost. Inland defences were worthless, save for sustaining a sense of purpose among those responsible for building them.

Peter Fleming argued in his later history of the period that although the British went through the motions of anticipating invasion, they did not in their hearts believe in such an eventuality, because they had no historical experience of it: “They paid lip-service136 to reality. They took the precautions which the Government advised, made the sacrifices which it required of them and worked like men possessed … But … they found it impossible, however steadfastly they gazed into the future, to fix in a satisfactory focus the terrible contingencies which invasion was expected to bring forth.” Fleming added a perceptive observation: “The menace of invasion137 was at once a tonic and a drug … The extreme and disheartening bleakness of their long-term prospects was obscured by the melodramatic nature of the predicament in which … the fortunes of war had placed them.”

Churchill understood the need to mobilise the British people to action for its own sake, rather than allowing them time to brood, to contemplate dark realities. He himself thought furiously about the middle distance. “When I look around to see how we can win the war,” he wrote to Beaverbrook on July 10, “I see only one sure path. We have no continental army which can defeat the German military power. The blockade is broken and Hitler has Asia and probably Africa to draw upon. Should he be repulsed here or not try invasion, he will recoil eastward and we have nothing to stop him. But there is one thing that will bring him back and bring him down, and that is an absolutely devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country upon the Nazi homeland.” Likewise, at Chequers on July 14: “Hitler must invade or fail138. If he fails he is bound to go east, and fail he will.” Churchill had no evidential basis in intelligence for his assertion that the Germans might lunge towards Russia. At this time, only a remarkable instinct guided him, shared by few others. Not until March 1941139, three months before the event, did British intelligence decide that a German invasion of the Soviet Union was likely.

As for aircraft production, while fighters were the immediate need, the prime minister urged the creation of the largest possible bomber force. This, a desperate policy born out of desperate circumstances and the absolute lack of any plausible alternative, would achieve destructive maturity only years later, when victory was assured by other means. Churchill appointed Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, the brainless old hero of the 1918 Zeebrugge