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By Root 868 0

The Battle of Britain caused the prestige of the nation’s airmen to ascend to lofty heights, where it remained through the ensuing five years of the war. The RAF gained a glamour and public esteem which never faded. As Churchill always recognised, modern war is waged partly on battlefields, and partly also on airwaves, front pages and in the hearts of men and women. When Britain’s powers were so small it was vital to create an inspiriting legend for the nation, and for the world. To this in 1940 Britain’s airmen contributed mightily, both through their deeds and the recording of them. The RAF was a supremely twentieth-century creation, which gained Churchill’s admiration but incomplete understanding. He displayed an enduring emotionalism about the courage and sacrifices of the aircrews. The men of Bomber as well as Fighter Command were never subjected to the accusations of pusillanimity which the prime minister regularly hurled at Britain’s soldiers, and sometimes sailors. Like the British people, he never forgot that, until November 1942, the RAF remained responsible for their country’s only visible battlefield victory, against the Luftwaffe in 1940.

On October 11 at Chequers, Churchill said: “That man’s effort is flagging.”188 Göring’s Luftwaffe was by no means a spent force. The months of night blitz that lay ahead inflicted much pain and destruction, which Fighter Command lacked adequate technology to frustrate. When John Martin telephoned the Reform Club from Downing Street one night to enquire how it had been affected by a nearby blast, the porter responded: “The club is burning, sir.”189 But the RAF had denied the Germans daylight control of Britain’s airspace, and inflicted an unsustainable rate of loss. The Luftwaffe lacked sufficient mass to inflict decisive damage upon Britain. Hitler, denied the chance of a cheap victory, saw no need to take further risks by continuing the all-out air battle. Churchill’s nation and army remained incapable of frustrating his purposes on the Continent, or challenging his dominion over its peoples. German attention, as Churchill suspected, was now shifting eastwards, in anticipation of an assault upon Russia.

The Luftwaffe continued its night blitz on Britain for months into 1941, maintaining pressure upon the obstinate island at minimal cost in aircraft losses. It was long indeed before the British themselves felt secure from invasion. Home defence continued to preoccupy Churchill and his commanders. He suffered spasms of renewed concern, which caused him to telephone the Admiralty and enquire about Channel conditions on nights thought propitious for a German assault. But the coming of autumn weather, and the Luftwaffe’s abandonment of daylight attacks, rendered Britain almost certain of safety until spring. Churchill had led his nation through a season which he rightly deemed critical for its survival.

Across the Atlantic, a host of Americans were dazzled by his achievement. Nazi propagandists sought to exploit a famous photo of Churchill wielding a tommy gun to suggest an image of Britain’s prime minister as a gangster. But instead the picture projected an entirely positive image to Roosevelt’s nation. Over there, what counted was the fact that the weapon was made in the United States. Americans were shown the leader of Britain putting to personal use a gun shipped from their country, and they loved it. By September 30, a Gallup survey showed that 52 percent of Americans favoured giving assistance to Churchill’s people, even at risk of war. Time’s cover story on September 30, 1940, “The Battle of Britain,” declared that

Winston Churchill so aptly and lovingly symbolizes Great Britain’s unwillingness to give up when apparently cornered … There is an extraordinary fact about English democracy—namely, that at almost any given time some English leader turns out to be a perfect symbol of his people. At the time of Edward VIII’s abdication, Stanley Baldwin was the typical Englishman. At the time of the Munich crisis, Neville Chamberlain was pathetically typical. But as of the fourth