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By the end of the 1950s, it was increasingly obvious that watching television at home was supplanting going out to the cinema as a prime recreational habit for young and old in Britain. This, in turn, had led to serious shrinkage both in the number of operating cinemas and in film production throughout the country. And, as the 1960s unfolded, what film output there was came as often as not to be financed by the more affluent American studios with an eye on the wider world market, where the Battle of Britain did not resonate. Even within the Air Ministry, there were those who wondered if harking back to the Battle of Britain every year was really in the best interests of the Royal Air Force (RAF). After years of work and a good deal of press scrutiny, a feature film called Battle of Britain made its high-profile premiere at the Dominion Theatre in aid of the RAF Benevolent Fund on the evening of September 15, 1969.

As soon as it was clear that the Luftwaffe had been comprehensively defeated in the daylight battles over England in August and September 1940, and the threat of invasion thereby averted, film companies began thinking about celebrating this singular victory on celluloid. For a number of reasons, though, it would take almost a year for a British feature film in which the Battle of Britain played a significant role to reach the screen; and almost two until audiences were able to judge the major effort by Leslie Howard to interpret the outcome of the battle with reference to the career of R. J. Mitchell, designer of the Spitfire. Neither the failure of such projects nor the insistence by the Air Ministry that Royal Air Force operations and security concerns took absolute precedence over the needs of film production companies dampened the spirits of those who thought feature films tackling the Battle of Britain would be successful. The First of the Few began production in August 1941 and was shown the following year.

This chapter examines the events in the Battle of Britain to provide a better understanding of the domestic and international role of British broadcasting in 1940. It argues that the propaganda tactics of German broadcasters during this battle were far less effective that they had been during the blitzkrieg in Holland, Belgium, and France. It describes the programmes and broadcasting of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) during this time.

Conservative revisionists such as John Charmley and Alan Clark argued that the Battle of Britain had been a mistake, and that the country would have been better off in terms of global power and influence if Winston Churchill had not rejected peace overtures from Adolf Hitler. However, traditional conservatives, among others, saw the memory of the Finest Hour as part of the national heritage and an important component in national identity that ought to be celebrated rather than contemptuously discarded. It was therefore perhaps no coincidence that much more was made of the fiftieth anniversary of the battle by the Royal Air Force and in the press than had been the case for some time, and that in the early 1990s, the long-delayed Battle of Britain Memorial was finally was built near Folkestone. A Perfect Hero would be a co-production of the new Nigel Havers company, Havahall Pictures, working with London Weekend Television. James Cellan Jones was to produce the television series.

As far back as the early 1950s, it had become evident that Air Ministry claims concerning the number of enemy aircraft shot down had, in fact, been greatly exaggerated. It was also becoming apparent by the 1960s that Royal Air Force (RAF) pilots had on occasion shot down friendly aircraft, shot up German seaplanes bearing Red Cross markings with the blessing of higher authority and even fired at German aircrew after they had bailed out. It was in this context that Derek Robinson began work on the novel Piece of Cake, which would become a television series. The Battle of Britain Memorial Flight had a total of four airworthy Spitfires in the early 1980s but, in part because of air show scheduling conflicts and also, perhaps, because of concerns about how the wartime RAF was going to be portrayed, the Ministry of Defence in the end decided against providing assistance by way of aircraft for Piece of Cake.

Over the past sixty-odd years, the representation of the Battle of Britain in British cinema has undergone an evolutionary process in which established images and attitudes have developed roughly in tandem with the changing social and cultural landscape of twentieth-century Britain. Feature films such as The Lion Has Wings and First of the Few helped develop a basic narrative of events in which The Few vanquish the many with the Spitfire. In the following decade, elements were added to this basic David-and-Goliath story in Angels One Five and Reach for the Sky. More than ten years on, there emerged the most wide-ranging and comprehensive treatment of events to date, The Battle of Britain, in which a variety of problems within the Royal Air Force were touched on and some of the horrors of war illustrated while, at the same time, the essential elements of the Finest Hour image, not least the heroism of pilots battling against the odds and saving Britain from invasion, were maintained.

Stories about World War II were among the most bankable subjects for film-makers in the 1950s, particular subjects becoming especially attractive if they had already achieved success in print. This was certainly the case with Reach for the Sky, the authorised biography of the legless air ace, Douglas Bader. Once developed into a feature film released in the summer of 1956, Reach for the Sky would show the Battle of Britain in a fashion superficially similar to, yet profoundly different from, the version on display in Angels One Five. Despite having lost both his legs in a pre-war flying accident, Bader had managed to force his way back into the air force when war came. By 1941, he had become one of the most publicly recognised of the Royal Air Force fighter aces. Shot down in the summer of 1941, Bader had made himself a constant headache for Germany as a prisoner of war before being liberated from Colditz Castle and given the task of leading the Battle of Britain Day fly-past over London on September 15, 1945.

The 1950s would prove to be the heyday of the British war picture. In the years after World War II, those participants who had interesting experiences to relate and the means to do so were often either putting pen to paper or hiring writers to tell their stories. There was no doubt that large numbers of cinema-goers were willing to pay to see war films of all kinds as long as they dealt with the British experience. Given the position it had already achieved during the war, and the way in which the Air Ministry continued to remind the public of what was being framed as the Royal Air Force's definitive wartime triumph – thanksgiving services, march-past parades, airfield open days and, of course, flypasts – each year on 15 September, it is hardly surprising that the Battle of Britain should have been viewed as one of the first war subjects seen as fit for the production of feature films in the 1950s. Indeed, as early as June 1951, production had started on what was to become Angels One Five.

This chapter examines the British historical counterfactuals surrounding the critical period, from the summer of 1940 through the winter of 1941, when a German invasion and/or occupation of Great Britain was widely anticipated. Starting with the 1930s’ debates over appeasement, an interest in how Britain might have been subjugated by Nazi Germany has remained a staple topic in the country’s historical and political discourse. Nazi Britain counterfactual speculations were used at a number of critical junctures in British history during the last half of the twentieth century. Winston Churchill’s 1940’s speeches about the coming invasion created a heroic image of how his countrymen would react, and after the war, alternate histories of how Britons would have behaved during a Nazi occupation have been important to the concept of national character. That concept describes what historical actors (individual and collective) were capable of doing under different circumstances, not just what they did under the circumstances they happened to face. As Britain’s role in the world shrank, its population diversified, and its place in Europe was questioned, the desire for national uniqueness kept reviving speculation about the might-have-been wartime subjection.

More than half a century after the firing stopped, World War II continues to resonate in the public imagination. In the 1950s, dramatic accounts of various operations that had occurred between 1939 and 1945 were a money-spinning staple of the British film industry. The Battle of Britain was fought out in the skies between the middle of June and the latter part of September 1940, resulting in the defeat of the Luftwaffe and any prospective enemy invasion by the Royal Air Force Fighter Command. It has ranked among the most-often-represented events of the war both on the page and on the screen. This book examines how the representation of the Battle of Britain has evolved over time on screen in relation to changing attitudes and circumstances, focusing on feature films and multi-part television dramas in which the Battle clearly permeates the plot. It also analyses each of the major fictional representations, starting with The Lion Has Wings and ending with A Perfect Hero.

As well as being a central feature of the popular mythology that grew up around World War II, the Battle of Britain must rank among the most widely anticipated events of the twentieth century. Anyone who remained unaware of what aerial warfare was thought to mean would have been rapidly educated if they had seen Things to Come, written by H. G. Wells and brought to the screen by London Films mogul Alexander Korda in early 1936. Korda also negotiated with the Air Ministry before the outbreak of war about making a film in which the strength of the Royal Air Force resulting from various recent expansion schemes would be showcased. By the time an agreement was reached on September 1, 1939, war with Germany was a virtual certainty. Korda immediately set about creating what would soon be titled The Lion Has Wings, a feature film that would contain a message diametrically opposite to that of Things to Come. The Lion Has Wings succeeded in counteracting the earlier sense that a Battle of Britain would be catastrophic in nature.

This chapter follows the establishment of the first permanent U.S. network radio bureaus in Europe, and the work of the National Broadcasting Company’s (NBC) European Representative, Fred Bate, and his colleagues, including César Saerchinger and Edward R. Murrow, as they developed transatlantic radio broadcast journalism. Throughout the 1930s, Bate and others surmounted obstacles of techno-aesthetic difference in radio production, continental political upheaval, ideological differences, censorship, and resource scarcity, to transform transatlantic broadcasts from shaky experiments into a reliable information conduit for listeners following global events. Such struggles made it possible for transatlantic broadcasting to report the February riots of 1934, the Anschluss, Munich crisis, and the Battle of Britain.

This chapter suggests that, after Dunkirk, civilian morale in Britain was galvanized around three sacrificial moments: the purging of the National Government, the Battle of Britain, and the Blitz. Accordingly, T. S. Eliot, Edith Sitwell, Dylan Thomas and others published powerful poems on the idea of sacrifice, many deriving their power from drafting tradition and mythology into new visions of social organization. In analysing a variety of these poetic visions, this chapter also considers work by Alun Lewis, Louis MacNeice, R. N. Currey, Keith Douglas, Timothy Corsellis, and Sidney Keyes. Three salient issues that bear on sacrifice can help us understand the poets’ hopes and misgivings: the relation of sacrifice to numbers and consent; the moral stasis induced when deaths are ritualized; the insight that members of a given society live in harmony not because of the periodic bloodletting of war, but in spite of it.

The subject of decisive victory was another subject that caught my attention while at the Naval War College, where we would ask students to list Napoleon’s decisive victories. The term “decisive” is overused, and too often engagements with only transient strategic significance—despite the number of casualties—were given the term. The number of truly decisive battles throughout history is few. The first step therefore was to define decisive, and the key was to identify victories having long-term significance. After defining the term, listed are what in my view are the Top Eleven throughout history.