The Battle Of Britain 1945 1965

Seventy-five years after the Battle of Britain, the Few's role in preventing invasion continues to enjoy a revered place in popular memory. The Air Ministry were central to the Battle's valorisation. This book explores both this, and also the now forgotten 1940 Battle of the Barges mounted by RAF bombers.

The Battle of Britain has held an enchanted place in British popular history and memory throughout the modern era. Its transition from history to heritage since 1965 confirms that the 1940 narrative shaped by the State has been sustained by historians, the media, popular culture, and through non-governmental heritage sites, often with financing from the National Lottery Heritage Lottery Fund. Garry Campion evaluates the Battle’s revered place in British society and its influence on national identity, considering its historiography and revisionism; the postwar lives of the Few, their leaders and memorialization; its depictions on screen and in commercial products; the RAF Museum’s Battle of Britain Hall; third-sector heritage attractions; and finally, fighter airfields, including RAF Hawkinge as a case study. A follow-up to Campion’s The Battle of Britain, 1945–1965 (Palgrave, 2015), this book offers an engaging, accessible study of the Battle’s afterlives in scholarship, memorialization, and popular culture.

Seventy-five years after the Battle of Britain, the Few's role in preventing invasion continues to enjoy a revered place in popular memory. The Air Ministry were central to the Battle's valorisation. This book explores both this, and also the now forgotten 1940 Battle of the Barges mounted by RAF bombers.

This text provides an innovative global military history that joins three periods—World War I, the interwar years, and World War II. Jeremy Black offers a comprehensive survey of both wars, comparing continuities and differences. He traces the causes of each war and assesses land, sea, and air warfare as separate dimensions. He argues that the unprecedented nature of the two wars owed much to the demographic and industrial strength of the states involved and their ability and determination to mobilize vast resources. Yet the demands of the world wars also posed major difficulties, not simply in sustaining the struggle but also in conceiving of practical strategies and operational methods in the heat and competition of ever-evolving conflict. In this process, resources, skills, leadership, morale, and alliance cohesion all proved significant. In addition to his military focus, Black considers other key dimensions of the conflicts, especially political and social influences and impacts. He thoroughly integrates the interwar years, tracing the significant continuities between the two world wars. He emphasizes how essential American financial, industrial, agricultural, and energy resources were to the Allies—both before and after the United States entered each war. Bringing the two world wars to life, Black sheds light not only on both as individual conflicts but also on the interwoven relationships between the two.

The first full reappraisal of one of Britain’s great fighter aces, this book examines the truth behind Tuck’s 1956 biography, Fly for Your Life. It looks at the evidence behind the myths, checks out some of the exaggerated stories and reveals the real Stanford Tuck. In January 1942 Bob Tuck was the top-scoring British fighter ace with an official score of 29 enemy aircraft destroyed. With film-star looks he was the glamorous role model for the RAF publicity machine and an eager press and public wanting wartime heroes. He had joined the RAF in 1935 and quickly showed his excellent flying skills. In 1940 his Spitfire squadron was fighting over Dunkirk where he proved himself an expert shot. During the Battle of Britain his legendary prowess grew and he was posted to command a leaderless and demoralized squadron, this time flying Hurricanes. He continued to prove he was an outstanding fighter ace, gaining the rare distinction of three DFCs and then the DSO for his leadership. He was shot down over France in January 1942. Imprisoned in Stalag Luft III. His room-mate was Roger Bushell, the mastermind of the Great Escape and Tuck worked with him on the committee and was to be his partner in the escape. In January 1944 however, around 20 POWs, including Tuck, were purged to a new camp. Still determined to escape, when his camp was moved out on the Long March westwards, Tuck and a Polish officer took a risky chance and made their way east to Russian forces and thence to England. This book reveals a more complex man than the one-dimensional hero of the previous biography. Post war, he became good friends with the Luftwaffe ace, Adolf Galland, and was a key advisor with him on the film, Battle of Britain, and, often with his other friend, Douglas Bader, made many media appearances. His health suffered in later years from the impact of his war service and his imprisonment and he died aged 70 in 1987.

This is a study of the relationship between Anglicans and the armed forces, of the military heritage and history of the Anglican Communion, and the changing nature of this relationship between the mid-Victorian period and the 1970s. This era spanned a period of imperial expansion and colonial conflict round the turn of the twentieth century, the two World Wars, the Cold War, wars of decolonisation, and Vietnam. In terms of armed conflict, it was the bloodiest period in the history of humanity and marked the advent of weaponry that had the capacity to extinguish human civilization. This book assesses the contribution of an expansive Anglican Communion to the armed forces of the English-speaking world, examines the ways in which this has been remembered, and explores its challenging legacy for the twenty-first century Church of England.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The author of The Devil in the White City and Dead Wake delivers an intimate chronicle of Winston Churchill and London during the Blitz—an inspiring portrait of courage and leadership in a time of unprecedented crisis “One of [Erik Larson’s] best books yet . . . perfectly timed for the moment.”—Time • “A bravura performance by one of America’s greatest storytellers.”—NPR NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • Time • Vogue • NPR • The Washington Post • Chicago Tribune • The Globe & Mail • Fortune • Bloomberg • New York Post • The New York Public Library • Kirkus Reviews • LibraryReads • PopMatters On Winston Churchill’s first day as prime minister, Adolf Hitler invaded Holland and Belgium. Poland and Czechoslovakia had already fallen, and the Dunkirk evacuation was just two weeks away. For the next twelve months, Hitler would wage a relentless bombing campaign, killing 45,000 Britons. It was up to Churchill to hold his country together and persuade President Franklin Roosevelt that Britain was a worthy ally—and willing to fight to the end. In The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson shows, in cinematic detail, how Churchill taught the British people “the art of being fearless.” It is a story of political brinkmanship, but it’s also an intimate domestic drama, set against the backdrop of Churchill’s prime-ministerial country home, Chequers; his wartime retreat, Ditchley, where he and his entourage go when the moon is brightest and the bombing threat is highest; and of course 10 Downing Street in London. Drawing on diaries, original archival documents, and once-secret intelligence reports—some released only recently—Larson provides a new lens on London’s darkest year through the day-to-day experience of Churchill and his family: his wife, Clementine; their youngest daughter, Mary, who chafes against her parents’ wartime protectiveness; their son, Randolph, and his beautiful, unhappy wife, Pamela; Pamela’s illicit lover, a dashing American emissary; and the advisers in Churchill’s “Secret Circle,” to whom he turns in the hardest moments. The Splendid and the Vile takes readers out of today’s political dysfunction and back to a time of true leadership, when, in the face of unrelenting horror, Churchill’s eloquence, courage, and perseverance bound a country, and a family, together.

Since the Second World War, depictions of Royal Air Force operations in film and television drama have become so numerous that they make up a genre worthy of scholarly attention. In this illuminating study, S. P. MacKenzie explores the different ways in which the men of RAF Bomber Command have been represented in dramatic form on the big and small screen from the war years to the present day. Bomber Boys on Screen is the first in-depth study of how and why the screen-drama image of those who flew, those who directed them, and those who provided support for RAF bomber operations has changed over time, sometimes in contested circumstances. Until now dramas that focus on Bomber Command have tended to be mentioned only in passing or studied in isolation, despite the prevalence of surveys of both the British war film genre and of aviation cinema. In Bomber Boys on Screen MacKenzie examines the development, presentation, and reception of significant dramas on a decade-by-decade basis. Titles from the beginning of the war (The Lion Has Wings, 1939) to the start of new century (Bomber's Moon, 2014) are situated in the context of technical possibilities and limitations, evolving social and cultural norms in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, and the development of moral and utilitarian controversies surrounding the wartime bomber offensive directed against Nazi Germany. While the focus is on feature films and television plays, reference is also made to documentaries, memorials, veterans' organizations, book titles, war comics, and other representations of the war fought by Bomber Command.