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page 1 of 1 This essay originally appeared in First of the Month (5th issue, 3/1 2001) B.o.B.: A fair number of Anglophones alive during or born in the decade following the Second World War lived in a subculture which encouraged strong responses to the Battle of Britain. A quick way to tell if you are part of this cohort is to determine if you have ever responded oddly powerfully to various lines from Henry V--for example Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter, If you got a little misty, it was probably not because you were infinitely moved by the thought of Harry the king, whom you may have known was a bit of a monster, or by mention of Bedford and Exeter, Warwick and Talbot, of whom you probably knew nothing at all. Rather, you subliminally thought about Churchill when you heard the actor playing Harry recite, and the happy few at the back of your mind did not fight at Agincourt: they flew Spitfires. As an experiment, recite aloud these three rather obscure lines from the close of King John: Come the three corners of the world in arms, If you actually teared, it is because within living memory England meant more to you than bad teeth and worse pop songs. The most powerful political myth of your childhood starred Adolph Hitler standing in for the three corners of the world in arms, the replacement of Chamberlain by Churchill stood for England to itself being true, and the Battle of Britain was when they did indeed shock them. These substitutions collectively made up a founding myth for the lay as well as the specialist understanding of Cold War politics, and what was for some decades taken to be the interpenetration of morality and prudence. I imbibed this myth in a Liberal Democratic '50s household, and imbibed it so thoroughly that as a teenager I was troubled the phrase "The League Against War and Fascism"-I had been raised to think that a sensible person could not simultaneously oppose in the same way both war and fascism, because the likeliest way to defeat fascism was to win a war against it. Had I known the early nineteenth century slogan I would have approved of it heartily: "The Rights of Man advance at the tip of the bayonet". This foundation myth lost a lot of its force following its redeployment as the Munich Analogy in debates over intervention in Vietnam, and after a while this effect killed off sentimentality about the Battle of Britain almost as effectively as Feminism and HMOs killed off enthusiasm for psychoanalysis. Now Richard Overy, one of the best historians of the Second World War has written a very brief book-a long pamphlet, really-about the Battle of Britain in the light of What We Know Now. It makes for very instructive reading. To understand what Overy is up to, one should realize that over the last thirty or forty years the broad cultural factors described above eroded the appeal of the Battle of Britain at least as much within the academy as without it. And there were additional factors which obscured the memory of the Few (as Churchill had described the RAF fighter pilots to whom the many owed so much). New sub-fields first arose, then became dominant, and began to eclipse first military history, then diplomatic history, finally political history, precisely those areas within which the tale of the Few mattered most. In many professional quarters military history is now seen as politically and professionally reactionary. To know much about the Battle became first quaint, then vaguely suspicious, and to care deeply about it was probably worse: methodologically retrograde, Eurocentric, what have you. Within the decaying sub-field, revisionists working on the Second World War had chipped away at the Battle of Britain myths. The old version had Hitler poised to invade, the Wehrmacht's descent on the defenseless island waiting only mastery of the skies over the Channel, and a determined effort to destroy the outnumbered RAF failing only because of the skill and courage of the outnumbered Few in their Spitfires. However, it turns out that most of the Few were less skilled at air to air combat than the Germans, they didn't fly Spitfires (most flew Hurricanes), and for that matter it was arguably the Germans who were the Few. RAF Fighter Command's strength in pilots and aircraft was at first roughly equal to the Luftwaffe fighter force, after a while exceeded it, and the British force possessed a number of other advantages; the Luftwaffe did as well as it did because German pilots initially had better tactics, flying in loose pairs rather than rigid and self-defeating three plane formations. For that matter, the Germans were almost certainly not gung ho about an invasion, which they saw as an extreme last resort; they were, in a rather feeble and feckless way, simply trying to erode British political will so that a compromise peace would be accepted. Had they attempted to invade, many suspect that they would almost certainly have failed miserably, and would have failed miserably had the RAF never existed: the Royal Navy might have seen them off very briskly all on its own. The tiny Kriegsmarine had suffered crippling losses in the Norwegian campaign, and although Overy does not go into the matter, the Luftwaffe was not in the summer of 1940 very good at sinking ships, a task for which it had scarcely trained. It did not field air-launched torpedoes, the real shipkillers of early WWII areo-naval combat, or many of the heavy, armor-piercing bombs which did the work at Pearl Harbor and Midway. Most of its bombs were fifty kilogram general purpose munitions, which would not have penetrated the deck armor of heavy cruisers, let alone battleships. The Germans did not have the specialized landing craft the Anglo-American invaders deployed in vast numbers off Normandy: the Germans planned to invade in wretched prahms, vessels which would have made between two and four knots and would have been swamped by the wakes of RN destroyers moving at flank speed, so that there is a chance that the RN could have destroyed a German invasion without even firing its guns. Overy does point out that the two sides were not fighting the same battle, did not date it from the same event, or consider it over at the same point. While academic halfwits delight in incanting that x was socially constructed, there is a decent case to be made that the Battle of Britain really was socially constructed-that the phrase is a post hoc construction fitted around an awkward, complicated and in some respects overblown episode. Britain did not win the war against Germany, in an ascending triumph dating from the Battle of Britain; Germany was winning the war until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and if any one nation "beat Hitler", it was Russia. We now know that the British People did not stand united against Hitler once their backs were to the wall: some wanted to compromise, and some of those were in the Cabinet itself. Social cohesion during the Battle can be overstated, and has been, in the early decades pretty systematically. Overy knows all this, and he knows something more: that the previous four paragraphs are simultaneously meticulously accurate and, as an implied interpretation of the Battle of Britain, poisonous nonsense. The Battle of Britain was, as Overy points out, a necessary battle, one in which a vastly powerful state, led by a regime determined to enslave or exterminate the rest of the peoples of the world, received its first check-and that check proved decisive. When all the epistemological posturing is over, competent historians acknowledge that both antagonists were aware that Hitler's forces had sought to destroy the RAF and break Britain's will, and failed signally to do either, thus losing the aura of invincibility. Victory in the Battle of Britain secured American aid, won precious time, broke German momentum, and did much more: seeking to retrieve that aura of invincibility eight months later, Hitler invaded Russia, and began the two-front war which would destroy him. The fatal timing of this decision was a product of defeat in the Battle of Britain; grossly unprepared to do so, Hitler invaded Russia in an attempt to compel Britain to make peace. Although Overy shies away from even the mildest rhetorical flourishes as he describes the Battle, he is perfectly aware that the stakes could not have been higher. More than a century ago Mahan, the great American theorist of sea power, analyzing the role of the Royal Navy in the wars against Napoleonic France, penned a once-famous phrase: something about `the storm-beaten wooden ships upon which the Grand Army never looked, but which forever stood between it and the conquest of the world'. If a Napoleonic world-empire seems almost infinitely less appalling nowadays than it did to Mahan's contemporaries, if such a threat seems ludicrously quaint, it is because we now know how much worse it gets: because we know, or once knew and have not quite forgotten, about the little metal monoplanes upon which Hitler never looked, but which forever stood between him and a viciously racist world-empire studded with crematoria, lit by lamps shaded with human skin. It is utterly unfashionable to write that way nowadays, at least in defense of the RAF, or Dad's, make that Granddad's, War. But it remains true, and in a very short and very quiet book, Overy shows why it is true, how once we assimilate the modern scholarship, remarkably little of real importance changes in our understanding of the Battle of Britain. As a party steals the White House boasting of its scorn for the use of military force to stop genocidal tyrants who live suitably far away-who practice their staggering cruelties on what Chamberlain, speaking of Czechoslovakia, once called far-way people of who we know very little--it may be time to take a more sympathetic look at the liberal internationalism which once fetishized the Battle of Britain. And maybe even at the Munich analogy. |