If you look at photographs of Royal Air Force pilots in the summer of nineteen forty, the thing that strikes you is how much of the time they are sitting down.
They are in deckchairs on the grass beside the runway, in flying kit, in the sun. Some are asleep. Some are reading. There is usually a dog. It looks like the least warlike scene imaginable.
They are sitting there because the aircraft are thirty seconds away and the telephone might ring at any moment, and when it rings they have about two minutes to be in the air. So they wait, in the open, in a deckchair, sometimes for six hours, and then run.
The average age of the men in those chairs was around twenty.
A fighter pilot's day started before dawn, because dawn was when raids were likely. You were woken in the dark, you ate something, and you went and sat by the aircraft to wait.
When the telephone rang the word was scramble. You ran, you were helped into the cockpit by a fitter who had been standing beside it for hours, and you were climbing within about two minutes of the phone.
Then you flew for perhaps forty minutes to an hour, because that is all the fuel a Spitfire carried, and much of that was spent climbing to get above the enemy formation.
And then the actual fighting, when it came, lasted seconds. Not minutes. A few seconds of firing, in a turn, at a target crossing your nose, and then everybody was somewhere else and you were alone in an empty sky, which pilots said was the most disorienting thing about it. One moment the air was full of aircraft, and the next moment there was nothing at all.
Then you landed, and were refuelled and rearmed in a few minutes, and you went back to the deckchair. On a bad day you might do that four or five times before dark.
Everybody remembers the Spitfire, and it deserves it. It was beautiful in a way that machines almost never are, with a curved elliptical wing that was difficult and expensive to build and gave it its particular look.
But there were more Hurricanes, and the Hurricanes shot down more aircraft than everything else in Britain put together, including the Spitfires.
The Hurricane was older in design, slower, and built partly of fabric stretched over a frame, which sounds like a disadvantage and was in fact a peculiar sort of advantage. Cannon shells could pass straight through fabric without exploding, and a groundcrew could patch the holes overnight with cloth and dope while a damaged Spitfire went away for structural repair.
The rough division of labour, where it could be arranged, was that Spitfires went for the escorting fighters and Hurricanes went for the bombers, because stopping the bombers was the entire point.
About one in five of the pilots who flew in the Battle of Britain were not from Britain.
There were New Zealanders and Canadians and Australians and South Africans. There were Belgians and Frenchmen who had got out as their countries fell. There were Irish volunteers, and a handful of Americans who had crossed the border into Canada to join up while their own country was still neutral.
And there were the Poles and the Czechs, who had been fighting Germany since before anybody else, had lost, had escaped across Europe by extraordinary routes, and arrived in Britain wanting to get straight back into the air.
The Royal Air Force was hesitant about them at first, on the grounds that they did not speak much English and would not follow instructions from a controller. The Poles were kept in training far longer than they thought reasonable.
Number 303 Squadron was declared operational at the end of August, essentially by accident, when one of its pilots on a training flight spotted a German formation, ignored everything he had been told, and attacked it on his own.
In the six weeks that followed, 303 Squadron shot down more aircraft than any other squadron in the battle. Their commanding officer said afterwards that the difference was simply that his pilots had already lost one country and did not intend to lose another.
The battle was not really won in the air. It was won in a series of underground rooms, by a man most people have never heard of.
Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding was in charge of Fighter Command, and he was not a warm or a popular figure. His nickname was Stuffy. He was awkward with superiors, uninterested in charming anybody, and utterly immovable on the things he thought were true.
In May nineteen forty, with France collapsing, the French government begged for more British fighter squadrons and much of the British cabinet was inclined to send them. Dowding argued flatly that the squadrons would be destroyed in a battle that was already lost, and that Britain would then have nothing left to defend itself with.
He wrote a letter that has become famous among people who study this period, and he won the argument, and it very probably decided the outcome of the summer.
His method during the battle was equally unglamorous. He refused to send up large formations to meet each raid, because that would have meant a small number of huge dramatic battles. He sent up squadrons in ones and twos, constantly, to keep the pressure on and keep his own losses survivable. It looked cautious. Several of his own commanders complained bitterly about it.
Less than a month after the battle was won, he was removed from his command.
There is one more thing that has to be said about these aircraft, and it is not a comfortable thing, but the story that comes out of it is.
A fighter of that period carried its fuel tank directly in front of the pilot. If it caught fire, the flames came straight back into the cockpit, and the pilot's hands were on the controls and his face was above them. Burns to the hands and face were the characteristic injury of the fighter pilot, and there were a great many of them.
The surgeon who took on the problem was a New Zealander called Archibald McIndoe, working at a small hospital in East Grinstead in Sussex. He rebuilt faces and hands using techniques that had barely been attempted before, over dozens of operations spread across years.
What made him remarkable was not only the surgery. He understood that a young man whose face has been rebuilt has a second problem waiting outside the hospital, and that the problem is other people. So he refused to let his patients wear the standard hospital uniform, kept them in their own clothes, filled the ward with beer barrels and a piano, and encouraged behaviour that a matron would normally have stopped instantly.
Then he went to the town of East Grinstead and asked it to do something difficult: to have these men in its shops and pubs and cinemas, and to look at them normally, and not to flinch. The town agreed, and it did it, and it became known as the town that did not stare.
The patients formed a club, and they named it themselves, with the black humour of people who had earned the right to it. They called it the Guinea Pig Club, because that is what they were, and it went on holding reunions for the next seventy years.
The name of this episode comes from a speech Churchill made on the twentieth of August, while the battle was still going on, in which he said that never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. The pilots themselves found it slightly embarrassing and made jokes about their bar bills.
About three thousand aircrew flew in the battle. Around five hundred of them were killed. That is a survival rate that sounds better than it felt, because the losses were not spread evenly, and a new pilot arriving in an experienced squadron was in far more danger than the men he was joining.
The fifteenth of September is remembered as Battle of Britain Day, because that was the day the largest attack was thrown at London and failed. Two days later, the invasion of Britain was postponed indefinitely. It was never rescheduled.
Here is something to think about tonight. Dowding was right about France, right about how to fight the battle, and right about most of the things he argued for, and he was extremely difficult to get along with, and he lost his job almost immediately afterwards. Being correct and being liked turn out to be quite separate skills. Which one do you think is harder to learn?