There has never, thank God, been a Battle of America. Despite the Hollywood depiction of the British Redcoats as proto-Nazi butchers in Mel Gibson's disgraceful movie, The Patriot, the American Revolution (or American War of Independence, as it is still known in Britain) was not a struggle for survival, but a colonial conflict between more or less civilized combatants that divided both American and British opinion. If George III had followed the wiser counsel of statesmen such as Edmund Burke and negotiated a settlement with the colonists, or even if he had won the war, Americans would not have been enslaved. The United States, or something very like it, would sooner or later have achieved independence.
Within living memory, however, there was a Battle of Britain. Sixty years ago this summer and autumn, the first great air battle in history was fought between the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the German Luftwaffe in the skies over southern England and East Anglia. The blitzkrieg had defeated the Allies in France, but had stopped at Dunkirk for long enough to allow the British Expeditionary Force to be evacuated, along with great numbers of Allied troops. All their equipment, however, had been lost. Unless a German invasion could be prevented, the Wehrmacht would almost certainly overwhelm the denuded and demoralized British Army. Only the Royal Navy could deter an invasion, but it was fully engaged in the Atlantic and Mediterranean. If the raf lost control of the skies over the English Channel, the overstretched Home Fleet would suffer the same fate that American bombers later meted out to the Imperial Japanese Navy. After playing a decisive role in the fall of France, the Luftwaffe was confident of victory.
