Many Not the Few: The Stolen History of the Battle of Britain

by Richard North

  But there was also the party political dimension, one which cast Churchill as leader of the Conservative Party, pitted against the Left Wing which was challenging him for power after the war. As war leader, we see him having sought national unity and public commitment, and his bid to capture and exploit “people power” in his speech of 14 July. Then, he eschewed the idea of a war “of chieftains or of princes, of dynasties or national ambition”. He was prepared to concede that it was “a war of peoples and of causes”.

  However, endorsing the concept of the People’s War not only contradicted Churchill’s own political doctrine, it conceded the game to his domestic political opposition. It required of him to define “war aims” and thereby acknowledge the right of the people to have a say in the management of the war, and then the peace, the very essence of the Left’s platform. This, as a Conservative politician, soon to become leader of the Party, he was unwilling to do.

  Thus, five weeks later, in his speech of 20 August, he very publicly rejected demands for a statement on war aims. It cannot be a coincidence that, in the same speech, he characterized the war as one of princes – of élites. What legitimized the transition was the definition of “the few”, the gallant young airmen in their flying machines, dashing to the rescue of the passive many. By creating that myth, Churchill found the means by which could justify his own political creed.

  Looking more deeply at Churchill’s speeches, one can see how they were used to support this stance. Ostensibly addressed to the nation, to allies and also the enemy, they make most sense if treated as one side of a conversation. On the other side was J. B. Priestley. As a political commentator, with his writings, his column in the Sunday Express and his Postscripts on the top BBC slot on Sundays, he could command vastly greater audiences than could Churchill. Already his rival in political philosophy, he was to become his rival for the affection of the British people – regarded by some as the only broadcaster worth listening to.3 Largely written out of contemporary histories, he was hugely influential.

  The subjects of the conversation were, of course, “People’s War” and “war aims” with their overtly Socialist agenda. Churchill presented his case in his speeches and broadcasts, Priestley through his diverse outlets. He represented the “people” who were doing the fighting and suffering. They were entitled to dictate how the war was fought and were earning the right to a “noble future”.

  How well Priestley had captured the public mood was identified by Michael Foot. In his biography of Labour MP Aneurin Bevin, he noted that the huge response to the Postscripts was evidence of the spirit of the age. Publishers were finding they could sell vast numbers of books on political and sociological topics. Soldiers were reading in their camp beds and airmen at their depots. Community life, so far from being disrupted by bombs and blackouts, was being richly renewed. Many an air-raid shelter became a miniature mock parliament, with class barriers broken, tongues untied and accents forgotten. And with this new spirit, wrote Foot, went a political ferment directed partly against the squalor of the past and partly in excited hope towards the future and the peace when it came.4

  Opposing this “political ferment” was Churchill, the party politician, defending the status quo. Thus, the conversation between the men became a proxy war, a fight that Churchill could not afford to have with his Labour coalition partners or, openly, with the trades unions. It started when, in response to Churchill’s “war of peoples and of causes” on 14 July, Priestley offered the Margate homily. “We’re not fighting to restore the past; it was the past which brought us to this heavy hour; but we are fighting to … create a noble future for all our species”, he had told his audience. On 21 July, he repeated the call to go forward “and really plan and build up a nobler world … in which ordinary, decent folk can not only find justice and security but beauty and delight”. This, he said, “is our real war aim”.

  On 28 July, Priestley continued the theme, but this time he enlisted the aid of “our lads in the RAF”. In his talk on 4 August, he then characterized the war as “between despair and hope”, with his almost feline swipe at the Prime Minister’s rhetoric, declaring: “We must not only summon our armed forces, wave our flags and sing our national anthems, but we must go deeper and by an almost mystical act of will, hold to our faith and hope”. So it was that Churchill, in his speech of 20 August was trying to claw back lost ground and regain the political initiative. His “few” was not just rhetoric, or a reaction to the drama he had seen at Park’s headquarters. It was the response to Priestley’s “many”, used to soften his public rejection of a statement of war aims, in what was quite a deliberate snub to the Left.

  Three days afterwards, Churchill was confronted by something of an internal rebellion, when the War Cabinet approved Duff Cooper’s “war aims” committee, charged with looking at a plan which had been instigated by the “socialist” Nicolson. Churchill intervened in the debate, and steered the discussion to his ideas on European reconstruction, thereby avoiding a discussion on domestic reforms, which were also part of the Cooper package.

  Then, on 18 September, there was Churchill’s next speech in the Commons. Delivered in the wake of the “great victory” in the air, his pitch was an overt appeal to authority, with his reference to “responsible officers of the Royal Air Force”. In making it, he asked the public to keep the production lines rolling. He was no longer appealing the “tough fibre of the Londoners”. It was more a Soviet-style call to maintain tractor quotas. The population had to prove itself “worthy of our boys in the air” – the élite which was so nobly saving it from the ravages of the Hun.

  But Churchill did not only have the public to deal with. He had his “enemy within”, his own political allies such as Cooper and Smuts who were pursuing a declaration of war aims. Trades union leaders and many others, not least the highly influential H. G. Wells, also continued to fight for this cause – with considerable support from the press, and in particular the Daily Mirror and the Sunday Pictorial. Hostile press articles had given Churchill particular problems in late September and early October, specifically over the Dakar operation. But it was significant that he had also taken exception to the comments in the Mirror on the People’s War, and taken them so seriously. They “stood for something most dangerous and sinister, namely, an attempt to bring about a situation in which the country would be ready for a surrender peace”.5

  This brought forward yet another dimension to the Battle of Britain. The “victory” in the air was used as a bastion against criticism. From political friend and supporter Hastings Lees-Smith on 8 October came the declaration that victory in the Battle of Britain was “more important than anything which happens elsewhere, even at Dakar”. This dynamic was seen again after the ignominious retreat from Greece, the defeat in Crete, the fall of Singapore in February 1942 and of Tobruk in June of the same year. Time and time again, when under attack for the failures of war policy, Churchill was to refer to the shining example of his 1940 “victory”. Until El Alamein, this was the only major success he could offer. He talked it up as a victory because it was the only one he had.

  By October, therefore, the die had been cast. Churchill had justified his political stance with the aid of the Battle of Britain and “the few”, and used them to bolster his leadership. But he still had rebellious newspapers to deal with and, although a sort of resolution in the “subversive press” affair had been reached by 15 October, there were to be further battles. By October, of course, the Blitz was at its height, but on the 15th, Cooper’s responses on war aims in the adjournment debate came perilously close to contradicting the Prime Minister in public.

  Faced with this ongoing rebellion, Churchill could express sympathy with the people but he could not acknowledge their role in preventing defeat without conceding the political game. Thus, we see him in the House of Commons on 5 November, talking of the “danger of invasion … diminished by the victories of the Royal Air Force” and of the “plain fact” that the def
eat of the invasion, “constitutes in itself one of the historic victories of the British Isles and is a monumental milestone on our onward march”.

  On 19 November, Churchill was again in the House, again refusing to commit to a declaration on war aims. But a further revolt was growing inside the War Cabinet when, the next day, “the general feeling” was for “some general statement of the essential fundamentals”.

  Lord Halifax attempted to put clothes on that “general feeling” on 13 December 1940, when he took it upon himself to present a statement in his own name. “The people of Great Britain and all those who stand with them in this war”, he declared, “are fighting to realise the hopes of millions of men and women throughout the world who desire above all things the right for themselves and their children to live their lives in freedom, security and peace”. This was circulated to the War Cabinet on 7 January 1941, and discussed on 20 November.6

  Churchill, of course, could not accept this – but he could not reject it out of hand either. Instead, he damned it with faint praise. It was “admirable in many respects”, but it would not in its present form, “impress public opinion”. With that, the matter was never again raised in the War Cabinet and, in due course, Cooper’s high-flown “war aims” committee got converted into the very pedestrian and practical “reconstruction committee”. Cooper was packed off in early 1941 to become Resident Cabinet Minister in Singapore, as far away from Whitehall as possible.

  On 9 February 1941, Churchill then made his “give us the tools and we’ll finish the job” broadcast. In this, he mocked “Herr Hitler”, who “did not dare attempt the invasion” – yet another allusion to the “victory” of the few. Only then did he allow that the bombing “so far from weakening the spirit of the British nation”, had “only roused it to a more intense and universal flame than was ever seen before in any modern community”. There was no linkage between the resistance to the bombing and that “victory”.

  Furthermore, to give the broadcast, he had claimed Priestley’s slot, which had already been advertised in the Radio Times. On 16 February, Priestley – only recently back on air – delivered that talk he would have given earlier. But the following week, under considerable attack from factions within the Conservative Party, he retaliated with an attack on the “Commanders from the Carlton Club”. These were, he said:

  [T]he gentlemen who tell me in public to stick to my business of writing books and plays, forgetting that they have made such a mournful hash of their business of running the world that I can no longer attend to mine, even if I wanted to.7

  The next week the talk was again cautious, but on Sunday 16 March, Priestley threw caution to the wind and dedicated his talk to merchant seamen, declaring:

  We owe them something more than sentimental speeches, made at a time when our lives depend on their skill and courage and sense of duty. We owe these men a square deal. In the last war, when they served us so well we praised them to the skies, clapped them on the back, and stood ‘em drinks. What we didn’t stand them, though, were better conditions and a reasonably secure future. We’ve no right to be praising men one year and then ignoring them a year of two afterwards.8

  That was a heresy too far. The people’s favourite had to go. He was taken off air, the executioner Duff Cooper. It was always suspected, though, that it had been on the insistence of Churchill. Six months later, on 8 September 1941, Priestley was to publish his tract called Out of the People, which set out fully his “programme for social and political reform, and for a better world for the ordinary man”.

  By then, the counterstroke was already in place. Only ten days after Priestley had been fired, on 28 March 1941, the Air Ministry produced the official account of the Battle of Britain in its pamphlet of the same name. Deliberately partisan – “propagandist”, according to George Orwell – it was a paean of praise for “the few”, referring exclusively to “the part played by the Royal Air Force in the victory”. Furthermore, it only covered the fighting from 8 August to 31 October 1940. Like the Hundred Years’ War, the battle was being “invented” after the event.

  Written by Hilary St George Saunders, the author of several published works, 50,000 copies of the pamphlet were printed. They sold out within three hours. A reprint of 300,000 was immediately arranged. By November 1941, 3,750,000 copies had been sold and, by 1 July 1942, when a “bitterly disappointed” St George Saunders resigned from the Air Ministry to become a House of Commons assistant librarian, sales of over 6,000,000 were being claimed.9 From 31 March to 9 April 1941, the pamphlet was fully serialized in the Daily Express, the final part headed: “These men saved England”. The people were being downgraded and offered alternative champions.

  What was not properly realized was that this pamphlet was setting such an intensely political agenda. There is no evidence that its publication coming so soon after Priestley had been fired was anything other than a coincidence. But it was a very convenient one. For Churchill, the Battle of Britain had become a talisman with which to ward off criticism, and the ideal antidote to Priestley and his subversive ideas. In 1941, he was to mention it in the House of Commons 116 times, more than any other politician.

  There now comes another dimension. It takes us away from the party political field into RAF internal politics. This becomes apparent in the May of 1941, just two months after the publication of the Air Ministry’s pamphlet, with the publication of a book called The Battle of Britain 1940. It was written by James Spaight, recently retired Principal Assistant Secretary at the Air Ministry. But as well as the fighter battle, he covered in detail the Bomber Command “counter-offensive”, together with Coastal Command and Fleet Air Arm activities. These, he declared, were an integral part of the battle. “All alike have the same purpose and contribute to the same end, the defeat of the attempt to subjugate Great Britain here at home”.10

  The book took on its political edge through the author of its foreword, Marshal of the RAF, Viscount Trenchard, sworn enemy of Dowding, a conspirator in his downfall, and a champion of strategic bombing. Spaight’s book was self-evidently an attempt to strengthen the image of Bomber Command, an issue of special significance when all the different Commands were competing for scarce resources. And nor was this the only attempt. Another book published in 1941 was entitled So Few, recounting the “immortal record of the Royal Air Force”. The series of short stories again gave coverage not only to the fighters but to Bomber Command, and even the exploits of the crew of a Sunderland flying boat, citing Churchill’s “airmen” in his 20 August speech.11

  The counteroffensive came from Dowding himself. Despite being the architect of the battle so vividly described by the Air Ministry, he had not been mentioned in its pamphlet. An offended Churchill suggested this was the equivalent of the Admiralty telling the tale of Trafalgar without Lord Nelson. As a result, the Air Council asked Dowding to write his own account, which was delivered in the form of an official “despatch” on 20 August 1941, exactly a year after Churchill’s “the few” speech. Even though it was not published until 11 September 1946, then in the London Gazette, it was circulated widely and became hugely influential. This was the next step in locking in a myth that downgraded the role of the people.

  Through this despatch, Dowding defined a new start date for the battle. Somewhat arbitrarily, he says, he chose 10 July 1940, arguing that heavy attacks made against Channel convoys on that day “probably constituted the beginning of the German offensive”. To him, the weight and scale of the attack indicated that “the primary object was rather to bring our fighters to battle than to destroy the hulls and cargoes of the small ships engaged in the coastal trade”.

  Luftwaffe air ace Adolf Galland, in his autobiography, was less certain. “I should not care to say which one of the three following strategic aims was responsible for the order to gain air supremacy,”, he wrote, “the total blockade of the island, the invasion, or the defeat of England according to Douhet concepts”. He added: “I rather doubt if the General
Staff knew themselves, because during the course of the Battle of Britain the stress was put on all of them in turn”.12

  Nevertheless, Dowding’s unsupported – and partisan – beliefs defined the battle as it is now known, its start date and end, the timing running from 10 July to 31 October 1940. In so doing, he strengthened the image of a duel between the Luftwaffe and RAF Fighter Command. But Dowding could not have known the bigger picture. He was offering an opinion, from a very narrow perspective. But it was not the opinion of a dispassionate historian. Rather, this was a man deposed by his enemies, writing of his own place in history before those enemies beat him to it.

  Much has been written of Dowding’s demise, of the unfairness with which he was apparently summarily dismissed and of the tedious office politics that attended it. But it has to be said that, while his planning and leadership doubtless saved the Fighter Command from destruction, he was not able to vanquish the night bomber. Towards the end of 1940, it was the night bomber menace which was exercising the War Cabinet, and it was this which was threatening morale and the war effort. The politicians were only too aware that assurances that the scourge would be defeated were wearing thin and that they were running out of ideas and options.

  Unfortunately for his personal reputation, in the closing stages of his career Dowding had presided over failure. Luftwaffe bombers were roaming the night skies of Great Britain, virtually unchallenged. When the name of his replacement on 18 November 1940 had been announced, the Express had declared: “Sholto Douglas is the man of the hour. His task is to stop the German night bomber”. That identified, far more than a shelf-full of biographies, what was really going on. But, in writing his account of the Battle, creating his own history, Dowding was not going to dwell on his failures. The people’s battle did not feature in his account – it could not, without raising uncomfortable questions about his performance and the role of his precious Fighter Command.