The War in Pictures II. [antikvár]

THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN On 3 September, 1940, Britain had been at war with Germany for one year. Germany was victorious everywhere. After the Polish campaign she had unleashed her magnificent war machine in turn against Norway and Denmark, Holland, Belgium and France. In the space of less than a year she had overthrown all her declared enemies—with the exception of Britain. Britain alone stood between Germany and complete domination of the whole of Western Europe, and Britain seemed doomed. Her small army had escaped miraculously from the trap of Dunkirk, but had left behind it all its equipment and stores, the vast quantities of which would have nourished it during a normal campaign. Fortunately, Britain's Air Force had not been too heavily engaged in the continental battles, and her Navy was still supreme. Hitler's tanks had come up against the Channel which the British Navy still controlled. Unlike Napoleon, who, 140-odd years earlier, had faced the same problem, Hitler had an air force; an air force, moreover, flushed with victory in the skies from Warsaw to Brittany, from Narvik to Toulon. That air force, nearly everyone was convinced, could clear the way across the English Channel for Hitler's triumphant Panzers. In Berlin the Germans boasted that the war would be over by the end of 1940, and that Hitler would dine in London before Christmas. The jackals were particularly convinced of the truth of this boast, and Mussolini, having rushed au secours du vainqueur, was preparing to drive Britain from her precarious foothold in the Middle East and Africa. Yet, although the neutral world was resigned to the extinction of Britain and her Empire, the second year of the war was, in fact, to provide a most astonishing spectacle of recovery. True, Britain was to take some very hard knocks, but those she gave in return, and, above all, the valour 3