Battle of Britain, Blitz offer timely lessons

With apologies to Santayana, those who ignore history miss powerful opportunities for encouragement and reassurance. The sequence of 75th anniversaries of World War II events coming in the next five years will offer valuable perspective relevant to challenges our nation and the world face today.

One such anniversary, that of the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, concludes this month. The Blitz ended on this date in 1941. It was one of history’s most perilous moments, when England, alone following Nazi Germany’s occupation of the continent of Europe, faced annihilation.

The importance of the moment can hardly be exaggerated: The outcome of World War II, if not the survival of Western civilization, turned on it. As author Len Deighton put it, without England’s prevailing in this battle, “what other battles would there have been?” Indeed, no feature of our lives would be the same had the conclusion been different.

The Battle of Britain was a terrible and fast-paced war of attrition in which the German air force – the Luftwaffe – had to defeat the Royal Air Force’s Fighter Command to enable an invasion of England.

It began in July 1940, with the fiercest fighting occurring in August and September. Fighter Command was at the breaking point – its pilots facing 10-to-1 odds daily, flying constantly, their losses unsustainable, facilities bombed to the brink – when irony intervened.

On the night of Aug. 24, Luftwaffe bombers heading to targets on London’s outskirts got lost and mistakenly struck central London. The RAF retaliated the following nights by attacking Berlin. Enraged, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to wipe out London and other major cities.

While this switch to nonmilitary targets saved Fighter Command, it was the beginning of a campaign of terror against Britain’s civilian population so violent and sustained that the name the British gave it – “the Blitz” – entered the lexicon.

The Blitz put the people of Britain to a test as crucial as the RAF’s. Not all were sure they were up to it. Prewar government studies had predicted complete breakdown of civilization in the face of all-out aerial attack, including collapse of infrastructure, widespread panic, uncontrollable epidemics, wounded beyond capacity for medical care, dead beyond ability to bury and insanity on a scale three times greater than physical casualties.

But despite the horror of the Blitz – 90,000 casualties, including almost 20,000 dead in London alone – the British refused to be terrorized. While damage was significant, none of the feared social breakdown materialized. The people of England stood together, living up to Churchill’s challenge to “brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’ ”

It’s easy now to consider the outcome of World War II as inevitable, almost preordained. But what if the British people had failed in 1940 and 1941? What if Germany had conquered Britain? Britain would have been removed from the fight and would not have existed as the base for Allied conduct of the war against Nazi Germany. D-Day, had it ever come, would have been years later. Return to what we would recognize as anything like the modern world would have been delayed by years, if not decades.

Though the entire British people deserve credit for turning back the Nazis 75 years ago, it is the pilots of Fighter Command who represent the victory. “Never in the field of human conflict,” Churchill told Parliament on Aug. 20, 1940, “was so much owed by so many to so few.”

“The Few” are now very few indeed: Only 21 remain. Those I’ve known are modest and self-effacing, the embodiment of quiet humility. With their fellow Britons of the Blitz, they teach that odds are not certainties, courage and persistence carry the day, and terrorism will win out only if it’s allowed to. In all this, they offer a timely lesson.

The British have not forgotten those days and the debt they owe their forebears who persevered in them: The media was full of remembrances of the Battle of Britain last summer, and the Few are revered as national treasures. I’ve witnessed the depth of this regard.

My wife and I had dinner with a friend, Geoff Wellum, who’d flown Spitfires in the battle. We were in his local, it was a Saturday evening and the place was packed. After talk at our table turned to the Battle of Britain, I suddenly noticed the entire room had fallen silent save for one voice: Geoff’s. Everyone was listening to him, a man to whom each knew he owed his life, a man whose name will be remembered in a millennium.

We might take a moment to listen, too.

Michael Cain of Spokane is a retired naval officer and longtime student of the Battle of Britain.