This September 15, Battle of Britain Day, marked the eighty-third anniversary of the victory of Britain’s Royal Air Force over the German Luftwaffe in southern England’s skies. The battle was fought during August and September 1940, but it was on the fifteenth that victory came into view. Until then, the Germans had seemed invincible. This battle broke their streak of successes and forced Hitler to postpone, and then abandon, his plans for the invasion of England. Germany had required a fast victory and a short war, which the Battle of Britain denied. Winston Churchill refused to surrender or settle and rallied his countrymen for a long fight back. A certain friend of mine, who was a teenager at the time, remembers how everyone in his Oxfordshire village gathered around the wireless to hear “how the RAF had shot down far more Jerries than they really had. But no matter—it was enough.” Churchill captured what had happened with a few shining phrases that expressed the emotional power of Britain’s first major victory:
The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world . . . goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of world war by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.
Even today, that final sentence resonates.
One hesitates to use the word, so cheapened has it become, but “existential” is the proper description of the crisis that was at hand. The “so much” that “so many” owed to “the few” was the survival of the British nation as a free state. In British history, only Trafalgar in 1805 is comparable. In American history, there is no comparable single clash. Had the RAF not prevailed and had the invasion taken place, Britain almost certainly would have joined the rest of conquered Europe under the Nazi yoke. The burden of liberation would then have fallen to the United States alone, which would have been forced to choose, as had Britain, between surrender or resistance, whether to pull up the drawbridge or take over the fight. Isolationism’s influence was still strong in America in 1940, and the question of involvement could have gone either way. After the shambles of Dunkirk and the collapse of France, the question was not just whether Britain would stand and fight but whether Britain could fight and win. While it took the shock of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, to rouse America to war, Britain’s air victory in 1940 undoubtedly pushed public opinion closer toward intervention.
This year, perusing the BBC’s website the morning of the fifteenth, I found no reference to any of this. The RAF did their best to fill the gap, forming a quiet gathering of a few remaining World War II veterans at Biggin Hill Aerodrome in Kent, “home to the Battle of Britain.” And on September 17, the Service of Remembrance and Thanksgiving on Battle of Britain Sunday was held in Westminster Abbey. The commemoration has been held annually there since 1944 (the first service was at St Paul’s Cathedral in 1943). The stately liturgy began as the standard of the Number 32 Squadron was borne through the Abbey and placed on the high altar by the dean. All sang “O God Our Help in Ages Past.” Flight Lieutenant Louise Tagg read from Exodus 14 (the crossing of the Red Sea). The choir followed with Psalm 46 (“God is our refuge and strength”). Air Chief Marshall Sir Richard Knighton read from Romans 14 (“Every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall confess”). Then the Battle of Britain Roll of Honour, bearing the names of the 1,497 pilots and aircrew killed or mortally wounded in the battle, was carried from the Grave of the Unknown Warrior to the RAF Chapel by Battle of Britain descendants, currently enlisted RAF aircrew from Battle of Britain squadrons, and a contingent of RAF Cadets. The RAF band played the March Theme from William Walton’s The Battle of Britain. All sang the Airmen’s Hymn. Giles Legood, the chaplain-in-chief of the Royal Air Force, gave the sermon. Service personnel read the collects. The dean pronounced the blessing. From the organ loft, a trumpeter sounded the last post. The standard was returned to the standard party. The choir and clergy, with the representative of the King, retired to the west door as the band played Walton’s “Spitfire Prelude.” Outside, the Battle of Britain Memorial Flight flew over the Abbey: one Spitfire and one Hurricane.
The Battle of Britain is the subject of significant historical literature and of considerable mythmaking. This is partially because the engagement itself was enormous: it was the first major battle fought entirely in the air. It loomed equally large in the popular imagination, thanks in no small part to Churchill’s soaring tribute. His was not the only voice, however, that moved the multitudes of the time. By sheer coincidence, Alice Duer Miller’s verse novel The White Cliffs was published on September 16, 1940, the day after the RAF bested the Luftwaffe. An American, Miller (1874–1942) was a successful writer of novels and screenplays, who in the 1910s had emerged as a prominent voice for women’s suffrage. She was an habitué of high literary and Hollywood circles in the 1920s and ’30s. She is said to have had great charm, and was a regular at the Algonquin Round Table with the likes of Dorothy Parker, George Kaufman, Edna Ferber, Robert Benchley, and Harold Ross, where according to Britannica “her carefree love of fun made her a much-loved figure.” For Harold Ross’s then-brand-new magazine, The New Yorker, she was listed as an advisory editor in 1925. But it is The White Cliffs for which she is best remembered. It was a huge and instant success in America and Britain, selling a million copies by the war’s end. The actress Lynn Fontanne recorded it twice for radio broadcast complete with symphonic accompaniment, and in 1944 it became a tear-jerking movie, The White Cliffs of Dover, starring Irene Dunne and Van Johnson and released three weeks before D-Day.
The book is not long, seventy pages in the first edition. Miller tells the story of a young American girl who comes to England intending a short visit but falls in love with a young English aristocrat from the West Country. They marry, but it is the summer of 1914 and he soon dies in France. With her infant son, the heroine decides to remain in England after war, raise the child as an Englishman, maintain the estate, and live the old country life. As war—from which America is still far removed and could offer refuge—reapproaches in the 1930s, she wrestles with the prospect of sending her son to war for England like his father. She muses on the tangle of her son’s combined English and American heritage. Risking her son, she decides, is the right thing to do, whatever the cost:
. . . Elizabeth long ago
Honored and loved, and bold as brass,
Daring and subtle, arrogant, clever,
English, too, to her stiff backbone,
Somewhat a bully, like her own
Father—yet even Elizabeth never
Dared to oppose the sullen might
Of the English, standing upon a right.
And were [Americans] not English, our forefathers never more
English than when they shook the dust of her sod
From their feet forever, angrily seeking a shore
Where in his own way a man might worship his God. . . .
The tree of Liberty grew and changed and spread
But the seed was English.
This is far from great verse, but it is accessible and true. So too are the poem’s most famous lines: “I am American bred/ I have seen much to hate here—much to forgive/ But in a world where England is finished and dead,/ I do not wish to live.” Miller was a competent writer capable of keen observation and clear expression, even if she lacked the sensibility of a master poet. The poem is a long way from Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” or even Betjeman’s “Before Invasion, 1940.” Yet The White Cliffs worked, if not as high art then at least as very high-grade propaganda, which I do not mean disparagingly. The book exerted much force in the movement of American opinion toward greater support for the Allies. Of course, such effects are impossible to quantify, and there is no record of what Miller herself intended when she conceived her verse novel. That she titled it after the White Cliffs suggests that she knew something about getting attention with just a few well-chosen words: the great chalk cliffs on the coast of Kent were recognizable to everyone in the West, and they literally marked the edge of England. “I have loved England, dearly,” she wrote, “Since that first morning, shining and pure/ The white cliffs of Dover I saw rising steeply/ Out of the sea that once made her secure.”
My copy, printed on April 15, 1941, as part of the eighteenth impression, borrowed from the library of my wife’s grandparents, carries the inscription “To Lady Minnie of Britain’s Best” and is signed “Jim, June 3, 1941.” I do not know who either Lady Minnie or Jim was or is, but they live on, together, sitting on an end table in my home, visitors from another time who once shared a book of poetry that was easy to read and recommend to others. Such reading and recommending probably happened a good deal, if the book’s sales figures mean anything.
It is commonly said that Americans nowadays are a distracted people. We have become nonobservant of old pieties and unobservant of much that happens directly around us. These allegations are doubly true when it comes to historical observation, which puts weighty demands on our education, often so lacking, and on our memory, always so short. For most of us Yanks, Battle of Britain Day is a historical marker almost wholly unobserved. We still do alright with our own big ones: the Fourth of July, Memorial Day and, lately, 9/11. But December 7 and D-Day dim with distance, and you can pretty much forget about V-E Day and V-J Day and for that matter Yorktown and Appomattox too. Our British cousins suffer the same affliction, though there are salutary exceptions. A younger English friend of mine believes the Battle of Britain still courses through the country’s cultural bloodstream. Even twentysomethings sipping warm beer in their local pub, he avers, will recognize and respect the words “The Few.” It is a heartening thought.