The Battle of Britain was won by members of our ‘clapped-out’ ruling class

Doppelganger

Re "But it’s worth remembering that the few whom we owe so much to were all members of England’s ‘clapped out’ ruling class.": really? What about the NCO pilots, the pilots who came from overseas, and the other pilots who were not from the "ruling classes"?

Herbert Thornton

".......it is now almost universally accepted that the Allied victory — or, more precisely, the avoidance of defeat before America entered the war — owed much to Churchill’s leadership. ‘I’m absolutely convinced that if Churchill hadn’t been there, the British people would have made terms with the Nazis,’ says Max Hastings, author of the recently published Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940-45."

That Churchill was the sole reason the British people did not make terms with Hitler may indeed be true but surely it requires us to also ask what other consequences would have followed? Two questions in particular that deserve an answer are, to my mind -

1. Would Hitler's campaign against the Soviet Union have succeeded? and

2. Would Hitler have launched his programme to exterminate all Germany's Jews?

I ask the second question because I discovered, to my surprise when working in East Africa, that one of my colleagues was from Vienna and had spent several months in a Nazi concentration camp. He told me that he had been released and allowed to leave Germany. I realise that his example may count for very little, but it does seem to raise the question of whether universal extermination of all Jews would have necessarily followed had Hitler's war against the Soviet Union been more successful.

Peter Jukes

Has the Spectator now lost all sense of historical probity, and left open the coffers of the past to unchecked plundering like this?

The RAF was famously the most meritocratic and least class obsessed of the three services. Of course, its senior officers were, by modern standards, Blimpish and Toff. But it was mainly nice upper middle class boys - like Richard Hillary - who flew the planes. Fighter pilots thrived on an ethos of individualism: they were more existentialist and radical than conservative. Think A Matter of Life and Death. The David Niven character may be charming and smooth spoken by our standards, but by the standards of the 1940s he was no aristocrat.

You only think the RAF pilots in the Battle of Britain are Toffs because of the change of accent and class structure over the last 60 years.

At the time the pilots were known as 'long haired boys' - rascals and rebels with more in common with Beatniks than Cecil Beaton.

Rarely has one op ed contained so many historical errors.

Peter Anson

This is such a pointless and silly article that any analysis would, itself, be pointless. One hopes that the author has not been paid.

Derek Mc

Doubtless when Toby has to crank out a few hundred words for the Spectator historical research must seem like a boring chore, however it wouldn't prevent him hanging an entire piece on a fallacy thereby rather invalidating the whole thing. Of the just over 3,000 pilots (including 20% from outside the UK) accepted to have fought in the battle of Britain approximately 200 came from a public school background. I don't suppose there's any chance of a correction or apology is there?

Mik Black

Mr Young doesn't seem to have actually read Orwell's essay, for if he had he might have discovered that Orwell actually says:

"It is worth noticing that the navy and, latterly, the air force, have always been more efficient than the regular army. But the navy is only partially, and the air force hardly at all, within the ruling-class orbit."

How long would it have taken to read the essay in its entirety? 20 minutes?