Abstract
With its seventy-fifth anniversary falling in September 2015 the Battle of Britain continues to resonate powerfully in British popular national memory, the roots of its valorisation firmly planted early in 1941. Why valorisation, in the sense of raising the value of the Battle as an event, rather than its mythicisation, as some historians have suggested? Usually, when one thinks of a myth the sense is of a largely fictitious event, so embroidered that it is no longer possible to untangle the facts from the subsequent layering of fiction, the primacy of supernatural deities central to the narrative. In contemporary usage describing an event as mythical is generally pejorative, to mythicise it, a further distortion. Revisionists have claimed that the Battle of Britain was deliberately mythicised both during wartime and thereafter, and certainly beyond what the actual facts of the air battles could bear. Challenging this, historian Basil Collier suggested in 1962 that ‘in military matters, legend usually has ten years’ start over truth. Legend is not necessarily myth. There is nothing mythical about the skill and courage of the young fighter pilots who gained an undying reputation as “the Few”.’1
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Notes
Collier, 1962, The Battle of Britain, p. 23.
Saunders, 1941, The Battle of Britain: An Air Ministry Account of the Great Days from 8th August–31st October 1940;
Balfour, 1979, Propaganda in War 1939–1945: Organisations, Policies and Publics in Britain and Germany, p. 43.
Süss, 2014, Death from the Skies: How the British and Germans Survived Bombing in World War Two.
Calder, 1997, The Myth of the Blitz.
See also Smith, 2000, Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory.
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© 2015 Garry Campion
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Campion, G. (2015). Introduction. In: The Battle of Britain, 1945–1965. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316264_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316264_1
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