July 10, 1940: The Battle of Britain Begins

St. Paul's Cathedral survived the Blitz.

Lots of buildings in London didn't.

July 10, 1940, 80 years ago: The Battle of Britain begins. Although Nazi Germany had previously attacked British troops, had conducted Luftwaffe (air force) bombing raids on the British mainland as early as June 26 (what became known as Störangriffe, or "nuisance raids"), and had occupied the Channel Islands (closer to the coast of France than to that of England) since June 30, the 10th of July is recognized as the day the battle began.

This is because it was the night of the 1st large-scale attacks on British cities, known as the Blitz. This lasted until May 11, 1941, destroying 2 million British homes, about 60 percent of them in London, and killing about 42,000 civilians. To put that in an American perspective: That's 16 "9/11s." Or a new 9/11 every 138 days. And we thought our suffering in 2001 was bad. Seaport cities were hit especially badly: London, Portsmouth, Southampton, Liverpool, Newcastle, Cardiff, Belfast.

But Britain's Royal Air Force was ready. Between July 10 and October 31, they lost 1,542 pilots, but the Nazis lost 2,585 of them. October 31 was the last day of sustained daytime bombing, as oncoming colder weather made it difficult to get the planes ready. The British pilots, many of them flying Supermarine Spitfire interceptor aircraft, stood their ground, and their air, and held the enemy off. As it turned out, the Channel Islands would be the only British territory that ever came under Nazi control.  

A Spitfire LF Mark IX,

1 of about 60 known to still be operable.

And the RAF made Adolf Hitler's "Operation Sea Lion," the invasion of the British mainland, inadvisable in the Summer of 1940, and all but impossible in the Autumn and Winter. It wasn't tried in the Spring of 1941, either. By the Summer, Hitler had turned his attention to the Soviet Union. Whether invading Britain would have been the biggest mistake he could have made, we'll never know. What we do know is that invading the Soviet Union became his biggest mistake -- not counting starting World War II in the first place.

The RAF moved Britain's Prime Minister Winston Churchill to say, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

"The Few," as they have become known, are now as few as it is possible to be. There is one left that is still alive. John Allman Hemingway, born July 17, 1919 in Dublin, Ireland, left the Republic of Ireland to enlist in the Royal Air Force. He provided air cover during the Battle of Dunkirk a few weeks before the Battle of Britain, and aided in the Allied invasions of Italy in 1943 (which included my grandfather, serving under General George S. Patton) and Normandy in 1944 (D-Day, which included eventual Baseball Hall-of-Famer Yogi Berra).

Lieutenant Hemingway was shot down 4 times before the war ended, but survived. He remained in the RAF after the war, stationed in the Middle East and France, and finally at the Air Ministry in London, retiring in 1969 with the rank of Group Captain. He lives in a nursing home in Dublin, and if he makes it to July 17, he will be 101 years old. (UPDATE: He was still alive on his 102nd birthday, July 17, 2021.)

When England play Germany in soccer, English fans like to sing, to the tune of "She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain":

There were ten German bombers in the air.

There were ten German bombers in the air.

There were ten German bombers

Ten German bombers

Ten German bombers in the air.

And the RAF of England shot one down.

And the RAF of England shot one down.

And the RAF of England

RAF of England

RAF of England shot one down.

There were nine German bombers in the air...

And so on, until, "Now, there's no German bombers in the air... 'cause the RAF of England shot them down!"

This leads to the paradox of Great Britain fielding teams as a single United Kingdom for the Olympic Games, and related tournaments like track and field's World Championships; but break them up into separate "Home Nations" for everything else, including international soccer, and even the Commonwealth Games, the British Commonwealth's "mini-Olympics": England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, with the Republic of Ireland being separate from the U.K. in both cases.

The RAF had Welshmen, Scotsmen, Irishmen (North and South), exiled men from nations such as France and Poland, and even Americans who wanted to get in on the Nazi-killing but weren't allowed to do so in their own country's armed forces prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. If it had only been an "RAF of England," the war might have been lost.