51.2°N 0.5°E Western Europe Battle of Britain & The Blitz
Briefing
Through the summer and autumn of 1940 the Luftwaffe tried to destroy RAF Fighter Command as the prelude to invasion, in the first battle fought entirely in the air. Churchill's Few turned back an air force that had never been beaten, and the night Blitz on British cities that followed killed over 40,000 civilians. It was Germany's first defeat of the war, and it kept Britain fighting.
Books Covering This Event (10)
Popular History
The Americans who stood with Britain in 1940-41 — Murrow, Harriman, and Ambassador Winant — when Washington would not.
Churchill's first year as Prime Minister — the Blitz, the Battle of Britain, and a family and country under bombardment.
Memoir
Shirer's actual diary as CBS correspondent in Berlin, from the Anschluss to the fall of France — published while the war still hung in the balance.
Churchill's six-volume memoir-history of the entire war, from the gathering storm to triumph and tragedy.
A Spitfire pilot's memoir of the Battle of Britain, flown at eighteen years old.
Historical Fiction
A battered London evacuee is billeted on a gruff widower, and two broken people mend each other as the bombs begin.
A captured British agent writes her confession for the Gestapo — a story of two girls, a Lysander, and what friendship costs.
Ursula Todd lives the twentieth century over and over — and the Blitz, in every version, is where the novel beats hardest.
A disabled girl escapes her abusive mother in the London evacuation and discovers, in wartime Kent, what care feels like.
The War in Books: The Battle of Britain and the Blitz
A summer in the air, a winter under the bombs, and the memory of both.
No British campaign has been more mythologised, and the best books on it manage to keep the legend without being trapped by it. Geoffrey Wellum’s First Light is the pilot’s view, the memoir of a very young man flying Spitfires, and it is memorable for the fear and exhaustion it admits to. Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile moves into Downing Street and the bombed cities, using diaries to show Churchill’s first year as prime minister as a family story as much as a political one. William Manchester and Paul Reid’s The Last Lion: Defender of the Realm treats the same leader on the grand scale.
William Shirer’s Berlin Diary shows how the campaign looked from the capital of the other side, from a reporter who was there. Evacuation and the bombing have also become the setting for some of the best-loved children’s fiction of the war. Michelle Magorian’s Goodnight Mister Tom and Kimberly Brubaker Bradley’s The War That Saved My Life both follow evacuees, and both find in the upheaval of war a chance of care that peace had failed to give. They are good places for younger readers to begin, and adults who come to them later often find they hold up. Between them, these books cover the Few and the many, which is how the story should be told.