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.