Introduction

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