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Stephen Bungay's magisterial history is acclaimed as the account of the Battle of Britain. Unrivalled for its synthesis of all previous historical accounts, for the quality of its strategic analysis and its truly compulsive narrative, this is a book ultimately distinguished by its conclusions - that it was the British in the Battle who displayed all the virtues of efficiency, organisation and even ruthlessness we habitually attribute to the Germans, and they who fell short in their amateurism, ill-preparedness, poor engineering and even in their old-fashioned notions of gallantry. An engrossing read for the military scholar and the general reader alike, this is a classic of military history that looks beyond the mythology, to explore all the tragedy and comedy; the brutality and compassion of war.… (more)
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He concludes that this was the most important battle of the war and if the Germans had won, it would have probably led to a Russian overall victory in the end and a very different world.
Many accounts of the battle have been written, from memoirs by the pilots to narratives from academic historians. In this respect Stephen Bungay’s qualifications stand out; a former business consultant and insurance executive, he brings a different approach to examining the conflict. Taking the fall of France as his starting point, he intersperses his narrative of the battle (which is largely free of the management jargon that might be expected given his background) with chapters examining various factors in the struggle, from the performances of the planes deployed to the command structures of the two sides. Here he draws upon both his training and his command of German to provide a more balanced assessment of the two sides. What emerges is a provocative argument that the German effort was hopeless, requiring exhausted pilots to achieve statistically unrealistic ratios of combat victories in conditions that favored their opponents.
Such an unusual conclusion might fly in the face of the mythology surrounding the famous “Few”, yet Bungay’s analysis is persuasive in marshaling the numbers to prove its point. Combined with a thorough summary of the campaign, it makes this book the best overview of the Battle of Britain. If there is a flaw, it lies in Bungay’s rather narrow scope of study, as he only takes into account events from the 1930s onward and largely overlooks the many studies of the “first Battle of Britain” that could have shed light on many of the attitudes participants brought to the campaign. Yet this is a minor flaw in what is otherwise an excellent study of a pivotal struggle of the Second World War.