With Wings Like Eagles: A History of the Battle of Britain

From Publishers Weekly The Battle of Britain has become as much myth as history. Korda ( Ulysses S. Grant ), former editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, gives its story fresh life with the expertise of an established popular historian and the polish of a master narrator. In the summer of 1940, Britain stood alone against the Third Reich, which had quickly overrun Western Europe and seemed poised to finish the job. All that blocked the Nazis were a couple of thousand fighter pilots and their commander, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the story's hero. Dowding fought to build Spitfires and Hurricanes, and trained men to fly them. He set up the radar system and the observer networks that kept watch for German raids. In the face of initial defeats, he husbanded his resources for a greater battle he knew would come. Korda is no triumphalist, demonstrating the mistakes, misunderstandings and simple cussedness that threatened the chances for a British victory. But Dowding's Brylcreem Boys, nicknamed for their favorite styling gel, succeeded against an enemy no less brave and skilled. 7 pages of color and 16 pages of b&w photos. (Jan. 6) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Bookmarks Magazine A key military engagement—Korda ranks it among "one of the four most crucial victories in British history"—the Battle of Britain has been written about extensively. What Korda achieves here is an elegant reexamination that looks beyond the long shadow and statesmanship of Winston Churchill to consider the impressive legacy of Chief Air Marshal Hugh Dowding. Critics agree that, whatever the title, this is largely Dowding's book. Korda intersperses compelling in-the-cockpit battle scenes with on-the-ground reportage, but in the end, the book is "less about [the young pilots] and more about the foresight and tactics that won the Battle of Britain" ( Wall Street Journal ).Copyright 2009 Bookmarks Publishing LLC From Booklist September 15, the UK’s Battle of Britain Day,xa0concludes Korda’s narrative of the famous World War II battle. The date is so honored because in retrospect it was recognized as the Nazis’ final attempt to defeat Fighter Command and clear the way for invasion.xa0The commander of Fighter Command, Hugh Dowding, received no plaudits for victory; rather, he was put out to pasture within weeks. Restoring Dowding’s achievement, Korda delves into preparations Dowding undertook in the late 1930s to create an integrated air defense system. In addition to lauding Dowding’s administrative decisions, Korda describes how his resistance to Churchill, who wanted to dispatch British fighters to save a collapsing France, probably preserved the margin of strength Fighter Command needed against the Luftwaffe. Vital though the Dowding factor may be, history readers invariably choose a Battle of Britain book for its account of Dowding’s pilots, whose aerial victories and losses Korda ably dramatizes, and for its photographs, of which this volume boasts 24 pages’ worth. All in all, a natural pick for the WWII collection. --Gilbert Taylor “A wonderful story, splendidly, deftly and originally told.” — Hugh Thomas, author of The Spanish Civil Wa r “A skillful, absorbing, often moving contribution to the popular understanding of one of the few episodes in history to live on untarnished and undiminished in the collective memory and to deserve the description ‘heroic.’” — Washington Post Book World The Battle of Britain was one of the great transformative events of modern history, and Michael Korda’s stirring account of the campaign is an absolute masterpiece, written with power, intensity and tremendous fidelity to the historical record. It is a tour de force of storytelling and analysis,and a highly pleasurable read, as well, history in the grand style of the masters of the art. — Donald L. Miller, author of Masters of the Air “An excellent book. The writing is most rewarding, and Korda’s natural talent and experience as a storyteller have enabled him to bind all the disparate episodes into a gripping story. A formidable job, beautifully completed.” — Len Deighton, author of The Ipcress File Military historians face tough choices. Do they write about The Big Picture, with presidents and prime ministers making decisions with generals and admirals? Or do they write from the foxhole level, where The Big Picture extends only 300 meters to the front and flanks? . . . In looking back at World War II’s Battle of Britain in With Wings Like Eagles , historian Michael Korda tells the tale from all of the angles cited above. Not only does he make it work, he also keeps it terse. . . . With Wings Like Eagles tells their story superbly. — St. Louis Post-Dispatch “A natural pick for the WWII collection.” — Booklist “Books have been written about the Battle of Britain, but to me none is as interesting and informative as Michael Korda’s new With Wings Like Eagles ." — Tampa Tribune “The book soars in those parts in which Korda describes how the British prepared for the war in the skies, or how the Germans failed time and again to deliver a knockout blow”. — New York Times Book Review “A worthy addition to the mounds of material on the battle that saved Britain and possibly much of the world.” — San Antonio Express-News "Regardless of whether you are one of the lucky few ever to have flown a Spitfire, or your parents not yet born in 1940, Michael Korda’s reliving of all the exhilaration, heroism, fear, and epochal significance of the ‘Battle of Britain’ will enthrall you. He restores the name of its principal architect, ‘Stuffy’ Dowding, to its proper pinnacle, and even has unexpected, but just, praise for Neville Chamberlain. His mastery of aero-technics is phenomenal, and no one can make an exciting, and complex, tale more understandable; quite simply the best book I have read this year." — Sir Alistair Horne, C.B.E. Michael Korda's brilliant work of history takes the reader back to the summer of 1940, when fewer than three thousand young fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force—often no more than nine hundred on any given day—stood between Hitler and the victory that seemed almost within his grasp. Korda re-creates the intensity of combat in "the long, delirious, burning blue" of the sky above southern England, and at the same time—perhaps for the first time—traces the entire complex web of political, diplomatic, scientific, industrial, and human decisions during the 1930s that led inexorably to the world's first, greatest, and most decisive air battle. Korda deftly interweaves the critical strands of the story—the invention of radar (the most important of Britain's military secrets); the developments by such visionary aircraft designers as R. J. Mitchell, Sidney Camm, and Willy Messerschmitt of the revolutionary, all-metal, high-speed monoplane fighters the British Spitfire and Hurricane and the German Bf 109; the rise of the theory of air bombing as the decisive weapon of modern warfare and the prevailing belief that "the bomber will always get through" (in the words of British prime minister Stanley Baldwin). As Nazi Germany rearmed swiftly after 1933, building up its bomber force, only one man, the central figure of Korda's book, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, the eccentric, infuriating, obstinate, difficult, and astonishingly foresighted creator and leader of RAF Fighter Command, did not believe that the bomber would always get through and was determined to provide Britain with a weapon few people wanted to believe was needed or even possible. Dowding persevered—despite opposition, shortage of funding, and bureaucratic infighting—to perfect the British fighter force just in time to meet and defeat the German onslaught. Korda brings to life the extraordinary men and women on both sides of the conflict, from such major historical figures as Winston Churchill, Neville Chamberlain, and Reichsmarschall Herman Göring (and his disputatious and bitterly feuding generals) to the British and German pilots, the American airmen who joined the RAF just in time for the Battle of Britain, the young airwomen of the RAF, the ground crews who refueled and rearmed the fighters in the middle of heavy German raids, and such heroic figures as Douglas Bader, Josef František, and the Luftwaffe aces Adolf Galland and his archrival Werner Mölders. Winston Churchill memorably said about the Battle of Britain, "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few." Here is the story of "the few," and how they prevailed against the odds, deprived Hitler of victory, and saved the world during three epic months in 1940. Michael Korda is the author of Ulysses S. Grant , Ike , Hero , and Charmed Lives . Educated at Le Rosey in Switzerland and at Magdalen College, Oxford, he served in the Royal Air Force. He took part in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and on its fiftieth anniversary was awarded the Order of Merit of the People's Republic of Hungary. He and his wife, Margaret, make their home in Dutchess County, New York. Read more