Battle of Britain (film)

Battle of Britain is a 1969 film directed by Guy Hamilton. The film broadly relates the events of the Battle of Britain. The script by James Kennaway and Wilfred Greatorex was based on the book The Narrow Margin by Derek Wood and Derek Dempster.

Accuracies and Inaccuracies

The film is generally faithful to the real historical events although merging some characters for dramatic reasons. It sticks to the orthodox view of the battle - that the Germans threw away their tactical advantages by switching bombing away from RAF airfields to terror bombing of London in revenge for RAF raids on Berlin. Later scholarship has cast doubt on this view, either arguing that the German switch was because they thought they had already defeated the RAF or that accelerated British aircraft production meant that defeat was never likely.

Related Topics:
London - Berlin

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As noted above many of the 'German' aircraft were actually Spanish copies with British Rolls-Royce Merlin engines.

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The scenes in the operation centre where the British listen to their fighters wireless transmissions is for dramatic reasons only. In reality the operations centre received information on the progress of the battle by telephone via the sector airfields.

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