Those magnificent flying machines
THEY were the young and the brave. In the high summer of 1940, some boys in blue uniforms, in a sky yet more blinding blue, took on a plague and defeated it. The plague was Nazism.
Like Henry V’s men at Agincourt, The Few —as Churchill unforgettably tagged the pilots of RAF Fighter Command—were outnumbered, but never outfought. Like Hal’s soldiers in that muddy, storied French field, the fighter boys, too, had the benefit of British technology. Henry’s comrades-in-arms toted the longbow; in the sunlit skies over England in 1940, above the
