ARTICLE: Choreographing the Battle of Britain

HOW IS THIS MY 100th POST ALREADY?! I’ve saved an exciting one for you today, so get ready to get stuck into the Battle of Britain and nerds coming to the rescue during the dark days of 1940, but before I do I just wanted to say: Thank you. When I was approached to start a Substack I had never heard of it, and now thanks to the work model it offers creative people, for the first time in my life I’m actually being paid at least something for the endless hours I put into creating history content for ordinary people.

If you’ve subscribed, particularly if you pledged the £5 a month or more, then you have literally changed my life in the past few months. Substack means I can limit the endless exploitation of being a content creator. I’ve been able to start turning down the kind of opportunities that offer “exposure;’” the ones where someone wants to pillage the inside of your head for their own gain, for a fleeting TV documentary, an event or an article and give you nothing in return for the incredibly hard work you’ve put in learning this stuff. The sleepless nights about how to hustle enough money from various projects to put a roof over my head, when you’re fretting about the £100 xxx owes you for something you did three months ago, have also diminished.

Thanks to people like you, I get to do the thing I love, most of the time. I hope you feel like you’re getting your money’s worth. If you haven’t yet subscribed, then please do. The more I can build this publication up, the less time I have to spend on beating a path towards the red line that clarifies paying the bills every month, and the more I get to write for you. Who knows, one day, maybe I can start building up a team and paying others to do what makes their nerdy little hearts sing. There are whole magazines that have moved onto here employing multiple writers.

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June, 1940

If you need the scene setting for you, then in short, it’s bleak. France has just dropped out of the war, the Low Countries have been overwhelmed and so now, Britain faces the prospect of an invasion coming from the continent. To pave the way, the Luftwaffe are about to attempt to pummel Britain into oblivion, so that at the very least we might negotiate a peace settlement with Hitler and back out of the war. Failing that, they’re coming for us.

On 18th June, Churchill addressed parliament and said: "The 'Battle of France' is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin."

The German plan all hinges on Hitler’s airmen gaining superiority over the Royal Air Force. The solution is obvious for RAF Fighter Command: Get up, get in their faces, send them packing before they can bomb the living daylights out of us. But if you thought it was just a case of someone keeping watch, then phoning it in when the enemy appeared from across the Channel and spitfires scrambling to meet them, you’d be wrong. Because nerds had got involved, and the system that they were able to develop was so advanced, it is mind boggling. So advanced, that Hitler never saw it coming…