Fighter Boys Views
The aim of this book is to answer the question, 'What were the Fighter Boys really like?' To do this the author talked to surviving pilots, read unpublished memoirs and made use of the holdings of the Imperial War Museum and other libraries. He also talked to surviving Luftwaffe pilots. He shows that Fighter Command 'was perhaps the most motley elite ever to exist in the British military'. Despite the fact that the pilots had been involved in 'something great' their chief characteristic was their ordinariness. Their victory, however, was of 'colossal importance'. By concentrating on individuals the author has given us a very human history of the Battle without losing sight of its overall strategic importance to the war. His book will not only inform a new generation but act as a memorial to the brave men in whose debt this Kingdom and Commonwealth remain. (T.B.)
The sixtieth anniversary of the Battle of Britain encouraged renewed examination of this never-forgotten contest, and in recent years a number of books have appeared on the epic fight, producing first rate essays like Richard Overy's The Battle of Britain: The Myth and the Reality. Patrick Bishop's Fighter Boys is one of them. More than other works, this book aspires to uncover what the fighter boys were really like. This is no easy task, as the Battle of Britain was mythologised before it was even over and those who took part in it were bathed in the glow of legend (p. x). Bishop attempts to peel layers of legend from these young men, and he mostly succeeds. Readers interested in robust discussions of the strategy, policy, or senior personalities of the battle will need to read elsewhere, but as social history Bishop's work is adequate in most places, first-rate in some spots, and poor through only a few passages.
Bishop carries a knack for personal portrayals of the pilots dueling over Southern England in the summer of 1940. Based on personal narrative and memory in the form of diaries, interviews, and published memoirs, Fighter Boys ably describes the daily lives of pilots. Their routines, social patterns, drinking habits, sexual mores, joys, fears and deaths are all grist for Bishop. The book bounces from wing to wing, squadron to squadron, and person to person without sacrificing too much to the broader historical experience. Bishop makes a habit of situating each set of memories against the battle writ large, and this allows the reader to track the fight's ebb and flow. At times, of course, the contest was desperate, but at least the fighter boys had the virtue of clarity and purpose, and by the fall they had won one of warfare's great victories (p. 187).
Despite obvious strengths in descriptive writing, Bishop does not always strike the right--or at least a complete--note. Some depictions seem facile or contrived. Photographs of World War I ace Albert Ball reveal for Bishop fatalism behind the easy smile (p. 15), while almost all childhood episodes of the 1940 fighter boys feel like encounters with fate (p. 51). As for the other side of the hill, portrayals of Luftwaffe pilots are half-hearted and two-dimensional in comparison to the British flyers. Perhaps this last critique falls beyond the book's scope, but Bishop invites the comparison with a separate chapter on the German pilots and their machines.
Fighter Boys Images
