Battle of Britain Day – 80 years after 15th September 1940. I was suprised to read there is still one Battle of Britain Hurricane pilot alive. So it is still just within living memory. John Hemingway DFC. Shot down 4 times during the war.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/surviving-pilot-battle-britain-last/

The guy in shirt sleeves running to his plane.

IF I ever invent a Time Machine I will travel back to The Battle of Britain to watch the dogfights over the White Cliffs of Dover!

A terrible time while also being an inspiring and fascinating period in our history.

Thank You John Hemingway :o)

IF I ever invent a Time Machine I will travel back to The Battle of Britain to watch the dogfights over the White Cliffs of Dover!

Bit selfish when you could go back and kill Hitler instead.

Actually, can you take Boris and Farage back with you and leave them there?

you could go back and kill Hitler

If you can convince me that that action won’t change the world I live in now – then I’m up for a showdown with ‘der Fuhrer’ ;o)

Yep wouldn’t want to unlearn all the great lessons that came out of that slaughter, like Europe working together, populism is dangerous and jingoism has been consigned to history, oh wait a minute, please take BJ and Nige back.

Bit selfish when you could go back and kill Hitler instead.

Stephen Fry wrote a novel about a guy who travels back in time to prevent the birth of Hitler and inadvertently ends up leaving the dictatorship door open for someone even worse.

To that end, I would quite happily travel back in time 81 years to deliver a hoof in the fuhrer’s slats.

Actually, can you take Boris and Farage back with you and leave them there?

There’s not much about those two that cannot be fixed by a good hoof or three in the slats, ideally in the present day before one of them goes and breaks international law…

IF I ever invent a Time Machine I will travel back to The Battle of Britain to watch the dogfights over the White Cliffs of Dover!

There’s a small memorial to a Hurricane pilot who was shot down and killed in August 1940 next to the trail along my usual loop.

The Hurricane (like the Spitfire) had the main fuel tank located between the engine bay and the instrument panel. Early Hurricanes lacked effective self-sealing of the main tank, so it was common for the fuel tank to leak into the cockpit and ignite, effectively blow-torching the pilot’s face and hands. The Battle of Britain taught RAF doctors about plastic surgery (read up on Guinea Pig Club), pilots suffered horrific injuries and often there was very little time to bail out before they melted.

It’s also worth reading about “Macky” Steinhoff, a Luftwaffe pilot who crashed an Me262 on takeoff in 1945 and who suffered severe burns. His face was reconstructed by RAF doctors, he went on to help rebuild the post war Luftwaffe (after receiving refresher training by the RAF) and became a NATO official during the 60s & 70s.

My dad has an awesome story of blackberrying during ww2 and watching a dogfight overhead. They hid under the bushes to escape the dropping shrapnel.

My father was let out of class early one lunchtime in January 1943 for passing a maths test. He went home for dinner, sat out a raid in the garden shelter and returned to this:

Sandhurst Road School.

He (aged almost nine at the time) talked to kids who’d been in the playground watching a fighter plane circling. He asserts that the pilot had the canopy back and was waving at the kids before turning round and dropping the bomb.

The surviving children eventually went to another local school, in assembly they were told that the RAF had sent a plane on a revenge mission to bomb a German school in retaliation.

This is a view that I’m quite sympathetic to:

Yep wouldn’t want to unlearn all the great lessons that came out of that slaughter, like Europe working together, populism is dangerous…

My father served in the RAF post-war. He was stationed in Germany around 1952/3 and received special leave to visit his cousins who lived outside Koblenz, something his father had organised. My father forged a friendship with his older cousin Bill (Wilhelm!) who’d been a Wehrmacht soldier.

To that end, I would quite happily travel back in time 81 years to deliver a hoof in the fuhrer’s slats.

If you had gone back 100years and worn a blonde wig and blue contact lenses you could really have messed shit up.

Marlene Dietrich put in a good effort.

Can’t speak for Count Manfred Beckett Czernin’s hair colour, but he also did a pretty good job too.

Quite the career.