If anyone out there hasn't heard about it, this year is the seventieth anniversary of the Battle of Britain. Germans are groaning and shaking their heads. Frenchmen snort and dismiss the whole thing. Americans scratch their heads and wonder how we won it without their air force. Russians declare they won it first.

Okay, once more they showed the 1968 Battle of Britain film. Again. But I watched it all the same, even with those horrible non-1940's mistakes. It was after all a fairly accurate war drama that depicted real events, even allowing for the dramatisation and 60's demeanour of the actors. I can't help it. I'm a complete sucker for Spitfires in warpaint.

Last night though they showed First Light, a docu-drama based on the memoirs of Geoffery Wellum, the youngest pilot to take part in the battle. I can excuse the use of a later MkIX Spitfire (real BoB veterans are thin on the ground) but what pleased me was the patina they reproduced. It reeked of 1940's atmosphere. Excellent.

Could I do It?

A chap at work once asked me if I could fly a spitfire. He knew I flew modern cessnas and such, and he was genuinely curious. I thought about it for a moment and told him that yes, in theory, I could. The spitfire was an aeroplane like any other, it does the same things. It did add a note of caution. I pointed out that I wasn't trained to fly taildraggers, referring to the undercarriage arrangement which demands different skills, and that the spitfire was ten or twenty times more powerful than the aeroplanes I flew, and thus much faster, more demanding, and so forth. For me it would be like learning to drive in a beat-up old mini then getting into a racing car and expecting to stay on the road.

But I so want to give it a try!

The thing is though is that the Spitfire was designed to fend off the Luftwaffe from our shores. It was good at that, if not entirely perfect, and the airframes they built were not expected to last more than ten hours of operational flying. That's worth remembering.

Buried Here

Another documentary had one veteran of the battle visit the site where his Hawker Hurricane fighter went down. The archaeologist pulled a bit of metal out of the ground. A handrail, that would have been rivetted to the canopy, probably the last bit of aeroplane that man handled before he baled out in a moment of frantic terror. He was visibly affected by handling it again. As Geoffery Wellum said - "People ask how I can remember all of this. How do they think I can forget it?"

On A Different Note

The war has left us with more than a few treasured airframes and fantasies. I've just discovered that in the middle of the channel between the Medway and the Thames is an old freighter that sank in a storm, broken in two at anchor as the weight of cargo stressed the hull too far.

The cargo was a consignment of munitions. Everything from cluster bombs to one thousand pounder heavies the British and Americans used to haul across European skies to pummel German industry and infrastructure. The vessel is now in a poor condition, threatening to fall apart in the next decade, and if the contents should for any reason ignite - the estimated explosive force would equal a small atomic bomb according to experts, producing a shockwave that would register around the world on earthquake detectors.

That sort of puts things in perspective.