Good Citizens, the Global Free and Affording Peace - Speech by Julian Lindley-French, Mansion House, London, September 8, 2025

Mansion House, City of London, September 8, 2025

Strategic Takeaways

Lord Peach, thank you. I am not of this parish, the City of London, and I am not a member of the Defence, Security and Resilience Development board, but I am fully aligned with what I am hearing here today: you here from the banking and financial sector are not neutral in the struggle between the Global Free and Global Autocracy.  If you want the Global Free to prevail you must be active proponents of a just and legitimate peace both here in Europe and beyond. That is the price of doing business.

This is a serious moment. My challenge to you thus is this: Is a grand coalition of the Global Free Nations and Good Citizen Banks possible to close the financial gap between necessary defence strategic ambition and public debt?  It had better be…and fast!  As my friend James Holland said earlier history does not repeat itself, but patterns of behaviour and power do. We may not be in 1933 yet, but we could be in 1932.

The Master Takeaway: So, and in that light, if you take nothing away from today at least take this: In the wake of the Banking and Financial Crisis of 2008 and 2010 and COVID We, the Global Free are trapped in a dangerous debt driven paradox that is putting social security and national security in direct competition for limited funds.  The only way politically to afford the defence needed to preserve the peace would be during a war, but then it is too late. The moment deterrence has failed the peace you take for granted has been lost…and with it your ability to do business.

The result?  Fantasy defence spending plans in which the requisite ends cannot possibly be met with the available means however creative the ways across defence, security and resilience. Our free nations need you to help fund the gap because if we cannot protect our people we cannot defend the space you need to remain profitable. Worse, many of us now live in hollowed out “Potemkin” states due to the two great systemic debt driving crises of the last twenty years.  Our adversaries understand that and have systematically undertaken strategic audits of our vulnerabilities across the social, information and security spectrum that they exploit daily.  Take the United Kingdom – it is under industrial levels of state-led cyber attack every day. Your place and way of doing business is under threat – be warned!

Therefore, the cost of preserving a fragile peace, and how and what must be afforded, at a time when indebtedness is already relatively severe at over 100% GDP for many countries is growing exponentially.  There is thus a pressing need for the Global Free, both public and private sectors, to find creative ways to fund security, defence and resilience – which is why I am here today. Many states in free Europe and being crippled by the confluence of the Great Financial Crisis and COVID which is preventing them from acting strategically in the interests of a just peace due to the consequent indebtedness. Worse, it is precisely our indebtedness that encouraging the autocracies to take the kind of risk evident in Ukraine and the Taiwan Strait and thus create the conditions for war.

Grand Strategic Takeaway 1 - It is just one of those times. Grand strategy is the generation of immense means in pursuit of global systemic ends which is needed from time to time when global order is challenged. In recent British history there have been several such challengers: Napoleon, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Hitler and Stalin. Xi and Putin? As Russia’s war on Ukraine and last week’s military parade in Beijing demonstrate we are once again facing dictators armed with an historic/nationalistic/opportunistic ‘mission’ to destroy freedom and re-order the world order to their narrow advantage.

Strategic Takeaway 2: America needs help! If you here want a rules-based global order to survive the Global Free must keep America strong where America needs to be strong. To that end, a new out of the box deterrence is needed which does not assume the American Bank of Mom and Dad will always be there. For all their myriad imperfections we the rest of the Global Free decided long ago that the United States was and is the capstone power of freedom. The alternative? The Threat of Decoupling. In the face of engineered multiple and simultaneous global pre-war crises the US is forced to de-couple from wilfully defenceless allies and partners at a time of maximum vulnerability and at a moment of our adversaries’ choosing.

Strategic Takeaway 3 - The Great Financial Arsenal of the Global Free. In this systemic struggle the banking and financial sector the world over must be the. Or, to put it in the language of the City of London – Reinsurance. Deterrence today is about convincing the Dictators that we have the means, as well as the ends and ways to deter them.  Again, for you here in this gilded room such support is the minimum price of doing future business. After the great financial shock which precipitated the West’s historic and relative power decline you the banks and great financial houses have a duty to the people in this shared and vital mission.

Strategic Takeaway 4: Sound Financing IS Credible Deterrence. Given the changing character of warfare preserving a just and legitimate demand dynamic credible deterrence in that will require a demonstrable ability by the Global Free to respond across the spectrum of future conflict – hybrid and information war, cyber war and AI-enabled hyperwar. Where to start? End the nonsense of Environmental, Social and Governance ‘rules’ that prevent you from funding everything our legitimate armed forces need to defend you and your business.  You are not neutral in this struggle and ESG is little more than implicit support for autocratic efforts to weaken the Global Free.

Strategic Takeaway 6: A Global Bank for Peace. In 1941 Lend-Lease helped London to continue to fight the Nazi war machine but only after Britain’s gold reserves had been exhausted by the “cash and carry” arrangement in place at the time. Imagine the history of Europe had the United States and its financial institutions funded peace and the free nations in Europe in the 1930s. Today, that means systemic private sector support across a labyrinth of critical infrastructures and people, across the expensive ability to fight to effect in the multi-domains of future war (air, sea, land, cyber, space, AI and knowledge), and across the Grand Coalition we need of the Global Free and Able.

The Four ‘Good Citizen’ Missions for Peace

Therefore, in the today’s grand strategic context there are three missions for peace a ‘Good Citizen’ financial sector can play:

Mission 1: Enable Sound Planning: Eisenhower once said – plans are nothing, planning is everything. Take Britain again, as we are all sitting here. If one examines British defence spending between 1900 and 2025 what one observes is a series of massive debt-funded spikes.  The reason for this is that it is precisely during times of economic stress that wars happen when free states DO NOT have the money to spend on preserving international peace.  Therefore, we the Global Free need to find a way to spread the cost of defence if we are to realise its value. The Global Free nations can only do that with your support. What you have to grip is you have no choice as we are all in this struggle together.

Mission 2: Offer Cheap Loans. There are precedents. Lend Lease, the 1946 Anglo-American Loan and the Marshall Plan were the financial and economic foundations of the Transatlantic Relationship of free nations. All were built on cheap loans over extended periods. Yes, it is all more debt but like US loans to the British they were spread out over extremely long periods and at low rates of return which meant the British could afford to c confront the crisis. Super GILTS?

Mission  3: Debt Offset. The free financial sector could ‘suspend’ current national debt by buying all or some of it to enable European democracies to defend the legal and political system vital to their profitable functioning.

Mission 4: Innovative Defence Investment. Defence is not a dirty word. It is the legitimate right of free peoples to defend themselves in the face of aggression. Imagine if Britain had been unable to afford the 1934 Rearmament Plan in the run-up to World War Two in the wake of the Depression?  The war wining Spitfire and Hurricane, the Dowding System, Chain Home Radar, the Bomber-led Expansion Programme, the KGV battleships and Illustrious Class aircraft carriers etc and et al.  We again desperately need to unleash the Great Instrument of Power that are commercial banks and investment funds so we can rebuild our legitimate credible defences much depleted due to the Great Financial Crisis and COVID. This can only be done through good citizen innovation and partnership.

Conclusion

Deterrence is to deter, to convince our adversaries that war is not an option in all and any circumstances. European Fighting power that can meet the future force-on-force challenge, AI and all. Societal resilience so that under all and any circumstances we can recover from any shock quickly. Above all, our leaders need to rebuild the political space for strategic leadership with the mindset and resources to prevail. THAT is deterrence because only then will our adversaries understand that no adventure against freedom is worth it.  DSRB is not just the future of defence financing it is a future pillar of deterrence.

Let me finish with a December 1940 quote from President Roosevelt:

“Suppose my neighbour’s home catches fire, and I have a length of garden hose four or five hundred feet away. If he can take my garden hose and connect it up with his hydrant, I may help him to put out his fire. Now, what do I do? I don’t say to him before that operation, ‘Neighbour, my garden hose cost me $15; you have to pay me $15 for it. What is the transaction that goes on? I don’t want $15 - I want my garden hose back after the fire is over. All right. If it goes through the fire all right, intact, without any damage to it, he gives it back to me and thanks me very much for the use of it.  But suppose it gets smashed up—holes in it—during the fire. We don’t have to have too much formality about it, but I say to him, ‘I was glad to lend you that hose; I see I can’t use it anymore, it’s all smashed up.’ He says, ‘How many feet of it were there?’ I tell him, ‘There were 150 feet of it.’ He says, ‘All right, I will replace it.’ Now if I get a nice garden hose back, I am in pretty good shape.”

The cost of failure? In 1949 British net public debt peaked at 250% of GDP. It was a cost of war from which Britain has never fully recovered. The lesson? The price of peace is far cheaper than the price of war!

The Defence, Security and Resilience Bank is the Good Citizen Bank, the Bank of Peace – a just and legitimate peace. I commend the DSRB to you.

Thank you!

Julian Lindley-French

Battle of Britain Day - September 15th, 1940!

 “I believe that, if an adequate fighter force is kept in this country, if the fleet remains in being, and if Home Forces are suitably organised to resist invasion, we should be able to carry on the war for some time, if not indefinitely”.

 Air Chief Marshal, Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Sir Hugh Dowding. May 15^th, 1940

Weather: Heavy overnight cloud and rain clearing. Fine with patchy cloud in the morning giving way to strata-cumulus clouds at 5,000 feet providing 8/10ths cover.

September 15^th, 1940:

0900 hours: Prime Minister Winston Churchill arrives at HQ Royal Air Force 11 Group, Fighter Command at Uxbridge and is greeted by Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park, Air Officer Commanding.

1030 hours: Radar (radio direction finding or RDF) stations of Chain Home at Beachy Head, Dover, Dunkirk (Kent), Pevensey, St Lawrence, Ventnor, and Westcliffe situated along the Kent coast and on the Isle of Wight, the personnel of which were mainly women of the Woman’s Royal Air Force (WRAF), detect two formations of 150 plus Luftwaffe aircraft forming up between Boulogne and Calais. 11 Group RAF fighter squadrons are placed on standby.

1100 hours: 200 plus Heinkel 111 and Dornier Do-17 and Do-215 bombers from 111/Kampfgruppe76 and KG73, escorted by Me-Bf109 and Me-110 fighters, are tracked flying NNW towards the English coast at Dungeness at heights of between 15,000 and 26,000 feet (‘Angels’ 15 and 26 in the parlance of the RAF ground controllers of the day).

1105-1120 hours: 144 RAF Hurricanes and Spitfires of (in sequence) 72, 92, 229, 303, 253, 501, 17, 73, 504, 257, 603 and 609 Squadrons ‘scramble’ and are ‘vectored’ by their Sector Controllers to meet the incoming Luftwaffe attack.

1130-1145 hours:  RAF commanders confirm the target is London. AVM Park calls upon 12 Group (AVM Trafford Leigh Mallory) based to the north of London to cover the capital. These include the so-called ‘Duxford Wing’ of massed Hurricanes and Spitfires.  12 Group scrambles some 100 fighters of (in sequence) 41, 242, 302, 310, 19, 611, 249, 46, 1(RCAF), 605 and 66 Squadrons.

1200 hours: The first massed RAF attack of the day begins.  The slow progress of the Luftwaffe bomber formation enables 12 Group fighters to join 11 Group and intercept the enemy with 11 squadrons above Maidstone and Ashford. The RAF’s strength comes as a shock to Luftwaffe aircrew and, whilst the Spitfire squadrons engage the fighter escort, the Hurricanes attack the bomber formation which begins to break up.  Stragglers are attacked and several are shot down.

1215 hours: The Spitfires succeed in separating the Bf109 fighters from the bombers. The longer-range, twin-engined Me-110s are no match for the British fighters and are effectively forced out of much of the battle, in spite of courageous efforts by many of their crews to protect the bombers.  Under intense RAF pressure the bomber force begins to drop its bombs randomly, whilst many turn prematurely short of London and seek to make their escape. Many of those that have survived are damaged, whilst those German pilots who bravely press on towards London are then confronted by 12 Group’s Spitfires and Hurricanes which ambush the bombers from a height of between 25,000 and 26,000 feet, some 3000 feet above the upper most layer of the bomber force. The weight of the attack is decisive and the Luftwaffe force is quickly broken up. There is no respite for the hard-pressed Luftwaffe crews.  The RAF maintains the pressure on the enemy by continuously and repeatedly attacking the bomber force from all sides as it makes its now disorganised way back towards the English coast. Many of the survivors head first west of London before turning for home over Weybridge, whilst some 80 bombers take a more direct route, first down the Thames Estuary and then over Kent, harassed all the way by the RAF.

1230 hours: The first massed battle of what would eventually prove to be the decisive day of the Battle of Britain is over. The RAF has gained a vital victory. What was meant to be the Luftwaffe’s final destruction of Fighter Command is decisively defeated. However, September 15^th, 1940 is far from over. As RAF squadrons land, re-fuel and re-arm the Luftwaffe prepares to launch the second major attack of the day.

1300 hours: Radar stations along the Kent coast again begin to detect another massed Luftwaffe force forming west of the Boulogne-Calais area, many of the aircraft involved have taken off from airfields in the Antwerp and Brussels region. AVM Park confirms the available strength of 11 Group’s fighters, but orders no action to be taken…yet.

1330 hours: Radar confirms the massing German force is larger than the morning attack and as yet the Luftwaffe’s targets are not clear to the RAF. 11 Group and 12 Group fighters are placed at ‘readiness’, together with squadrons from 10 Group (AVM Quintin Brand) which covers the West of England.

1400 hours: The Luftwaffe force approaches the Kent coast ((KG2, KG53, KG76 plus some elements of KG1, KG4 and KG26). This time the Luftwaffe gains a tactical edge by reducing the time it takes to mass the attacking formation. Moreover, the sheer intensity of the morning’s action has disrupted Fighter Command’s battle rhythm. Some RAF squadrons are still refuelling and re-arming whilst many of the pilots who had survived being shot down in the morning are not yet back with their squadrons.

1410 hours: RAF Sector Controllers place all 11 Group squadrons on standby and request ‘maximum assistance’ from 10 and 12 Groups. Five squadrons of the Duxford Wing (49 aircraft) from 16, 242, 302, 310 and 611 squadrons are scrambled. Crucially, AVM Park adjusts his tactics from the morning. He orders the bulk of the squadrons to hold back and patrol east, south and west of London. However, he also orders his forward deployed squadrons at Hawkinge, Lympne, Manston and Tangmere and Manston to engage the Luftwaffe fighter escort early in an attempt to force the Bf-109s to ‘dogfight’ and use up much of their limited reserves of fuel. This renders the bomber fleet exceptionally vulnerable to massed RAF attack.

1415 hours: The first bomber formations cross the Kent coast. Two other formations follow at 1430 and 1445 hours. The bomber fleet is again made up of He111, Do-17 and D-215 aircraft.  The British estimate the strength to be between 150 and 200 bombers plus some 400 Bf109s and Me-110s as escorts. In fact, the strength is 170 bombers and some 300 plus fighters.

1415 hours: The first engagement takes place south of Canterbury. Other formations are attacked south of Maidstone and west of Dartford as RAF squadrons begin to harass the attacking force. The closer the Luftwaffe gets to London the more Spitfires and Hurricanes attack them.  Bereft of an effective fighter escort the bomber force is quickly and badly mauled by 11 Group as (in sequence) 73, 66, 72, 249, 504, 253, 213 and 607 Squadrons repeatedly attack.

1450 hours: AVM Park’s decision to hold squadrons back, most notably the Duxford Wing, now proves decisive, even if many of the RAF fighters had been scrambled too slowly. 150 RAF Hurricanes and Spitfires attack the bomber fleet over the south and south-west of London. As in the morning the Spitfires attack the Bf109s and Me-110 fighters, whilst the Hurricanes attack the bomber force. Critically, the Bf109s are now at the limits of their range.

1500 hours: 303 (Polish) Squadron returns to its base at Northholt. In just over an hour of action they destroy 3 Do-17s, 2 Me-110’s and 1 Bf109 for a cost of 2 Hurricanes lost and 1 pilot killed. By the time Luftwaffe bombers reach London they are out-numbered by defending Hurricanes and Spitfires. They break off the attack and turn for the Channel and escape.

1600 hours: The last of the Luftwaffe bomber force is attacked as it makes its way across the English coast. Another small incoming raid of 10 He-111s is detected heading towards Portland for an attack on the Supermarine Spitfire factory at Woolston. It is engaged by 10 Group’s 152 (Spitfires), 607 (Hurricanes) and 609 (Spitfires) Squadrons. Several aircraft of the attacking force are destroyed and not one bomb is dropped on the factory.

 September 15^th, 1940, Battle of Britain Day, is over.

 Analysis

September 15^th, 1940 was a turning point not just of the Battle of Britain, but of World War Two and the fight against Nazism. The RAF had won a decisive victory over the Luftwaffe and whilst they did not know it at the time, the victory effectively ended any chance Britain could be invaded. Without complete control of the air Operation Sea Lion, the planned invasion of Britain, was effectively dead in the water. At least it would have been. Any attempt to cross the Channel with two Army Groups comprised of the best Wehrmacht units would have been suicide in the face of constant attacks by the RAF and the Royal Navy, which in 1940 was still the world’s largest.  Britain would fight on and the RAF would begin the long and slow shift from the defensive to the offensive and the regular 1000 heavy bomber attacks on German cities.  These attacks were hugely popular with a British people determined to ‘give it back to em’, but came at an appalling cost to RAF aircrew, German and other civilians.

To some extent ‘The Day’ has become shrouded in myth. The RAF claimed to have shot down some 185 Luftwaffe aircraft on September 15th. In fact, the number was 61, with twenty aircraft badly-damaged, whilst the RAF lost 32 fighters. By the standards of contemporary warfare the casualties were relatively light. The RAF lost 16 pilots killed in action and 14 wounded, whilst the Luftwaffe lost 81 aircrew killed with 31 wounded, although 63 aircrew were also captured by the British.  Many were experienced men. Moreover, by September 1940 Britain was out-producing Germany in the construction of advanced fighters. Therefore, whilst the Luftwaffe was by no means a spent force on the evening of September 15^th, 1940, the defeat came at the end of what had been a gruelling summer for the Luftwaffe.  However, perhaps the greatest impact of the RAF’s decisive victory was psychological.  For the first time in World War Two the Luftwaffe had faced a force equipped with advanced technology, excellent air defence fighters and very capable pilots and had been badly beaten. 

The Battle of Britain had effectively begun on June 18^th, 1940 when Churchill said to the House of Commons, “What General Weygand called the Battle of France is now over, I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin”.  The RAF’s total strength at the outset of the Battle of Britain was 1,963 aircraft whilst the Luftwaffe had some 2,550 aircraft. Not all British aircraft, of course, were front-line fighters. However, by the end of the campaign the RAF had lost 1,744 aircraft destroyed to the Luftwaffe’s 1,977 aircraft destroyed. Crucially, the Luftwaffe’s head of intelligence, Oberst Joseph Beppo Schmidt, repeatedly over-estimated Luftwaffe strength whilst chronically under-estimating both the fighting power of the RAF and the remarkable capability of the world’s first advanced air defence system. Indeed, Luftwaffe aircrew, who were repeatedly briefed that the RAF were down to their last few fighters, shared a grim standing joke each time they saw British fighters moving to attack: “Here come those last 50 British fighters…again”. 

On the morning of September 15^th Air Chief Marshal Dowding had 726 fighters at readiness, whilst the Luftwaffe had 620 fighters and 500 light-to-medium bombers, the bomb capacity of which was simply too ‘light’ given the strategic objectives. By comparison, in June 1942 RAF Bomber Command attacked Cologne with 1000 far heavier bombers, such as the Stirling, Halifax, Lancaster and Wellington types. The Germans also had no organised espionage network in Britain so they could not accurately know what damage they were doing, the state of either the RAF or the morale of the British people. They thought they had but most German spies were quickly captured by the British and forced to work for British Intelligence. 

 Luftwaffe High Command’s over-confidence also led them to make catastrophic mistakes. On August 15^th, 1940, dubbed “Black Thursday” (Schwarzer Donnerstag) by Luftwaffe aircrew, Luftflotte V based in Norway was ordered to attack the north of England. The assumption was that all the RAF’s reserves had been moved south to cover Kent and London. They had not.  Chain Home picked up a force of some 200 attacking aircraft early in its mission which was then badly-mauled by Spitfires from 13 Group (AVM Richard Maul) which covered the north of England. It was forced to turn and flee over the sea losing 23 aircraft for no downed RAF fighters.  The escorting Me-110s even abandoned the bombers and formed so-called ‘wagon wheels’ for self-protection. The so-called Dowding System had prevailed again.

The Dowding System was critical to Britain’s victory.  It used the ‘eyes’ of radar to rapidly inform a robust command chain of the strength, speed, direction and height of an attacking force. This enabled HQ Fighter Command based at Bentley Priory to quickly assess the size and likely targets of the force before giving each Group the information they needed to deploy its squadrons efficiently and effectively. Group HQ then passed on the information to Sector Controllers who scrambled the various squadrons. Crucially, the entire system was ‘hardened’ when it was built in 1937 to ensure it was both resilient and enjoyed redundancy of communications and was thus very hard to knock-out. That the system existed at all was due to decisions taken in the 1930s by the oft-berated Baldwin and Chamberlain governments. Such was its success that the Dowding System was to form the basis of many of the world’s ground-controlled air defence systems up until, and in some case even beyond, the year 2000.

 The Luftwaffe was defeated because it failed to secure either of its primary strategic aims: to force the British to the negotiating table on German terms; or secure uncontested air superiority over the English Channel as a prelude to invasion. It also suffered a massive materiel loss over the three month course of the battle from which it never fully recovered, undermining its future effectiveness in Russia. The fault lay not with the mainly young Luftwaffe aircrews who showed great bravery, but with their commanders, most notably Luftwaffe Chief Reichmarschall Hermann Goering.  He failed to understand the importance of radar to the British and also failed to exploit the RAF’s greatest vulnerability – 11 Group’s vital front-line air bases. They were often attacked but then allowed to recover because the Luftwaffe never fully understood the battle rhythm of the RAF and thus failed to exploit its vulnerabilities.  Luftwaffe high command also failed to understand that the true test for the RAF was not the number of fighters it could shoot down, Britain was replacing them at a faster rate, but the attrition rate of the pilots who flew them. Dowding’s main concern was the rate of loss of his 2,353 British pilots. Thankfully, Britain had a golden reserve in some 574 foreign pilots from Poland (141 pilots), New Zealand (135), Canada (112), Czechoslovakia (88). Australia (36), South Africa (25), Free French (14) US (11), Ireland 10, and some 10 pilots from what is today Zimbabwe, the Caribbean and Israel. 

One of the most important consequences of the RAF’s victory was the damage it did to both the prestige of Goering and the trust Adolf Hitler had in him. The first seeds of doubt that Nazism would prevail were sown in the mind of Hitler and his Nazi cronies by the RAF’s brave pilots. As dawn broke on September 15^th, 1940 Goering and his Luftwaffe commanders had confidently expected they would, indeed, inflict the final, fatal blow on what they really believed to be the RAF’s few remaining Spitfires and Hurricanes.  The sight of massed RAF air power waiting to ambush the attacks rapidly disabused already cynical Luftwaffe aircrews of their commanders’ folly. As Hans Zonderlind, an air gunner on a Luftwaffe Do-17 said of September 15^th, “We saw the Hurricanes coming towards us and it seemed the whole of the RAF was there. We had never seen so many British fighters coming at us at once”.

Much of this complacency was driven by Nazi ideology and the German superiority it espoused. During the Polish campaign of September 1939, and the attacks on the Low Countries and France in May and June 1940, such arrogance was reinforced by success. The RAF punctured this arrogance. Much of it was down to one aircraft, R.J. Mitchell’s superb Mark V Spitfire and its Rolls Royce Merlin engine. There is no question the Spitfire got into the heads of Luftwaffe aircrew. The aerial scourge, and in many ways signature sound of the Wehrmacht’s Blitzkrieg campaigns had been the ‘flying artillery’ that was the Juncker Ju-87 ‘Stuka’ dive bomber. However, between August 15^th (Adler Tag) and August 18^th the Stuka’s suffered such heavy losses to both Spitfires and Hurricanes that they had to be withdrawn from the fight.  As battle fatigue set in Luftwaffe aircrew constantly reported being attacked by ‘Spitfires’, when in fact the RAF had more Hurricanes. 

It is still a matter of conjecture whether or not Luftwaffe ace Adolf Galland asked Goering for a squadron (staffeln) of Spitfires. In some respects, the Me Bf-109 was a superior fighter. It could climb faster and due to its fuel-injected engine also climb higher than a Spitfire. The mix of cannon and machine guns also gave it more devastating firepower than the eight Browning 303 calibre machines guns with which both Hurricanes and Spitfires were equipped. However, the Spitfire enjoyed two critical advantages in air combat both of which were due to its two elliptical wings which could bear far more weight than the Me Bf-109. This enabled the Spitfire to dive and turn faster, as well as turn very tightly at lower speeds.  And, of course, both Hurricanes and Spitfires were operating close to their own bases, whereas the Me Bf-109 was not, which negated many of its advantages as a hunter.  Interestingly, by the time the last Spitfire was built in 1948 some 22,000 had been manufactured in 22 variants, including a navalised version, the Seafire. 12,129 of them were produced at the enormous Castle Bromwich Aircraft Factory near Birmingham which began production in May 1940, albeit mired in very British managerial and industrial relations challenges. Critically, preparations had been made to massively increase British military aircraft production in the event of war with the 1935 Shadow Factory Plan.

The lessons for today? First, whilst the building of modern free Europe did not begin that day, it took a great stride forward. Democracy fought back and won. Second, even if distracted by as deep an economic crisis as faced by the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments during the 1930s a democracy must never abandon a sound defence or properly prepare to mount it. Third, that equivalency of military materiel and personnel is vital. Preparedness, readiness and robustness.

In tribute to the RAF pilots of many nations who defended Britain and a free Europe on a fateful day, and the many young women who made that defence work. In respectful memory of ALL the brave young men who lost their lives on September 15^th, 1940, Battle of Britain Day. As Churchill famously said on August 20^th, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few”.

 Requiesce in Pace.  Per Ardua ad Astra!

 (With thanks to the Battle of Britain Historical Society)

 Julian Lindley-French, September 15^th, 2025