The Battle of Britain

by Basil Collier

Reproductions of newspaper articles, military documents, a German propaganda leaflet, combat reports, and other materials help recreate the Battle of Britain.

Genres: History

1 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

John Basil Collier MBE was a novelist, travel writer, critic and broadcaster who wrote several books of military history, particularly military aviation, World War II and military and political strategy.

Reviews

[Robert Hepple · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Battle of Britain, by Basil Collier, was first published in 1962 by the publisher BT Batsford Ltd. This 1969 Fontana reprint was, I would guess, the result of the increased interest in the subject generated by the 1969 movie on the subject. The book is a short, but concise, account of the air battle over the UK in late 1940, and whilst it tends to stick to the British perspective, some useful and well presented text results. The cover features artwork so bad that it would not look out of place in a child's comic-book of that era. The short selection of colour plates in the centre of the book provide some mostly relevant photos of the events, marred by a couple of wrongly captioned inappropriate images. The book finishes with 40 pages of appendices covering organisational structures and summaries of aircraft types, and a chronology of key events. The summaries of aircraft types contain a lot of inaccurate data. I did like this book because of the readable text that forms the bulk of the book, but I do think that a minimal amount of proof reading would have detected the errors in the photos and the aircraft data.

[Dave · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although a bit dated now (the book was originally printed in 1962), "The Battle of Britain" offers a good recounting of the air battles over southern England during the height of the battle between July and September 1940.

[YAMAMURA Tsukiko]

Britain,war,battles,aeroplanes,Germany,Nazi