The Battle of Britain: 3 Days That Saved the Nation

CLOCK TICKS The battle for France is over,

It's the summer of 1940.

Hitler's forces are poised to invade Britain.

And all that stands in their way

are the men and women of the Royal Air Force.

As wave after wave of enemy bombers make their way towards Britain,

commanders desperately try and figure out

where they will strike next.

But this isn't the familiar story of the Battle of Britain,

one of tactics, machines and famous names.

Over three nights, we're going to explore the lost

and forgotten tales of the operations room workers,

ground crews and pilots

who put their lives on the line to defend Britain.

They've all heard of the Battle of Britain,

but they've never heard of Archie McKellar.

We'll uncover forgotten documents that reveal the human

cost of the battle...

Hmm.

...and relive moments of heroism.

Even when my grandmother was talking about it at the age of 94,

it always brought a tear to her eye.

Over the next three nights, we're going to follow three pivotal

days from the Battle of Britain.

The first is August 15, 1940,

when Hitler's attacks began in earnest.

The second is August 30, the RAF's most intense day of fighting.

Britain's airfields are bombarded, and defeat seems imminent.

And the third is September 15,

when Britain's exhausted defenders gamble everything to win the battle.

We'll be telling the story in minute-by-minute detail.

From Scotland to the West Country, Kent to the North of England,

we'll discover what it was like as the whole country came under attack,

as we retrace the battle in the air...

If that was real, we'd have been hit full-on.

...and on the ground.

It was the greatest battle the RAF ever fought.

But at its heart were the people.

This is the story of their Battle of Britain.

6am, the 15th of August, 1940.

The Battle of Britain began five weeks ago, on the 10th ofjuly.

Up until now,

Hitler has mostly focused his air raids on the South East of England.

But in just a few hours' time, he will use his Luftwaffe air force

to try and crush the RAF once and for all,

this time right across the country.

At a top-secret location in West London,

19-year-old Joan Fanshawe is arriving for the early shift.

I'm heading 18 metres, or 60 feet,

beneath the London suburb of Uxbridge.

It's an unassuming location

but it would play a crucial role in the Battle of Britain.

This is the operations room for the South East of England.

It's known as the 11 Group Bunker and it's one of four nerve centres

from which the Battle of Britain was fought.

It was here that Fighter Command were able to track

the course of the battle, minute by minute,

and send aircraft into the skies to meet the Nazi attacks.

Joan Fanshawe is one of around 50 RAF personnel

on the early shift in the bunker on the 15th of August.

She's been secretly keeping a diary of her hours in the ops room.

July 4th is when she joined,

and within two weeks she is sent to Uxbridge.

So, was Joan one of the first women who was a plotter?

They were the first group.

The week before she joins up, this is July 5th,

"The whole day dominated by my thoughts of having my hair..

Intercept at...

Joan's diary also tells us about life on the front line.

I didn't think that anyone was allowed to keep a diary while...

They weren't.

She's fairly careful about what information goes in there. Right.

You don't hear anything about what's really going on in there,

but you know she's at Uxbridge and you know she goes underground,

which maybe would be more information

than you'd want to fall into other people's hands, I don't know.

Joan is a member of the WAAF.

And according to the recruiting brochure, her officialjob

title is "Clerk, Special Duties", but she's actually a plotter.

She stood on this very spot and her job was to look after

the space between Dover and Calais on this map.

She would listen for incoming intelligence

and then plot the position of enemy aircraft using these

blocks which represented Luftwaffe raids.

And this one here represented British RAF squadrons.

Once it was all plotted, that would give her commanders

a picture of what was going on in the air.

We know about her shift on the 15th of August

because she writes about it in her diary.

Joan's shift started quietly -

the weather was poor, it was too cloudy for the attacks to begin.

But that wouldn't last long.

Also playing a waiting game early that morning

are hundreds of RAF pilots up and down the country...

...including a 28-year-old Scottish pilot at RAF Drem

in East Lothian, Scotland.

Flight Lieutenant Archie McKellar has already

been in the RAF for four years.

Now he's trying to catch a little sleep after getting

back from his night patrol at 4:20am.

But Archie isn't a typical pilot.

I've come to Glasgow to find out more.

So, tell me a little bit about him.

Well, there was john and Margaret.

That was his mother and father.

And they wanted him to go into the family business of plastering

and construction, and he didn't want to do that.

Archie wanted to fly.

Right, it was a working-class family. Yeah.

So, sort of flying was quite a big dream, really,

for a young man like this.

It was a dream, it's something he wanted to do.

He decided, "l'm going to fly

"without my parents knowing about this."

A typical kind of McKellar thing.

Is it? Were you the same?

Similar things, yes.

Archie grew up in this former tenement building in Paisley -

not the normal background of a pilot.

So, he became a plasterer's apprentice with his dad.

Given that he did come from this quite modest background,

how would he have been able to afford flying lessons?

He saved his wages and went off and secretly learned.

Snuck off to go and learn?

Learned to fly and then neither of them were aware.

They didn't know he was flying at all,

but he used to fly over the house and waggle the wings of the plane.

Archie learned to fly at the Scottish Flying Club.

In 1936, he was talent-spotted as a promising pilot

and invited to join the RAF.

How much were you, as a family, aware of Archie and what he did?

Well, I wasn't aware until I was a wee bit older,

and then I found out and he just became one of my heroes.

Archie's impact as a pilot during the Second World War

was almost instantaneous.

Just weeks after the war began, he was the first pilot to shoot down

a Nazi bomber over Britain.

This photo is the actual scene.

He later became an ace in a day,

destroying five enemy aircraft in 24 hours.

But for now, on the morning of the 15th of August,

Archie is waiting for the enemy to arrive.

11:10am, the clouds clear and there's a blue sky over Kent.

Then blips appear on the radar.

PHONE RINGS

The enemy are approaching from over Calais,

around 20 miles away from British shores.

They can be over targets in South East England

in less than 20 minutes.

It's the first wave of an enormous Luftwaffe raid.

The force includes 50 bombers, each carrying up to 1,000lbs of bombs.

Their objective - to destroy Britain's airfields.

Protecting the German bombers are dozens of small,

fast and deadly fighter planes.

The RAF must intercept the raid before it reaches its targets.

Every second counts.

The largest force seen in a battle so far is about to hit Britain.

It's 11:10am on the 15th of August, 1940.

The Battle of Britain has been raging for five weeks.

But today, a massive force of Luftwaffe bombers is crossing

the Channel to wipe out the RAF once and for all.

At airbases, young pilots are waiting for the call to scramble.

Among them is William Hopkin of 54 Squadron at RAF Hornchurch.

His job is to patrol the Kent Coast in his Spitfire.

I've tracked down their lost airfield. It's just parkland today,

but that morning it was on the front line of Britain's defence.

This was the airfield at RAF Hornchurch.

On the morning of the 15th of August,

it's very possible that William Hopkin

was waiting just over there in the cockpit of his Spitfire,

ready for the signal to take off and engage the enemy.

William is the son of a vicar from Bedfordshire.

His story has never been told before.

I'm meeting someone very close to him - his son, Simon Hopkin.

How old was he?

Yeah.

Simon has a rare artefact - the pilot's log book that

belonged to his father, where he wrote up all his action.

SPEAKS INDISTINCTLY

But the two brothers would not be flying together for long.

"Alan lost in Bristol Blenheim in enemy territory, one-night

"bombing, Cherbourg."

William Hopkin has only been with an operational squadron for

three months and he's never shot down an enemy aircraft before.

I want to know what he must have been feeling on that morning.

Fighter pilot Air Marshal Cliff Spink,

who flew in the RAF for 30 years, is giving me the chance to find out.

How did those young pilots even get up out of their seats

and pick their parachutes up?

It's very difficult to imagine or put

yourself in the position of someone like that.

They would have not only known that there were a lot of pilots not

coming back, but there's a level of expectation -

he's not wanting to let down either himself,

but particularly his comrades.

And of course, these young men like William -

they either survive the next few days and then would probably

survive a lot longer,

or actually got shot down and killed very early on.

The task ahead weighs heavily on 19-year-old William