You lay in the tall grass with the wind blowing gently across you and watched the hundreds of silver planes swarming through the heavens like clouds of gnats. All around you, anti-aircraft guns were shuddering and coughing, stabbing the sky with small white bursts. You could see the flash of wings and the long white plumes from the exhausts; you could hear the whine of engines and the rattle of machine-gun bullets. You knew the fate of civilization was being decided fifteen thousand feet above your head in a world of sun, wind and sky. You knew it, but even so it was hard to take it in.
—Virginia Cowles, correspondent for the Sunday Times, Looking for Trouble (1941)