The Battle of Britain, which was to prove so decisive and far-reaching in its outcome, was one which neither side wanted to fight. Even Hitler, on whose personal orders, embodied in a Directive dated July 16, 1940, the Battle was launched, had hoped to avoid it. And how, in retrospect, he must have wished that he had succeeded in doing so; for the Battle of Britain was his first failure and it turned out to be the precursor of a long run of declining fortune leading eventually to calamitous defeat.
After the Blitzkreig which, in the course of a few springtime weeks, brought about the defeat and occupation of Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France, Hitler not only hoped but also believed that Britain would sue for peace on the best terms she could get. The Führer, in fact, would probably have made those terms superficially attractive. For about a month he was, so to speak, sitting by the telephone waiting for Britain to call. He waited in vain. And so, early in July, he issued his Directive:
‘As England, in spite of her hopeless military position, has so far shown herself unwilling to come to any compromise, I have decided to begin preparations for and, if necessary, to carry out the invasion of England.
‘This operation is dictated by the necessity to eliminate Great Britain as a base from which the war against Germany can be fought. If necessary the island will be occupied . . . I therefore issue the following orders:
1. The landing operation must be a surprise crossing on a broad front extending approximately from Ramsgate to a point west of the Isle of Wight . . . The preparations . . . must be concluded by the middle of August.
2. The following preparations must be undertaken to make a landing in England possible:
(a) The English air force must be eliminated to such an extent that it will be incapable of putting up any substantial opposition to the invading troops . . .’
Note that the first priority was the elimination of the RAF. In issuing that invasion order – code-named ‘Operation Sealion’ – Hitler was backed and supported by the assurance of Reichsmarschall Goering that the Luftwaffe could bring about the required defeat and elimination of Fighter Command. There is no doubt that if Goering’s two operational commanders – Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring, commanding Luftflotte 2, and Generalfeldmarschall Hugo Sperrle, commanding Luftflotte 3 – had been given a choice they would have opted for delay. Although the German air force had carried all before it in the spring campaign, it had not done so without suffering heavy losses. Different authorities give different figures, but the total would have been at least 2,000, including those lost during the campaign, but not due to enemy action. Certainly the number of bombers available at the beginning of July was still some 15 per cent less than at the beginning of March.
Across the Channel the two main operational commanders, Dowding and Park, were also at the head of a force which had by no means recovered from the part it had been compelled to play in the Battle of France and its aftermath. Dowding’s determined efforts in resisting pressures upon him to commit more and more of his Command’s precious fighters to the Battle of France are part of popular history. It may therefore come as a surprise to many to learn that every one of his squadrons, with the exception only of three based in Scotland, became engaged, to a greater or lesser extent, in that spring campaign. The few weeks of respite following the completion of the Dunkirk evacuation were used to good advantage to rebuild the Command’s strength in terms of both men and aircraft. But Dowding and Park must both have prayed for the longest possible postponement of the onslaught.
Dowding and Park – they were the key men from start to finish. It is impossible to over-emphasise the dominating as well as the crucial role which those officers played in the Battle. It was fortunate indeed for Britain that two such remarkable men stood in the breach at the time. It is no less fortunate that, by and large, they were allowed to get on with it, to do it their way, without interference either from the Air Council or from Government. It was also perhaps no less fortunate for our country that Kesselring and Sperrle were by contrast subject to the constant intervention of their Commander-in-Chief, Goering, and also, at a critical time and in a critical way, of Hitler himself.
An earlier chapter of this book describes Fighter Command’s infrastructure and organisation, built up in the two or three years leading to 1940, and its astonishingly complete and effective communications system, involving a vast and exclusive telephone and teleprinter network – rightly described by John Terraine as ‘a magnificently quick and secret achievement of the Post Office’ – which enabled the Dowding system to function effectively. And, of course, it was the Dowding system, very much and very personally the Commander-in-Chief’s own creation.
Future generations of British people should never forget what they owe to the perspicacity and skill of this retiring, unglamorous, outwardly rather grumpy man. All too often history teaches us the sorry lessons to be learned from the experience of having the wrong men in the wrong place at the critical time. In the case of Dowding, exactly the reverse is true. And he had been in the right places for an astonishingly long time; for his appointment as Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command, in 1936, had been preceded by a four-year stint as a Member of the Air Council with a role which enabled him to exercise decisive influence in defining the specification and development of the planes with which in due course the Battle was to be fought.
In Keith Park, the 48-year-old New Zealander, who had first fought for Britain as an artillery soldier at Gallipoli and on the Somme, before gaining a Commission and transferring to the Royal Flying Corps, Dowding had a subordinate who was totally committed to the implementation of his Commander-in-Chief’s plans and modus operandi. To quote Terraine once more: ‘Dowding controlled the Battle from day to day; Park controlled it from hour to hour.’ It would, I believe, be impossible to over-emphasise the skill, perception and sensitivity with which that hour-to-hour control – so often, as the drama developed, hours involving tremendous stress and momentous decisions based on incomplete information – was exercised by a superb commander whose name is virtually unknown to the British public today.
The detailed tactics of the Battle of Britain have been excellently and expertly described by my old friend and comrade, Johnnie Johnson. I will not go over that ground again, but will try to pick out and illustrate the main moves and factors which, in the end, proved decisive.
The Battle is deemed, for the purposes of history, to have begun on July 10. Its first phase, as has already been described, was fought out mainly over the Channel and along the south-east coast of England. For the Germans it was a kind of probing operation, combined with a genuine attempt to disrupt the passage of Channel convoys and to damage the harbours along their routes. But that limitation in the nature of this phase of the attack was probably not evident at all to most observers at the time. The ferocity of the engagements between Royal Air Force and Luftwaffe was clear for all to see. To the watching world, as well as to the people of Britain, it was obvious that the first moves in the intended subjugation of our islands had been set in hand.
What, then, were the reactions of Dowding and Park? They were cautious and limited. Both men believed deeply that their primary role was to defend the country against the attack of the main German bomber force, when it came. Those bombers had to destroy certain key targets if Hitler’s purpose was to be achieved. Enemy activity in this opening phase did not, for the most part, fall within that category and so Dowding and Park, determined to avoid to the greatest possible extent losses in fighter-versus-fighter combat, kept their response to a minimum. Above all, Dowding stolidly refused to transfer squadrons from Nos. 12 and 13 Groups to reinforce No. 11 Group, although he did press forward with all possible despatch the establishment of No. 10 Group on Park’s right flank, a move which was to pay priceless dividends in the next and critical phase of the Battle.
That phase was initiated in the beginning of August, though its full force and fury were not apparent until the middle of that month. Once again Hitler gave the order, personally, in his Directive Number 17, issued on August 1, which stated that the Luftwaffe should ‘use all forces at its disposal to destroy the British Air Force as quickly as possible’. Seven days later Goering followed this up with his own personal order to his squadrons. This stated that ‘within a short period you will wipe the British Air Force from the sky’.
The day chosen for the true initiation of that process, after some delays caused partly by adverse weather, was August 13. But the first truly major assault came two days later, when the Luftwaffe flew nearly 1,800 sorties, aimed very specifically at Fighter Command – its airfields, its ground installations, its radar stations and, of course, its aircraft and pilots as they were scrambled to intercept the invading air fleets. For the first and last time in the Battle a large-scale attack was also launched against the north-east of England. It was carried out by bombers of Luftflotte 5, which crossed the North Sea from their bases in Scandinavia escorted by twin-engined Bf 110s. They were met and destroyed in large numbers by squadrons from Nos. 12 and 13 Groups which Goering, perhaps, had imagined would by now have been diverted to the Battle in the south-east.
Seventy-six German planes were destroyed that day, according to figures assembled from records which became available after the war, for the loss of 35 of our own fighters. But our own most serious and dangerous losses were in the form of damage on the ground. Further onslaughts against Fighter Command followed daily, reaching a peak of ferocity on August 18. That was the day when Kenley, a key fighter base just a few miles south of London, received 100 enemy bombs, including direct hits on its operations room, where the controlling staff, including a large number of WAAF, displayed a degree of heroism and fortitude which fully matched that of the airmen they were directing into battle.
But if Kenley suffered most, nearly all Park’s major bases, as well as others outside No. 11 Group, came under attack that day and his pilots were stretched to the limit in the air. Losses were severe; more than 70 fighters were put out of action, about half of them damaged beyond repair; a substantial number of other RAF planes of various types were also destroyed or damaged on the ground; and the communications network which enabled Dowding’s system of defence to operate so effectively, beginning at the radar stations standing exposed around the coastline, was also put under great strain. In my book Flying Start, I summarise this phase of the Battle, as follows:
‘By the end of the first week in September the policy was beginning to pay off. Day after sunlit day an average of one thousand German airplanes came over. Dawn after chilly dawn the weary British pilots assembled at their dispersal points and waited quietly for the telephone call which would send some of them to death, even before breakfast. Night after weary night the reckoning was made and though the advantage was constantly in Britain’s favour and though no doubt the German pilots were almost as bone-weary as our own and the Luftwaffe’s morale must have been severely affected by the daily loss of dozens of crews and the grisly spectacle of many more aircraft returning riddled by bullets and soaked in blood – yet the steamroller technique was beginning to tell against Dowding and England.
‘The supply of pilots began to dry up. Some were shot down two or three times, but, escaping injury, returned to the battle. Others were killed before they had fired a shot. Most survived a few days before falling in the fury of the fight, either to their death or to a period of convalescence from their wounds. Dowding could not rotate his squadrons fast enough to keep pace with the losses. Squadrons in the south became depleted before others, taken out of the line to re-form, could build up their strength again. Dowding had to take experienced pilots from the squadrons which were resting and re-forming, in order to plug the gaps in other squadrons, which should really have been taken out of the line. It was a policy of desperation and it could not last for long. In the darkness of that crisis it may well have seemed to our fifty-eight-year-old commander that it was a problem without a solution.
‘It might have been so, but for the intervention of Hitler himself, who now had one of those flashes of intuition which, from time to time, brought such dire consequences to his country. At the moment when the battle was in the balance, when the weight of Goering’s strategy was coming close to success, when Fighter Command was near to breaking point – at that precise moment of crisis something else broke. It was Hitler’s patience. The Führer spoke and Goering obeyed. The point and purpose of the German attack was diverted from the destruction of the RAF to the cowing and subjugation of London.
‘It was the turning point. London burned; but Britain was saved.’
For those who want them, the statistics are all available now, honed down by careful historical research to fine limits of accuracy. Indeed, they are here between the covers of this book. They do no more or less, I believe, than support and illustrate my simplified account. They show that during the second half of August and the beginning of September the Royal Air Force was bleeding very severely. It was bleeding to the extent that its ability to prevent the Luftwaffe from achieving air superiority over south-east England was slipping away. In other words, we were coming close to losing the Battle. And that was happening because the Germans continued relentlessly to focus their attack against Fighter Command, against its planes, its pilots, its airfields, its entire apparatus. For a time the flow of new pilots and new planes into Dowding’s command fell short of the losses. And, in the squadrons, the survivors were suffering intense fatigue.
It is all too easy to over-simplify. But it really does seem obvious to me that if Hitler had not at that moment diverted the attack from the air defence system to London and other cities the outcome would most probably have been different. The move, however, did nothing to lessen the strain on Dowding, Park and their pilots. There was much hard air fighting still to come, including the day, September 15, which has long been marked and celebrated as ‘Battle of Britain Day’; the day when Goering, obedient to his Führer’s command, threw every available bomber and fighter against London; the day when Churchill, watching the build-up of this huge enemy force and the response of our fighters as plotted on the table of the operations room at No. 11 Group, turned to Park and asked: ‘How many fighters have you left?’ and Park replied ‘None, sir.’
And so it is only with hindsight that one can see clearly where the turning point came, for certainly it was not clear at the time, any more to those directly involved in the Battle than to the millions on the ground who suffered from the daily and nightly bombings. But, although Operation Sealion was not officially postponed until early October, the real opportunity to invade, to activate the huge fleet of assorted vessels assembled across the Channel, had passed by mid-September. And from then on, Fighter Command’s strength, instead of ebbing away, began to pick up again. The all-out assault of September 15 was repeated, twice, albeit on a reducing scale – on September 17 and 28. But, by then, although we did not know it at the time, the Battle had been won and lost. There was more fierce fighting to come in October, but it is significant that, after September 28, the German twin-engine bombers were withdrawn from daylight operations. A number of Bf 109s and 110s were converted to the fighter-bomber role. Their attacks were more than merely irritating and meant that the squadrons of No. 11 Group were kept hard at it all through October; but they were not capable of completing the job which Goering had undertaken so confidently three months before.
In reviewing the course of this decisive battle it is impossible to avoid the one aspect of the RAF’s conduct of it which gave rise to serious discordance. I refer to what came to be known as ‘the Big Wing controversy’. The ‘Big Wing’ in question was assembled by the Air Officer Commanding No. 12 Group. Air Vice Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory. The boundary between him and No. 11 Group was only a few minutes’ flying time, by Spitfire or Hurricane, north of London, the Group’s southernmost sector being at Duxford, a few miles southwest of Cambridge. There, in late August, Leigh-Mallory assembled a force of three squadrons to operate as a single wing formation under the leadership of one of the RAF’s most brilliant and courageous officers, Squadron Leader Douglas Bader. Early in September the strength was increased to five squadrons of Hurricanes and two of Spitfires. Day after day, as the Battle raged in the south over No. 11 Group’s area, this formidable force stood ready at Duxford. It could only enter the Battle to the south, over No. 11 Group’s area, as and when so directed by Fighter Command and requested by No. 11 Group. Frequently the request was made and there were several occasions when the Duxford Wing was in action.
The controversy arose because Leigh-Mallory insisted, in a rather vociferous and public manner, that his squadrons could have been used by Park to much greater and better effect. In short, he felt that he and his squadrons were deliberately excluded from the centre stage of the action. At the time it seemed to me, from the worm’s eye view of a junior pilot officer, that Leigh-Mallory’s attitude was justified. My own squadron frequently formed part of the Duxford Wing during September, having been withdrawn from No. 11 Group to re-form following very severe losses when flying from Kenley during the second half of August. And, indeed, quite often we did find ourselves sitting there on the ground while large-scale actions were taking place to the south of us.
I have thought about this question a great deal and studied it in some detail. My own interest in it is the greater because of my unbounded admiration of and affection for Douglas Bader, with whom I flew throughout the summer of 1941 when Fighter Command had turned from defence to attack. The broad conclusion I have come to is that the squadrons assembled at Duxford could have been used more effectively, but that the reason why they were not is to be found more in Leigh-Mallory’s attitude than in Park’s. It was essential that full control of the battle over London and the south-east should rest with Park and that the squadrons made available to him from Nos. 10 and 12 Groups should be fitted into his tactics, as they developed hour by hour and minute by minute.
There was a marked difference between the attitudes of Leigh-Mallory and Brand, his No. 10 Group opposite number, in this regard. The latter unhesitatingly and unfailingly put his squadrons at Park’s disposal and did so without reservation. Leigh-Mallory, on the other hand, having developed his theory about the usefulness of operating at Wing strength, sought to influence the way in which his squadrons should be used by No. 11 Group, an attitude exemplified by his decision, already mentioned, to increase the strength and size of his Wing from three squadrons to five. That decision was undoubtedly made in the knowledge that Park was, to say the least, lacking in enthusiasm about the usefulness of a Big Wing in the circumstances in which he was fighting the Battle. And undoubtedly it reduced the Wing’s flexibility and increased the time it took to get off the ground, assemble and reach the area where Park needed it. There was certainly no doubt about Bader’s desire and determination to get to grips with the enemy. His leadership, given the inherent limitation of the Big Wing’s usefulness in the circumstances of the Battle at the time, was, as always, inspirational. And there were occasions when Bader’s ‘balbo’ came together with the enemy with great effect. There were also occasions when No. 12 Group’s help was desperately needed and called for but failed to materialise as Park and his controllers required and this led to much bitterness and recrimination.
All of this resulted, I believe, more from a clash of strong and unbending personalities than anything else. And its bitterness was exacerbated when, the Battle of Britain having been won, and that great victory having been achieved essentially by Park’s brilliant handling of Dowding’s superb creation, the former was, in November, replaced by Leigh-Mallory as Commander of No. 11 Group and the latter was put out to grass. And so those in No. 12 Group, who had sometimes felt that they were being kept out of the Battle, perhaps because Park and No. 11 Group wanted to ‘hog’ it all, were inclined to crow; and those in No. 11 Group, who had borne the main burden of Battle, felt let down. It was the one unhappy and unworthy aspect of an otherwise glorious triumph for the Royal Air Force and Fighter Command.
And triumphant it certainly was. There can be no doubt that the Battle of Britain was one of the truly decisive battles of history. In reaching that conclusion it is necessary to ask oneself two questions. First, what would have been the consequence, for Britain and for the world, if, as so nearly happened, Fighter Command had been brought to breaking point in September 1940? And what was the impact on the subsequent course of the war of the fact that by the narrowest of margins, near-defeat was tipped over to victory?
The short answer to the first question is that the Germans would have made a determined effort to invade and would probably have succeeded. It is true that the British Home Fleet would have remained intact and no doubt the Royal Navy would have moved that fleet down into the unsheltered south-eastern approaches in an effort to destroy the invasion fleet. But with the Luftwaffe in control of the skies it is doubtful whether sea power alone could have prevailed. Indeed, the Royal Navy would undoubtedly have suffered terrible losses. We were to see, a few months later, how naval superiority counted for nothing against air superiority, when the Royal Navy lost ship after ship at the hands of the Luftwaffe while attempting to disrupt the German occupation of Crete, which was successfully carried out by air power alone. Even if, for some reason, the Germans had found it necessary to postpone the actual invasion, Britain’s plight would have been dire. The Luftwaffe would have been in command of our skies, able to disrupt the production of aircraft, fighters and bombers alike, and of weapons desperately needed by the Army, to sink the convoys as they approached our harbours and to do great damage to internal communications, including the railway network.
Although the spirit of the nation, buoyed up by Churchill’s leadership and exhortation, was utterly defiant, it is hard to see how we could have survived as a fighting force, still less how the anti-invasion ground forces, under the command of General Sir Alan Brooke, could have been built up and strengthened to a condition in which they might have prevailed against an invasion launched in the spring of 1941. When Brooke took over, after Dunkirk, he found himself with one Corps Headquarters, one Regular Division and two Territorial Divisions – all desperately short of equipment – with which to defend the coast from Kent to Wales. And although, under Fighter Command’s umbrella, he had succeeded in building up the strength of his force by September, it remained terribly inadequate in relation to what Hitler could have sent over against it.
Without doubt, therefore, the frustration of the orders issued by Hitler and Goering to the effect that the RAF was to be destroyed averted a disaster of catastrophic proportions. What, then, were the positive effects?
I think that one which is not often identified or mentioned, probably because it is intangible, is the far-reaching effect which the RAF victory – perhaps, even more so, the Luftwaffe’s defeat and the consequent failure to invade – had on the hearts and minds not only of the protagonist nations but of the watching world at large, and most particularly the people of North America. Following the subjugation of all northern and western Europe in a few weeks of devastating Blitzkrieg, most people probably thought that the German war machine was unbeatable. And, although the memory of it has conveniently been allowed to die, there is no doubt that quite a lot of people, most particularly in North America, still saw Hitler and Hitler’s Germany as a quite desirable bulwark against Bolshevism. To them the prospect of a patched-up peace between Germany and Britain was therefore, in June and July 1940, not altogether unwelcome.
The Battle of Britain did much to change both attitudes and expectations. It was fought in full daylight and in full view of millions of spectators. It was fought to the encouraging and incomparable commentary of Winston Churchill, whose words affected attitudes far beyond Britain. And it was fought also to the commentary of some outstandingly brilliant reporters, notably the Columbia Broadcasting Company’s great Ed Murrow whose daily broadcasts – ‘This is London . . .’ – carried the mood and the sound and the drama of the Battle into millions of American homes. The David and Goliath nature of the conflict, as it was projected, the reports and photographs of the bombing of London and other British cities, the undoubted heroism not only of British airmen but of millions of men and women on the ground, tilted sympathy our way.
All of that added up to a factor of enormous importance in the development of the war against Germany. It was a factor which cannot be precisely measured, but it must certainly have contributed as significantly to ultimate victory as did others of a more tangible and measurable nature.
The first and most obvious of these was that the British were able to institute the process of turning their own war machine from one which was primarily focused on the anti-invasion role to one more concerned with offence. It is true that Sealion was not finally abandoned altogether as part of the German war plan until February 1942. Hitler had reluctantly accepted its postponement on October 12, 1940, but it had been, quite specifically, only a postponement. And so in the spring and summer of 1941 the British Army in southern Britain still assumed a defensive stance. Even when the Germans invaded Russia, in July of that year, the idea that England itself might be invaded was not altogether or formally set aside either in the German or the British High Commands. There were those in the latter as well as the former who believed that Russian resistance would last only a few weeks. And so the switch from a defensive to an offensive attitude was a gradual one. But the mental move towards it had already begun as the last daylight raids of the Battle of Britain took place in October 1940.
By the spring of 1941 the Army was already thinking in terms of offensive operations, against Fortress Europe, manifested in the first place by ‘Commando’ raids and eventually to culminate in full-scale invasions, first through Sicily and Italy and later through Normandy. Bomber Command of the Royal Air Force was carrying the war to Germany’s heartland night after night. Fighter Command was embarking on a campaign which was to reproduce over north-east France the daily pattern of high-altitude dog fights which only a few months previously had been seen over south-east England. The aircraft factories, which for a few desperate weeks in September 1940 had been unable to maintain a rate of production equal to the rate of Fighter Command’s losses, were now building up output in comparative safety, for although they were still vulnerable to night bombing, this was infinitely less effective than the daylight attacks, of 1940.
And so Fighter Command’s victory had been crucial in opening the way for our own bomber offensive and, perhaps even more important, for the expansion of Coastal Command, which now had to play a role over the Atlantic no less vital than that which Fighter Command had played over south-east Britain and the Channel. The Battle of the Atlantic was about to begin, in earnest. It does not have the historical glamour of the Battle of Britain. But it was every bit as vital to victory. And it could not have been won if the Battle of Britain had not been won first, because air power as well as sea power was an essential factor in its prosecution.
The frustration of Hitler’s plan to crush Britain was also, of course, a factor of enormous importance in his most far-reaching plan of all – the invasion and defeat of Russia. As the eastward advance developed in the late summer and autumn of 1941 it seemed to many that Russian resistance must inevitably collapse. Of course, Russia’s capacity for absorbing punishment, for surviving and continuing the fight, for producing infantry division after division after division to replace those steamrollered out of existence by the Germans in defeat after defeat after defeat, was a war-winning factor all on its own. But whether it could have done the trick if Germany had been able to concentrate its entire war effort on the eastern front, on Russia and Russia alone, must be doubtful. And so the outcome of the Battle of Britain most certainly was a factor of major importance on the outcome of the Battle for Russia.
There is really no end to the chain of consequences which flows from an event as decisive as the Battle of Britain. But I believe I have listed those which are most significant:
Firstly, the German invasion plan, Operation Sealion, had to be called off. If it had gone forward, in conditions where the Germans exercised control of the air, it would most probably have succeeded.
Secondly, the Battle of Britain was the first major military set-back for Germany and for Hitler himself; the effect on the morale of the protagonists and on the attitudes of the world at large was, though intangible and therefore not precisely calculable, a major factor in the further prosecution of the war.
Thirdly, the British Army gradually changed its stance and role from that of an anti-invasion force to one of attack and invasion.
Fourthly, Britain’s aircraft factories were able to build up production of planes for Bomber and Coastal Commands so that the assault against Germany itself could be carried forward by the RAF, long before the 1944 landings, and the battle for the maintenance of our supply lines could be successfully fought out over the hostile Atlantic Ocean.
Fifthly, the German invasion of Russia had to be carried out with an enemy at her back – and an enemy of ever increasing strength.
As the British people – and some, no doubt, in the nations of the old Empire whose pilots played so bold a part in the Battle – look back, some six decades later, they see the image as it has been projected over the years – the image of vapour trails in the blue summer sky above Kent and Sussex; of the rattle of machine gun and light cannon fire as small formations of Spitfires and Hurricanes dived into great wedges of Swastika-marked German bombers; of young men with silk scarves and yellow ‘Mae West’ life-jackets scrambling from bomb-pocked airfields; of pretty but business-like WAAFs moving the plots around like roulette chips on operations room boards; and of the death and destruction in a thousand city streets across the face of south-east England, but most particularly in London and its outer suburbs. Those are the stereotype images and they are accurate enough. But behind them and above them you should look for the image of Lord Dowding, who conceived and built the system of air defence which was capable of saving Britain from German invasion and who then, most brilliantly supported by Keith Park, directed its use when the test came. And you should consider the dire consequences if that unique and effective system had not been in place – dire consequences not only for Britain but also, as we have seen, for the whole of the civilised world.