The Battle of Britain Wasn't Won by the Spitfire скачать в хорошем качестве

The Battle of Britain Wasn't Won by the Spitfire

Summer, 1940. Thirty-three Hurricane squadrons and nineteen Spitfire squadrons stood between Hitler's Luftwaffe and the invasion of Britain. When it was over, the Hurricanes had shot down 656 German aircraft. The Spitfires had shot down 529. But when the British film industry decided to tell the story of how the island was saved, the movie was called The First of the Few. In America, they just called it Spitfire. It starred Leslie Howard and David Niven, it told the story of R.J. Mitchell designing his masterpiece, and it didn't mention the Hurricane at all.Not once.John Fozard, a retired Hawker designer who'd go on to work on the Harrier jump jet, called it an infamous wartime movie that performed a permanent assassination job on the Hurricane. He wasn't being dramatic. He was being precise. Because in 1942, that film didn't just celebrate the Spitfire. It erased the fighter that had done most of the killing.And here's what nobody talks about. The myth wasn't built by accident. It was built by three forces working in the same direction at the same time — a propaganda film, the vanity of German pilots, and the simple, stupid fact that one aeroplane was prettier than the other.But we need to go back. Before the myth. Before the film. Before any of it. We need to go back to a man named Sydney Camm and the decision he made in the early 1930s that would, without exaggeration, save his country.