I like to think Dunkirk was a prequel to the BoB movie (and yes, it was in real life but that's beside the point). Also that Sir Michael Caine's Fortis Leader survived being shot down and was rescued by a Little Ship.

Too bad Farrier got captured and missed out on the good scrap throughout that summer!

"Dunkirk" was utter tripe. The first time in 50 years of movie watching that I almost walked out of the cinema. An insult to a lot of brave men.

I have watched this film since i was a lad. Still can make me extremely emotional watching it, but also a childish smile.

@@111gerbil I prefer the original

"Good afternoon my arse !!!"

This is based on a true incident. Apparently a polish pilot was shot down during the BoB and arrested by a group of farm workers because he spoke virtually no English.

I wonder whether Mitchel's Rolls-Royce survives. I've done a Google search and found nothing. If it survives, in WHATEVER condition, it's got to be worth several times as much as other Rollers.

It happened more than once. In Northumberland, an RAF pilot came down and was marched 30 miles by the Home Guard before they discovered he was Polish.

The Farmhand is old enough to have served in WW1...

If I'm not mistaken, they had the highest "kill" count of all the Allied squadrons that fought in the battle

Think that one can do when you really want to exact revenge.

overrated

I think the Browning .303 played a bigger part than the Poles.

@@stvdagger8074 Radar played a bigger part than either the Spitfire or the Hurricane.

RAF never had a 319 Squadron cock, it was attached to 145.

As were the French, Belgian, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian and other pilots who made the trip.

@@stevetheduck1425 There were NO Danish OR Norwegian pilots in Fighter Command during the battle of Britain.

Heck the Poles shot down over 100 Luftwaffe planes, while flying PZ11's!

And it only took about 7000 years.

@@daringdare5078 i thought it was more

if you think about it this is still just flinging rocks and sticks…

I saw this film at a cinema at age 10 and loved it. Made lots of Airfix models. I recall riding to the library to borrow Biggles books, with this music playing in my head. Riding fast, wheeling and diving, my blue bike with its red mudguards was my Spitfire. I hear this music and tingles run up my spine.

Often on repeat on my Spotify, plus the Luftwaffe March

I have a dvd with the William Walton score on it as well. TOTALLY different experience! It really shows just how right they were to go with Ron Goodwins' work.

@@PercyPruneMHDOIFandBars Agreed 100%.

@@WeissVogel Goodwin intended to name his work the "Luftwaffe March", but he was persuaded to name it "Aces High" instead. My dad and I always called it the Luftwaffe March, the title fits.

Yes they are

In my opinion the 109 looks better.

@@Siqilliya true but in the allies its spitfires but germany its 109

@@Siqilliya Nah nothing looks as good as a Spitfire mk 1, nothing.

How did they stabilize the weather?🌨🌩🌀⛅

Johnny Johnson the top scoring Western ace in Europe flew with a Canadian wing and had nothing but praise for them

Rowans battle of britain and the sequal wings of victory did a good job as well with large numbers in sky. Successor to Reach for the skies on the Amiga and Atari st.

Wings Of Prey is a very good Battle of Britain game. Worth a look

I think without a doubt the best simulator for this period of all time is Their Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain.

And Lancasters and Mosquitoes

@@larry4789 yeah

There is a well-attested incident from early in the Battle of Britain of a group of fighters shooting at a couple of Heinkel bombers that retreated across the channel. The British fighters fired until they had no ammunition, but neither bomber crashed. The fighters went up close to see that almost the entirety of both bombers were full of holes, and they were still flying. The fighters had to break off and went back to base (they shouldn't have even gone over the water, surviving a ditching was chancy at best). The incident was report high up, and the effort put into re-arming the Spitfire with 20mm cannons was intensified, resulting in the Spitfire Mark IIb, which led to a standard fit of two or four 20mm cannon from then on. There was even a single spit with six cannon, which proved too heavy.

The Wehrmacht seeing that the Luftwaffe are not having a good day.

Ahhh I see another Squire fan.

Well hello there fellow Squire fans

Do you know where to find a subtitled version of the full film?

@@HerrFresh The special edition DVD has subtitles in several languages, including Polish. I don't know which other languages.

While celebrating the bravery, skill and success of Polish "Kościuszko" 303 sqd, the top scoring RAF squadron of the battle of Britain, also remember the other nationalities who flew as part of the squadron during the battle and who contributed SO much to its success. Polish "Kościuszko" 303 Sqd total kill tally - 58.5 confirmed kills Squadron commander, Sqd Ldr Ronald Gustave Kellett (British) - 5 confirmed kills "A" Flight commander, Fl Lt John Alexander Kent (Canadian) - 6 confirmed kills "B" Flight commander, Fl Lt Athol Stanhope Forbes (British) - 7 confirmed kills. Sgt pilot Josef František (Czechoslovakian) - 17 confirmed Kills. We in the UK remember ALL the pilots (and NOT just the Polish ones). As for the reference to top national "kill tallies", the nazis had planned for a short war, and had built up a large prewar bank of excellent pilots, but made insufficient planning for long term maintenance of those numbers, so as the initial cadre of excellent pilots inevitably got "whittled down" through 1939-42, there was ever fewer replacements of lower quality to take their place, with the result that those remaining were forced to fly till either a nervous breakdown or death removed them from duty, though a tiny percentage of their very best pilots racked up hundreds of kills (mostly against the early poorly trained and equipped soviet VVT pilots) but as an organisation the luftwaffe was bled dry and ended up from mid 1944 onwards sending barely trained Hitler Youth lads up to face the onslaught of the allied air forces. The Allied air forces for their part routinely rotated their pilots out of combat and into training posts here in the UK & the Americas, with the result that while individual pilots racked up far lower scores, the allied airforces as a whole quickly overtook the luftwaffe numbers of excellently trained pilots, so much so that by mid 1944 the allies were massively scaling back their fighter pilot training programs due to the large surplus of very capable allied pilots. The result was the luftwaffe had a MUCH smaller number of "aces" (+5 kills) but with a tiny number of much higher kill tallies, the allies had many MANY times more "aces" than the luftwaffe, but with no outlandish kill tallies.

🎼

Me too.

@@larry4789 And me.

No doubt, especially as he called the pilot a "Boche bastard!"

@@CaseyJonesNumber1 you can tell how he held that pitchfork like it was a bayonet

'Burn, you b****ards' is sometimes in the subtitles.

@@stevetheduck1425 There's worse than that, and it won't be in the subtitles!

Ox was the comic relief here in the movie; oh and watch the end scene where he is reading a book about better ways of speaking English (that was a little funny given his encounter on the ground).

He was polish I believe, polish accent sounds a bit German ngl

@@khonwang6263 Yes, in the final scene of the movie, when Hitler canceled Operation Sea Lion everybody was quiet more in the RAF airfields, squadrons, control, and radar stations so there appeared the same polish pilot that was talking too much while knocking down a Heinkel, was the same in the airfield but now reading a English vocabulary book hahah

@@khonwang6263 His flight suit is like the German ones too.

Swarms of the sods old chap

hopefully they offered him a hand shake and a beer :-)

Well he is still alive at the end of the movie so that’s the good thing. They didn’t kill him.

Foxtrot Leader, cut that out. Everyone, keep quiet.

I like the other great comment from this film - "Yellow nosed bastards coming down!" as the Me109's dived from above.

Ikr it's sounds like ox is saying HOLY S*IT

It's polish, he is saying "Pale się, wyskakuje na spadochronie!" which means " Im burning, im jumping out with a parachute! ".

The scene at the end of the film where they are taking them off and piling them up is just classic.

They did repeated embarkation exercises...and had no landing craft, just river barges.

Interesting fact: There was only enough life jackets for the first assault wave, for the planned improvised "River Crossing". A bright spark then suggested that once ashore the 1st wave would discard their life jackets so the 2nd assault wave could use them. But no one bothered to plan or organize how those life jacket would be transported back for the 2nd assault wave to use. This in a nutshell tells how poorly prepared and equipped the german armed forces was for an actual cross channel invasion on 1940, that manpower wise was almost as big as Operation Overlord in 1944. 🤔🤔🤔

James May would approve

Actually during the Falklands war the Argentine pilots constantly complained about their semi trained drafted ground crews not understanding why they had to meticulously clean the fighter's canopies - a tiny spot of dirt on the perspex, suddenly noticed could panic a pilot into making a deadly mistake thinking it was an enemy aircraft approaching!

@@plymouth5714 never knew that 😂😂

There's quite a bit of 'animation' or painted-on art during the film; numerous real planes catching fire or exploding are actually simply splashes of colour. The more convincing ones are radio controlled models.

nice generalisation

This is a fictional event often repeated even in official histories, where the 'big wing' theory was proved to work. It was attempted several times, usually if the target was London. It didn't work, for the reasons said in the film. The 'come up here and look for yourself' part of this film shows the result of attempted 'big wings'. Not intercepting bomber / fighter formations and breaking them up before their targets meant that the bombers hit their targets, and then a few fighters attacked as they retreated, achieving very little, due to the very slow overtaking speeds, fuel shortages due to long tail-chases, and landing away from their airfield of origin, leaving dozens of planes not in the battle and out of communication much of the time. The 'big wing' idea eventually became useful much later, when it was routine to have three squadrons on the same airfield, operating in support of each other as a group. Rendezvous-ing small groups of planes in cloudy skies was simply asking too much of the control system then. Especially when everyone added more height to gain an advantage, resulting in formations being invisible to each other, and the heights being wrongly reported.

230

They'd have turned him over to the Police or Home Guard, who'd be willing to listen and check his identity. I'm not sure, but I think incidents like that would have led to Polish pilots flying exclusively in RAF uniform.

He’s shown right at the very end of the film, sat in a wicker chair waiting for the scramble call, engrossed in a Polish-English please book.

Sadly, I think one Polish pilot was beaten to death by angry Londoners, mistaking him for Luftwaffe.

@@JonathanShayfer Wrong

Ikr he was mistaken

The English farmers confused him as a Luftwaffe pilot.

Have you not seen the nose of B-29 Superfortress or a Lancaster? All the bombers of the period had big (armoured) glass fronts for nose turrets.

OMG thank you so much i love your vids and i am a huge history buff!

I recommend a new scene from midway

Old or new midway?

Lets do new possibly the pearl harbor scene?

Whats cool is where i live they had two supermarine spitfires being escorted by a new modern jet

The "109s" were HA-1112-M1L "Buchon" from Spain. They're 109s with RR Merlin engines. It's why their nose shape is wrong for proper 109s. The "HE-111s" were also Spanish licenced versions.

@@No1sonuk I know, but I am still counting them.

@@katana1430 I'm pointing out they were from the Spanish Air Force. IIRC, some of the Buchons used are still flying.

@@No1sonukDo you mean that they were SAF while the movie was being filmed? I thought they were rented out of an aircraft boneyard or something.

@@katana1430 I just found this: "The movie production company was fortunate in that as they started their search for available German fighters the Spanish air force had just retired their entire fleet of Buchons. A large pile of scrapped Buchons was purchased at auction, and 19 aircraft were reconstructed from the salvage to be used in the movie."

False but the tale is so often repeated, it's almost recognised as fact. The priority was always always ALWAYS the bombers.

A Hurricane could out turn a Spitfire

@@martinhambleton5076 True, and a Spit could out turn a 109.

Due to the pilot's accent the farmer thought the pilot was German not Polish.

The accent would be unfamiliar to Brits at the time, and his flight suit was similar to what the Luftwaffe crews wear.

English farmers confused a Polish pilot, thinking he was a German pilot.

You must be joking, there are no where near as many airworthy spits,hurricanes any more. Where are the going to get the aircraft from. Dam stupid comment

@@milessheppardson3008 CGI...

As Michael Caine once said remake the bad films and leave the good ones alone, If this film was made today it would be full of CGI crap not real aircraft such as the ones used in this.

@@jonobrien1339 With RAF fighters piloted by disable black lesbians.

@@No1sonuk Oh yeah, just so people can then complain about "too much CGI" and about how "movies aren't made like they used to"...

Battle of Britain is the name of the film

You're slippin'

@@JohnnysWarStories man im pissed

@@willbill6663 Better get the next one!

@@JohnnysWarStories lol I just opened my computer and saw a notification and panicked

👋

No the pilot was Polish. The British farmers thought the polish pilot was German because of his accent. A lot of polish people, amongst other nationalities, came to Britain to fight in the RAF during the Battle of Britain.

@@harrydodd5797 Also, I think his flight suit was similar to what the Luftwaffe crews wear.

The pilot was Polish.

He then led the RAF into attacks (Circuses and Rodeos) on German airfields in France and Holland during 1941, killing the entire front line strength before he was removed. Some bizarre belief that the disadvantages the prevented the Germans from winning would somehow not affect his own men when they did the exact same thing.

@@stevetheduck1425 Leigh Mallory had zero fighter experience before being put in charge of a fighter group. He was friends with the politicals though, which neither Dowding nor Park were. Park gave the luftwaffe a second serving when he took over the Malta air defence.

Not entirely true. The big wings came into their own when the Luftwaffe raided London. I disagree about your claim that the movie sides with Leigh Mallory. If anything, the opposite applies. This was an era during which new tactics were continuously tried and evaluated. Some tactics were better than others.

@@Gungho1a It's too easy to criticise the tactics from a keypad, more than 80 years after the event. New tactics were being tried the whole time and many failed. Park's decision to put Defiants in 11 Group was a grave error, based upon his own experience as a Bristol Fighters ace in WW1. The Defiant was essentially a modern version of a Bristol Fighter. They should've been deployed in the north instead, whey they wouldn't have encountered 109s. Make no mistake, Park was a feckin hero, but EVERY commander got it wrong sometimes. One of Leigh Mallory's brothers died on Everest in the 30s. Another brother was killed whilst fighting the Japanese behind their lines. He himself died in the war. He didn't just talk the talk, he was the real deal. As with Bomber Harris or the USAAF commanders bombing Japan, they all made errors of judgement for the best reasons.

@@raypurchase801 Hate to rain on your waffly parade of words, but that assessment is based on revisionist hiatorieans, such as stephen bungay, and more accurate recent analysis. Lwigh Mallory had exactly zero fighter experience before he took over his group. Park, on the other hand, spent his entire career in fighters, and was Dowdings number two, effectively implementing the creation of the RAFs antiair defence system. In relation to the Defiants, there were only a couple of squadrons, and it was Dowding who placed them in Park's group, as that was Dowdings responsibility...a situation forced on him by the UK Air Ministry. Park and Dowding got rid of them as soon as they could and put them on night work. Leigh Mallory was actually too obtuse to consider that his pilots claims didnt add up. His tactical plan of flying big blocks of planes around at long distance from their bases wore pilots out and was inefficient...and at odds with the air defence system's operation. To be fair, there were two types of officer in the RAF at the time. The academically gifted and driven professionals such as Park, and the culturally solid although bland career chair fillers like leigh mallory. Neither Park nor Dowding fully fitted the RAFculture at the time, thank god they didnt.

DAMN YOU lol

im 4 seconds late

@@willbill6663 lol😂

@@harpik7800 DISLIKE COMMENT

@@harpik7800 also are you new to this channel? cus every vid im here first

Dumb much?

Germany had given up on the invasion plan before the US entered the war.

Some Americans, pretending to be Canadians, and a couple of USAAC pilots in Britain to 'observe' this battle did fly and some even fought in the Battle of Britain. The 'Eagle Squadrons' of US pilots (and some Brits) date from after the USA joined the war, after Pearl Harbour. Interestingly, the US observers seem not to have noticed that mass daylight bomber formations were just targets, or were ignored, and the USAAC continued to do this for the whole war. One US pilot who fought in the Battle of Britain was later ordered to a USAAC squadron, where his first-hand knowledge of how to fight and win was also ignored.