Spitfire Summer

Main Review:

You know how it is, everyone has those days when they’re just quietly going about their daily business when all of a sudden they’re struck by the overwhelming desire to learn more about the Second World War. It happens to the best of us.

Fortunately for me, I am lucky enough to have a group of war-gaming friends close at hand. So when it was my turn to dive into the Battle of Britain like a Stuka bomber tearing over the Channel, they were able to provide suggestions on books which would help me dip my toe in the proverbial waters. My friend Tim offered some wonderful pointers and recommendations and then went so far as to gift me a copy of Malcom Brown’s ‘Spitfire Summer’.

Right at the outset, I can say that ‘Spitfire Summer’ is like no other history book I have ever read. All the way through Brown guides the reader from one direct quote to the next like a museum curator or art curator moving a tour group past room after room of portraits and paintings. From first hand accounts and newspaper extracts to written testimonies and remembrances from 50 years on, everything is well introduced, although the sheer volume of quotes in a relatively small book does mean they all start to blend together quite quickly. When these quotes are sewn together well though, they give a direct and personal account of the events being described that is really informative and entertaining in a way that might not be expected.

Perhaps one of the reasons why Brown makes such extensive use of direct quotation is because it acts as the perfect foil or counter to his own writing style, which is nothing short of downright bombastic. It’s all ever so slightly ‘overcooked’ in a way that put me in mind of the 1995 adaptation of Richard III with Ian McKellen. Despite how that might sound, I promise I do not mean it as a criticism of the book. Indeed, I found Brown’s hamming up of the history oddly entertaining.  If he speaks as he writes, I reckon he’d be able to make a lucrative side hustle as a town crier.

Whilst I could handle the verbosity, there were some elements of the writing style that irked me. Particularly at the beginning, Brown haughtily throws in a number of untranslated French phrases that seem to be present solely to seem important. My other main issue is that one of the chief beneficiaries of Brown’s grandiose way of writing is Winston Churchill,  a man who has never needed further aggrandisement at the best of times but is painted throughout as this leonine force of nature.

When you get used to the verbose writing style and the frequent quotation, there is a lot of interesting stuff to pull out from Spitfire Summer. A personal highlight was the section which gives explicit attention to the persecution of foreign nationals in Britain after the outbreak of war and their internment in camps. I would happily have read a much longer book focussed entirely on this and the rest of the hysteria of the ‘fifth column’ throughout the war as it’s a facet of the war that I think can be all too easily forgotten when allusion are made to ‘the Dunkirk Spirit’.

Speaking of Dunkirk, the first two chapters deal with the Fall of France and the evacuation of the BEF from the shores of Dunkirk. Whilst I appreciate that it was a momentous point in the early war period, I was somewhat perturbed that my book ostensibly about the ‘Battle of Britain’ spends the first third of its runtime talking about an event where the Air Force, by virtue of being in planes 10,000ft in the air, were not actively involved with in the same way as the army and navy ‘on the ground’.

After chapters on Dunkirk, the LDV, Land Girls and plenty more besides, I began to get the hint that I might have gotten the wrong end of the stick about the book. With a name like Spitfire Summer I’d expected (and hoped) that the main focus would be the air crews of Fighter Command and their herculean efforts to hold back the Luftwaffe; one dog-fight at a time. What Brown has actually compiled is a general history of the Summer of 1940, of which the Air Force play only a very small part of the overall tale. You have to get two thirds of the way through the book before you get to the ‘Battle in the Skies’ and after one (ONE!) single chapter on this Brown moves right along to his next topic and that’s that.

Brown’s knowledge of the period is clear, and I’m sure that he has deliberately included all these extra elements and chapters to try and ‘shine a light’ on the lesser-known parts of the history which frequently get overshadowed by the glitzy glamourisation of the pilots. It was just unfortunate in my case those plucky hotshots were exactly whom I’d come to the book for, and so the itch didn’t feel like it had been fully scratched by the time I finished reading.

I DID enjoy the book, but it simply wasn’t what I was expecting before I started. Spitfire Summer provided plenty of interesting tidbits, but, largely because of how many topics it covers, each section felt rather shallow and nothing got the amount of time that it deserved. I think it’s best to think of this as a signpost book – the sort of history that you read to determine what topics you might be interested in reading more about, rather than trying to be an authoritative account of any one particular element.

Until the next one – happy reading!