The Battle of Britain in 1940 was a decisive turning point in British history and we owe an immense debt of gratitude to the 3,000 Royal Air Force pilots who defended this country against a proposed German invasion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We have just heard the news<\/a> that the last of the British aces of that conflict has died aged 101. He was Paul Farne<\/strong>s who shot down five Luftwaffe aircraft in the Battle and more later in the war. But this is a time to remember that one-fifth of all the RAF’s pilots in the Battle of Britain were not in fact British.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There were contingents from many other Allies countries, most notably Poland and Czechoslovakia. The 88 Czech pilots included Josef Frantisek<\/strong>, who was the top-scoring RAF pilot of the Battle, and Karel Kuttelwascher<\/strong>, the father of my ex-wife. You can read more about the contribition of Czechs to the wartime RAF here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Battle of Britain in 1940 was a decisive turning point in British history and we owe an immense debt of gratitude to the 3,000 Royal Air Force pilots who defended this country against a proposed German invasion. We have just heard the news that the last of the British aces of that conflict has […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25473"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25478,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25473\/revisions\/25478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}