In this edition of The Things We Forgot To Remember, Michael Portillo discovered that The Battle of Britain wasn't the only significant turning point in the Second World War.

FOUNDRY NOISE

MICHAEL Behind me, you can hear the sound of history being made. At this bronze foundry in Basingstoke an image of our past is being cast before my eyes. The craftsmen here are shaping a monument to the brave men and women who fought in the Battle of Britain, which is to be placed on the Embankment alongside the Thames in London.

That’s what we do with the great legends of history – we construct and reconstruct them, we inherit and recast the great moments of our shared heritage. And when we consider the past, perhaps we change it a little. So how do we know whether our tableaux of the past are accurate?

In this series I’m revisiting some of the cast-iron events of history – the Spanish Armada, the French Revolution, the lunar landings and, here, the Battle of Britain – icons from the past forged in our minds - to see what we’ve remembered of them and why. And to see what we’ve forgotten, because our selective amnesia can be telling.

MUSIC 1940’S – BLUEBIRDS OVER THE WHITE CLIFFS OF DOVER

MONTAGE ARCHIVE OF DOGFIGHTS, CHURCHILL’S BATTLE OF FRANCE/FINEST HOUR SPEECH CLIP AND AIR COMMODORE PETER BROTHERS’ ORAL HISTORY.

CHURCHILL Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

MICHAEL Summer 1940 and Britain is in danger of Nazi invasion. Only two things stand in Hitler’s way: the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy.

BROTHERS It was fine, you were shooting at aeroplanes, you’d been brought up on reading Biggles stories and so on.

CHURCHILL Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the War.

BROTHERS One thought about it after the War and realised how serious it was, but at the time you were fighting for yourself, for your wife and your country, and that was, that was it.

MUSIC

MICHAEL The men of the air, the few, have been immortalised by Churchill’s Shakespearean epitaphs. But did they do more to save us than their comrades at sea? Why is it that when we think of the Battle for Britain we look only up to the sky, and why have we forgotten to remember the Battle of Mers el Kabir?

MICHAEL If you close your eyes and think about the Battle of Britain I’m sure you’ll bring to mind the young pilots in their flying boots and their leather helmets, you’ll probably be able to hear the roar of the Merlin Engines that powered the Spitfires – “the spits” – over the clear blue skies of Kent. Everybody knows the story. History, national identity, the national survival myth, the Battle of Britain is remembered quite simply because we want to remember it.

And here I am at the RAF Museum in Hendon in the Battle of Britain Hall, a huge building filled with the machines that fought the Battle of Britain.

One of those entrusted with safeguarding the memory of the Battle of Britain and celebrating the role of the Royal Air Force is Aviation historian David Keen.

David we’re surrounded by the artefacts of the Battle of Britain, how crucial was this battle in British History?

DAVID KEEN It’s the most important action that the Royal Air Force has ever been involved in. It was important to Britain in 1940 because Britain stood alone. Of all the nations which had gone to war against Nazi Germany, Britain was the only one left undefeated and unoccupied, and it looked as if the invasion of this country was imminent and it was really in the hands of the Royal Air Force to prevent that. Both Britain and Germany knew that for a successful invasion of this island to take place control of the air was the key, and the RAF knew that if they lost control of the air then there was very little that could be done to prevent an invasion. True we had the Royal Navy, but they wouldn’t wish to commit their capital ships to the onslaught of the Luftwaffe, which remember had been undefeated in all their operations up to that point.

FX Scream of Merlin Engine and shooting

ARCHIVE I’m looking round now, I can hear machine gunfire but I can’t see our Spitfires, they must be somewhere there. Oh here’s one coming down now.

MICHAEL In the Royal Air Force’s view it was this one action that kept Britain in the war when the rest of Europe had succumbed.

ARCHIVE There are three Spitfires chasing three Messerschmidts now. Oh boy look at them going and look how the…

MICHAEL Certainly, to those who were there in the Hurricanes and Spitfires – there is no doubt what they were fighting for…

ARCHIVE Oh yes, the RAF fighters have really got these boys taped…

BROTHERS If we’d failed we would have been invaded, there were no question of that.

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