The Sky Suspended PDF
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This book is for JACK and SUSAN The Sky Suspended This book is for JACK and SUSAN THE SKY SUSPENDED BY DREW MIDDLETON Their shoulders held the sky suspended, They stood, and earth's foundations stay . . . —A. E. Housman, "Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries" LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. NEW YORK LONDON TORONTO . . 1960 OPEN SHELF. LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO., INC. 119 WEST 40th STREET, NEW YORK 18 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO., Ltd. 6 & 7 CLIFFORD STREET, LONDON W 1 LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO. 20 CRANFIELD ROAD, TORONTO 16 THE SKY SUSPENDED © COPYRIGHT I960 BY DREW MIDDLETON ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THE RIGHT TO REPRODUCE THIS BOOK, OR ANY PORTION THEREOF, IN ANY FORM PUBLISHED SIMULTANEOUSLY IN THE DOMINION OF CANADA BY LONGMANS, GREEN AND CO., TORONTO FIRST EDITION 17 55 FEB '61 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 60-15277 Printed in the United States of America INTRODUCTION This book is in part payment of a debt which I, in common with all who love freedom, owe the pilots of Fighter Com- mand. To a great degree this is their story. It is also the story of the pilots and air crews of the Luftwaffe, brave and steadfast men, terribly mishandled and serving an odious tyranny. Finally it is a story of the ordinary men and women of the United Kingdom. The story of 1940 cannot be confined to the battle in the air. The British na- tional effort included popular resistance to the bombing of London and the provincial cities as well as the daylight battle over southeast England. Unless we see the scene as a whole, we cannot grasp the significance of those events of twenty years ago. So many good books have been written about various aspects of the war in 1940 that it would be impossible to list them all. For the day-to-day conduct of operations I have relied upon The Defence of the United Kingdom of the United Kingdom Military Series. Written by Basil Col- lier, this is surely one of the finest records of its type. No historian will be able to write about the war without it. Volume I of The Royal Air Force, 1939-1945 by Denis Richards contains the best short account of the Battle of [v ] INTRODUCTION Britain that I have read. As the reader will learn, I have supplemented these accounts with notes from my own diary of the period and with the log of 85 Squadron. Adolf Galland's The First and the Last is the best German rec- ord on the operational level. Captured German documents, particularly the War Diaries of the Naval Staff and the minutes of Hitler's conferences with the naval com- manders, provide an intimate picture of the German High Command during the invasion period. Hitler as War Lord by General Haider is a professional soldier's picture of his terrible chieftain. The best book written in the West about the invasion is Peter Fleming's Invasion 1940, which ap- peared in the United States as Operation Sea Lion. On the bombing of London there is, in addition to the numerous local histories and the newspaper files, The Blitz by Con- stantine Fitz Gibbon, a clear and moving story of Lon- don's trial. Finally I must acknowledge my debt, as every writer about the period must do, to Sir Winston Churchill's The Second World War. To William H. Stoneman, my friend and companion then as now, the book and I owe a great deal. D.M. London April 8, 1960 [vi ]
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