Spitfire ace

There's a show coming to the Discovery channel about the Spitfire pilots during the second World War. (What a cool name for a plane for a start - Spit fire - and so they did).

It got me thinking about these young men, some of whom were just boys. They carried the fate of the free world on their shoulders and fought, outnumbered three to one, against the might of Hitler's Luftwaffe.

Hitler at this point was marching virtually unfettered through Europe nd he knew that Britain was the only thing standing between him and total control of Europe - and then the world so he sent his armada of bombers and fighters to beat the small island into submission. Day after day the planes flew across the channel intent on smashing Britain into surrender.

And day after day, the young pilots of the RAF rose to the occasion, with the odds against them. They fought with their backs to the wall, sometimes flying sortie after sortie, landing just to refuel and rearm. Then they would once again scream into the sky to beat back the hoards. I often wonder how on the ground must have felt as they watched the battles; the sky above buzzing with aircraft, the air thick with exploding planes, the sound of machine gun fire as the various protagonists wheel and spiral as they try to gain advantage over their enemy.

What a sight it surely must have been.

The fact that we now live in relative freedom is down to those young men for if Hitler had invaded Britain then the Americans couldn't have used it as a staging post, therefore couldn't have helped. America was just to far away across an ocean.

After days and weeks of failed attempts to beat the RAF, and suffering terrible losses, Hitler asked Goering, the head of the Luftwaffe - "What do you need to win?" Goering replied, "Spitfires, give me Spitfires". And whilst that epitome of air superiority undoubtedly played a huge part, it was ultimately the brave young pilots who deserved the greatest accolade - which came from the then Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill who said:

"Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few".

Young men with an unshakeable sense of duty and a determination never to give in in the face of severe onslaught.

I wonder do such men exist today.