In 1940 nations had fallen to the Nazis all across Europe, and Britain, standing alone without American support at that time, faced imminent invasion. The German air force and army were far superior to the British. We were expecting invasion, road signs had been taken down so the invaders wouldn’t easily find their way around. One of the great unsung stories, the British Resistance, were readied. The coin was flipped and it came down in its edge, teetering.
The Battle of Britain – aircraft fighting over the skies of Southern and Eastern England flown by young men, mostly in their late teens and early twenties - decided it.
Once Battle of Britain was over, invasion wasn’t going to happen, the US and Soviet Union came in, the Nazis were eventually going to lose, fate was sealed. The defeat of the Nazis - and beyond that government fascism in Europe and the disintegration of its deep-rooted militarism - begins there.
But at that point in mid-1940, the Nazis were still very much on the ascendant. Not only was it ordinary people fighting but in this case it wasn’t a mass action, it came down to a very small band of people, so few that you read a list of their names. That makes it a unique event in history.
Churchill nailed it at the time. For all the evil deeds in his career before the war and the abhorrence of many of his views, his clarity in the build-up to war and during wartime was crucial. He clearly saw, in the immediate aftermath, what had happened in the Battle of Britain. ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few’.
Twenty year old John Freeborn, of 27 Broomfield Crescent, Leeds 6, flew more operational hours in the Battle of Britain than any other pilot. Even among such an elite and respected band as The Few, John Freeborn stood out.
Born in 1919 in Middleton - an area that was then open farmland rather than today's housing estates near the ring road - the family moved to Broomfield Crescent when John was a boy. To this day he's a proud Northerner and frequently asserts that Yorkshire supplied more pilots to the Battle of Britain than any other county.
He attended Leeds Grammar School beside Woodhouse Moor on the corner of Moorland Road and Clarendon Road (the building is now the University of Leeds Business School). Once he was an air ace he came back to the school in and did a display of aerobatics before landing on the cricket pitch. It amused him that in a few short years the masters had gone from thrashing the crap out of him to fawning over him at lunch.
John was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross twice. For the first one, in recognition of his service during the Battle of Britain, his parents accompanied him to the investiture. The first biography of him, A Tiger's Tale: The Story of Battle of Britain Fighter Ace Wg. Cdr. John Connell Freeborn, has pictures of the invitation.
Here's John with his mother Jean in Leeds shortly after receiving his DFC.
Most of his comrades have died, but John is one of the few of The Few who is still alive. He has co-authored a new biography, Tiger Cub: The Story of John Freeborn DFC*.
