This history of the Battle of Britain provides an encyclopaedic academic rigour: the author went back to original sources both in the Public Record Office and the German archives. Challenging virtually every time-honoured myth and assumption about Britain's victory, the book questions the traditional myth of an amateurish, honourable British Few up against a pitiless and regimented German war machine. It actually asserts exactly the opposite: that it was Britain's pilots who were the ruthless combatants and its aircraft production that was the well-oiled machine, and the Germans who never quite recovered from their amateurish underestimation of their most dangerous enemy.