Battle of Britain

The Battle of Britain was fought in the skies over Britain in 1940 as the Luftwaffe tried to gain air superiority over the RAF. Fighter pilots, radar operators, ground crews, observers and civilians all formed part of the defence. The battle followed the fall of France and came at a moment when Britain stood largely alone in Europe.

It mattered because German failure prevented invasion and gave Britain a powerful narrative of resistance. The battle also showed the importance of radar, command systems and morale in modern war. It works well for novels about pilots, WAAFs, operations rooms, fear, propaganda and families living under the threat of invasion.

World War II fiction has a very large reading audience, from Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See and Kate Atkinson's Life After Life to Robert Harris, Alan Furst, Herman Wouk, Kristin Hannah and Ken Follett. Series and thrillers often use occupied Europe, intelligence work, resistance networks, codebreaking, naval war and family survival as their core material. These entries should therefore support both literary novels and high-conversion series pages for wartime, espionage, Holocaust, home-front and military fiction.