In The Air

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 65, 20 September 1940, Page 5

In The Air

OST of us know and some of us remember, but none of us can be reminded too often that there is nothing finer in the history of our race than the story of the Royal Air Force since Dunkirk. He is a dull man who does not feel humble when he thinks of the Navy-by which we mean every man and every boy who fights at seawho has ceased to feel proud of his kinship with the men who fought in France, who can forget the work done during the last three months in munition factories. But magnificent though all those men and women have been, their efforts would now have been useless if the Air Force had lost the sky. And that leaves the story all untold. It is not half, not even the beginning, of the truth behind every pilot and observer and gunner. It is not possible to tell the truth in ordinarily possible language. We just know that without them Britain could not have held out, that London would now have been a smoking ruin, the Channel a German bridge. So much we know, so much we glibly say but we have no sooner said it than we know that we have said nothing. We have no words for the deeds that lie behind it all, for the daring by day and the skill by night, the endurance and the self-sacrifice of a handful of men and mere boys holding the gates of civilisation. To call it an epic is as feeble in an age of screaming propaganda as to say that it is a miracle but in fact it is more than either. And yet it does not matter much what we call it. We know that it is salvation and victory. Some of us will not live to enjoy the fruit of the victory, for the world is shaking on its foundations and the crooked will not be made straight again in a single generation. But our children will enjoy it, and their children. And there would have been nothing left for any of us but the bread of sorrow if the Air Force had -- for a single day or night.