The Pattern of the War This week we had a
revised version of Mr. Chester Wilmot's Battle for Britain, first heard in 1947, but now freshened and made more exact by more recently published documents. The facts of the great struggle of 194o—the work of the R.A.F., the secret radar dispositions, Hitler's on-again-off-again " Sealion " operation—are pretty well known. The Churchill speeches we have by heart ; and (if I may say so) in our hearts. But Battle for Britain unites them in a comprehensive whole, and weaves all the variegated detail into a strong pattern. The manner is blessedly undramatic, and Mr. Laurence Gilliam has been content to allow the arranged facts to speak for themselves ; as they do, proudly. One of the difficulties of these programmes is: the voices of the great. Do you allow your actor to impersonate the embattled Churchill ? I can myself give an admirable dinner-party rendering of Mr. Churchill's 1940 manner, on the subject of the coldness of the soup ; but those " finest hour " speeches are too noble 4 part of the world's history to allow the triviality of reproduction by any tongue but one. Battle for Britain solved this problem neatly by giving them to us as the B.B.C. announcer quoted them in the day's 9 o'clock news, until finally it ended the programme with a record of the old trumpet tongue itself. But Hitler and Goering it gave to actors, one strident, one orotund ! I think this problem is not really solved ; because I suspect that it is really insoluble.
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