When Britain went to war in 1939, its air force had quadrupled to a strength of 118,000 regulars. However, the Luftwaffe, by now an aerial armada with more than 500,000 men, outnumbered the RAF several times over in both pilots and planes.
A year later, German bombers would demolish the parliamentary debating chamber where Churchill had implored his nation to make greater haste in rearming. And the question of Britain's survival would be debated in the sky by the new pilots of the RAF.