In this commemorative atmosphere of the Second World War, where scholarly and popular literature of nearly every aspect of the British military abounds, one might wonder at the value of another such entrant in this publishing parade. Yet, in The Good Fight, Garry Campion has contributed to this burgeoning collection of wartime literature an impressively detailed and deeply researched work on the Battle of Britain and its propaganda. One would be hard pressed to discover any recent work that covers the sixteen weeks of the Battle of Britain in such detail and with such a breadth of sources. Employing a wide range of primary material—newspapers and magazine articles, BBC coverage, feature films, newsreels, Ministry of Information (MOI) shorts, cartoons, posters, artists’ renderings of the Battle and Royal Air Force (RAF) staff, eyewitness accounts, and both youth and adult literature—Campion charts the development of both official and unofficial propaganda before and during the Battle itself and then considers its impact on wartime and (briefly) postwar popular memories and historiography.

The main argument of the book posits that the significance of the Battle and the heroization of Churchill’s “The Few” initially laid down during the Battle, and as early as five months after its official end, has remained central to postwar historiography. While Campion acknowledges recent debates over the primacy of the RAF in thwarting Hitler’s invasion plans and, indeed, those who question the strength of those plans, it is clear that, with due respect to the Royal Navy and Army, he is nonetheless convinced that the prowess of the RAF was key in “dissuading Hitler’s plans” and, therefore, integral in maintaining British morale (6). Much of this thesis rests on the actual success of the RAF in late 1940, the expected invasion failing to materialize, and the nation’s need for a victory in the wake of the retreat at Dunkirk and the subsequent French capitulation.

Throughout the text, the reader is guided through the various phases of the Battle and the parallel propaganda effort (all of which is reinforced in a concise and helpful timeline presented at the beginning of the book). There was a great deal of media interest during the Battle, as detailed in the chapters on the BBC and the “hot propaganda” of the press, which kept a keen eye on the pilots of the RAF until the Blitz, when bombed-out citizens took precedence. It was the media’s portrayal of the achievements of the RAF during the height of the Battle, Campion stresses, that sustained morale when the public had little else to take comfort in. Indeed, he goes further, arguing that the enthusiasm displayed by the press, despite restrictive Air Ministry censorship, amounted to unsolicited “semi-official propaganda” and “it is hard to imagine … how such propaganda might have been bettered” (159–60).

Beyond the period of the Battle itself, “cold propaganda” helped perpetuate the mystique of “The Few” that was forged in the heat of battle. It is in these central chapters on newsreels, MOI shorts, feature film, and other visual media where Campion hits his stride, offering more analysis and better description of the sources than in previous chapters. Indeed, it is here that the reader begins to appreciate Campion’s knowledgeable and discerning eye. In his descriptions of these materials, especially in his analyses of photographs and film, Campion meticulously notes the numerous errors and the prewar stock and duplicate footage used throughout.

Campion’s rendering gives the reader a sense of the sheer volume of media coverage devoted to the Battle and especially offers insight into the chaos and uncertainty during which both British citizens and propagandists alike had to make sense of the events. We can clearly see this in Campion’s work up of the “claims controversy” and the discrepancy of loss/win totals between the RAF and the Luftwaffe (105). Despite the difficulties in tallying such numbers during the heat of battle, the Air Ministry was primarily concerned to present the public with realistic statistics. The public was constantly reassured that the RAF’s procedure for compiling such statistics was professional, considered, and impartial. Underneath this careful compilation was a concern to generate “honest propaganda,” which when compared to the Luftwaffe’s overinflated boasts, underscores the core propaganda issue at stake: the difference between the democratic and honest British and the lying, totalitarian Hun (112). While some notes of skepticism from the home front were sounded (largely from Home Intelligence reports and authors such as George Orwell), Campion argues that British media reported official statistics with little question as to authenticity and gradually won over the public, as evidenced by Mass Observation diarists’ accounts of the Battle.

The claims controversy demonstrates that British propaganda could not be overdrawn, but beneath this propaganda nevertheless lay an almost unshakable confidence in the flyboys themselves, and embedded in all of the sources presented in The Good Fight is the “mythicisation” of the fighter pilot (314). The propaganda of the Battle focused largely on the fortitude, professionalism, and bravery of the fighters winning through in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, thus spurring on the morale of those at home, the hopes of the conquered, and, finally, convincing the Americans to join the fight. Throughout the book, we are presented with numerous examples of this heroic rendering of the fighter pilots, beginning with Churchill’s “The Few” speech, which was instantly employed, if almost always misquoted, in references to the Battle.

Clearly, the author is both knowledgeable and passionate about the subject, confirming this when he confesses having been “captivated” by a Battle of Britain picture book as a boy (305). Certainly, the reader benefits by his passion. Yet, there are some concerns I have with this book. First, Campion’s text is littered with acronyms, the meanings of which are never presented in the narrative, leaving the reader to continually jog back and forth between the text and the list of abbreviations. Second, in Campion’s quest for a detailed “work of reference,” the narrative sometimes reads like an annotated bibliography of extant materials rather than an in-depth analysis of those sources (8). Finally, while the reader is introduced to materials that reference the Battle during the war, there is very little attempt to connect or analyze the propaganda in a broader framework of national identity or popular memory or, indeed, to test the claims of the propaganda itself (except in the instance of the claims controversy). For this, we may perhaps need to wait for Campion’s next work, also by Palgrave, The Battle of Britain, 1945–2010: Representation, Revisionism, Re-enchantment. The above concerns might be distracting to the general reader, but for those with a deep interest in the Battle and the RAF, this book is indispensable.