The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

bolstering the position in France, all fighter resources were now to be used
for what they had originally been designed for in the event of war:
defending Britain and her armed forces only. Later that day, the eight halfsquadrons
sent to France began returning. The next day, most of the
remaining fighter squadrons flew back to England. By the 21st, only three
RAF Hurricane squadrons – those with the Advanced Air Striking Force –
were still in France.
Bee Beamont had gone home on the 20th. It had come like a bolt from
the blue. One minute he was watching a shot-down Hurricane plunge into
the ground on the far side of the airfield, and almost the next his CO was
offering him or one of the other pilots a flight home on a DC-2 that was
about to take off. They tossed for it, and Bee won, finding himself a short
while later on a Dutch KLM transport plane along with a number of other
RAF fighter pilots.
He was landing back down at Hendon before the realization that he had
been plucked from the maelstrom of war really sank in. From Hendon, he
and a few others went into central London, its streets crammed with
shoppers, buses, tradesmen and people going about their daily business with
what seemed like no concern at all. They stopped at the RAF Club near
Hyde Park Corner. Just a few hours before they had been in the heat of
battle; now a group of dirty, unshaven pilots were standing in the middle of
London with the nation’s masses wandering past them as though there was
no war on at all.
This was not really the case, however. Most in Britain were still half
expecting German parachutists to float down from the sky at any moment.
Daidie Penna saw a train-load of wounded troops pull into her local station
on the 19th; she thought everyone out and about seemed very tense,
although over the next couple of days the news seemed brighter. ‘We seem
to be holding the Germans at present,’ she noted on the 21st.
In fact, Churchill, from the moment he became Prime Minister, was
determined not to shield the public from the reality of the situation. This
was sensible because should the situation deteriorate – and clearly it was
doing so – then the public would have already been prepared, whilst at the
same time it would be more likely to trust the Government. Certainly, his
new Minister of Information, Duff Cooper, was very much of the same
mind. Credible openness was to be the policy, while Churchill hoped that
his rhetoric could stir the nation to fall in behind him. If Daidie Penna was