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

2
The Eve of Battle
DAVID CROOK FLEW L.1083 twice more on 6 May, and again on the 7th and
8th. On Thursday, 9 May, he practised both aerial attacks and formation
flying, then was given the afternoon off, so with several of his friends from
the squadron he went into Edinburgh for a ‘grand evening’ including a slapup
dinner and an uproarious variety performance at the Empire. Life in 609
Squadron could hardly have been more enjoyable.
As David had been carrying out his ninth and tenth Spitfire flights on
that May Thursday, the world must have seemed a very calm and peaceful
place. Through the light puffs of cloud, he would have seen Scotland
stretching away from him, Edinburgh nestling against the Firth of Forth and
then, to the north, the rolling coast and, inland, the mountains of Perthshire.
The country looked a much smaller place from even 6,000 feet. He would
also have seen the North Sea, deep, dark and forbidding, with ships, small
lines of white wake following behind, dotting the vast expanse of water as
they ferried freight around the British Isles. Fishermen, too, continued to
head out to sea, making their way carefully through the channels between
the extensive minefields that had been laid all along the Scottish and
English east coast.
It would have been a scene that after four days back with the squadron
would have already felt utterly familiar. It was almost as though the country
were not at war at all. Yet, far across the sea, on mainland Europe, these
were the last hours of calm. Some 900 miles away, in Berlin, Adolf Hitler,
the Führer of the German Reich, was in his study dictating a proclamation
to his forces gathering on the Western Front. The new Reich Chancellery
that stretched all the way along Voss-strasse in the heart of the German
capital had been designed by Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer. Despite being
more than 1,400 feet long and containing not only vast rooms and galleries
but a massive underground bunker system, the new headquarters of the
Reich had been completed in less than a year by 4,500 workers operating in
shifts around the clock, for seven days a week. The Führer’s study was
naturally at the new building’s heart, with five towering six-metre-high