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

Despite this, despite the hindrances from above, and despite the very
real threat of aerial attack, Guderian left his headquarters at Koblenz later
that afternoon with spirits as confident as those of his Führer. He had
complete trust in his commanders and knew his men were highly trained
and ready; each man knew his task and what was expected of him. Nothing,
he believed, had been left to chance. And yet for it to succeed, he would
need good fortune. Plenty of good fortune.
Both France and Britain had been expecting a German offensive in the west
for some time. Even though theirs was a modern world, the obvious
campaigning season was spring and summer and so since the particularly
harsh winter had ebbed away, they had been increasingly aware that Hitler
could strike at any moment.
Nonetheless, in Westminster, the political capital of Britain, the
attention of the nation’s leaders was less on Germany, that May Thursday,
and more on their own survival. Britain was in the midst of a drastic
political crisis. For the past two days, a debate had been going on in the
House of Commons over the Government’s handling of the war to date and
specifically the campaign in Norway, which had begun on 9 April. British
forces, under-equipped and without sufficient air support, had been soundly
beaten in their first clash on land with German forces, and in a subsequent
vote of confidence the Prime Minister had suffered a crippling moral defeat.
Despite the numerous news programmes on the radio and the detailed
accounts of the debate in the papers, however, these dramatic events seem
to have passed over the heads of many in Britain that morning. Certainly, it
made little impression on David Crook and his fellow pilots, for example.
Young men with Spitfires to fly might have found all this politicking of
little interest, yet there were few signs of it causing much of a stir in the
Surrey village of Tadworth either. ‘Out this morning,’ wrote 37-year-old
Daidie Penna, ‘people didn’t seem to have much to say of the Government’s
stormy passage. I think they’ve got into the habit these days of
concentrating on their own lives and trying to exclude the unpredictable and
rapidly varying international situations.’ Although a housewife and mother
of three, Daidie was also a writer and artist, intelligent and opinionated. She
had a further particular interest in politics because an old family friend was
a Labour Opposition MP, Herbert Morrison. Decidedly left of centre
herself, Daidie was certainly no admirer of the Prime Minister, Neville