In the summer of 1940, Britain was the last unconquered country in Western Europe. France had surrendered on June 22. The United States was neutral. The Soviet Union, ten months earlier, had signed a non-aggression pact with Germany. The British Expeditionary Force had been driven into the sea at Dunkirk and evacuated home with most of its equipment abandoned on the beach. Hitler stood 21 miles from the white cliffs and expected Britain to ask for terms. What stopped him from asking was fewer than 3,000 RAF fighter pilots, average age 20, flying out of a handful of grass airfields in southeast England, and not all of them were British.
The pilots who won the Battle of Britain came from 14 nations. There were Poles whose country had been overrun the year before, Czechs whose country had been overrun the year before that, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Belgians, French, and a handful of Americans who broke their own country’s neutrality laws to come fight.
The Polish 303 Squadron, flying from RAF Northolt outside London, became the highest-scoring squadron of the entire battle. The Czech 310 and the Canadian 242 (commanded by the legless ace Douglas Bader) flew from Duxford to the north. By the time the battle ended on October 31, 1940, 544 of “The Few” were dead, and Britain had not been invaded. This tour walks the ground they fought over, on both sides of the Channel.
This tour is 10 days long, beginning in France and ending in London. It runs backwards through the BEF’s fighting retreat to Dunkirk, crosses the Channel, and follows the air war forward through the airfields, bunkers, and command rooms that won the summer of 1940. It is timed to land at IWM Duxford for the Battle of Britain Air Show, when the surviving Spitfires fly.
Along the way, you will:
- Walk the ground at Arras and Cambrai where, on May 21, 1940, the British 1st Army Tank Brigade attacked the flank of Erwin Rommel’s 7th Panzer Division and very nearly stopped him, a brief, desperate counterattack that gave the BEF the time it needed to begin pulling back to the coast.
- Follow the BEF’s 60-mile fighting retreat through Cassel, where the Gloucestershire Regiment held a rear-guard action against four German divisions, and through Esquelbecq, where on May 28, 1940, soldiers of the 1st SS Division murdered some 80 British prisoners after they had surrendered. It was a foretaste of what the SS would do across Europe.
- Visit the fortified town of Bergues, where 450 defenders held against overwhelming German assault until they were overrun, and the Canal de Bergues, where on June 1, 1940, Capt. Marcus Ervine-Andrews of the East Lancashire Regiment earned the Victoria Cross holding the line under fire until his men could withdraw across the water.
- Walk the half-mile concrete Dunkirk Mole, from which more than 200,000 of the 338,000 troops evacuated during Operation Dynamo (May 26–June 4, 1940) boarded ships home. Visit the battle-scarred walls of Saint Eloi Church, the Dunkirk Commonwealth War Graves Cemetery, and the Bray Dunes, where soldiers waited under Stuka attack for their turn.
- Cross the Channel by ferry to the White Cliffs of Dover, then descend into the bunker at Dover Castle, where Vice-Admiral Bertram Ramsay directed Operation Dynamo — four years before he commanded the naval landings at Normandy. Visit the Battle of Britain Memorial atop the cliffs at Capel-le-Ferne, where the new Scramble Experience simulates climbing into a Spitfire as the alarm sounds.
- Tour IWM Duxford behind the scenes, one of the most original Battle of Britain airfields in Britain, built by German POWs in 1918, and home in 1940 to 19 Squadron (the first to receive the Spitfire), the Czech 310 Squadron, and the Canadian 242 Squadron under Douglas Bader.
- Spend the next day at the Duxford Battle of Britain Air Show, with VIP marquee seating and flight-line access. The surviving Spitfires and Hurricanes (the actual aircraft type that won the battle) will fly overhead. Pay your respects in the morning at the Cambridge American Cemetery, where 3,811 American war dead, most of them Eighth Air Force airmen, are buried.
- Descend into the Battle of Britain Bunker at Uxbridge, 11 Group’s underground operations room, where fighters were vectored to incoming German raids. The plotting board has been restored to its exact appearance on September 15, 1940, Battle of Britain Day. After his August 16 visit, Churchill said in the car: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”
- Visit the Biggin Hill Heritage Hangar on the site of one of the most active Battle of Britain airfields, now a working Spitfire restoration center. Walk among Spitfires and Hawker Hurricanes being rebuilt by hand, alongside an original Messerschmitt 109 — the German fighter that opposed them in 1940.
- Visit Bentley Priory, the country house north of London where Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding directed the entire Battle of Britain. Dowding’s Fighter Command — his radar network, his sector controllers, and the multinational squadrons including the Polish 303 at Northolt, the highest-scoring RAF squadron of the battle — was the first integrated air defense system in history.
- Walk Churchill’s wartime London with a Blue Badge guide — the Cabinet War Rooms where the Prime Minister and his cabinet ran the war from a basement near St. James’s Park, the Battle of Britain Monument on the Embankment, the bombed-and-rebuilt London Docklands, and St. Paul’s Cathedral, whose dome stood untouched in Herbert Mason’s famous photograph of the night the city burned around it.
- Conclude the tour with a private dinner at the Royal Air Force Club at 128 Piccadilly. The last of the Few, John “Paddy” Hemingway, died in March 2025 at the age of 105. The walls are full of squadron crests. The toast at this dinner now has new weight.
Most Americans’ memory of WWII begins on December 7, 1941. The summer of 1940 is treated as a prologue, a dark chapter before “we” got involved. It is more honest to call it the hinge. If the RAF had lost in September 1940, the war as Americans remember it does not happen: no D-Day, no Eighth Air Force, no Allied landings in North Africa or Italy or southern France.
The Reich consolidates Western Europe and turns east with its rear secure. Everything that comes later in our catalog of tours depends on what fewer than 3,000 fighter pilots, most in their early twenties, did in the skies over southeast England that summer.
By the end of these 10 days, you will not look at a Spitfire the same way. You will know what it took to put one in the air at Biggin Hill in August 1940: the radar net, the sector controller, the boy at the plotting table moving a wooden marker across the map, the pilot running across grass to a parked aircraft.
You will know the names of squadrons most Americans never learned: 303, 310, 242. You will know what “The Few” meant before the phrase was a slogan. And the war will not begin for you at Pearl Harbor anymore.
