The Battle of Britain and The Dawn Knock on the Door

The Telegraph this weekend notes the 70th anniversary of the date deemed to represent the start of the Battle of Britain, read here. My Mother was a nurse at the Middlesex Hospital in Central London during the battle and the dreadful Blitz of London that followed. I was lucky to be born in the later part of the war and was amazed by the description she gave of the battle at its height over London when she observed the dog fights and successes of the Spitfires and Hurricanes over the City. Naturally enough, in view of the horror, she was less detailed on her experiences as a Ward Sister during the Blitz. In later years she described to me her thoughts on the conflict and the most compelling description of the horrors that had overtaken Europe and required military action on our democratic country's part was, in her view, the fear of the whole Continent of the Gestapo's dawn knock on the door of their home, thereafter removing men, women and entire families to deportment, torture and the death camps. I suppose therefore that it is a small mercy that she has not lived to see the sacrifices and trauma of our parents generation laid to waste, through the self-interested deceit and vaulting ambition of our treacherous political classes, as the European Arrest Warrant now allows, upon the signature of any jumped-up petty official across any one of the other 26 countries of the EU, without the need for production of evidence nor any hearing before an English court, any British subject to be forcibly removed to any other part of the EU for trial, entirely in accordance with their own foreign legal procedures on offences that may not even be criminal under English Law. Could the pilots of the RAF fighters ever have contemplated such an event a mere seventy years following the Battle and without one protest from the population at large? What value has our generation placed upon the sacrifices of the few, and all the other less lauded heroes, such as my own Mother?