Marking the 70-year anniversary of the actual raid, Taylor Downing reviews the classic war movie The Dam Busters At 7.30am on 17 May 1943, Flying Officer Jerry Fray took off in his photo-reconnaissance Spitfire for a damage assessment sortie over Germany. At 30,000 feet and about 100 miles from the Ruhr, he could see what […]

In the second of his new occasional series, TV producer and historian Taylor Downing reviews a wartime Spitfire classic. On 16 August 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill visited the control room of RAF Fighter Command’s 11 Group at Uxbridge. The Battle of Britain had just gone up a gear as Goering had ordered his Luftwaffe […]

Launching a new occasional series, TV documentary producer and military historian Taylor Downing explores the story behind the wartime movie classic In Which We Serve. On 20 May 1941, 16,000 German airborne troops launched the invasion of Crete, Hitler’s final operation to reverse the disaster of Mussolini’s attempt to occupy Greece on behalf of the […]