The Battle of Britain and Operation Sealion
A different perspective on our “Finest Hour”, the Battle of Britain. Whilst the courage, skill and sacrifice of the pilots of Fighter Command is unquestionable, were German forces in fact capable of achieving a successful seaborne invasion of Britain (codenamed “Operation Sealion”) in 1940? Has the contribution of both the Royal Navy and Britain’s land forces (as portrayed by Dads Army) in preventing an invasion been underestimated by popular history? And to what lengths were Churchill and the War Cabinet prepared to go in the event of an invasion being attempted?
Dambusters
On the night of 16/17 May, 1943 the RAF’s recently formed 617 Squadron carried out what was probably the most famous air raid of all time. A combination of the genius of Barnes Wallis, inventor of the bouncing bomb, and the astonishing courage and skill of the crews saw two major German dams breached and a third damaged, leading to loss and disruption to the Nazi war economy. Normally kept top secret, the aerial reconnaissance photos of the ruptured dams and consequent flooding were transmitted around the world, giving the Allies a major propaganda coup.
How was the technology developed? How was this daring raid executed? Was the raid worth the lives of the 53 aircrew who perished on the night? How accurate was the epic 1955 Dambusters movie? This is a fascinating presentation about one of the greatest feats of arms of World War 2.
The Space Race
Born out of the rivalry of opposing Cold War ideologies, the Space Race was a momentous chapter in human history. Between 1957, when the Soviets were the first to launch an artificial satellite into earth orbit, to the final moon landing by the United States in 1972, the Space Race brought about astonishing technological advances, and achievements of immense skill and courage on the part of the astronauts and cosmonauts who rode the rockets to space. President John F Kennedy’s dramatic challenge in 1961 to NASA and its contractors to build spacecraft to fly astronauts to the moon and back by the end of the decade seemed at the time to be science fiction, and how that feat was duly accomplished is one of mankind’s greatest stories.
The Cold War
The conflict that defined and shaped the modern world. From its origins in the wartime conferences between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, to the Iron Curtain, to the Berlin airlift, to the U-2 incident, to the Cuban missile crisis, to the space race, to the Vietnam war, to the KGB versus the CIA, to Thatcher Reagan and Gorbachev, to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR, the Cold War dominated the world’s political landscape for more than 40 years. It is a story of tyrants, power struggles, missile gaps, subterfuge, spies and superpower summits, but finally a story of how ordinary people changed the course of history.
