Not only did the RAF fly and fight over friendly territory, which ensured that surviving pilots would fight again; its pilots also fought with the existential brio of men who believed they were battling a far larger air force with nothing less than Britain’s survival at stake. RAF pilots recognized the “desperate seriousness of the situation,” as Galland put it, while the Luftwaffe operated with a degree of complacency, conjured by easy past successes and by faulty intelligence that portrayed the RAF as a desperately weakened force.
