The Battle of Britain began 70 years ago today. Kanika Datta talks to one of the leading authorities on this struggle for air supremacy: a British ex-policeman named Dilip Sarkar
For most Calcuttans, Red Road along the Maidan is one of the few remaining links with World War II. Then a red-clay strip, from which the road derived its name, it served as a runway for Hurricanes taking off to fight the British empire’s war against the Japanese. Almost 8,000 km to the west there is another link, in the person of Dilip Sarkar, a former policeman and one of the UK’s leading authorities on the Battle of Britain.
Sarkar, 49, has written 26 books, 23 of them on the Battle of Britain or Spitfire pilots in World War II. The latest, The Few: The Battle of Britain in the Words of the Pilots, was released in November last year ahead of the 70th anniversary celebrations that start today, July 10.
Worcester-based Sarkar was born in Calcutta to a Bengali father, Tridibendra Chandra, and a British mother, Janet. His parents had met when Tridibendra was studying engineering in Worcester; the family returned to the UK when Sarkar was about a year old.
Father and son both breached the race barrier, each in his own way. Sarkar’s father — known as ‘Trid’ — became Worcester’s first ‘coloured’ magistrate in 1978. In 1983, Dilip became one of the UK’s first coloured policemen, a job he held for 22 years. In 2003 he was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for his services to aviation history.
For all his own, not inconsiderable achievements, Sarkar is immensely proud of his father. “Although he was an engineer, he devoted his life to race relations and charity work,” he says. A Quaker by conversion, Trid was also associated with Swanirvar, a non-profit organisation that does development work in rural Bengal, until his early death in 2001 at the age of 68.
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It was his civic-minded father who urged him into the civil service, but Sarkar owes his interest in military history to a neighbour who served in the Royal Navy during World War II and inspired him with “tales of derring-do”.
His obsession with the Battle of Britain began at age eight when he saw the eponymous hit movie with its dazzling star cast: Laurence Olivier, Michael Caine, Christopher Plummer, Susannah York. An aero-modeller uncle introduced him to the Spitfire, and stoked another life-long fascination. Ten years later, he began to research this most famous of air wars that thwarted Hitler’s plan of invading the British Isles. Sarkar juggled his policeman’s career — he’s been everything from a beat cop to a detective — with what eventually became his vocation.
Sarkar says the human stories and experiences of this battle interest him most. Indeed, he’s interviewed more Battle of Britain pilots than almost any other historian. “If anyone ever needs to know anything about the RAF during the summer of 1940, don’t ask the Few, ask him!” wrote George Unwin, a Battle of Britain fighter ace, about Sarkar’s book Last of the Few, which is due out during the 70th anniversary celebrations.
Both The Few and Last of the Few capture the stories of an elite group of fighter pilots whom Winston Churchill immortalised with a much-quoted tribute in the House of Commons: “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” Ever since, the pilots who participated in the 16-week war are known as ‘The Few’.
For Sarkar, these two books (and several before) provided a chance to capture the unique stories of a generation that is now in its 80s and 90s — men like former Spitfire pilot Ken Wilkinson, 93, who signed copies at the book release.
Sarkar has not limited himself to narrative history, nor is his outlook clouded by the heroic romanticism that has developed around this 1940 battle. He was, for instance, the first to write about the fact that Group Captain Sir Douglas Bader, the iconic legless fighter pilot, was not in fact shot down by the enemy over France but by friendly fire. He also shows that although Bader remains widely and rightly admired he was not the wildly popular leader of legend. A new biography is in the works, he says.
Though Sarkar has emerged as a respected scholar of the Battle of Britain and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he is not a historian by training. This is an omission he started repairing in 2008, when he began a degree in history at the University of Worcester. That degree completed, he is now focusing on a PhD from Birmingham University’s Department for War Studies — specifically, the Centre for Air Power Studies.
His thesis will be on the Big Wing Controversy, the topic of a book he published in 1997, about tactics between high commanders and politicians that broke out in the Battle of Britain.
He has another book planned, in which he will compare the performance and contribution of two fighters, the Spitfire and Hurricane, during the Battle of Britain. He’s keen to disprove the notion that the Hurricane shot down more fighters during the battle than the Spitfire did. He is also working with ITV on a programme on the Duxford airfield, the base for Douglas Bader’s famous squadron.
With such a very British interest and a British upbringing — thanks to his Quaker father he attended a Quaker boarding school — it’s no surprise that Sarkar sees himself as English. He says he hasn’t been back to India since he left as an infant and, except one cousin with whom he keeps in touch via Facebook, he doesn’t have links with his birthplace.
Meanwhile, he clears up a little point of history. Pilots of several nationalities flew for the RAF during the Battle of Britain, which the RAF dates between July 10 and October 31, 1940 (though it didn’t start and finish quite so definitively). They include Czechs, Poles, South Africans, Americans and so on. Despite many claims to the contrary, he says no Indian pilot was involved in the battle. “There were several Indian pilots who flew for the RAF during the war, but none of them flew any operational sorties for any of the accredited groups during that 16-week period,” he says firmly. “All such claims are spurious.”
