Richard Overy is a first-class historian and an excellent writer. He’s also an expert on the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the Second World War, so this short book was full of promise. It lived up to expectations. Clearly-written with a solid dose of myth-busting, he describes a “battle” that claimed tens of thousands of civilian lives — a battle which began with both sides aiming to destroy military targets and limit civilian casualties, but in the end having to dispense with nearly all the rules and aim to ruthlessly bomb the enemy into submission. What seems to have won the battle for the RAF was not the fact that it had better pilots (the Germans had skilled and motivate pilots too) but that it vastly over-produced aircraft and trained airmen. It turns out that “the Few” were not so few, and there were more of them and more airplanes, than the Luftwaffe had. The book also portrays the German military leadership, including Hitler, as behaving somewhat rationally at this point in the war, deciding that without air superiority over England, an invasion could not take place. Recommended.