13 Hours That Saved Britain

Uses a lot of Battle Of Britain movie footage interspersed with some boring anecdotes. Not much detail about the pilots, the planes, the decisions made etc.

A lot of recycled footage from "The Battle of Britain" movie which is now quite old. Historically that material was pretty good but unfortunately they forgot to mention the Americans and Commonwealth pilots, let alone the poles. Even the original BoB movie featured Christopher Plummer with Canadian colours as well as the French and others.

My impression looking at how it was advertised was that we would see more on the management which was something special. Unfortunately, we only got the basics. The people who were interi added some colour but little information as they were.mostly children at the time.

Where were the Germans or indeed other adults from the time (I now that most would have passed but I'm sure there is footage on file)?

Not a single mention of the foreign pilots who constituted 20% of the RAF fighter command during the battle. Not mentioning the Polish pilots is like making a documentary about the 1966 World Cup Final without mentioning Sir Geoff Hurst. 303 Polish Squadron top scored during the Battle of Britain and pilots from many other countries helped a beleaguered Britain to survive... just. This is a highly innacurate account of what actually happened.

"The Battle of Britain" was epic classic movie, with beautiful in-flight sequences of almost original aircraft, but usage of edited out material from this film in a documentary, is a misunderstanding. "Almost" makes a difference in this case. One could think, that Messerschmitts and Heinkels really had Merlin engines with huge radiators, because they saw it in a document... And, with due respect, special effects in the movie are not up to date. The documentary makes ridiculous usage of poorly disguised American vehicles as German ones in completely redundant scenes. But was I expecting too much?.. Well, the allegation alone, that any given "13 hours" saved Britain, should have given some hint as for seriousness of this production... By the way, the authors surely haven't heard, that in spite of "saving Britain" on 15 August, it was 18 August to be dubbed "The Hardest Day".

Despite civilian witnesses' perspective is quite interesting, but personally I was hoping to see some in-depth analysis of peculiar air raids, numbers of aicraft involved and squadron numbers... Not to mention, that it would have been nice to hear, that not only British pilots took part in that glorious day.

Short, to the point and effective. Very informative and involving, but feels slightly one-dimensional without at least some German interviewees. Clever use of stock footage from 'The Battle of Britain' adds an extra level of polish to the documentary. Definitely a must-see for military and aviation history enthusiasts.