...to which some of them, said "He must have heard about our back-pay owing".
The sheer effort it must have taken to fly three, four or five sorties a day, initially on very few hours' experience in fighters, seeing the attrition rate among colleagues, in aircraft only semi-serviceable after the last sortie, against some very experienced and battle-hardened pilots astonishes me.
Churchill's other appropriate words on the subject were, of course, "...this was their finest hour".