Originally Posted by
Chugalug2
The "expert" was Stephen Bungay who, of course, has just published a book, "The Most Dangerous Enemy" about the Battle of Britain. ...
<snip>
... the Beeb's love of revisionist thinkers ready as always to fight other people's wars. At one point Bungay dismissed German Intelligence as knowing everything but understanding nothing. One felt that the comment could be equally applied to him!
To be fair - Bungay's book was published in 2001 and his knowledge and analysis of the Battle is extremely good (I very much doubt that he would've missed the Bader as AOC-in-C mistake had the thing been run past him). The book was widely praised when it came out, and since he is willing to appear on the TV, this is why you see him so often on programmes about the Battle (and why the book has been reprinted, along with a host of others to coincide with the 70th anniversary)
Also, Bungay isn't a revisionist thinker (and 'revisionism' shouldn't be seen as a dirty word, either. 'Crevice' on the other hand...)
I get the impression that he may have become a bit more 'talking head' over time, though, in that his more recent appearances on TV have seen him being a bit more ready to offer sound-bites rather than analysis (sound-bites being better for the editor, of course) and this sometimes makes him sound overly deprecating of Dowding, or critical of the way the Battle was handled in a way which doesn't appear in the book.
If you want revisionist approaches to the Battle, try Derek Robinson (who claims that the RN was the 'only relevant' service in 1940) or Anthony Cumming (who amongst other things states that the RN won the 'wider Battle of Britian' without really explaining what the wider Battle of Britain
was, and whose bid to enhance the reputation of Admiral Forbes - a laudable objective - in various academic journals has been conducted through the mechanism of attempting to diminish Dowding's reputation)
Bungay's view on German intelligence and the egregious 'Beppo' Schmid is generally accepted to be correct these days - there was a lot of information available to the Germans which could and perhaps should've pointed them in the right direction, but Schmid took the easier course of telling Goering what he wanted to hear, not what was actually going on.