Battle Pieces

THEIR FINEST HOUR--Allan A. Michie and Walter Graebner -- Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

Last year's Battle of Britain will go into the books as one of the most epic--if not the most decisive--in history. It was like Marathon, Tours, the Catalaunian Fields--by every human reckoning the Nazis should have won. They did not, or if they did, they did not know it.

Published in England last December, Their Finest Hour (from a phrase in Churchill's speech at the height of the battle) describes flaming bits of that battle. Allan Michie and Walter Graebner are TIME correspondents in England, and U. S. readers have already read parts of Their Finest Hour in LIFE. This week they could read it all in book form in the U. S.

It includes 16 reports, many of them told to the authors by participants of the battle. They are terse, matter-of-fact, human and terrific. Twenty-One Days is Sergeant Jack Wadsworth's description of the Flanders retreat and the rescue at Dunkirk. Fight to the Finish is a report by Chief Petty Officer Bishop and Signalman Gold of the sinking of H.M.S.

Scotstoun in a fight with two German submarines. Said Signalman Gold: "It's a funny feeling to see a ship you've lived in go like that. . . . Those who could stand up cheered, and I could hear them joining us from other boats and rafts.

Then she was gone." &"Up Periscope!"; is the grim account by an unnamed officer of the submarine Sturgeon of the sinking of a crowded Nazi troop transport. Front-Line Girl is the story of Sonia Straw, one of the first three women to receive the George Medal for civilian gallantry. "Although she had seen nothing more bloody than a cut finger in her 19 years" Sonia treated bomb victims for everything from shrapnel wounds to shell shock. Most blood-tingling are the restrained accounts of fights and bombings by British airmen whose anonymity the R. A. F. guards unless they are killed. Spirit of the British fliers is summed up by one who said: "When you're going into it you think 'What fun,' and when it's over you think 'How bloody dangerous.' " But the terrible battle for the skies always gets back to earth--especially to London, whose British composure under aerial siege is a puzzle and a worry to the Nazis. Says Reporter Graebner in his closing report: "Nothing that's happened in the war so far has excited Londoners."

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