Hi! Welcome to my free coloring pages blog.
I am a retired Science teacher who draws to keep busy.
There are over 1200 drawings on this blog that you can print and color.
Today's new drawing is of a famous British World War II fighter called the Spitfire.
Spitfire near the White Cliffs of Dover
I watched a documentary today called Spitfire The Plane That Saved The World. It was really well done. It was on the Curiosity Stream streaming service. The Spitfire was a World War II British fighter aircraft. It could fly very fast for its day, (over 400 miles per hour or 644 kilometers per hour). The British built over 22,000 of these aircraft before and during the war.
During the Battle of Britain, a pilot might get shot down and catch a ride back to his airfield and then fly again that very same day. Eventually, the Spitfire pilots and ground crews were exhausted from fighting off constant bombing raids that at first targeted them mostly. But the German Air Force, the Luftwaffe began to bomb London and that gave the ground crews and pilots a chance to rest, regroup, repair, and service aircraft and get back into the fight.
The Spitfires (and their pilots) were able to defeat the Luftwaffe and turn the tide of the war. The leader of Germany or the Third Reich decided to turn to North Africa and the Arab oil fields. Then a bit later Hitler ordered a massive attack on Russia or The Soviet Union.
If the Spitfires had not been able to fight off the German air attack in the Battle of Britain then the islands of Great Britain would have certainly been invaded. But because of the British victory in the air, the Island of Great Britain became the land "aircraft carrier" for both British and American bombers. My own father was a B-24 Bomber pilot. He told me how great it felt when flying back from a mission, to see the White Cliffs of Dover. It meant that you were safe. So I added those English cliffs to my drawing. (My father also said that he felt like he should have been teaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the Germans and Italians, not dropping bombs on them.) The aircraft carrier is in the drawing because they were used to transport Spitfires to near the Island of Malta during the North Africa campaign.
Before the Battle of Britain began the Untied Kingdom Prime Minister Winston Churchill said the following in a speech to Parliament:
What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”
NOTE This drawing of the Spitfire can be found by clicking on the button labeled... Vehicles and Military Vehicles. Then scroll down to the bottom for the new drawing. The B-24 drawing will also be further up that list. Have fun coloring! By the way, I added the drawing I did of the B-24 Bomber below. It is from a previous post.
B 24 J Liberator
(Many of these planes were based in Great Britain and they couldn't have
been there if the Spitfires, their pilots, and ground crews had not
defeated the Germans in the Battle of Britain.)
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