Books: 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...