Press kit

The story of the Battle of Britain told through the pubs that kept Fighter Command flying, with a gazetteer guiding readers to every surviving bar.

In the summer of 1940 the Few fought over southern England by day and rebuilt themselves by night in the pubs at the airfield gates. Pubs, Pilots, and the Battle of Britain follows Fighter Command group by group and station by station, from the Unicorn at Chichester to the White Hart at Brasted, showing how landlords, landladies, and regulars became part of the machinery that kept exhausted young pilots in the air. A full gazetteer records what became of every pub, which still trade, and where a reader can raise a glass where the pilots did.

Justin Omps is an American writer based in Arlington, Virginia. His Anglophilia began under the rusty floors of a Mk1 Mini and grew into a years-long project reconstructing the drinking geography of the Battle of Britain, pub by pub. Pubs, Pilots, and the Battle of Britain is his first book.

Justin Omps is an American writer based in Arlington, Virginia. His affection for Britain began in a garage, with bloodied knuckles earned on the undersides of a Mk1 Mini and a Series Land Rover, and grew into an appreciation of how the British stood alone against monstrous evil in 1940. It took an outsider to knock on doors in Kent and Sussex asking what became of the pubs where the Few drank, and the answers, recorded in the gazetteer of his first book, are by turns heartening and heartbreaking. Some pubs still trade. Some are Thai restaurants and convenience stores. One was demolished in 2019 with its famous sign still out front. Pubs, Pilots, and the Battle of Britain is published by Pen and Sword Books and distributed in North America by Casemate.