Ron Goodwin and Sir William Walton - Soundtrack to the file "The Battle Of Britain"

August 18, 1940 is called "The Hardest Day", the height of the fighting in the Battle of Britain.  The British and Germans between them lost 125 aircraft that day, plus many more damaged.  But the Germans took the worst of it: not only did they lose over 130 pilots killed or captured (vs 10 killed on the British side), the blow to Hermann Goering's reputation was decisive.  He had been telling Hitler that he had RAF Fighter Command on the ropes, and yet his Luftwaffe met hundreds of fighters.

In 1969 a film was made of the battle.  You couldn't make it today - not only were there dozens of period aircraft (filmed from a B-25 that had been converted into a flying camera station), but it had an all-star cast of patriotic British actors: Sir Lawrence Olivier, Christopher Plummer, Michael Redgrave, and Michael Caine were only a few of the cast.

The music score was originally by Sir William Walton (a venerable composer of the day) but United Artists didn't like it and brought in the American Ron Goodwin.  Olivier protested, threatening to have his name removed from the credits, so a compromise was struck where both scores were merged.  The result is, once again, something that would never be made today but which worked well in the film.