On August 24, 1940, Flight Lt. Gordon Olive led “A” Flight of 65 Squadron on an early afternoon patrol over the Thames Estuary. Controllers directed the four Spitfires to intercept an incoming raid of approximately sixty bombers protected by a heavy escort of forty fighters at about 20,000 feet. Seeing the fighters above them, Olive ordered “A” Flight to climb. They attacked “down sun,” with the sun at their backs and in the eyes of their targets, from 28,000 feet. He damaged a twin-engine Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighter that dived away to escape destruction. Aware of the danger of other Luftwaffe aircraft in his vicinity, Olive climbed above them and pursued another Bf 110. As he was about to destroy his second target, five single-engine Bf 109s attacked him from above. Olive immediately climbed toward and above them. He attacked the rearmost fighter until running out of ammunition before returning to the squadron's forward airfield at Manston near the Channel Coast in Kent. In a chaotic and deadly environment where altitude, or “the high ground,” was the key to survival, Olive had climbed three times, met his enemies, and drove them away. Just two months before, his Spitfire struggled against the Luftwaffe's fighters in combat. The addition of a constant-speed propeller of American origin enhanced the performance of Olive's Spitfire and helped make it a truly world-class fighter.

During the spring, summer, and fall of 1940, Fighter Command of Great Britain's RAF faced Nazi Germany's Luftwaffe in an aerial duel to control the skies over France and England. After the fall of France, this struggle for the air, if lost by the RAF, would be a prelude to an invasion of the British Isles. The resultant Battle of Britain represented a dramatic change in warfare where the survival of a nation depended upon a small group of aviators, called the “few” by Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill, and their Spitfire and Hurricane fighter aircraft. It also demonstrated the importance of air power weaponry, which included well-known systems such as radar and the fighter-interceptor, but fundamental technologies such as the variable-pitch propeller as well.