Trees, cornfields, spitfires; fighter planes fly through clear sun lit skies
over the beauty of the English countryside on a late summer evening. Land girls
look up. The planes are spotted from the ground by relay stations, their
positions relayed. Tractors cut wheat. Nothing interrupts the harvest.
Silhouettes of soldiers by water at sunset; evening fades to night. Canadian
soldiers laugh and sing on a troop train going who knows where.
Dance music, a grand ballroom packed with wheeling dancers. Coal miners; the
pithead at night. A signalman changes a signal and a huge locomotive advances,
hissing into the night. A Lancaster bomber factory, a Lancaster taking off at
sunset, ARP and ambulance station workers at a concert, Parliament buildings.
Radio: London Calling; patriotic music, broadcasts in different languages,
dramatic clear evening skies, a grim message of good luck to the forces abroad,
bird song in a wood at sunset or dawn. Sounds and images of freedom continue to
alternate with scenes of everyday wartime life, and scenes from the industry of
war.
Giant chimneys and smoke stacks belch clouds of dense, black, sulphurous
smoke into the hazy air in fantastic quantities, to a chorus of Rule Britannia.
All Britain's industrial might runs flat out for the war effort. The film ends
with an aerial shot of Britain's patchwork countryside through cumulus clouds.
Some of the others of the hundreds of short shots and sound recordings: stock
shot of bombed city; workers, men and women in munitions and tank factories;
radio programmes: e.g. London Calling, Calling All Workers; girls singing in
munitions factory; Flanagan and Allen singing in lunchtime concert in factory
canteen; blackboard menu in factory canteen: surprisingly good menu!; Myra Hess
concert; steel works.