"The second British advantage was in the air, though here the advantage was much smaller. Served up to the House of Commons on August 20,1940, Churchill's tribute to Fighter Command - 'Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few' - remains one his most memorable utterances. At the time, however, pilots joked that it was an allusion to the size of their unpaid mess bills. Churchill's own private secretaries felt the speech 'seemed to drag' because it contained 'less oratory than usual'. His phrase 'the few' implied that the Royal Air Force was outnumbered by the Luftwaffe; and indeed that was what British intelligence believed at the time. In reality, the RAF had a narrow edge. On August 9, just before the Germans launched their crucial offensive against Britain's air defences, the RAF had 1,032 fighters. The German fighters available for the attack numbered 1,011. Moreover, the RAF had 1,400 trained pilots, several hundred more than the Luftwaffe, and they proved more than a match for the Germans in skill and courage."