The Lion Has Wings is a 1939 British, black-and-white, documentary-style, propaganda war film that was directed by Adrian Brunel, Brian Desmond Hurst, Alexander Korda and Michael Powell.

The Lion Has Wings is recounted in various 'chapters' with a linking story revolving around a senior Royal Air Force (RAF) officer, played by Ralph Richardson, his wife and his family.

Since The Lion Has Wings was made before the attacks on Britain had begun, the film had to rely on existing stock footage, including sequences lifted from the air raid featurette, The Gap.

However, the bombing raids were shown first being reported by spies then confirmed by the Observer Corps, a tactic that was actually occurring as part of Britain's defensive measures.

The film also shows Luftwaffe bombers trying to attack London, but being completely turned back by barrage balloons, which in reality had little effect on the raids.

These errors or misinterpretations added to other lofty claims that Britain had sufficient aircraft in production and was quite ready to fight to counter the overwhelming numbers of Luftwaffe raiders; all purposeful exaggerations were intended to bolster morale.

Public reaction was generally reserved, as British audiences saw The Lion Has Wings as patently simplistic and patronising; yet, it was a commercial success.

[10] Powell later derided the project as 'an outrageous piece of propaganda, full of half-truths and half-lies, with some stagey episodes which were rather embarrassing and with actual facts which were highly distorted...'[8] William Shirer, author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, recounts in his Berlin Diaryon 10 June 1940 that he thought the film 'very bad, supercilious, and silly'.