A Summer Bright and Terrible (14 page)

Without Lindemann.

Although he could no longer bully the committee,
Lindemann still had the ear of Churchill, who, responding to his insistence,
repeatedly fought against all the available research funds going to radar. This
was the beginning of a strong love-hate relationship between Churchill and
Dowding, who strongly supported radar. Well, perhaps the love part had begun
several years before, when Churchill, as Colonial Secretary, had been impressed
with Dowding’s work in keeping peace in Iraq with a few bombers. Now, when they
should have been working together on their overall purpose of preparing England
for war, they were instead warring over the details, arguing about spending
scarce research funds on entangling wires or air-to-air bombs or, most
importantly, on infrared versus radar.

Churchill’s method was to bluster and rant,
avoiding details, conjuring all-powerful images, and then daring his opponent
to bring up a single argument against him. His command of the English language
was masterful (in contrast to his command of science), and he would use it to sweep
all objections aside and to carry his opponent away on a flood of words and
eloquent phrases. Dowding’s method was to sit quietly and listen rather than
attempting to stem that inexorable flow of rodomontade, and then not to try to
counter arguments that were so far-flung as to be indefensible, but instead to
simply say no.

No, he would not reassign his little supply of
research moneys. No, his committee told him that radar was not inferior to
infrared. No, he would not accept Churchill’s statistics (which had been
supplied by Lindemann, whose love of statistics was so great that he was
well-known to frequently make up his own). No, no, and again no. Dowding was
adamant, indefatigable, immovable. He would put his trust in God, and pray for
radar.

Thirteen

In 1936 the Royal Air Force underwent a
total rearrangement into four main commands: Training Command, Coastal Command,
Bomber Command, and Fighter Command, the last organized out of the former Air
Defence Great Britain. Boom Trenchard had retired, and Dowding, as the most
senior officer in the RAF after Chief of the Air Staff (CAS) Edward Ellington,
was appointed the first Commander in Chief of Fighter Command. Ellington told
him that upon his (Ellington’s) retirement the next year, Dowding would take
his place as CAS, the top RAF position.

The appointment to Fighter Command was a
natural one in view of his activities as Air Member for Research and
Development the past several years. Now he was in a position to put the fruits
of his labours to work, integrating the new eight-gun fighters that were slated
soon to come off the production lines with a radar system that was slated soon
to work.

This appointment suited Dowding perfectly. He
believed in radar and the Spitfire, and this was what he wanted: a chance to
put it all together and defend his homeland against the bombers. But he was
still very much alone in the belief that it could be done. The plum
appointment, given to a slightly younger contemporary named Arthur Harris, was
thought to be that of Bomber Command.

It was clear by now that Hitler was a growing
menace. What was not clear was how to defend against him. The Prime Minister,
Neville Chamberlain, thought Hitler could be reasoned with. Chamberlain’s
opponents in Parliament, headed by Winston Churchill, applied the term
appeasement
rather than reason. In the Air Ministry, the thinking was in favour of strength
through a bomber force that would deter any attack, and so the majority of
available funds were funnelled to Bomber Harris. Dowding stood alone, yet
resolute, in his belief that a strong fighter force would be a better
deterrent.

“The best defence of the country is the fear of
the fighter,” he argued, and halfway measures would be disastrous. Given a
sufficient force, no one would dare attack. Given a halfway decent force, he
could stop an attack eventually, but only after severe damage was done. Given
an insufficient force, enemy bombers would “destroy the productive capacity of
the country,” and then what use was Bomber Command?

By 1936, the hillside property of Bentley
Priory had passed into the hands of His Majesty’s government and was newly
established as the headquarters of Fighter Command. At nine o’clock in the
morning of July 14, Air Chief Marshal Hugh Caswall Tremenheere Dowding presented
himself at the front gate of the priory for the first time. His uniform was
correct to the smallest detail, his hat sat firmly and perfectly horizontal on
his head. Contrary to military custom worldwide, he did not take over his new
command with brass bands blaring and flags flying and ceremonial speeches
flowing. He arrived alone and unannounced; the guard at the gate didn’t know
who he was and inspected his pass carefully before allowing him entrance. No
one knew he was coming. The officer in charge of the priory wasn’t even there,
and so an embarrassed sergeant took him over the grounds.

This suited Stuffy perfectly. He took as his
office—which is kept today just as he left it—a large room with
floor-to-ceiling French windows overlooking a rose garden. He had his desk
placed with the windows to his left and back to take advantage of the sunlight
and so that he might easily swivel around to look out of them over Harrow Hill
to London sprawling in the distance. He took off his hat and, without any fuss,
got down to work. He had also taken a large white house called Montrose, in
Stanmore, the adjacent village, down the hill from the priory, and had brought
his sister Hilda to keep house for him. Leaving the domestic details to her, he
began setting up his command immediately.

In the still of the night, he would lie in bed
in that old house, thinking those thoughts that are best left unthought, of
death and desire and loneliness, of the empty void and dark despair, of his
lost love, Clarice, wandering alone and frightened through the void. Was she
trying to reach him, as he was trying to reach her? To think of her gone
forever was terrible; to think of her reaching out helplessly while he lay here
blind and deaf was even worse.

But for now these were thoughts that slid into
his mind only in the dark and lonely moments of the night. With the dawn he
awoke, pulled himself out of bed, and was driven up the hill. His waking hours
were filled, every minute of them, with the task of putting together England’s defence.
In this he was bound on one hand by the strict budgetary restrictions of a
government still reeling from the worldwide depression, and on the other hand
by the stubborn resistance to new ideas that permeated the Air Ministry and his
colleagues on the Air Staff. Finally, he had to face the normal recalcitrance
of people asked to do something they had never heard of before—and to do it in
a hurry.

He needed, for example, modern airports that
wouldn’t sink in a sea of mud when it rained. The two main fighter airfields,
Biggin Hill and Kenley, like nearly all of those scattered around England, were
made of grass over a clay base. When it rained, the grass would sink and the
clay would rise and it all became a nonoperational quagmire. Dowding wanted
concrete runways.

According to Lord Balfour, “senior officers who
long ago had surrendered the pilot’s seat for the office chair resisted this
innovation which they considered unnecessary, dangerous, and expensive.” . . .
Dowding pleaded for hard runways, telling the Air Staff ‘During the winter of
1936/37 there were three consecutive weeks during which not a single aircraft
could take off or land at Kenley.’ But as late as 1938 the Air Staff declared
there was no need to plan for hard runways.” The idea of training on anything
except a grass field was blasphemy to those who had been brought up on pure,
natural, organic grass. They argued that training accidents would increase in
number and severity, since on a grass field, you could wander around as you
pleased when you landed, but with concrete runways, the slightest deviation
would lead to the plane s swerving off the runway onto . . . the grass?

The argument didn’t make sense, but perhaps for
that very reason, it was made heatedly. (If you can’t generate light, settle
for heat.) Dowding also needed a brand new operational system to pass the
information from the incoming radar plots to his fighter pilots. This began
with telephone lines that wouldn’t be easily disrupted by bombs. He went to the
Air Staff for funds to put in place a web of underground lines connecting all
the eastern and south-eastern coast. The staff argued that it would be a
ridiculous waste of funds to provide such a costly scheme, which would be useful
only if the proposed radar system actually turned out to work. Dowding replied
that it had to work.

“Yes, well, let’s just wait and see,” was the
reply.

“We can’t afford to wait,” he said, looking
over his shoulder at the Luftwaffe growing like a cancer in Germany.

“Hard runways, underground telephone lines,”
they grumbled. “The man’s mad.”

Which is what they had said about the man who
first proposed the tank. But also what has been said about every man who thinks
he’s Napoleon or Jesus. And so day after day he argued, they objected, he came
back with answers to their objections, they objected to his answers . . .

Watson-Watt and Wilkins proposed a system of
radio transmitters, to be named the Chain Home, or CH, towers, lining the
south-eastern coasts, sending their beams out over the waters, linked to
receivers that would pick up the echoes of any plane venturing into their
airspace. Dowding embraced the scheme enthusiastically and took it to the Air
Ministry. Grudgingly, he was given permission to begin constructing them, but
only with the solemn provision that no towers were to be built anywhere they
might interfere with the grouse shooting. Dowding didn’t react to that
restriction with horror, with a growl, or even a grumble. He nodded, and got on
with it.

And so, inch by inch, month by month, argument
by argument, Dowding began building the aerial defence of England, turning the
country once more back into an island.

For each improvement, he had to fight for
funding and production priority with Harris, who thought that anyone who couldn’t
see the prime importance of bombers was a lunatic. He and Dowding went back a
long way, and all along the way, they had been adversaries. When Dowding had
been in Research, Harris had been in Plans, and their research and their plans
had collided headlong. “I had so many differences of opinion with Stuffy. . . .
I had a major fight [about] instruments for navigation and blind flying [for my
bombers]—and I couldn’t afford to be polite when he started laying his ears
back and being stubborn. Stubborn as a mule, but a nice old boy really. He was
just out of touch with flying.”

To Harris, anyone who couldn’t understand that
the future lay with bombers rather than fighters was “just out of touch.” He
insisted that all aircraft production should be concentrated on bombers, but
Dowding managed to convince the Air Staff that he would need fifty-two
squadrons of fighters to mount a suitable defence over England. As of 1938, he
had twenty-nine, with no Spitfires and fewer than a hundred Hurricanes, none of
which could climb above fifteen thousand feet, while the Luftwaffe bombers
could reach twenty-five thousand.

We tend to get the impression that people
involved in Great Things do not have the same petty irritations that clutter
our own lives, but they are human too. Despite being told by Ellington in 1936
that he (Dowding) would replace Ellington as CAS upon the senior man’s
retirement in the next year, Dowding was told in 1937 that this was not to be
the case. “The S. of S. [Secretary of State for Air Viscount Swinton] has asked
me to let you know,” Ellington wrote, “. . . that he has decided that Newall
will succeed me as C.A.S.”

This was the same Cyril Newall whom Dowding had
bested in a field exercise in their subaltern days in India by rousing his own
men at four a.m. and attacking Newall’s group while they were eating breakfast.
Though they were near contemporaries, Dowding was senior to Newall by a few
months and had hoped “to reach the top of the tree,” as he put it. So, “naturally
it came as somewhat of a blow. But when I look back on this incident in the
light of later events, I see how fortunate this decision really was.”

It was more than “somewhat” of a blow. He and
Newall were the two most senior men in the RAF, and their careers had grown
side by side with the normal competition between two keen officers. Before the
higher-ups’ change of heart, when Dowding had heard that he himself would be
the next CAS, Dowding had been pleased but not surprised. As slightly the
senior of the two, he would expect to be the natural choice unless there was a
serious problem with him. And now he was told that indeed he was not the
choice; the clear inference was that there certainly was a serious problem with
him.

As in fact there was. He saw the future of war
in the air more clearly than anyone else, but the result was not the immediate
admiration of his peers but rather their contempt, sprinkled liberally with
irritation. Harris’s opinion that he was out of touch with flying was the
consensus among those who advocated the bomber offense over the fighter defence,
and they were in the majority. Thus the contempt and the irritation grew
steadily as Dowding, without regard for the feelings and needs of others, with
characteristic obstinacy and without taking the time or making the effort to
schmooze his compatriots, relentlessly fought for what he saw as his God-given
light.