A Summer Bright and Terrible (18 page)

In the Battle of France, Dowding lost half his
Hurricanes, and more were lost over Dunkirk, together with some of his hoarded
Spitfires, which were first committed to action there. Then came another
respite, shorter this time, during which more Hurris and Spits came off the
production lines, more pilots were trained, and the worst of the radar glitches
were fixed. When the Battle of Britain began, in that summer that was both too
long and too short, too bright and too terrible, Dowding and his chicks were
still not quite ready, but they were slowly getting there.

Just barely in the nick of time.

The summer was too long in that it seemed
to take forever for autumn to come, and with it the autumnal gales that would
sweep in from the Atlantic to roil the Channel and make it impossible for any
invasion force to cross. The function of Fighter Command was not to defeat the
Luftwaffe but to prevent its own defeat, to stay in existence and prevent the
Luftwaffe from gaining air superiority until those saving winds should blow.

The summer was too short in that there wasn’t
enough time to prepare, to manufacture enough Spitfires and Hurricanes, to cure
the glitches in the radar system, to train the masses of operators who would
have to run the observers’ sightings and the radar plots into a controlled
system of fighter deployment, to produce more fighter pilots to replace those
killed. Every day seemed a race against time, while every month seemed to
stretch out endlessly.

The summer was too bright; it never seemed to
rain. Every morning, the pilots would roll out of bed and look up at the clear
bright sky and ask each other, What’s happened to the typical English summer?
Where the fuck are the clouds, the fog, the rain that would give us a day’s
respite from the Luftwaffe?

The summer was too terrible, as planes and
pilots tumbled burning out of the sky.

The battle that began that summer was
different from the one everyone had prepared for. When Dowding had argued that
he needed fifty squadrons of fighters to defend England, he and everyone else
had been thinking of German bombers coming from Germany, from so far away that
German fighters could not make the trip. Now the German bombers would be coming
from much closer bases in occupied France, and they would be accompanied by
escorting fighters. The British Spitfires would have to fight their way through
a cloud of Messerschmitts to reach the bombers, and fifty squadrons was no
longer sufficient. But that was all they had.

This unanticipated problem was somewhat
countered by Hitler’s having built his air force as a tactical weapon of light
bombers to support the army, and not, as Giulio Douhet had envisaged, a
strategic force of heavy bombers to destroy cities. Hitler intended to win the
war not by terror bombing but by invasion, and to do this, he had to destroy
Fighter Command rather than England’s cities.

Lindemann, incidentally, misunderstood this
problem. “I assume that day bombers are not the problem,” he wrote, “as our
fighters can deal with them.” He was worried about night bombing, which did in
fact present a problem later, but in the summer of 1940 the day bombers were
the menace. Night bombers could not be found in the dark sides, let alone shot
down, but their effect was minimal since the same darkness that shielded them
also shielded their targets. Churchill, while still as fond as ever of the
Prof, had learned by this time that the defence of the realm was to be left to
Dowding. Lindemann’s schemes against night bombers, including searchlights
mounted on night fighters and aerial mines dropped by parachute onto the
bombers, were given their trial, and failed, and that was that. The real fight
took place in the light of day.

During June, the Luftwaffe probed England’s
air defences with single bombers by day and night, doing little damage. Dowding
responded with flights of three fighters at a time. A few bombers were shot
down in the daylight hours, a few fighters were lost—mostly by accidents and
mostly during abortive attempts to send off the Spits and Hurris by night.
Radar had not yet advanced far enough to be made small enough to be fit into an
airplane, and these high-spirited thoroughbred planes were difficult enough to
fly by day, let alone by night. No night fighter ever caught sight of a German
bomber, let alone got into position to attack one, let alone shoot one down.

On July 4, the Luftwaffe attacked for the first
time in force. At 8:41 that morning, thirty-three Stukas suddenly dropped out
of the clouds to hit the Portsmouth naval base. Although radar had picked them
up, it had not done so soon enough. What’s more, because the aerodrome Dowding
had fought for in this sector wasn’t yet completed, the Hurricanes were still
miles away when the bombs began dropping. In four minutes a merchant tanker and
an antiaircraft ship were left burning and sinking, and the Stukas had
disappeared. One of them was shot down by antiaircraft fire, but the British
fighters arrived on the scene too late.

At two o’clock that afternoon, a convoy sailing
through the Straits of Dover was hit by a formation of twin-engine Dorniers.
This time eight Hurricanes intercepted them, but were beaten away by thirty escorting
Messerschmitts.

At six-thirty that evening, radar reported an
incoming raid, and nine Hurris were scrambled. This time there were no bombers
approaching; there was nothing but an overwhelming force of Messerschmitts. Two
British fighters were shot down, one Me was lost.

Such was the opening phase of the Battle of
Britain. Goring’s strategy was obvious and clever, and there wasn’t much
Dowding could do about it. Although with the fall of France and the
availability of the French coastal aerodromes, England was within the range of
the German fighters, it was just barely within their range. The further inland
they had to fly, the less gas they would have to enable them to fight.
Therefore Goring ordered attacks on coastal targets, ships, and naval bases,
which the RAF would have to defend. When the British fighters come up, he
ordered, shoot them down.

Dowding’s strategy was more subtle, and poor
Goring never did catch on. When the July 4 fighting was over, the morning
Stukas returned to base and reported that they had encountered no fighter defence.
The afternoon Dorniers came home and reported only an ineffective fighter defence.
The thirty-six evening Messerschmitts came home and reported they had been
opposed by only nine Hurricanes.

What was Goring to conclude from all this? The
prime strategy of any general from time immemorial, since before the time of Alexander
the Great, was to attempt to meet enemy forces with superior numbers. When the
Stukas were unopposed, perhaps the RAF had been caught by surprise, but when
the Dorniers and the Messerschmitts were met by only a few fighters, and when
Dowding sent eight Hurricanes up against thirty Messerschmitts in the afternoon
and nine up against thirty-six in the evening, it was clear to Goring that
Dowding had only a very few fighters at his disposal.

It was the obvious conclusion, and it was
wrong. As the battle commenced that summer, the Luftwaffe enjoyed only a slight
advantage in numbers of fighters. (The Germans, however, did have hundreds of
bombers, which the RAF had to attack. Moreover, Goring could pick the targets
and therefore concentrate his fighters, while Fighter Command had to spread its
force over the entire prospective battlefield, namely, the length and breadth
of England.) Dowding’s strategy was based on his understanding that he didn’t
have to win the battle; he only had to avoid losing it. He had to keep Fighter
Command viable throughout the summer; he had to keep it ready to oppose the
invasion. He had to keep his planes flying until the autumn winds came blasting
in.

Goring’s orders were different. He had to
destroy Dowding. He never understood that Dowding didn’t have to destroy him,
but had only to survive. So throughout the month of July, Goring sent his
bombers against the British convoys and their naval bases and coastal defences,
and time after time, a few British fighters—“penny-packets,” Dowding called
them—would rise up to defend as best they could. Goring was happy to report to
Hitler that his failure to wipe out the BEF at Dunkirk wasn’t really a failure
after all: The aerial fighting over France and particularly over Dunkirk had
practically wiped out the British fighters; there were only a few left.

In that first week of July, Hitler issued his
Directive No. 15, ordering his army, navy, and air staffs to begin coordinated
planning for the invasion of England.

Eighteen

Dowding was staking the entire outcome of
the war on two diaphanous hopes. One was a fatherly God who had let His people
down rather continuously throughout history, and the second was a complex,
untried system of control revolving around a brand new technologic development:
the detection of airplanes by radio waves.

To realize how vulnerable was his trust in God,
one has only to study the history of the Jewish people for the past three
thousand years. To realize how nearly impossible it was to organize a military
system around a new technology, consider the time when the tank was first
proposed (“The man’s mad!”). Or consider that by the time of the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941—a full year and a half after radar had
proved decisive in the Battle of Britain—American generals still had not
integrated radar into the U.S. defence. (An experimental set actually detected
the approaching Japanese forces, but the warning was ignored. Had it been acted
on, the disaster would have been prevented.)

Nevertheless, this is what Dowding proposed to
do. And, in fact, what he did.

He divided Fighter Command into Groups, the
two most important of which were Nos. 11 and 12. No. 12 Group was assigned the
north-east coast, which was the closest to the German airfields and so was
expected to bear the brunt of any attack from that quarter. To establish
command of this most important Group, in 1937 he chose Air Vice-Marshal
Trafford Leigh-Mallory, to Dowding’s everlasting regret.

Leigh-Mallory was an imposing man, especially once
he reached high rank. He was large, big-boned, and husky but not fat, with an
impressive moustache. In the First World War, he had been a pilot with the RFC,
but in Army Cooperation rather than fighters. Some people with that background,
being given command of a Fighter Group, would have been rather reserved,
unwilling to push their opinions. Leigh-Mallory belonged to the other group,
those who would compensate for a lack of experience by being overly aggressive.
This characteristic may have been even more exaggerated by his family
circumstance. Though an intelligent man with an honours degree in history from
Cambridge and an excellent athlete, he was always overshadowed by his brother
George Mallory, the most famous mountain climber in England’s history, who had
recently died on the crest of Mount Everest. On Mount Snowdon, there is a
celebrated climb known as Mallory’s Pipe, the official description of which
concludes: “This climb is totally impossible. It has been performed once, in
failing light, by Mr. G. H. L. Mallory.”

Put it all together, and you have an
intelligent, strong, aggressive and ambitious Air Vice-Marshal, not prone to
tolerate the opinions of others. He was perhaps a good man to be in command,
but not such a good man to be second in command.

For No. 11 Group, Dowding chose Keith Park, a
small, wiry, tough New Zealander who had become a fighter ace in the First
World War after being wounded and hospitalized in some of the worst infantry
battles of that war. He had left New Zealand as a common mud soldier, but after
the Somme, he had had enough. He might be crazy, but he wasn’t stupid. He tried
to join the RFC, to fight in the nice, clean air high above the sopping
trenches, but the RFC wasn’t accepting anyone with wounds as severe as his. So
through a compassionate medical officer, his medical records were “lost,” and
as a healthy soldier with combat experience, he was taken in by the RFC,
eventually becoming New Zealand’s top ace.

In April 1940, Dowding gave him command of No.
11 Group, which guarded the south-eastern corner of England, facing France
across the Channel. The original intention had been to expect German bombers
coming across the North Sea from Germany into No. 12 Group’s territory, with 11
Group serving as backup. But then in May, France had fallen and the Luftwaffe
had occupied the French airfields, bringing the south-eastern coast into the
spotlight as the expected hot spot.

Leigh-Mallory, as Dowding’s most senior
subordinate commander, expected to lead the defences wherever the Germans might
attack. He immediately asked for transfer to command 11 Group, but Dowding had
confidence in Park and kept the two men where they were.

His confidence in Park was justified by later
events. Moving Leigh-Mallory to 11 Group would have been disastrous. As it was,
Leigh-Mallory nearly brought the whole system crashing down around its ears.

Leigh-Mallory and Park couldn’t stand each
other. As Lord Balfour, the Under-Secretary for Air, put it, “These two very
different characters had individual views on air fighting strategy and tactics.
They disliked each other to the point of strong personal antipathy and took no
trouble to hide this fact from their staffs.”