A Summer Bright and Terrible (22 page)

The next day, Monday, August 12, again began
with a sweep by Me 109 fighters, but this was just a prelude to attacks on the
radar stations. Just after 8:30 in the morning, sixteen twin-engine
Messerschmitt 110 fighter-bombers took off from Calais. They crossed the
Channel south of Dover and flew along the coast.

In the wooden shack next to the radar
transmitters at Dover, the WAAF operator was watching the blip they produced on
her screen as they headed west. The Controller at Sector headquarters was
studying the map table, following the marker that signalled their progress and
trying to guess at their target. Then suddenly they broke into four sections
and swerved directly north.

The blip on the radar screen in the shack at
Dover reflected that change of course, and the WAAF operator called it to the
attention of the duty officer, who called in the news to Sector Control. He
murmured to the WAAF, “Looks like they’re coming right at us.”

She nodded assent, reached up to the hook over
her head, put on her tin hat, and continued to read off the coordinates as the
bombers dove in to the attack. The bombs hit a few moments later.

The bombers had broken into four sections. They
hit the radar stations at Dover, Rye, Pevensey, and Dunkirk (in Kent). The
wooden huts burst apart; the tin hats were no protection for the WAAFs. The
electronics, the power supplies, the men and women were shattered. Pieces of
arms and legs, tubes and cables, blood and electric sparks mingled in the wind,
and the stations went off the air. Other raids swept in unseen by the blinded
radar and hit airfields at Hawkinge and Lympne.

The wooden shacks were destroyed but the towers
still stood. Fragile and skinny, they appeared highly vulnerable, but the shock
waves of the bombs passed right through their open structure. And the shacks
that fell apart with the first bombs were just as easily rebuilt. The
electronics damage was more difficult to repair, the pieces of the people blown
apart were harder to gather, but by late afternoon, the WAAF operators who
survived had had their cups of tea and the stations were back on the air.

In the afternoon, the Luftwaffe came back, this
time heading for the fighter aerodromes and expecting to sweep in unseen past
the blasted radars, but again they were met by Spitfires and Hurricanes in
precisely the right place at the right time.

Goring was convinced by this that he had been
right all along. Martini was a fool. It was the same with all specialists, he
said. They exaggerated the importance of whatever they were working on. They
didn’t see the whole picture. “There doesn’t appear to be any point in
continuing attacks on radar sites,” he wrote to his commanders, “since not one
of those attacked has been put out of action.”

But, he continued, it didn’t matter. The
bombers had demolished the RAF main airfield at Manston and destroyed all the
Spitfires there, he said. In truth, they had hit Manston hard, but the bombs
had scattered around the grounds; not one Spit had been hit. They had destroyed
forty fighters the previous day, according to the reports brought back by the
Luftwaffe pilots, and another thirty-five today; the actual losses were
seventeen the previous day and the same number today. The Luftwaffe
reconnaissance photographs showed empty fighter bases, but in reality most of
the photos showed abandoned bases or those used by training or bomber
squadrons, so the absence of fighters on them was meaningless.

Goring believed the photos and the reports of
his pilots. The RAF was down to its last few Spitfires, he assured them. One or
two more days of dedicated action would finish the fighters off. The Attack of
the Eagles would end the history of England; the nation of shopkeepers would
drown in its own blood.

Twenty-two

AUGUST 13.

Adlerangriff!

It rained.

Dark clouds, heavy rain blanketed the
French airfields. The Luftwaffe commanders got out of bed, looked out the
window, and went back to bed. All of them did, except for two Group leaders.

Oberst Johannes Fink, commanding seventy-four
Dornier bombers, wasn’t going to let the weather interfere with his mission for
der Fuhrer.
Just before dawn he led his planes off the ground and
through the muck, and was happy to find that the commander of his fighter
escort also had not been deterred by the rain. They rendezvoused off the French
coast and headed for England.

But they were alone. Nobody else took off, and
as dawn failed to lighten the dark sky, Goring decided to postpone the Attack
of the Eagles. Meanwhile, as Fink steered around a large cloud formation over
the Channel he found that the fighters, which had gone around the other side of
the cloud, had abruptly disappeared. He didn’t know they had received a radio
signal cancelling their mission. Radio communications were haphazard in those
days, and Fink never heard the signal. He wondered about the fighters’
disappearance, he worried about continuing alone, and then he flew on.

His bad luck at missing the recall message
turned around. Although his bombers were picked up by radar, the Observer Corps
gave faulty directions as they passed overland. Sector Control sent five
squadrons, but four of them went off to the wrong place. One British fighter
squadron found them, but there were too many bombers to stop, and Fink’s planes
bombed the Eastchurch fighter base.

That is, they bombed Eastchurch, which they
thought was a fighter base but which was no longer in regular use. A squadron
of Spitfires did happen to be using it temporarily, and on the Germans’ return,
Oberst Fink reported the squadron destroyed. In fact, although the airfield was
badly damaged, only one Spit was destroyed.

Dowding, following events as they unfolded, was
worried. The Luftwaffe had been attacking shipping and naval ports, and his
chicks had been fighting them evenly in the air but had still been unable to
stop the massacre of the convoys. Now, if the Germans started attacking his
airfields, why wouldn’t they have the same success they had with the convoys?
If they did, Fighter Command was doomed.

He hoped that this morning’s attack on
Eastchurch was an isolated event; perhaps the Dorniers had gotten lost in the
bad weather and had simply attacked the first thing they saw. Please, he
thought, dear God.

During the raids all summer long he would sit
in the Operations Room at Bentley Priory and listen to the radio chatter as
plots showed up on the radar screens and as fighters were sent off to meet
them. It had been bad enough in the first war, when he had to send his boys off
to be killed. Waiting on the tarmac for the sound of their engines returning,
counting them as they came limping home. Six planes taking off and three or
four coming back, four planes taking off and one or two coming back, smoking,
shot up, on a wing and a prayer, as they said.

It was worse in this war because they had
radios, and he could hear them, from the first “Tally-ho, buggers at six o’clock!”
to the final, heartrending screams:

“Get this bastard off my tail!”

“Break! Break right!”

“I’m hit! Shit, I’m hit! Oh God—”

And then the screams, rattling in Dowding’s
ears, and the visions scorching his brain behind his eyes: the Spitfires, the
Hurricanes, his chicks clawing the canopy as fire clawed at their clothes, at
their skin, at their eyes, and the long, slow spin downward from twenty
thousand feet, and then finally the burst of flame as they hit the ground.

Sometimes they managed to bail out. It wasn’t
easy, in a hail of bullets, in a diving, spinning plane flipping over and over
at three hundred miles an hour. Too often they didn’t, too often the screams
reverberated over and over and . . .

Late in the afternoon, the clouds parted,
the rain stopped, and the Attack of the Eagles began in earnest. In Bentley
Priory, Dowding watched the markers on the map table being placed one after the
other, heading not for the Channel ports but for his airfields. There was no
longer any hope that the morning’s raid had been an anomaly; no, it was the
beginning of a shift in German tactics. He watched in dismay as the raids came
in one after the other, sailing right past the coastal targets and heading
straight for his airfields.

He kept his face inscrutable, for a commander
must not show fear, but he was afraid. When he had fought Churchill, had railed
against sending his boys to France, he hadn’t been afraid of their facing the
Luftwaffe in the air there, but he was afraid that without radar they would be
destroyed on the ground. Here in England, they had radar warning, but they
couldn’t stay in the air continuously. If the Luftwaffe were able to send in
continuous fleets of bombers, the second fleet would catch his fighters refuelling
on the ground after fighting off the first fleet.

Even if the bombers came over while the
fighters were in the air and found only empty airfields, they could destroy the
hangars, runways, and supporting equipment; without these, his chicks could not
fly, his fighters could not fight. The battle would be lost.

All afternoon the bombers came, roaming over
the countryside, searching out Dowding’s airfields. But the German
reconnaissance proved faulty; the intelligence they had reaped from pre-war
spies proved out-of-date. The bombers hit the Eastchurch and Worthy Down
aerodromes, but these hadn’t been used by Fighter Command for years. They
bombed Lee-on-Solent, which housed only naval bombers. They bombed the city of
Southampton but missed the Spitfire factory there.

Even when they had the right targets, they
missed. Middle Wallop was a vital airfield, but the bombers hit an empty field
close by at Andover instead. They did catch Detling and practically destroyed
it along with twenty-two parked airplanes—but Detling was not one of Dowding’s
airfields, and none of the planes destroyed were fighters.

At the end of the day Goring was triumphant.
The returning Messerschmitt pilots claimed they had destroyed eighty-four
British fighters in the air, while the bomber crews chimed in with an
additional fifty-plus destroyed on the ground. The Attack of the Eagles had
been a success, he wired Hitler; in a few more days, there would be no British
fighters in the sky. Plans for the invasion could proceed.

The true numbers were different. Dowding had
lost thirteen of his chicks in the air, not eighty-four. The bomber crews were
more realistic in their estimate, for nearly fifty planes had been destroyed on
the ground. But only one of them was a fighter. The Luftwaffe lost sixty-four.

Only thirteen of his lads had died in the
air. Only thirteen young, healthy boys with their whole lives ahead of them had
had those lives gauged out, had died in the most horrible way imaginable, alone
in the sky four miles above the earth, falling, burning, screaming for their
mothers. Radio silence was supposed to be practiced; they weren’t supposed to
use their radios for anything other than to warn of incoming bandits. But when
the flames leaped up between the seats, when their throats were belching blood,
when the canopy was jammed and they couldn’t get out, couldn’t escape the
flames and the bullets and the cannon, they did tend to forget standing orders.
They did tend to scream.

In the evening, when the day’s battle was over,
Dowding would have his chauffeur drive him to one or two of the neighbouring
airfields to talk to his boys, not so much to encourage them as to learn from
their lips what was happening up in the fighting skies. Then back he would go
to his office in the priory to finish off the day’s paperwork. Finally, late at
night, exhausted yet needing to be up in a few hours at dawn to be ready for
the next day’s onslaught, he would be driven back down the hill to his home,
Montrose. The car would leave him at the front of that large white house, where
two short steps led up to the door that was locked in the old-fashioned way, to
be opened by his large brass key. It usually took him a few moments to fit the key
in, for there was no light in the blackout. The driver would wait until he
found the lock and opened the door, and then would drive away.

These days were terrible, yet the nights were
worse. During the day he would concentrate on the battle, would worry about
what was happening, would wonder if they could hold out until the autumn. That
was bad enough, but at night, inside his quiet house, he would struggle to put
away these thoughts of despair, and it was then that the voices of his chicks
came back to him. It was then that their faces shone bright and eager—only to
be torn away by the horrible flames.

The house would be dark. His wife was dead and
his son was a fighter pilot, flying a Spitfire with No. 74 Squadron at
Hornchurch, in the heart of the battle. Dowding’s sister, Hilda, kept house for
him. She would not have left any lights on, so that when he opened the door,
there would be no telltale streak of light into the blacked-out night. But one
night as he closed the door behind him and for a moment leaned against it, worn
out, feeling old, vulnerable, and guilty for being alive when so many were
dead, the dark was broken by a soft, diffuse light coming from the parlour.

Walking to it, he saw a small fire burning in
the fireplace. Though the days were hot, the summer evenings were often chilly
and Hilda must have lit the fire and forgotten about it when she went to bed.
He smiled. This would be something to tease her about in the morning. He sat
down in front of it, staring hypnotized into the flickering flames, thinking of
his fighter pilots, his boys, his chicks. The gayest band of brothers that ever
flew into battle.