A Summer Bright and Terrible (26 page)

If either Rogers St. John or Billy Graham had
understood anything about the battle they would have realized that the British
fighters were single-seaters: There wasn’t any crew, there wasn’t anyone except
the pilot, there wasn’t anyone who could have seen the pilot dead and another
figure at the controls. The whole story was just made up by the novelist, but
now millions of people have Billy Graham’s word that the world was saved by
angels. He ended his sermon by quoting again from Rogers St. John’s novel: “There
just wasn’t any other way to explain how the RAF, outnumbered by planes so much
better and outgunned 100 to 1, how they won the Battle of Britain—even now,
with hindsight and information, nobody can figure that one.”

Well, we can figure it. The German planes weren’t
better; there was nothing better than the Spitfire. And although the Brits were
outnumbered, it was nothing like 100 to 1; it was more like 3 to 2. Finally,
above all, the British won because they had radar and the proper organization
to back it up.
That
was Dowding’s contribution, not his angels.

He didn’t need angels; he needed pilots. A
Spitfire that rolled out of the factory was immediately as good as, or even
better than, the lost one it replaced, but a new pilot was little better than
fodder for the Messerschmitts’ cannon until he learned to fly the Spit as if he
were part of it, and this was not easy to do. A modern fighter was a high-spirited
airplane, and a dogfight was a contest of twisting, gut-wrenching aerobatics.
Learning to throw these beasts around in the air, taking them to the extreme
that their structures could bear without going an inch past it, took long
training. America’s first ace in the war, Buzz Wagner, and our top-scoring ace,
Dick Bong, both lost their lives in training accidents after their fighting was
done, learning to fly new fighters.

Dowding was back in the nightmare of his past.
In the First World War, he had railed against his chief’s orders to send his
fledgling pilots up to fight, arguing passionately that they needed more
experience, that they would just go up to be killed. Now it was the same, only
more so; now he was the chief, and he had no choice but to send them up.

Because every day the Luftwaffe came back.
Every day the radar would report massive formations building up over France,
heading out over the Channel, coming in to bomb Dowding’s airports and his
radar stations. On Saturday and Sunday, August 17 and 18, the bombers returned.
Inexorably they blackened the skies, and the radar shacks exploded and the
aerodromes were ruined with craters and the hangars were burned down, and the
wrecks of Spitfires and Hurricanes littered the runways and the countryside.

Every day more Spitfires came out of the
factories, and new pilots, trained barely enough to take off and land, came out
of Training Command to fly them. Every day they clambered into the air to defend
the land, following the directions of the remaining radar stations, small
penny-packets of fighters diving out of the sun to attack the intruders.
Somehow those “last few Spitfires” kept clawing at the Messerschmitts and
dropping the Dorniers from the bright, sunlit sky.

At noon on the eighteenth, twelve Spits were
scrambled to attack three hundred enemy aircraft over Kent. At one o’clock,
Biggin Hill was attacked, and at the same time fifty bombers hit Kenley high
up. Meanwhile, another German squadron zoomed in low, strewing bombs across the
aerodrome, cutting all communications, leaving this important sector station in
such ruins that ambulances blocked every access road. It was useless for the
next three days.

At two o’clock a massive raid came in to the
east. Fighter Command responded by protecting its airfields there, but the
bombers went for the Poling radar station and knocked it out of action for a
week. An hour later, a formation of Me 109s swept in over Manston and destroyed
more aircraft on the ground before they had a chance to take off. In the early
evening, five more raids hit Kent, dropping their bombs throughout a wide area.

At the end of the day, the Luftwaffe had lost
nearly a hundred planes, but the British had lost fifty. More importantly, the
RAF had lost more than twenty irreplaceable pilots dead or in hospital, lost
one of their prime radar stations, and suffered severe damage to several
aerodromes. The straws were piling high, and the camel’s back was breaking.

On Monday, August 19, it rained.

The aerodromes were quiet. The pilots
slept. Exhausted, worn out, finally they had a day of rest. The WAAFs deep
underground in the Operations Rooms couldn’t hear the rain, but they could hear
the quiet in their earphones, the lovely, calming quiet.

The mechanics had time to tune their engines.
The craters that maimed the airfields were filled in. The bullet holes were
repaired. Dowding had time to review the situation.

It was not a pleasant situation. Close to two
hundred Luftwaffe planes had been shot down in the last four days, but although
the German losses far outstripped those of the British, Fighter Command ended
up even worse off. Dowding had lost the use of most of his frontline airfields,
many of his most experienced pilots, and several of his all-important radar
stations. By Goring’s orders, the radar stations were low-priority targets, but
they had been constructed in such a rushed and harried manner that little
effort had been put into camouflaging or protecting them. It had been all
Dowding could do to get them ready in time; now he bitterly regretted the time
wasted arguing with the Air Ministry over their necessity, the time and money
wasted on Lindemann’s silly schemes, simply to pacify Churchill.

But he threw such thoughts behind him. One of
the comforts of not having enough time to do what is necessary is that one
doesn’t waste time on unprofitable regrets. As Dr. Johnson noted, the imminence
of death concentrates the mind wonderfully. So what was it that he could do?

Getting together with Keith Park, he emphasized
that they must reorganize in line with his original plans. In particular, No.
12 Group had been wasted in the preceding weeks. That afternoon, Park issued a
new directive to his Controllers: “If all our squadrons around London are off
the ground engaging enemy mass attacks, ask No. 12 Group or Command Controller
to provide squadrons to patrol [our] aerodromes.”

Dowding made sure that the message was passed
on to Leigh-Mallory, who immediately informed all his squadron commanders to be
ready, they were finally about to be called into the fight. Douglas Bader told
him in turn that when he was called on by 11 Group, he wasn’t going to send off
two or three of his men to combat twenty or thirty Messerschmitts. He would
take his whole squadron with him. All he needed was sufficient warning, and
then they’d see what a massed force could do.

Leigh-Mallory didn’t remind him that so far it
hadn’t worked, that there wasn’t sufficient warning time. To him, as to Bader,
it was simply up to 11 Group to give them enough time. Simple problems demand
simple solutions—to a simple mind.

For the moment, though, all was quiet, damp
with rain. All problems were hidden by the lovely clouds that finally came to
hide the cruel sun of that bright summer. From Monday through Friday, August 19
through 24, each day dawned darkly; each day the worn-out pilots opened one eye
and looked lovingly at the drizzle, then closed it, rolled over, and went back
to sleep.

Occasionally the sun broke through over
England, and a few bombers would slip through the clouds and drop a few bombs,
but hardly anyone noticed. In Germany the mood was not quite so sanguine, as
Goring summoned his group leaders and lambasted them furiously. Why had Fighter
Command not yet been destroyed? He called them cowards and incompetents and
fired half of them. He promoted a group of young Turks, fighter pilots who had
distinguished themselves in the action, to take their place. Chief among these
was a heavily moustached veteran of the Spanish Civil War, Adolf Galland, who
became the youngest general in the German armed forces. Goring set them loose,
telling them to choose their own targets, bomb whatever they liked—except for
London. Hitler reserved the right to make that decision himself.

It was hard to understand Hitler. At the
beginning of the war, the British had feared that London would be the first
target, the “fat cow,” in Churchill’s phrase, sitting there helplessly to “attract
birds of prey.” London’s children had been evacuated to the country to avoid
the bombs, which didn’t fall. Day after day, the bombers came, but they came to
the coastal towns and the aerodromes, to Birmingham and Coventry, to villages
such as Brize Norton and Harwell, to Rochester and Church Fenton. Not a
solitary bomb was dropped on London, and no one understood why.

It was said that Hitler had a respect for great
cities, due to his architectural background, or that he still hoped England
would surrender and didn’t want to stir up animosity by bombing their capital,
but neither of these makes sense. To be sure, nothing about a sociopath makes
sense if one looks at him as at a sane man. For whatever reason, London
remained inviolate, safe.

Every morning, Goring looked out the
window, cursing the clouds, reading the weather reports and throwing them to
the floor. He had promised Hitler victory over Fighter Command within a few
days, and now the days were stretching out to weeks. Further delays were
unthinkable, for the autumn was fast approaching. Where was the
verdammte
sun? What was keeping it hidden?

At Bentley Priory, Dowding knew the answer. God
was holding the sun in His hands, granting Fighter Command the respite it
needed. He had prayed for radar, he had worked to provide modern fighters and
concrete airfields and underground phone lines, but all that, in the end, was
nothing without the benevolence and active, personal intervention of God. “I
pay my homage to those dear boys, those gallant boys, who gave their all that
our nation might live,” he would later write. “I pay my tribute to their
leaders and commanders; but I say with absolute conviction that, but for God’s
intervention, the Battle of Britain would have been lost.”

On Saturday, August 24, God evidently decided
enough was enough. The sun came out again.

Twenty-six

The sun came out, and so did the Luftwaffe.
They came swarming out of France like angry hornets whose hive has been
attacked. At 8:30 in the morning a hundred bombers and fighters hit Dover,
which was not a particularly important target. The reason became clear at ten o’clock,
when the bombers turned for home. At that point, a new group of German fighters
swept in, hoping to catch the exhausted defenders low on fuel and ammunition.
The radar operators were alert, however, and the defenders retired, leaving the
Me’s wandering over the English countryside free and sassy, but impotent.

The raids resumed shortly after lunch, this
time in earnest. Every one of 11 Group’s airfields was attacked. Some of the
raids were beaten off, but Tangmere, Hornchurch, and Manston were devastated.
Every squadron of 11 Group was engaged, and radar picked up still more bombers.
In accord with Park’s instructions, the Controllers called on 12 Group to
protect the North Weald aerodrome, and three minutes later, Bader’s 242
Squadron was scrambling. But instead of racing off to North Weald, the first
Hurricanes to be airborne turned and circled around, following Bader’s orders,
while the next section took off. And then both sections circled again while the
third section took off.

By the time the entire squadron was scrambled
it was too late. They arrived over North Weald to find the skies empty except
for a black cloud slowly rising, twisting in the wind, blanketing the burning
aerodrome. Bader called the Controllers for instructions: Where were the bloody
Huns?

They were gone, sailing safely home, leaving
behind battered and burning airfields at Hornchurch and Hawkinge, at Manston
and Croydon, at Tangmere and Middle Wallop, at all the fighter airfields
ringing London. They left Fighter Command battered and bruised, teetering on
its last legs. Another few weeks of such attacks, Dowding realized, and Goring
would be right: The invasion could take place unimpeded.

And then the Ford God intervened once again, in
a
very
mysterious way. His wonders to perform. That night, the Germans
bombed London.

For the moment, nobody understood the
significance of that act. Not even Dowding realized that it contained the seeds
of England’s deliverance and his personal downfall. At the very beginning of
the war, London was assumed to be the main target of any enemy. But then, as
month followed month and no bombs dropped, it seemed that London was the safest
place to be. The evacuees drifted back, and life settled down again.

So now, when the bombs finally fell, the only
surprise was that it had taken so long. Nobody understood that the Luftwaffe
had just made the biggest mistake of the war, for at the moment nothing of much
significance seemed to have happened, and, indeed, the next day the war
continued as before.

The airfields at Manston and Warmwell were
attacked by three hundred bombers, and although most of them were beaten off, a
few scattered bombs fell, by chance severing the telephone lines to both
airfields and severely disrupting the incoming radar information. As soon as
these raids retired, another hundred came barrelling in and the bombs continued
to fall.