A Summer Bright and Terrible (5 page)

Let’s reconstruct the situation. After
returning from Elba, Napoleon has roused the French people to his side and is
now ensconced in Paris. Here comes the Duke of Wellington and the Prussian
general, Gebhard Leberecht von Blucher, leading two prongs of armies. Blucher
is defeated by one of Napoleon’s lieutenants and retreats. Wellington sets up
on a hill near the village of Waterloo.

What should Napoleon do? He can remain in Paris
and await siege, or he can attack Wellington. Two questions arise: First, how
strong is Wellington? His forces are visible on the slope of the hill, but he
has a reputation for hiding more forces on the back slope. Second, where is
Blucher? Is he retreating back to Prussia, or has he regrouped and headed to
Waterloo to help Wellington?

Napoleon feels that Wellington is bluffing, that
he hopes Napoleon will think he has more troops behind the hill since he’s done
that before, and so Napoleon will hide in Paris. Then, when more British troops
arise, Wellington will attack. Also, Napoleon’s intuition and understanding of
psychology lead him to believe that Blucher doesn’t have the heart for more war
and is on his way back to Prussia.

So he attacks the British troops on the hill at
Waterloo. But Wellington did have more troops hidden, and as they arise from
the back slope of the hill, Blucher suddenly emerges from the woods with his
Prussian army to roll up Napoleon’s flank, and Waterloo is lost.

Balloons would have been able to look over the
hill and find the hidden British troops, and would also have seen Blucher long
before he made his disastrous appearance. The course of history would have been
quite different.
But now, in
the early years of the twentieth century, Napoleon is long gone and so is the
idea of any military use of the air, despite the success of the Wright
brothers. The British army has bought a few of these flimsy airplanes, but it
cannot find any use for them.

Until, that is, a young staff officer steps
outside the constricting box of military thinking . . .

Four

We don’t know very much about Dowding’s
early life, except that it seems to have been a normal one for a soldier of his
generation. But, of course, what was normal for his generation is not quite
that for ours.

Though the two world wars brought us into the
modern era, their roots lay far back in the dim mists of Victorian times.
Dowding, who like most of the war’s commanders was born at the height of Queen
Victoria’s reign, grew up in that mixture of naive credulity and scientific
optimism that characterized the times. During the thirty-two years from his birth
to the outbreak of the First World War, the world was an exciting place to a
person of inquisitive mind. Science had broken out of its bottle like a wild
genie, and the universe had become, incredibly, both more understandable and
more mystifying. Nothing, it seemed, was beyond the promise of science to
understand and control—but not quite yet. Radio waves had sprung out of the
aether—indeed, Dowding was the first person in the world to communicate
directly from an airplane to a ground station—and X-rays had appeared out of
nowhere, leading to the even more mysterious emanations of radioactivity.
Einstein proclaimed that space and time did not absolutely exist, and the world
was shown to be immeasurably older than the biblical term of six thousand years.

But other scientific investigations led to
mysteries as yet unfathomable. Television was promised but proved elusive.
N-rays were discovered and then lost again. Evolution went off on myriad tracks
that dwindled to dead ends. Malthus showed that the world could not survive the
next hundred years; Marconi received radio messages from Mars; Matthews
invented the death ray; and Sir William Crookes, president of the most
respected organization of scientists in the world, the British Association,
published a series of investigations into the spirit world. Nothing, it seemed,
lay beyond the reach—if not the grasp—of science. Nothing was impossible,
though much remained mysterious, only dimly glimpsed, going bump, bump, bump in
the forests of the night.

As a child growing into a young man, Hugh
Dowding was a normal product of those times; that is, he ignored them. Neither
scientifically nor psychically acute, he displayed little interest in all these
revolutionary thoughts swirling in the wind. Though at a later and crucial
period in his life the atmosphere he had unconsciously absorbed in his youth
would surface, at the time he was concerned solely with his own life, with
finding his own way, which was as difficult for him as it is for most of us.

Often described as a typical dour Scotsman, he
was nothing of the kind unless environment tops heredity. He came from a long
line of Englishmen who would seem right at home in the classic villages
described by Agatha Christie. On both sides his forebears were mostly clerics,
earning small but regular livings in various English parishes, with one
great-grandfather who won and lost a fortune, a maternal grandfather who was a
general, and an eccentric uncle, nicknamed “Beelzebub,” who retired from the
navy as an admiral and left for South America to catch insects. His father was
an English schoolteacher who bought his own preparatory school in Scotland, and
so Hugh was born there, in Moffat, in 1882. Growing up as
the son of the headmaster, Hugh decided
that the only thing he didn’t want to be in life was a schoolteacher. But then
what was one to do? The usual choices for the son of a poor professional were
the Church, law, medicine, or the army or navy.

Hugh chose the army for a reason that any
schoolchild could understand: All the other professions required the study of
Greek.

And so, upon graduation from Winchester, he
gained enrolment in a one-year army course that would guarantee him a
commission in the Royal Engineers. All he had to do was complete the course
successfully. Unfortunately, the impetus of not having to learn Greek wasn’t
sufficient to induce him to take the course seriously, and he failed. “I would
have got the commission if I had kept my place, but I failed through laziness,
he admitted. He wasn’t tossed out of the army completely, but he was forced to
take a lower position, as a subaltern gunner in the artillery.

Which wasn’t at all bad. The year was 1900, he
was eighteen years old, and life as a subaltern in an army at peace was rather
pleasant. He was soon sent to India, where he enthusiastically took up horse
racing and polo. The other traditional occupations of the young officers,
drinking, carousing, and fornicating, didn’t interest him as much, and so it
was here that he earned his nickname, “Stuffy.” But he thought it was the
others who were the stuffy ones; they were the ones who weren’t open to new
ideas, as he soon discovered.

Aside from the pleasant life he led, several
episodes confirmed his opinion of the closed-mindedness of others. This
assessment would replay itself later, in more important times. In one of the
ongoing army exercises, Dowding was given command of one section, while the
opposing group of Ghurkas was to be led by one of his contemporaries, another
subaltern, named Cyril Newall. The exercise was scheduled to begin at six a.m.,
but Dowding roused his troops and had them on the march by four o’clock. He
caught the Ghurkas at their breakfast, and routed them. This was the beginning
of a long rivalry with Newall, which would
have serious consequences in 1940.

At other times his initiative served only to
get him in trouble. The first time he took his turn as garrison orderly
officer, he found that one of his duties was to inspect the daily meat ration.
Not knowing anything about what to look for in such an inspection, he bought a
manual that warned that sometimes old animals were foisted off on the military,
and that an inspector could determine the age by noting that the vertebral
spaces should be at least a quarter inch wide. When he took a look and found no
visible spaces at all, he decided that the animal was too old and so rejected
it.

Which meant that the garrison had no meat that
day. When the commanding officer was served his vegetarian meal, he glowered at
Dowding “in a most unchristian temper,” as Dowding recalled, telling him that
the next time he held the duty, to mind his own bloody business.

This lesson was reinforced when he held the
duty of range officer. His job was to take the artillery’s target out to sea,
to a distance of roughly three miles. At that point a flag flying from a hill
beside the station would be lowered, and he was then to drop the target, move
comfortably away, and record the accuracy with which the cannons bombarded the
target.

Since it was Dowding’s first time as range
officer, the Colonel of the Regiment accompanied him. They sailed away the
requisite three miles, and Dowding proposed to stop and drop the target. But
the Colonel pointed out that the flag had not yet dropped, and ordered him to
keep going. And going, and going . . .

Despite Dowding’s protestations that the cannon
had a range of only five miles, they kept going. Finally, when they were close
to fifteen miles out at sea, the flag dropped. Dowding stopped the launch,
released the target, and watched as the cannon fire didn’t come close to
reaching it.

As they returned, Dowding remarked that he
expected to catch
hell for
this. The Colonel didn’t see why, since Dowding had followed his orders
perfectly, but agreed to test the situation. When they reached headquarters,
the Colonel waited outside while Dowding went in alone. Immediately, the sound
of loud shouts was heard, asking why he had sailed so totally out of range, if
his entire family were imbeciles or was it only him, did he have any idea what
the range of a cannon was, and, if he did, did he care or did he think he had
been dispatched on the launch to enjoy a leisurely sea voyage?

Whereupon the Colonel made his entrance.

Dowding was beginning to realize that following
the manual, obeying instructions as they were written, wasn’t all that it was
cracked up to be.

After six years in India, he got back to
England to attend the Staff College at Camberley, a necessary step in a
military career. There he discovered that the military tendency to walk about
with blinkers on and to keep a rigid mind was not confined to the lower rank of
officers. In current terminology, the staff talked the talk but didn’t walk the
walk. “I was always hurt by the lip service the staff paid to freedom of
thought,” he later said, “contrasted with an actual tendency to repress all but
conventional ideas.”

This lack of imagination and initiative was
exemplified at the college. Every student took turns being commanding officer
of a military exercise, but since he was the youngest and most junior, Dowding
was the last one. It was 1913 when he got his chance. When he did, he found that
he had six aircraft, or aeroplanes, as they were then called, at his disposal.
No one ever made any use of these aircraft, because no one had the slightest
idea what to do with them.

It had been only a few years previously, in
1907, when the Wright brothers, rebuffed by the United States, had offered
their invention to the British. Lord Tweedsmuir replied on behalf of their
Lordships: “I have consulted my expert advisers with regard to your
suggestion as to the employment of
aeroplanes. I regret to have to tell you, after the careful consideration of my
Board, that the Admiralty, while thanking you for so kindly bringing the
proposals to their notice, are of opinion that they would not be of any
practical value to the Naval Service.”

The army was no more impressed. A member of its
council, on being urged to consider airplanes as suitable reconnaissance
machines, replied that “aircraft could not fly at less than forty miles per
hour, and it would be impossible for anyone to see anything of value at that
rather high speed.”

A major problem in any military operation is to
know exactly where the enemy are and how strong they are. Dowding decided to
use his six aircraft to fly around and find them. The instructor overseeing the
operation of the exercise told him that the plan was ridiculous; aside from the
obvious impossibility of seeing anything clearly at “that rather high speed,”
the aeroplanes would never be able to find their way around. That is, he said,
they might fly from point A to point B, but they couldn’t simply get up there
and fly around in circles looking for the enemy, and, if they should find them,
have any idea where they were or how to get home again to make their report.

Dowding replied that they could simply follow
the railway lines that crisscrossed England in those days. The instructor
laughed: If they all tried to follow the same line, they’d crash into each
other.

Nevertheless it was Dowding’s prerogative to
ignore the instructor’s advice, although this would be putting his future
career in peril. And so he did use the aircraft, and they did find the enemy
and observed them clearly. With this information, he won the exercise
overwhelmingly since he now knew exactly where the enemy was whereas they had
no idea where he was.

Considering the result, and comparing it to the
instructor’s ignorance, Dowding had decided that “the army might as well have
some staff officers who knew something about flying,” so he decided to
learn to fly. Official policy was that the
Central Flying School of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC), which had been
established just the previous year, would accept only officers who already knew
how to fly; they had to get a civilian license at their own expense. So Dowding
got his civilian ticket by taking lessons at daybreak, before his official
duties began. He passed the RFC flying test on the day of his graduation from
the Staff College.