A Summer Bright and Terrible (17 page)

Colville, again writing in his diary for
Saturday, May 18, described the potentially dire consequences of either
decision the cabinet had to make: “The Cabinet have now got to take a
fundamental decision. They can either send most of the fighters from this
country in the hope of turning the scale of the western front, in which case
the war might be appreciably shortened; or they can maintain them here for
defensive purposes. . . . If we send the fighters and lose them, then this
country will be left at the mercy of concentrated German air attack and we can
hardly avoid destruction. It would be a terrifying gamble, but I am afraid it
is one we ought to take.”

It was a gamble that they probably would have
taken, if not for Dowding. Not knowing about the reversal of the decision he
had pushed through at the meeting, or of the subsequent order to dispatch even
more fighters to France, he was nevertheless distrustful of the cabinet, and
particularly of Churchill. As soon as he returned to the priory, he sat down
and wrote a letter to the Chief of the Air Staff, hoping that the CAS would
show it to Churchill.

Sir,

I have the honour to
refer to the very serious calls which have recently been made upon the Home
Defence Fighter Units in an attempt to stem the German invasion on the
continent.

I hope and believe
that our Armies may yet be victorious in France and Belgium, but we have to
face the possibility that they may be defeated.

In this case I
presume that there is no one who will deny that England should fight on, even
though the remainder of the Continent of Europe is dominated by the Germans.

For this purpose it
is necessary to retain some minimum fighter strength in this country and I must
. . . remind the Air Council that the last estimate . . . as to the force
necessary to defend this country was 52 squadrons, and my strength has now been
reduced to the equivalent of 36 squadrons.

Once a decision has
been reached as to the limit on which the Air Council and the Cabinet are
prepared to stake the existence of the country, it should be made clear to the
Allied Commanders on the Continent that not a single aeroplane from Fighter
Command beyond the limit will be sent across the Channel, no matter how
desperate the situation may become. . . .

I believe that, if
an adequate fighter force is kept in this country if the fleet remains in
being, and if Home Forces are suitably organized to resist invasion, we should
be able to carry on the war single handed for some time, if not indefinitely.
But, if the Home Defence Force is drained away in desperate attempts to remedy
the situation in France, defeat in France will involve the final, complete and
irremediable defeat of this country.

Finally, this letter took effect. Newall presented
the letter to his cohorts, the army and navy Chiefs of Staff, and he strongly
urged that no more fighters be sent. The chiefs reluctantly agreed, and at last
Churchill surrendered to the inevitable. He wrote to General Sir Hastings “Pug”
Ismay (his Chief of Staff): “No more squadrons of fighters will leave the
country whatever the need of France. . . . “

On this same day, May 19, they received the
news that the French army south of the BEF had melted away. The British
retreated to the Channel port of Dunkerque and dug in. The victorious Wehrmacht
pursued them, paused to gather its forces, and prepared to destroy them—and
Hitler called time out.

Goring had persuaded him. Reichsmarschall
Hermann Goring, an ace pilot who had led Baron Manfred von Richthofen’s
squadron after the Rittmeister had been killed, had risen to command the
Luftwaffe. But he had morphed from a fighter pilot into a gluttonous sycophant,
a strutting, fat peacock far removed from the realities of the air war.
Infatuated to the point of drunkenness over the Luftwaffe’s victories in Poland
and France, he now saw his greatest opportunity. He convinced Hitler that he
could destroy the BEF from the air.

Hitler liked the idea. Like Churchill, he
thought he was a better general than his generals. Unlike Churchill, he always
sought to play them off against each other, to undermine them, to humiliate
them. Goring was his boy, firmly in his pocket, and now Hitler saw the chance
to use his court jester to show the army generals he could do without them. He
halted the Panzers and sent in the Stukas.

And, across the Channel, Dowding sent in the
Spitfires.

When the army reached Dunkerque, Britain
set to work. Three centuries of naval heritage came to life; not only the Royal
Navy but every sailboat, motorboat, yacht, and spinnaker came floating,
sailing, putt-putting down the rivers and coastlines of England, headed across
the waters to France. Every weekend sailor, every farmer who vacationed on the
sea, every man in England in whom the blood of Drake and Nelson coursed brought
his four-man or seven-man skiff and set off across the Channel to bring the
army home.

The navy sent every ship it had, freighters to
load the soldiers by the hundreds and destroyers to guard the sailboats while
they picked two, three, four men out of the surging surf. Above them the
Hurricanes patrolled, and with them came the Spitfires, finally committed to
action by Dowding, together with every other plane that could fly and carry a
gun.

And sometimes the Stukas broke through and
slaughtered the boys waiting on the beach and those struggling through the
water to reach the ships. And sometimes the bombers hit the ships and men died,
while, hidden above the clouds, the Hurris and Spits flashed into greater
hordes of German bombers and shot them down and drove them away.

The British soldiers died blown to bits,
machine-gunned, strafed, drowned; they died by the hundreds, but they were
saved by the thousands. Two hundred thousand of them came home. Although it was
impossible to keep every German bomber away, the great masses of them that
Goring had promised would destroy the BEF were beaten off, and that raggedy
flotilla of professional and amateur sailors brought the army home, brought
their lads back to Blighty.

A few days later, France surrendered. Of
250 Hurricanes sent there, only 66 returned; the loss amounted to half the
total number of Hurricanes in the RAF.

The Battle of France is over. I expect that
the Battle of Britain is about to begin. . . . Hitler knows that he will have
to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all
Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad,
sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United
States . . . will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age, made more sinister . .
. by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our
duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth
last for a thousand years, men will still say,
“This
was their finest
hour.”

Sixteen

Well! The man certainly had a way with
words. And he kept it up. After France surrendered but before the Battle of
Britain began, Lord Halifax led a coterie of Englishmen seeking to negotiate a
peace with Hitler. When Hitler replied that he had no demands on England, that
England could keep its empire and he would keep the Continent he had conquered,
Churchill bellowed, No! Not bloody likely! “All the conquered people of Europe
shall share the gains—aye, and freedom shall be restored to
all.
We
abate nothing of our just demands; not one jot or tittle do we recede. . . .
Czechs, Poles, Norwegians, Dutch, Belgians, have joined their causes to our
own.
All these shall he restored!”

The man was magnificent. As Hitler, furious at
this rebuff, geared up to invade England, Churchill warned him and warmed the
hearts of every free person: “We shall defend our island whatever the cost may
be,” he roared. “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing
grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the
hills; we shall
never
surrender!”

Of course, he had nothing to fight with. The
army had come home from Dunkirk, but they had left all their weapons behind.
They brought back no tanks or artillery, no machine guns or bullets. They had
no hope of defeating the powerful Wehrmacht, which was flushed with victory and
armed with the best tanks in the world and what appeared to be the most
powerful air force.

The British had only one thing going for them:
the courage that sprung like a lion out of Churchill’s heart and reverberated
with his gruff voice throughout the land.

And, oh yes, they had the defensive system of
radar, Spitfires, and Hurricanes that Dowding had put in place.

Dowding’s relationship with Churchill is
one of the unsolved mysteries of history. Dowding himself said, “After the
meeting of 15 May there was no chance of our ever becoming friendly. I had
opposed him, and he had had to change his very stubborn mind in front of a
large gathering of senior officers and officials over a very important issue.”
This feeling was shared by Dowding’s friend, Field Marshal Archibald Wavell,
who upon hearing of the May 15 meeting, warned him to beware of Churchill’s
enmity. Indeed, after the Battle of Britain was over, Dowding was summarily
fired, and the feeling among the fighter pilots was that they would never
forgive Churchill for that. But earlier this summer, when others, irritated by
Dowding’s long intransigence, tried to fire him, Churchill angrily vetoed them.

Churchill was a complex man. As Neville
Chamberlain put it, “What a brilliant creature he is! I like him. I like his
humour and vitality. I like his courage. . . . But not for all the joys of
Paradise would I be a member of his staff!” He would come storming into a
meeting and bark out his thoughts as if they were commands, then fix everyone
with his glowering eyes and silently dare them to answer. According to Lord
Esher, “he handles great subjects in rhythmical language and becomes quickly
enslaved by his own phrases. He deceives himself into the belief that he takes
broad views, when his mind is fixed upon one comparatively small aspect of the
question.” Others said, “It is like arguing with a brass band.”
So, more often than not, they didn’t even try, and then he would win
the war with his tanks or nearly lose it in the Dardanelles. Sometimes they
would try to answer him with the beginnings of a long-winded argument, but he
would cut them off rudely; he didn’t have time for such meanderings, for long
explanations.

But many of these arguments were by their
nature subtle and complex; they needed long explanations. No matter, he would
not listen. His own statements were, if colourful and brilliant, always clear
and concise, and if you couldn’t answer them in the same way, it was because
your mind was muddied and your thinking muddled, and to cheery blazes with you!

This was why he valued Lindemann so much. The
Prof could always give a short explanation of what he was proposing, and if in
doing so, he skipped over a few vital details—details that often meant that his
conclusion was totally wrong—well, he didn’t care and neither did Churchill.
Meanwhile, those more knowledgeable at the meeting would break a tooth or two
as they silently gritted them and as their blood pressure rose.

Dowding was lucky; he didn’t have to shave the
truth to simplify it. His message was by its nature simple and direct: “If the
present rate of wastage continues for another fortnight we shall not have a
single Hurricane left in France
or in this country.”
It was a message
Churchill could understand. He didn’t like it, he didn’t like having it shoved
down his throat, but he could understand it and appreciate it. And when France
did fall and the Luftwaffe came sailing over the horizon, he was damned glad
and appreciative of the Hurricanes and Spitfires Dowding had saved from
Churchill’s misplaced love of France. Out of the embarrassment and ire arising
at the May 15 cabinet meeting, there grew, like a phoenix, admiration for a man
Churchill knew he could trust not to kowtow, not to be overawed by rhetoric.
Above all else, Dowding knew what he was doing and could say so in plain words.

Not everyone felt the same way about Dowding.
His forthrightness was seen by some as stubbornness (Lord Halifax regretted “the
proneness of Dowding to give expression to purely personal views even if they
clash or seriously detract from official views”); by some as pure nastiness
(when Robert Watson-Watt offered him some hundreds of airborne radar sets,
Stuffy said with some asperity, “Just give me ten that work!”); and by others,
such as Bomber Harris, as downright stupidity (“out of touch with flying”). His
1936 appointment to put Fighter Command together had been a natural one in view
of his seniority and his championing of radar and the new fighters when he was
head of Research. But once in charge there, he was even more peremptory and
dismissive of everyone’s opinions than he had ever been.

Some thought it was because of the broken
promise that he would become chief of Air Staff in 1937, when instead, Cyril
Newall was appointed the new CAS. (Dowding was also told then that he would
stay in the RAF in his present or an equivalent position until 1942, another
promise to be broken.) Others thought it was just the natural tendency of one’s
nature to become intensified as one became older; in Dowding’s case, his
natural perversity was becoming unbearable. Whatever the reason, they wanted
him gone.

And so, although in 1937 Secretary of State for
Air Ellington informed him that “an officer of your rank will be employed . . .
up to the age of 60 [i.e., 1942],” in August 1938 the Air Ministry informed him
that he would be asked to retire and relinquish Fighter Command to Air
Vice-Marshal C. L. Courtney the following June (1938). Then, three days before
the proposed takeover, Courtney was injured in an air crash and the decision
was revoked. So too was the promise that he would remain “in an equivalent
position” until 1942. He was told that he should stay on with Fighter Command
for another year, but that was all: “We will be unable to offer you employment
in the RAF after June 1939. Then in February 1939—six months early—without
prior notice to him, the
Evening Standard
publicly announced his
retirement.

Next, Sir Archibald Sinclair (now Secretary of
State for Air and head of the Air Ministry) telephoned to tell him that the
retirement would be deferred until the end of the year. Dowding replied that he
“was not willing to extend service unless I had the confidence and support of
the Air Council hitherto denied me.” He received Sinclair’s verbal assurance
and was asked to continue to serve till the end of March 1940.

One day before his scheduled March retirement,
Newall asked him to stay on until July 14. On July 11, just three days before
this new retirement date, Churchill wrote a private and confidential letter to
Sinclair: “I was very much taken aback the other night, when you told me that
you had been considering removing Sir Hugh Dowding at the expiration of his
present appointment . . . he is one of the very best men you have got.” He went
on to say that talk of enforced retirement should be discontinued and Dowding
should be kept in office as long as the war lasted. He even suggested that
Dowding was the proper man to be made chief of the Air Staff.

Sinclair immediately rescinded the July
retirement, writing to Dowding and asking him to stay on throughout the summer
in his present position, ignoring Churchill’s suggestions that he be promoted
to CAS and kept on until the end of the war. Dowding replied that despite the “discourtesy
and lack of consideration” that the Air Ministry had shown him in retiring and un-retiring
him five times, he would be happy to stay on. He himself added the words “without
any date for my retirement being fixed,” because everyone else seemed to be
intent on reducing the strength of Fighter Command “below the extreme danger
point . . . and no one else will fight as I do” against these proposals. In
reply, Sinclair wrote him a nice letter that said nothing except to thank him
for agreeing to stay on, and that the summer would be quite long enough, thank
you very much. October 31 would be his new retirement date.

Churchill made no further comment.

And so the long, hot summer began, with
Churchill a lion bearded in his den, roaring his fury at the enemy pacing
outside, and with Dowding glowering at his political masters, but inwardly
glowing and exultant.

Exultant? Yes, for he had begun to see beyond
the evils of this world into a higher realm. Sir Maurice Dean, Permanent
Undersecretary of State for Air at the time, remembered that Dowding strode
into Whitehall on the day France surrendered, mounted the stairs to the Air
Staff offices where Dean worked, and announced, “Now we cannot lose.”

“His face was shining. His words and demeanour
would have become a major prophet. Marshal of the RAF or not, for practical
purposes that was what he was at that moment.”

Of course, Dowding was immensely relieved that,
with France gone, no more fighters would be sent across the Channel. And with
his forces intact, he was confident that he could withstand the Luftwaffe and
that therefore England could withstand Germany.

Or . . .

Had he just gotten the word from God?

Ford Halifax, writing in his diary about the
fall of France, quoted Dowding as saying, “I went on my knees and thanked God.”
Now a belief in God is reasonably normal, especially in wartime, when everyone
believes that God is on his side, but Dowding went a bit further—not quite
around the bend yet, but well on his way. He was beginning to have visions.
Although he didn’t yet announce these to the public during the summer, he did
ask close friends whether he shouldn’t publish his experiences to reassure the
British people that they had nothing to fear in this war.

What did he mean by his “experiences”? An
experience is more than a belief, as indeed it was for Dowding. He meant he was
actually speaking to spirits from “the other side”—spirits that told him
clearly that God was working on behalf of the British people. Convinced of
this, he explained to friends—and later published—his conviction that “God will
not allow our nation to be obliterated in this war, and He has already
intervened in our behalf.” The first part of that statement is, again, the sort
of thing that many people cling to in times of duress, but the second part?
What did he mean?

He meant the “miracle” of Dunkirk. He told his
friends now, and later published, that God had “stilled the waters of the
Channel into an unnatural calm for days on end” so that the fleet of small
boats might bring the army back safely to England. Of course, you might reason
that if God could do that, and were inclined to do it, then He could just as
easily have prevented the military defeat that rendered the “miracle” of
Dunkirk necessary in the first place. God might also have prevented the
Luftwaffe bombers from killing all those soldiers on the Dunkirk beaches, and
later in the war from razing London—not to mention what the Almighty might have
done about Buchenwald and Auschwitz.

But Dowding had no doubt that he was literally
marching arm in arm with the Lord of Hosts. How could he doubt it? The spirits
told him so. Later that summer, his own wife, Clarice, would appear to him,
confirming all this. And yet, while his mind was wandering amid the faeries and
cacodaemons, his feet remained planted firmly on the solid ground—on the ground
where the radar towers were anchored, from which the radio beams soared up into
the air to detect whatever waves of bombers might appear over the horizon.

Somehow the spirit voices cleared his mind
rather than clouding it, somehow he remained rooted both in the ethereal realm
and in our own, somehow he remained in control, directing Lighter Command
against the onslaught that now began.

Seventeen

At the time of the Munich Agreement in
1938, Dowding had about half the fighter squadrons needed to defend England,
and all were fitted with outmoded biplane fighters. He had neither radar,
Spitfires, nor Hurricanes. One year later, when the war began, he had the
beginnings of a comprehensive radar system set up, but as discussed earlier, it
wasn’t yet operating properly. He had a few squadrons of Hurricanes, and the
Spitfires were beginning to be produced. In the spring of 1940, Chamberlain, in
nearly his last speech as Prime Minister, goaded Hitler for having “missed the
bus,” for not having attacked when England was still unprepared. A few days
later Hitler did attack, sweeping over France.