A Summer Bright and Terrible (19 page)

It all began with Park’s suddenly becoming the
hot-shot commander of the prime fighting force in Lighter Command. It was as if
Leigh-Mallory took as a personal affront the surrender of France and the
shifting focus of the Luftwaffe’s assault on Britain. Well, what he really took
as an affront was Dowding’s refusal to switch his and Park’s commands when the
defensive shift took place. Added to this was their personal opposites: They
were as different emotionally as they were physically—the big, strong,
overpowering presence of Leigh-Mallory as compared to the small, wiry, spring-like
tension of Park. They were bound to dislike each other.

Finally, and most importantly, they held
different views on how to fight the Luftwaffe. Park was in total agreement with
Dowding’s strategy of sending up small flights of fighters to attack overwhelming
forces, in order to sustain a fighting force capable of resisting invasion.
This was nonsense to Leigh-Mallory. Attack in force—this was his motto. Bring
in the strongest concentrations of aircraft you have, and wipe the skies clean
of the Luftwaffe.

This is, of course, the normal strategy in
warfare. But it didn’t work, for two reasons. One was that the RAF didn’t have
to defeat the Luftwaffe; they just had to avoid being defeated. Leigh-Mallory’s
strategy would have resulted in gigantic, pitched air battles between the two
forces, which was just what Goring wanted and just what Dowding wanted to
deprive him of.

The second reason is the time it took to bring
large formations of fighters together. The Big Wing, as Leigh-Mallory’s tactic
became known, consisted of several squadrons of fighters sailing in to attack
en masse. But the airfields weren’t large enough to enable an entire
squadron—let alone several squadrons—to take off all at once. Individual
flights of three planes would take off, and then the first ones would have to
circle and form up with the later ones. This took time, and radar wasn’t yet
good enough to provide enough time for such aerial organizing. So to get
several squadrons into the air at one place and time, and to organize them into
a fighting unit, took time that the RAF did not have. The German bombers would
have reached their targets and unloaded their bombs before the Big Wing caught
them.

Nonsense, said Leigh-Mallory, all it takes is a
bit of practice. And even if this were true, he continued, so what? We’ll hit
them so hard that they won’t come back again.

In the event, it often did prove true that the
Big Wing was too late to intercept the bombers before they did their bombing,
so what was left of his strategy was the second part: Hit them so hard that
they won’t come back again.

If they were fighting the war they had expected
to fight—a Douhet campaign of bombers against cities—then the Big Wing tactic
might have been a reasonable approach. But that was
not
the war they
were fighting. Dowding’s strategy was to hit the bombers as quickly as
possible, albeit with small penny-packets of fighters. Disrupt the bombers if
you can, but mainly keep alive to fight another day and thereby frustrate
Hitler’s plan to invade.

If Dowding and Leigh-Mallory had been equally
in command, a vigorous discussion of the two strategies would have been in
order. But Dowding was solely in command. Leigh-Mallory was his subordinate and
should have followed his orders—which were to stand by and act as backup to
Park’s No. 11 Group. When the bombers came over, Park would be in command,
sending up his fighters in accordance with Dowding’s strategy to foil as much
of the bombing as he could. When his forces were overwhelmed by the large
numbers of attackers, as would often be the case, Park was to bring in
Leigh-Mallory’s Group.

When given these orders, Leigh-Mallory’s mouth
went taut and smoke began pouring out of his ears. Sit back and wait to take
orders from that kiwi Park? His frustration erupting like Krakatoa, he
disobeyed the orders.

Dowding’s biggest mistake—his only mistake,
really—in the battle was not to crack down on Leigh-Mallory. Long after the
battle was over, Dowding reflected, “Looking back on things now, I believe that
I ought to have been very much firmer, in fact stricter, with Leigh-Mallory.”
Balfour suggested that, regarding Dowding’s comment, “for Leigh-Mallory, read
both [Leigh-Mallory and Park].” But that is nonsense. Park was obeying Dowding’s
commands; Leigh-Mallory was not. We may as well get this straight from the
outset.
The heroes here are Dowding and Park; the
villain of the piece is Leigh-Mallory.

This assessment is not universally accepted.
One can make a case for either side; there is good and bad in every man. There
are also pros and cons to every decision, as there are two sides to every
story. And of course, the verdicts of history are often shuffled and reshuffled
according to the changing fashions of the times. Nevertheless, Leigh-Mallory is
my villain.

You may come to disagree, but first listen to
the tale as I believe it should be told.

Nineteen

The basic concept of Dowding’s scheme was
that the four Groups were the core, but they were to flow into and out of each
other as needed, as directed by Dowding or as the exigencies of battle
demanded. Nos. 11 and 12 Groups would do most of the fighting, while 10 Group,
in the far west out of Luftwaffe range, would be used for training and
replacement purposes, backing up Park’s 11 Group with reinforcements. No. 13,
in the far north, would defend Scapa Flow, train pilots, and be ready to back
up Leigh-Mallory’s 12 Group if necessary.

If the Luftwaffe attacked one Group s area of
responsibility, for example, fighters in the adjoining Groups were to be held
in readiness and released into the fight immediately when—but only when—called
on by the primary Group Commander.

Leigh-Mallory did not like this concept, which
limited his powers. His idea was total autonomy for the Group AOCs (Air
Officers Commanding), particularly before the fall of France, when he expected
that the attacks would come into his sector. He issued a memo emphasizing control
of his immediate area without regard for what might be going on elsewhere. At
that time, Fighter Command had forty-one squadrons of fighters; he asked for
twenty-nine of these to be placed under his immediate control. Dowding replied that
this memo showed “a misconception of the basic ideas of fighter defence.” He
might have considered replacing Leigh-Mallory at this time, but his attitude
was to pick the people he thought best for the job and then leave them alone.
His assumption that they would follow orders turned out to be unrealistic.

In a fighter defence exercise early in 1939,
the radar hadn’t managed to pick up a group of “enemy” bombers that suddenly
appeared over one of Leigh-Mallory’s aerodromes. He reacted by instituting
standing patrols, so as not to be caught flat-footed again. Dowding pointed out
that the purpose of the exercise was to find weaknesses and fix them, not to
change strategy. In the coming war, the RAF would not have sufficient planes to
mount standing patrols; they would have to rely on radar. He informed
Leigh-Mallory that he was not to institute such strategic changes on his own.
Dowding might as well have stood outside his office at Bentley Priory and
shouted into the wind. Leigh-Mallory came storming out of the meeting, swearing
that “he would move heaven and earth to get Dowding sacked from his job.” In
the end, that is what he did.

When the war began, Dowding reminded his Group
Commanders not to issue special Group orders in addition to those of Fighter
Command. This was necessary because squadrons might be freely moved into and
out of particular Groups as the constantly changing flow of the situation
demanded, and it would be confusing if pilots found themselves in a Group where
orders that they did not know about were standard operating procedure.

Two days after the war began, Leigh-Mallory
introduced a new set of special orders to his own Group. Dowding immediately
ordered him to cancel them and not to issue any others. Leigh-Mallory
continued, however, to do so, as when he transferred several squadrons that
Dowding had assigned to particular airfields to other bases, including some
that were overcrowded. This was a serious breach, since Dowding would assign a
squadron to one base with primary responsibility for local defence, but also
with an eye to where it might be needed elsewhere. Leigh-Mallory was concerned
only with his own local defence, a narrow view that could not be tolerated.

Dowding wrote what he considered to be a severe
note: “I have delegated tactical control almost completely to Groups and
Sectors, but I have not delegated strategical control, and the threat to the
line must be regarded as a whole and not parochially.” He also pointed out that
three squadrons were the maximum that any aerodrome could hold if central
organization was to be in control, and Leigh-Mallory now had as many as seven
squadrons at some aerodromes. “I would only ask you to remember that Fighter
Command has to operate as a whole,” Dowding concluded.

With this message, Leigh-Mallory subsided, and
as the winter months marched through the Bore War and on into the beginning
phases of the summer’s battle, he gave Fighter Command little more grief.
Dowding turned his attention to the other myriad details needed to turn Fighter
Command into an efficient, strong organization, as summer arrived.

On July 16, Hitler issued Directive No. 16:

Preparation for
a Landing Operation Against England:

As England, despite
her hopeless military situation, still shows no sign of willingness to come to
terms, I have decided to prepare, and if necessary to carry out, an invasion
against her.

He went on to state that the British army,
having lost all its equipment at Dunkirk, would not be able to mount any
effective opposition. But he demanded, as a prerequisite to the invasion, that
the Luftwaffe must first annihilate Fighter Command.

On July 21, Goring met with the German naval
staff, who complained that the British navy still seemed to own the English
Channel. It was imperative, he was told, that the Channel be denied them. No
responsibility could be assumed for transporting the Wehrmacht across the
waters in the presence of the Royal Navy. Goring promised to destroy the
English Channel ports and any ship that dared set sail. He told his Luftwaffe
commanders that these tactics would surely bring up the last few British
fighters. They were to be destroyed.

Nearly all the Chain Home radar stations
were now complete and linked by secured telephone lines to the central command
system. They kept a constant watch over the French coastline. The worst of the
technical problems had been worked out. Chief among these were the backward
echoes and the difficulty of distinguishing friendly aircraft from enemy. The
backward-echo problem was solved by the shielding of transmissions so that only
the forward half got out, and the friend-versus-enemy problem was solved by the
installation of a small transmitter in the British fighters so that they sent
out an identifiable signal. This IFF (Identification-Friend-or-Foe) apparatus
by now had been installed in virtually all aircraft of Fighter Command,
although many bombers and Coastal Command flying boats had not yet been fitted
and were occasionally the objects of an interception.

The height problem was actually two problems,
and progress was being made on both. The original CH transmitters fired their
transmissions up into the sky, allowing low-flying bombers to slip under
undetected. It wasn’t simply a matter of aiming the transmitters lower; the
problem was ground interference, which bounced the waves around in a manner to
make their interpretation impossible. The solution, to find a wavelength that
the ground didn’t seem to reflect, had now been found. The first Chain Home Low
station was operating by July. Seven others had been built, but weren’t yet bug-free
and in operation.

Height determination was still a problem and
would remain so throughout the battle. Because an error of a few thousand feet
was all too frequent, pilots were understandably reluctant to commit themselves
to battle, only to find the enemy unexpectedly above them. The World War I
slogan “Beware of the Hun in the sun” was still operable. Since gravity had not
yet been repealed, height meant life and death to a fighter pilot.

The fighter pilots were the glamorous heroes of
the fight, but just as a quarterback needs his linemen, the pilots needed their
workhorses on the ground. To make the system work, the RAF had to train radar
operators by the thousands, and here Dowding had a revolutionary idea: women.
When he suggested training them for this work, the consensus around him was
that it wasn’t reasonable, for the radar operators would be working beside the
transmitting towers in wooden shacks, which would be obvious targets for
Luftwaffe bombers. The women would panic, leaving the radar screens untended,
and catastrophe would ensue.

Dowding didn’t think so. He pushed his idea
through, and the women worked out perfectly, proving to be just as tough as the
men when under attack.

The other ground workhorse that needed to be
fit into the system was the Controller, who would take the radar information
and direct the fighters to the attack. The problem, which Dowding anticipated
correctly, was that once in the cockpit and off into the wild blue, a fighter pilot
is a law unto himself, readily willing to ignore radioed instructions from
silly groundlings. The solution Dowding applied was to take the fighter pilots
themselves and train them as Controllers. Hearing instructions from one of
their own, they were more easily controlled and directed onto the incoming
bombers (although many of them did like to put a few thousand extra feet onto
their altitude).