A Summer Bright and Terrible (21 page)

You can imagine their reaction when he showed
up without his legs. They were going to be led by a cripple. That was the best
that Fighter Command could do for them. It showed just where they stood in the
estimation of the hierarchy: somewhere just above the latrine cleaners and just
below the janitors.

Bader called them all together for a squadron
meeting. He told them what he expected of them, that they were going to be one
of the finest fighting squadrons in the RAF. There was silence for a moment.
Then from the back of the room came the clear comment, “Bollocks! Then, a
moment later, the voice added, “Sir.”

Bader later said it was the “Sir” that amused
him and let him think he had a chance with them. Without another word he limped
out of the room and across the field to his Hurricane. Using his arms, he
pulled himself up on the wing, balanced himself by leaning against the
fuselage, and, lifting his right leg with both hands, he pushed it over the
side into the cockpit. He braced himself against the canopy and lifted his
other leg in his hands and pulled it in, half-falling into the cockpit with it
as he always did.

He took off but instead of safely reaching for
height before retracting the wheels, he pulled them up as soon as they left the
ground, keeping his nose inches off the ground while the airspeed wound up.
Then he pulled the Hurri steeply up, rolled off the top, and came screaming down
again straight at the group gathered to watch. He knocked their hats off with
his slipstream and zoomed back up into the sky.

They had never seen anything like what they saw
that day; they didn’t think it was possible to do what Bader was doing. He
swung low over the grass, pulled up into a loop, went over the top and straight
down into another loop—which is something absolutely prohibited by the book. If
the first had not been precisely perfect, if he had lost any altitude in it, he
would have crashed on the second. He didn’t crash. And he didn’t stop. He went
right on into another consecutive loop, a third, and then a fourth.

They looked at each other. Not one of them
would have dared try that.

He came roaring back down to grass-top height
and rolled upside down: his old specialty. He held it there right across the
aerodrome in front of their wide-open eyes. Then he flipped over upright again
and took it straight up in a tight, looping climb. At the top of the loop, he
flicked into a roll, dropped off into a spin, and came right out of that into
another loop. He used to do that at the pre-war air shows, but they were too
young; they had never seen it done before.

When he came down a half hour later, dropping
the Hurricane softly into a perfect landing as if it were a feathery bird
instead of a ton of metal and canvas, they were still standing there in perfect
attention. He pulled himself heavily out of the seat and dropped off the wing
onto the ground, a cripple once again. He hobbled across the grass past them,
glancing at their faces, and disappeared into his quarters.

As he closed the door behind him, he smiled.
Bollocks, indeed!

An ambitious commander of No. 12 Group,
jealous of the commander of No. 11 Group.

A daring, charismatic squadron leader, eager
for battle.

A group of the gayest young men ever to fly
into battle, impatient for battle, denied that battle.

And a sober, patient commander in chief.

A situation waiting to explode.

Twenty-one

Im Westen Nichts Neues
was the title of the best novel to come out of the First World War.
It was translated as
All Quiet on the Western Front.
A more accurate
translation would be
Nothing New on the Western Front,
and that would be
a good description of the fighting as July turned into August. Sporadic attacks
on convoys continued, but as the English cut down on their shipping, the
attacks became less frequent. To the fighter pilots, it seemed that the
fighting might peter out, but Winston Churchill knew better because of the work
being done in an old Victorian mansion built in 1882 by Sir Herbert Leon.

In 1938 His Majesty’s government acquired the
site, Bletchley Park, for its Code and Cipher School. The stables were
converted into garages, the tack and feed house and the apple and plum store
into work cottages. A radio station was set up under the rooftop water tower.
The pigeon loft was left alone.

On July 25, 1939, two of the Bletchley Park
inmates met with a small group of Poles in the Pyry forest. The British were
given a set of sheets documenting the use of the German cryptography machine,
which consisted of two typewriters, one of which would convert a message into
code and the other would then receive the message and retype it back into
ordinary language. Using several wheels to vary the codes, the system was
unbreakable, but with the Polish information, the British had a chance. Working
together with three Polish mathematicians, Rozecki, Zygalski, and Rejewski, who
had escaped to Paris, Alan Turing put together the forerunner of today’s
computers, and by 1940, the group at Bletchley had broken the Luftwaffe’s code.

The code was named Enigma, the intercepted
messages Ultra. Throughout the rest of the war, an expanded group of
mathematicians, cryptologists, linguists, chess players, and engineers worked
constantly to decipher the intercepted German radio messages. The system was so
important that only a handful of people besides Churchill had access to Ultra.
Dowding was not put on the list until very near the end of the battle.

On August 1, 1940, an Ultra copy of Hitler’s
Directive No. 17 was sent to Churchill:

For the Conduct
of the Air and Sea War against England.

I intend to
intensify air and sea warfare against the English in their homeland. I
therefore order the Luftwaffe to overpower the Royal Air Force with all the
forces at its command, in the shortest possible time. After achieving air
superiority the Luftwaffe is to be ready to participate in full force in Fall
Seelowe.

The code name
Fall Seelowe,
Operation
Sea Lion, had already been identified by the code breakers at Bletchley. It was
the plan for the invasion of England.

A couple of false starts ensued. Goring,
with his customary panache, named the coming Luftwaffe offensive
Adlerangriff,
Attack of the Eagles, and many histories list it as beginning on August 8. That
day’s fighting did not signal the beginning of anything new but rather the last
of the old. Because of the slackening off of attacks during the previous few
days, the Admiralty decided to try sending another convoy down from the north
and through the Dover straits. When it was sighted, the Luftwaffe—still
operating under its old orders of striking at all shipping—sprung at it in
force.

Radar picked up the incoming raid and a pitched
battle ensued, with mixed results. The convoy was destroyed, with seven of the
twenty ships sunk and six so damaged they had to head for the nearest port;
only four made their destination without damage. But the victory came at a high
cost: The Luftwaffe lost twenty-four aircraft, with another dozen heavily
damaged; fifteen British fighters were shot down.

The next day began with scattered attacks
against ports, with other bombers searching for convoys that did not set sail
because of the previous day’s losses. The actual date set for
Adlerangriff
was August 10, but bad weather blew across France and the day’s activity was cancelled
and reset for August 13.

Reichsmarschall
Goring to all units:

Adlerangriff!
You will proceed to smash the British Air Force
out of the sky.
Heil Hitler!

Enough already with the convoys and the
seaports. The mission of the Luftwaffe now was to destroy Fighter Command, to
sweep the sides clear so the navy and the army could proceed with the invasion
of England. They would attack the British fighters in the air and on the
ground, overwhelming them with hordes of Messerschmitts in the air and, if they
didn’t rise to fight, destroying them on the ground by attacking their
airfields. The Luftwaffe would even destroy the aircraft before they were
built, by bombing the Hawker and Supermarine factories where the Hurricanes and
Spitfires were constructed.

But the German reconnaissance planes sent to
find the aerodromes and factories did not do a good job. They found the Upavon
aerodrome, which their analysts gave a highest priority, but it was an outmoded
field no longer used by Fighter Command. They also found one of Fighter Command’s
most important fields, Tangmere, but all the Spits and Hurris had been
scrambled before the Luftwaffe arrived, so their photographs showed nothing but
the night-fighter squadron of twin-engine Blenheims on the grass. When the
Germans misidentified these as bombers, they dismissed Tangmere as a target.
The Woolston factory had unfortunately been built in an exposed position right
on the south coast, but the Luftwaffe never found out that it was an outsource
of Supermarine and was building Spitfires, so they never targeted it. They got
it all wrong.

And as for the radar towers . . .

Every nation spies on every other nation, even
if it is not planning to go to war, but especially if it
is
planning
war. In 1938, several groups of “tourists” returned from England to Germany
with reports of strange Eiffel-like towers being constructed on the south and
east coasts. It did not take any stroke of genius to understand that they were
military in nature. But what were they? Radar seemed a reasonable choice.

Radar is viewed as an English invention, but
scientific discoveries are often simultaneously made in more than one place.
Science is funny that way. Well, perhaps it’s not so funny. Events have a way
of coming together at a particular time so that simultaneous discoveries are
perhaps inevitable. In the late 1930s, the interference of airplanes with radio
waves would have been observed in many countries, many of which were either
preparing for war or worrying about those that were. The airplane was the
coming weapon of mass destruction, and so means of detecting their onslaught
would be on the minds of people all over the world.

The difference was that England had Dowding, a
man who both appreciated the possibilities and had the power to do something
about it. No other country had such a man, and so although work did progress on
radar systems in Germany, Japan, Russia, and the United States, only England
had a working system that was integral to its defence when the war began.

In Germany the man who had the power to bring
radar along was Goring, but he had not the intelligence. The man there who had
the intelligence was the Luftwaffe’s Director General of Radio Signals, General
Wolfgang Martini (a man unique in that each of his names reflects a singular
glory of Western civilization). After long argument, he persuaded Goring to let
him fit a zeppelin with radio detection instruments and fly along the coast of
England to find out what those towers were emitting.

On May 9, 1939, he cruised off what he thought
was the east coast of England. In reality, he was lost in fog and drifted over
Yorkshire. His course was plotted by the British radar, and the officer in
charge of the radar reported, “We were sorely tempted to radio a position
correction to the airship, but this would have revealed we were seeing her on
radar, so we kept silent.” Martini’s equipment wasn’t working that night, and
all he got was static.

He had time for one last try before war began,
on August 2, after checking and double-checking his equipment. But on this
night, it was England’s radar system that failed. None of the operators saw him
on their screens, and he received no signal from them. He returned to Germany
and reported to Goring that the towers seemed to be inactive.

By the summer of 1940, the Germans had their
own radar system, but Martini hadn’t been able to integrate it into the
military machine. German thoroughness and technical superiority are well-known,
particularly to the Germans, and since Goring didn’t think of his own radar as
important he couldn’t believe that the British system was. Yes, he admitted to
Martini, those towers were probably a sort of radar system, but it couldn’t be
very good. Not worth wasting bombs on.

But Martini kept at him. He showed Goring
pictures the reconnaissance aircraft had brought back: flimsy towers and wooden
shacks. Such an easy target!

Goring laughed, shaking his head in amusement.
These technical types! All right, he said. All right, we’ll bomb your little
wooden shacks. Tomorrow, August 11.

Though Dowding wasn’t yet on the Ultra
list, Churchill did let him know—without revealing the source—that
Adlerangriff
was scheduled for August 13. Otherwise, Dowding might have thought it started
on Sunday, August 11. But no, this was just a warm-up. Batting practice.

Large bands of Messerschmitts came streaming
over the coast shortly after dawn, escorting a few bombers, which hit Dover but
caused no damage. The damage was done by the Messerschmitts, which swarmed over
the defending fighters. A few hours later, more than a hundred bombers attacked
the Portland naval base, and four squadrons were sent up against them and their
escorts. Eighteen German planes fell flaming this day, but so did sixteen Hurricanes
and one Spitfire.