A Summer Bright and Terrible (23 page)

But that was only because they were so young.
At that age of immortality they hadn’t the imagination to visualize the hungry
flames waiting for them. But
he
knew. He knew they were not immortal; he
could see the flames tearing at their scarred and twisted bodies. Oh God, if
only they didn’t have to die! If only—

What right had he to send these young, healthy
boys off to die, to speed those eager heroes up the line to death? Well, he
knew the answer to that. It wasn’t his right, but his duty. It was an onerous
burden that he was too weak to bear; it was breaking him. But he
couldn’t
break. His duty was clear. He had to remain strong, he had to send them off to
die, he had to save his country. It was God’s will. God had saved them at
Dunkirk. He had stilled the waters, He had brought the army home, and He would
give him the strength to carry his burden. But if only . . .

He sighed. He wanted to rest the boys, give
them some time off, but he hadn’t enough Spitfires or pilots to fly them; he
needed every one, every day. They were magnificent, sailing in to attack again
and again, fighting desperate odds, but how long could they prevail? He stared
into the flames and began to float away into a peaceful . . .

There was a movement in the room, and as he
turned, he saw in the dark corner a pilot get awkwardly to attention, obviously
flustered. “I must have dozed off, sir. I’m terribly sorry.”

“Quite all right,” Dowding said. He waited, but
the boy seemed bewildered, as if he didn’t know where he was. He was still in
his flying boots, a white scarf around his neck, so he must have been flying
that day and would be off again tomorrow. And yet he could fall asleep on a
strange sofa in his commanding officer’s house. Dowding thought he would have
given a good deal for one night’s untroubled deep sleep, for the sleep of the
young.

“Is there something I can do for you?” he
asked.

“I . . . ,” the boy stopped. “I’m afraid I’m
confused,” he said. “I don’t really know why I’m here.”

It was probably a mild case of shell shock,
Dowding thought sadly. He would take the boy off operations for a few days, if
he could. If he could spare him. Oh, dear Lord. How could he spare any of them?

“I mean,” the boy began again, and this time
his voice began to rise in agitation, “I don’t know where I am!”

Dowding leaned forward into the firelight. “Do
you know who I am?” he asked gently. He was just a bit surprised that he wasn’t
surprised at all by the boy’s puzzlement, nor by the incipient panic in his
voice; he just wanted to calm him down, to help him.

The boy squinted through the dark. “Why, you’re
Stuffy,” he said. “Excuse me, sir. Air Marshal Dowding, sir.”

“It’s quite all right then, isn’t it?”

“But what am I doing here? Did you bring me
here, sir?”

“Not to worry,” Dowding assured him. “You’ve
fallen asleep, you’re exhausted. Just relax and it’ll all come back. What’s the
last thing you remember?”

“We were scrambled this afternoon, just after
tea. Paddy was leading, I was flying number three on his wing.” He broke off,
beginning to shake. “What’s going on?”

“What do you mean?”

He sat there, his voice trembling. “Fire,” he
said. “Someone yelled to break, and there was fire everywhere—how did I get
out?” He stared at his hands, holding them up shakily in front of his face. “My
hands were on fire. Oh God, my face—”

“It’s all right, you don’t have to worry,” a
soft, familiar voice said, and Dowding turned to see a woman in Red Cross
uniform coming across the room. He couldn’t see her face in the shadows, but he
knew that he knew her, and that she would take care of the lad. “We lost you
for a moment, but here you are safe and sound,” she said. She took the boy’s
hand, but he pulled it away from her.

“It’s burning,” he said.

“But you can see it isn’t,” she replied.

“It
was
!”

“But it isn’t now, is it? Everything’s quite
all right now.”

The boy was shaking violently, beginning to
call out spasmodically, uncontrollably. The Red Cross nurse turned to Dowding
for help, and as she did the fire lit her face and he saw that it was his wife,
Clarice. He stood up and went to the boy and put his hand on his shoulder and
said, “This is my wife. You can go with her, you can trust her. She’ll take
care of you.”

The boy snapped back to attention. “Yes sir!”

Dowding smiled at him. The boy hesitated for
just one second, then he smiled back, and Dowding could see how he must have
looked a few years ago when he was in school, a few weeks ago with his mother,
a few hours ago with his mates, before he took off in his Hurricane and was
shot down in flames.

“Thank you,” Clarice said. “He’ll be all right
now.” And she took him by the hand and led him away into the darkness.

Dowding stared after them for some time. Then
he put out the fire and, tottering from exhaustion, climbed the narrow wooden
stairs to his bed.

Twenty-three

That was the first time he saw Clarice
after she died. Soon she became a regular visitor as he helped her guide his
dead pilots to their afterlife. In his book,
Lychgate,
Dowding described
the next time they met. He had for some time been participating in seances, and
this time, he said, “I had been told that I might ask any questions; and so I
asked about my own people, whether they were well and happy. After my mother
had come and told me of my father, L. L. [his seance ‘guide’] said: ‘Here is a
lady, very quiet, peaceful and dignified.’ I said, ‘Well, that’s not my wife
anyway; she was always full of laughter and fun and gaiety.’ Shouts of laughter
from Clarice who always enjoyed dressing up and acting. She puts on her natural
appearance. Astonishment on the part of L. L. ‘Why, she has been in my circle
for a long time now. I had no idea who she was, or that she had anything to do
with you.’ To Clarice: ‘What have you been doing in my circle all this time?’
Clarice: ‘Oh, I just came to see if you were a proper person for Hugh to
associate with.’”

He went on to explain to his readers that “Clarice
is my wife who is a very active member of our group. She died in 1920 . . . but
nothing prevents her from manifesting as opportunity arises.”

Clarice helped calm him, helped him get through
the dark nights of that summer. She brought him assurance that his dead chicks weren’t
really dead; they had merely passed on to another level of existence. She also
assured him that despite the awful bombings, despite the terrible threat of
Hitler’s planned invasion and all its awful consequences, he had nothing to
fear. He would write, “It is only by personal experience that complete
conviction [of life after death and of God’s love] is possible. I had this
personal experience in the Battle of Britain.”

He had taken that final step; he had gone round
the bend. It was perfectly possible for a man of Dowding’s generation to
believe in life after death and still be completely sane, for he had the
testimony of well-respected scientists in that regard. But it is one thing to
believe in the possibility of ghosts, and quite another to actually see them
and talk with them.

With all the goodwill in the world for his
accomplishments, one has to accept that Dowding was quite mad.

And the war went on.

That night, while Dowding was conversing
with Clarice, the Luftwaffe sent bombers to more than a dozen cities in
Britain, ranging from Scotland to Wales and Ireland. They did little damage,
for they were hard-pressed to even find the cities they were looking for in the
blacked-out night, let alone to hit specific targets. They were not a present
danger, but their invisibility in the night was a harbinger of horrors to come.

Adlerangriff
had
been postponed until August 15, but on August 14 the attack was continued
against Fighter Command’s airfields. The sheer force of numbers overwhelmed the
defenders, and although no permanent damage was done, several airfields were
rendered inactive while dozens of bomb craters were filled in. But only three
Hurricanes and one Spitfire were lost, against twenty-one Luftwaffe aircraft.

Preparing for the onslaught to come, Dowding
rotated several of the squadrons that had been hardest hit, taking them out of
the line to refresh and retrain, and bringing in new squadrons to the forward
aerodromes.

For the official start of
Adlerangriff,
Goring prepared a total knockout blow aimed at breaking the back of Fighter
Command in one glorious battle. Till now all the fighting had been in the
south-eastern corner of England, and Goring was convinced—by the small numbers
of fighters sent up to combat the raids—that these were all Dowding had left.
He was sure that Dowding, like any sensible commander, would by now have called
in all his reserves, would have brought in every fighter from all over the
island.

This conclusion was reinforced by the results
of the reconnaissance flights the Reichsmarschall had sent out on the
fourteenth: The amazing thing was not the photos they brought back, but that
the planes themselves had come back. Every one of them had come back. This was
the first time all summer that none of them had been attacked and shot down by
the RAF. Clearly, he assured his flight commanders in a top-level meeting at
Karinhall, there were only a few Spitfires left.

He was wrong. His planes had come home because
six of the Chain Home radar stations—nearly half the defensive network in that
southeast corner of England—had been knocked out by the last few days’ raids.
They hadn’t picked up the reconnaissance planes, and so no interceptions had
been made. But to Goring, the safe return of the planes served to confirm his
own idea that Fighter Command was down to its last few fighters. If they could
be hit again, hard, today, before they had time to rest and repair their
damaged Spitfires, it would all be over.

Therefore, Goring smiled, he would attack in
the north as well as the south. His bombers based in Scandinavia would fly over
the North Sea to strike at the heart of the industrial north. They would have
to fly without escorts of Me 109s because of the distance, but no fighters
would be needed, since they would encounter no defence. The helplessness of the
Royal Air Force would be plain for everyone in England to see. And if that wasn’t
enough to convince the British to surrender, he would overwhelm their last
fighters in the south.

The morning dawned cloudy, with occasional
fog. There were no enemy attacks at dawn, or for the next few hours. The
Operations Room at Bentley Priory was quiet, the WAAFs and the control officers
stood around with nothing to do. Morning tea was brought and sipped quietly.
The black markers for enemy aircraft and the red ones for British were not
touched. On the airfields the pilots lounged in their garden chairs, sleeping
or just snoozing, playing poker or draughts, looking up at the empty sky.

The only planes flying were German weather
aircraft, sniffing around to poke at the clouds and the winds. As they came
back to the French airfields their data were analyzed and sent in to
headquarters, reporting that the weather was bad—but that it was clearing.

The air crews had been briefed for the day’s
assault, and then had been held at readiness. On bases in France, Belgium, and
Holland, the bombers and their fighter escorts were waiting. In Norway and
Denmark there were no fighters, but the bombers were ready to go. In a wide
semicircle around England they waited for the weather to clear, releasing them
to show England that there was to be no respite, there was no hope, there was
nothing in the future but complete and utter destruction.

At eleven o’clock in the morning the fog
lifted, the clouds parted, the weather cleared.

Minutes later, the first radar blips
appeared, showing a massive build-up of enemy formations over the French coast.
Standing orders for the Sector Controllers were to wait until they knew exactly
where the raids were going and then to scramble as few fighters as possible.
But today the formations were growing so large, and with every minute another
one appeared, that it was impossible to count them or to determine where they
were going. The entire air seemed to be filled with so many Stukas and
Messerschmitts, Junkers and Dorniers and Heinkels, that the Controllers lost
control. They began to order every available fighter into the air with orders
to attack whatever they saw. And what they saw were hordes of bombers attacking
their aerodromes, surrounded by clouds of Messerschmitts. The fighter pilots
stared at them, like African natives staring in horror at an incoming cloud of
locusts. For one long moment they were transfixed, and then they dove in to the
attack. Six Spits attacking thirty-six Me’s, seven Hurris plunging through to a
hundred bombers.

Meanwhile, lumbering over the North Sea, the
bombers from Norway and Denmark ploughed on. Goring had managed to give them a
phony escort of Me 110s. These were twin-engine fighters that had been
withdrawn from the south because they had turned out to be helpless against the
Spitfires and Hurricanes. They were here today to provide emotional support, to
give the appearance of an escort. Nothing more would be needed, Goring was
sure.