A Summer Bright and Terrible (25 page)

Dowding should have intervened. He should
have come down hard on Leigh-Mallory and insisted he in turn come down hard on
Bader. He should have taken a firm hand, as he had after the air defence
exercises in 1939. When Leigh-Mallory had tried to insist on his right to
override Command orders, Dowding had told him, in front of other senior
officers: “The trouble with you, Leigh-Mallory, is that sometimes you cannot
see further than the end of your little nose.”

But he didn’t realize the extent of the
problem. How could he? The man was only human. He was spending all day, every
day, in Bentley Priory monitoring the battle, and every evening he went to
visit the pilots who were bearing the brunt of the fighting. This did not
include 12 Group’s pilots, but he didn’t have time for everyone; he wanted to
talk to those most involved, the 11 Group men at Kenley, Biggin Hill, Tangmere.
He would return to Montrose in the dead of night, often after midnight, and be
up at dawn. He had only those few hours between to think, and what he thought
about was the danger for England and the deaths awaiting those who fought in
the sides, and what God had in store.

Churchill often invited his top commanders to
dine with him at Chequers, to review the day’s actions and to talk of the
future. John Colville reported that “one night at Chequers [Dowding] told us
that the battle was going well. The only things that worried him were his dreams.
The previous night he had dreamed there was only one man in England capable of
operating a Bofors gun and his name was William Shakespeare. We supposed we
were intended to laugh, but I looked at Dowding’s face and was sure he was
speaking in deadly earnest.”

He took his dreams as real warnings from the
beyond and wasn’t sure what they meant. With all this, he had no time for Leigh-Mallory’s
little fussings.

Twenty-five

The attacks continued without letup.
Although the Luftwaffe had lost nearly a hundred planes on the first day of
Adlerangriff,
they had plenty more. The first raid on August 16 came in just before eleven o’clock,
hitting the West Mailing aerodrome while workers were still clearing the rubble
and filling in craters from yesterday’s raid. The last raid of the day came
just after five o’clock, aiming for Biggin Hill. This one was beaten off, but
in between, hundreds of bombers roared all over 11 Group’s area. The Hornchurch
aerodrome was well defended, but Tangmere was demolished. The Ventnor radar
station was put out of action, despite Goring’s decision that the radar
stations weren’t worth the effort of destroying them; with so many bombers, the
Luftwaffe was able to spare enough to hit low-priority targets.

It was on this day, the second day of
Adlerangriff,
the sixteenth day of August, that Billy Fiske attacked a
Staffel
of
Stukas.

Billy was the son of a Chicago banker, an
American golden boy who led the charmed life of young Americans born into the
aristocracy of wealth in the early twentieth century. He grew up as much at
home in the pleasure palaces of Europe as in America; he was bright, clever,
witty, handsome, and athletic, and everyone loved him. In 1928, at the age of
sixteen, he was already the champion bobsledder at Saint Moritz and was chosen
to lead the American team in the Winter Olympics at Lake Placid in 1932. When
the team won the gold, he became the youngest gold-medal winner ever in that
sport.

He began college at Cambridge University that
same year and was immediately and for the next ten years one of the leaders of
the set known as the Bright Young Things, playing golf, partying and dancing,
driving the convertible Bentley his father had bought him, learning to fly, and
finally marrying the former Countess of Warwick. He also put in a spot of work
in the London office of a New York banking firm. Then, in the spring of 1939,
life became serious: His firm gave him the choice of continuing his party life
or coming back to New York and getting serious about banking. With a sigh, he
decided that it was time to give up childish things, and he sailed home.

A few months later Hitler invaded Poland,
Britain declared war, and Billy Fiske decided that banking was too dull after
all.

The Royal Air Force was then made up of three
distinct groups: the regular air force, composed of—as it was said—pilots who
wished to be gentlemen; the part-time Auxiliary, composed of gentlemen who
wished to be pilots; and the working-class Reserve, composed of those who were
neither and wished to be both. In 1924 Lord Edward Grosvenor had gathered those
members of his club, White’s of St James’s, who had learned to fly and formed
the 601 (County of London) Auxiliary Air Force Squadron, henceforth known
affectionately (or enviously) as the Millionaires Squadron. A number of Billy’s
friends had joined, and now he sailed back to England on the
Aquitania
to join them.

Despite being an American citizen, he was
accepted into the RAF. After passing the Elementary Flying Training School, he
moved on to the advanced Flying Training School at Brize Norton, and on July 12
he was granted his wish and assigned to 601 Squadron, which was part of 11
Group, based at Tangmere.

His welcome there was not as enthusiastic as he
had hoped. The members of the squadron were by now experienced Hurricane
pilots, and despite his training, Billy wasn’t ready to fly combat. But the
fighting hadn’t yet heated up, and they were able to keep him out of it for the
next two weeks while he trained hard. By the end of the month, he began to fly
operational patrols, although he was told to stick to his leader and keep his
head down, and in another couple of weeks, he felt himself an old hand. Today,
August 16, when the Klaxon sounded at Tangmere, he was ready.

“Buzzard scramble! Buzzard scramble!”

Forty-three seconds of confusion, chaos, and
pandemonium erupted on the aerodrome. Cards went flying through the air, tables
were overturned, and Billy ran with the other pilots out of the dispersal hut.
Grass and dirt and chalk were kicked into the air as the erks hit the starter
buttons and the propellers spun into life, black fumes spread through the air
as the exhaust pipes coughed and sputtered, and on the forty-fourth second
eight Hurricanes of Buzzard Squadron were taxiing into position and racing down
the grass, lifting into the air, folding their wheels into their wings, and
slipping off away from the aerodrome. As the second hand ticked around the
clock to begin the second minute, the sounds of chaos died away and the black specks
disappeared into the bright blue sky.

“Buzzard Leader.”

“Buzzard Control. Vector 190,” the radio
responded. “Twelve bandits angels twelve just a few miles in front of you. Do
you see them?” “Hello, Buzzard Control. Sighting negative. Listening out.”

Billy listened on the radiotelephone, but said
nothing; it wasn’t his place to talk. Instead he searched the sides ahead of
them, and watched his squadron leader lead them up to fifteen thousand feet.
They should have seen the enemy formation by now, but there was nothing in
sight. The sun was high in the sky, on his eleven o’clock, and he wondered
about the possibility of a passel of Messerschmitts hiding up there, ready to
pounce.

“Buzzard Leader, this is Buzzard Control, are
you reading?”

“Buzzard Leader, roger.”

“Vector 050. We have you behind them now.”

The leader’s wings dipped and turned, and the
others followed him around in a wide curve to port. “There’s fuck all up here,
laddie,” he called in.

“You should be right behind them now,” Control
called in.

“I should be back in me bed, right enough,” the
leader answered.

And then there was silence, silence, as the
Hurricanes cut through the thin air and young eyes scanned the skies—

“Tally-ho! Bandits at two o’clock low!”

There they were, coming out of the haze three
thousand feet below them, a formation of Stukas cruising along without a care
in the world. The squadron leader didn’t like this: Stukas never came alone.
There should be Messerschmitts about. He looked up, squinting into the sun. Up
there, hidden in the glare . . .

But the Stukas were headed for Tangmere, for
his aerodrome, and he couldn’t hesitate any longer. “Keep an eye open, laddies,”
he warned, and his exhaust belched a purple puff as he shoved the throttle into
the wall, and every one of his mates followed suit, diving down onto their
prey.

Billy picked out one for himself and followed
it down as he peeled off, aiming his sight at the rear gunner, centering right
on the flash of the gun spitting at him—

“Break! Break! Messerschmitts—”

There was a flash of black wings and a rainfall
of red tracer bullets simultaneous with the warning, and as Billy broke left,
his plane shuddered and his canopy shattered, and the control panel in front of
his face splintered into fragments. Instinctively he pushed his nose down and
spun out of there.

Luckily no one followed him, and even more
luckily, when he moved the controls, they responded. As he pulled out over the
trees he was alone. The controls were sloppy but they worked. His face felt
warm and sticky, and his right hand was covered in blood, but nothing hurt, he
felt nothing. He steered back toward the aerodrome.

It was only a few minutes away, but by the time
he reached it he was feeling a whole lot worse. He had to fight to keep his
eyes open. He could see the Stukas flashing overhead, he could see bomb
splashes and black smoke on the aerodrome, but he had no choice. He had to go
in.

He came in high and fast, then side-slipped at
the last minute to lose height and speed. With his windscreen covered in oil,
he had to lean out to see where he was going. As he did, a bomb erupted on the
grass right in front of him. He swerved away, thought for a moment of going
around again—that would be doing it by the book, but the guy who wrote the book
wasn’t bleeding to death. He lowered his wheels and dropped down between the
jagged craters, trying to steer around them but as his tail wheel touched the
ground, his nose came up and he couldn’t see where he was going.

He didn’t care. He was down, safe on the
ground, that was all he knew as his eyes closed and his head fell forward and
all the noise faded away.

The ground crews watching from their slit
trenches saw his Hurricane roll to a stop, and then it sat there. They looked
at each other. They could see the pilot in the cockpit, but he wasn’t moving
and the bombs were still falling. They saw four black-crossed Messerschmitts
swoop over the Hurricane, saw the splatter of their bullets as they rocked it,
saw the pilot disappear into a sudden roaring cascade of flames.

They jumped up from their trenches, ran through
the bullets and bombs, climbed onto the burning wings, and reached with their
bare hands into the flaming oil that filled the cockpit and was scorching the
face of Billy Fiske. They lifted him burning and smoking out of hell and down
onto the grass, they flung themselves on him to put out the flames, they lifted
him onto their shoulders and half-ran, half-stumbled back across the dangerous
open grass through the shrapnel and bombs and the splattering of bullets, and
fell back with him into their slit trench.

When the raid was over, an ambulance rushed him
to hospital, where he died the next day, never regaining consciousness. He was
the golden boy, the
beau vivant
, the Olympic champion, the envy and idol
of all who knew him, the epitome of the times.

He was the first American to die in combat in
World War II.

The Luftwaffe lost more than fifty
airplanes that day; the RAF nearly forty. But contrary to what Goring thought,
the loss of airplanes was not serious for Dowding, since the factories were
putting out more every day than were lost. The real problems were the damage to
the aerodromes and the supporting structures, the radar stations, and the
pilots. Without radar, Dowding would be lost. Without the aerodromes in
operating conditions, his planes couldn’t fly. And without pilots . . . well,
of course, he did have his angels.

Not really. This is one of the fallacies
that have grown up around Dowding. In his book
Angels,
Billy Graham
writes that when he wanted to preach a sermon on angels, he found that almost
nothing had been written on the subject in this century. Then he discovered the
book
Tell No Man,
by Adela Rogers St. John. As Billy Graham describes
the scene recounted there: “A celebration [was] held some months after the war,
honouring Air Chief Marshal Lord Hugh Dowding. The King, the Prime Minister and
scores of dignitaries were there . . . the Air Chief Marshal recounted the
story of his legendary conflict where his pitifully small complement of men
rarely slept, and their planes never stopped flying. He told about airmen on a mission
who, having been hit, were either incapacitated or dead. Yet their planes kept
flying and fighting . . . [with] a figure still operating the controls. What
was the explanation? The Air Chief Marshal said he believed angels had actually
flown some of the planes whose pilots sat dead in their cockpits.”

What Graham doesn’t say, or perhaps didn’t
realize, was that the book he quotes is a novel. It’s fiction. It’s made up.
What Rogers St. John actually has her made-up character say is this: “Some
months after the war, I was at a banquet honouring Air Chief Marshal Lord Hugh
Dowding . . . as the cheers kept rocketing, he held up his hand, they lifted
him up onto the table and you never heard such quiet. . . . [This was] the man
who planned every move of the strategy of that flying show that saved England
when she stood alone to save a free world. . . . He told us that night that
angels had flown the planes for pilots already dead. When they came down the
crew told him their pilot had been hit by the first burst, but the plane kept
on flying and fighting, and sometimes they saw a figure at the controls.”