A Summer Bright and Terrible (3 page)

None of the British pilots were experienced in
war. When the rear section of No. 74 Squadron of Spitfires broke through a
cloud and saw fighters below, they instinctively attacked, diving into them at
well over three hundred miles an hour. At that speed and with their adrenaline
pumping and the
tally-ho
ringing in their ears, they weren’t about to
think in terms of aircraft identification. They simply pushed the red button and
opened fire. As the tracers flashed past them, the Hurricanes broke and
scattered, most of them never even seeing their attackers, and naturally
reported being bounced by Me’s.

As the reports drift back in to Bentley
Priory—no bomb damage, no German planes shot down, no cannon holes in the
Hurricanes—as the sun begins to sink over the west counties, as a disturbing
quiet envelops the land, King George solemnly bids good-bye to Dowding and his
staff. He drives away, and Dowding is left to sift through the reports and to
reflect on what it means.

“I shall pray for radar, and trust in God,” he
had said.

But there was an old saying in Scotland, where
he was born, which he had never before understood: “Beware of answered prayers.”

A cold chill began to settle deep in his spine.

Two

Britain’s vulnerability to aerial attack
had been anticipated some thirty years earlier. It all began with a headstrong
newspaper publisher and a swimmer cutting through the waters of the English
Channel.

The year was 1904, and the idea came from the
fertile imaginings of a young Englishman named Alfred Harmsworth, who at the
age of thirty-nine was publisher of the
Daily Mail,
one of the many
penny papers in England. He had the strangest notion of offering a
hundred-guinea prize for the first person to swim the English Channel, hoping
that when he publicized this in his paper, people would begin to buy it.

And so he did, and so they did. Soon he had
built the
Daily Mail
into one of the largest-circulation papers in the
world, topping the million-reader mark, and Harmsworth looked around for
another prize contender.

It took him a couple of years, but in 1906, he
found it: Aviation was the thing. While most people regarded the Wright
brothers’ flight of a few years earlier as little more than a stunt, Harmsworth
thought otherwise. He offered a prize of ten thousand pounds for the first
aviator to fly from London to Manchester.

The idea was ridiculous. The distance between
London and
Manchester was 185
miles, and the European record for distance was 220
yards.
The prize was
quite properly ridiculed by
Punch
magazine, which offered the same
amount of money for the first man to swim the Atlantic and for the first flight
to Mars.

No one attempted to win either the
Daily
Mail’s
or
Punch’s
prize. Lord Northcliffe, as Harmsworth now was,
realized he had bitten off more than anyone could chew, and two years later, in
1908, he found a more promising possibility. If it had excited people to read
about someone swimming across the Channel, how about someone flying over it? He
announced a prize of one thousand pounds for the first flight from France to
England.

Unlike Northcliffe’s previous offer, this was a
well-thought-out proposal. At first it sounded sensational, the stuff of
science fiction—actually to fly through the air from the Continent across the
wild waters to England. But it was clearly doable: The Channel was twenty-two
miles wide at its narrowest point, between Calais and Dover, and by 1908, some
airplanes, like the Wright Flyer, could fly for an hour and a half and could
cover the twenty-two miles in less than an hour. Everyone expected Wilbur
Wright to try for the prize, but Wilbur declined to risk the only airplane he
had in Europe on a flight across water. It wasn’t until the following summer
that a young man named Hubert Latham announced his intention of taking home the
prize.

Latham was a twenty-six-year-old Englishman who
lived in Paris. He was rich, he was handsome, he was suave and sophisticated.
The man was famous not only for his ivory cigarette holder and charming smile
but for his society affairs, his big-game hunting in Africa, and his skill at
racing motorboats at Monaco. Within three months of learning to fly, “Le Tham”
(as he was known to the French newspaper-reading public) had established a
world endurance record of one hour, thirty-seven minutes, landing only when it
began to rain.

Now he was on the cliffs near Calais with his
streamlined monoplane, the Antoinette IV. A French cruiser waited in the Channel
to
rescue him if he failed. On
July 19, 1909, he took off cleanly, circled around the field to gain height,
and then sailed out over the cliffs, disappearing across the water to the
cheers of the crowds who saw him off.

But airplane engines in those days were not
reliable. The same engine that had previously kept him in the air for an hour
and a half now decided to sputter to a halt in fifteen minutes, and he was
forced to glide down and splash into the sea six miles from the French coast.
Luckily the Antoinette floated until the cruiser steamed by to find Le Tham
perched patiently on its wing, smoking a cigarette in his famous ivory holder.

He immediately sent to Paris for a new machine,
but as the days slipped by, another Frenchman, Louis Bleriot, appeared on the
scene. He had made a fortune manufacturing headlamps for the newly burgeoning
automobile industry, and then, inspired by the Wright brothers, he began
designing airplanes—without, however, the Wrights’ success. One after another
of his designs crashed and burned, and with each one went a sizable piece of
his fortune.

But by 1909, when his eleventh design, the
Bleriot XI, had made several flights of up to twenty minutes, he decided to
enter it in the race for Lord Northcliffe’s prize. The trouble was that the
Channel crossing would take at least half an hour, ten minutes longer than his
longest flight. Another problem was that he had badly burned his foot on the
exhaust pipe that ran through the cockpit, so he could hardly walk. And most
troubling of all, he was out of money. By now he had spent all his headlamp
fortune and his wife’s substantial dowry; he was not only crippled, he was
bankrupt. He could no more buy enough fuel to fly the Channel than he could buy
eggs for breakfast.

But on July 1, 1909, his wife was visiting some
wealthy Parisian friends in a second-story apartment in Paris. Nobody noticed
that their little girl had climbed up onto the windowsill and was leaning out,
until with a cry Bleriot’s wife sprang out of her chair and seized
the child just as she slipped. In gratitude
for saving their daughter’s life, the friends insisted on financing Bleriot’s
attempt across the Channel.

Meanwhile, Hubert Latham’s new airplane had
arrived. Several days of clouds and strong winds prevented him from attempting
the flight, but on the night of July 24, the winds began to show signs of
possibly weakening and the clouds began to break. Latham went to bed, leaving
word to be awakened at dawn if the weather continued to improve. By 2:00 a.m.,
the air was calm and the sky clear—but no one woke him. His mechanics were
asleep, and so Latham slept on.

In the Bleriot camp, however, the mechanics
were alert. When they saw the stars coming out, they ran to wake Bleriot. The
plane was wheeled out of the hangar and checked quickly, for there wasn’t much
to check: The little airplane had no instruments, not even a compass.

Bleriot was close enough to Latham’s camp to
see it through his binoculars. To his amazement—and relief—it was quiet and
dark. At 4:41 a.m., the sun began to rise. Bleriot took off with the sun,
swerved out over the cold waters of the Channel—quite alone, with no escorting
French naval vessel in case he crashed—and steered as best he could for
England.

In the dim light of the rising dawn, the
weather held clear and somehow the engine continued its steady beat. In less
than half an hour, he could make out a darkening along the horizon: England!
But the famous white cliffs of Dover were nowhere to be seen.

He had no idea where he was, and the prize had
specified that the flight be from Calais to Dover. Then he spotted three ships
all going in the same direction. Reasoning that they might be headed for a
port, and that the port might be Dover, he turned around and flew in that
direction. Luckily, he was right: Just as the winds began to pick up and bounce
him around, he saw the famous white cliffs.

“The wind was fighting me now worse than ever.
Suddenly at the edge of an opening that appeared in the cliff, I saw a man
desperately
waving a tricolor
flag, out alone in the middle of a field, shouting ‘Bravo! Bravo!’ I attempt a
landing, but the wind catches me and whirls me round two or three times. At
once I stop my motor, and instantly my machine falls straight upon the land. I
am safe on your shore.”

The man was a French newsman who was waiting
for Latham, but who welcomed Bleriot just as effusively, wrapping him in the
French flag and kissing him soundly on both cheeks. Bleriot had flown for
thirty-seven minutes and had covered twenty-four miles. Many others had flown
for greater distances but, as we all know, symbolism is greater than reality. “England
is no longer an island,” Lord Northcliffe exclaimed as the crowds went wild. “England
is no longer an island!”

Winston Churchill soon saw what he meant,
lamenting that “England came into big things as an accident of naval power when
she was an island. Through an accident of airpower she will probably cease to
exist.”

The first hints of the power of air had
come as early as 1911, when the Italians used primitive airplanes to bomb the
Senussi tribes in Africa. The Italians’ action broke all the rules of civilized
warfare, as they weren’t able to distinguish between spear-carrying warriors
and baby-carrying women, but no one in Europe or America seemed to care.
Actions taken against African blacks had little to do with civilized peoples.

But then on Christmas Eve of 1914, in the first
year of World War I, a single German airplane ventured over England and dropped
one tiny bomb into the garden of a suburban home outside Dover. The Kaiser was
horrified; honourable men did not conduct warfare against helpless women and
children, though Italians might, nor could such cowardly actions have any
conceivable effect on the battlefields, where the real decisions of victory or
defeat would be made. He absolutely forbade any further such adventures.

And yet . . .

Others began to think about it. True, that lone
bomb had done nothing to help Germany’s cause. On the other hand, could the
British do anything to stop more airplanes from dropping more bombs? The German
naval staff, in particular, was intrigued. War had begun, the army had invaded
France, but the U-boats were not yet seen as an effective weapon and the
Kriegsmarine was not part of the war; they were irrelevant. How could they get
into the action? Searching for some way to justify their existence, the
admirals hit on a unique development. Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin had
perfected gigantic, lighter-than-air dirigibles that, the admirals suggested to
Kaiser Wilhelm, could carry bombs over England and drop them, not on
civilians—not on women and children, certainly—but on military targets. The
admirals pointed to the London docks as suitable for attack.

Still the Kaiser refused. The accuracy of bombs
dropped from a height sufficient to keep the zeppelins safe from ground fire
was clearly insufficient to safeguard the homes of families living near the
docks.

But the months began to slip by without the
anticipated successes in the trenches of France, and increasingly the admirals
suggested, proposed, and finally promised that they could hit the docks and not
the houses. Finally the Kaiser relented. Permission was granted to attack the
docks, but the resulting bomb raids did not turn out as anticipated. The
admirals were wrong: The docks were largely undamaged, while the houses nearby
were demolished and civilians were killed.

The Kaiser was appalled, but the German
newspapers were ecstatic. They reported the raids jubilantly, and the German
people responded with an enthusiasm they had lost when the army’s advance
stagnated. The outcries of the outraged British served only to stimulate morale
in Germany. The navy urged further attacks. Suddenly, the bombing of women and
children looked like an effective way to wage war after all.

The German army staff could not let the navy
claim this new war for themselves. They ordered their own airships to bomb
London, seeking not only the docks—which the navy could argue belonged to
them
—but
any “targets of opportunity.” Again the Kaiser protested, but the arguments
were too strong, the chances of success too high, the airships both too
expensive to waste and unsuitable for any other military operations, and on May
30, 1915, he capitulated to the extent of authorizing the aerial bombing of
targets east of the Tower of London. The only civilians in the East End lived
in slums, and no one was expected to care much about them.

The German Admiralty quickly responded by proposing
to attack military targets “of interest to Naval strategy” throughout the city
of London. These would include the British Admiralty offices, the railways
(which brought goods to the docks), and the Bank of England (which provided the
financial support for all naval operations). Once this concept was approved,
the next step was inevitable: They began to bomb
all
railways, all
offices, all administrative and logistical support facilities. Since these were
scattered through the city, interspersed with truly civilian offices and
residences, the necessity of civilian casualties simply had to be accepted.