With Wings Like Eagles (15 page)

The boundaries of each group were drawn with great care, and had been carefully thought out by Dowding. They might be invisible from the air, and at 300 miles per hour it was easy enough for pilots to overlook them, but they served a purpose in his plan and he did not intend them to be ignored when the serious fighting began. In this he was optimistic, or perhaps naive—certainly, throughout his career Dowding expected (and deserved) more loyalty than he got.

The most significant exception was, of all people, the dynamic and widely distrusted press tycoon Lord Beaverbrook, millionaire owner of the
Daily Express
and the
Evening Standard
, whom Churchill had made Minister of Aircraft Production over the strong objections of the king (and the queen). “The Beaver,” as he was known to those close to him (Evelyn Waugh caricatured him triumphantly as “Lord Copper,” owner of “the
Daily Beast
,” in his novel
Scoop
), was one of Churchill’s most loyal friends, and one of the very few people on whose advice Churchill counted in both his political and his private life. (Another was Brendan Bracken, against whom the king and queen had raised even stronger and more outraged objections when Churchill eventually made him Minister of Information.
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) Beaverbrook was mischievous, temperamental, shrewd, demanding, mercurial, capable of great charm when it suited him and brutal when it did not, and endowed with a sharp, boisterous sense of humor (though largely at the expense of other people), as well as being a world-class hypochondriac, gossip, and womanizer. He ran his newspaper empire like a dictator. William Maxwell (“Max”) Aitken was by birth a Canadian (hence his choice of Beaverbrook for his title). He had been a power behind the scenes in British politics since before World War I, and had made and unmade prime ministers, amassing a huge fortune and many enemies along the way. Beaverbrook and Bracken, both adventurers from humble (and in Bracken’s case, somewhat mysterious) backgrounds who had risen to wealth and power in England, were generally described by more conventional Conservatives, whose instinctive loyalty was still owed to Neville Chamberlain, as “gangsters.” (Anthony Eden and the circle around him were known derisively by the same kind of people as Churchill’s “glamour boys.”)

Churchill, overruling the Beaver’s pleas of ill health, chose him for the job of increasing aircraft production, which had fallen badly behind schedule, counting on Beaverbrook’s energy and ruthlessness to get the job done, even though Beaverbrook knew little or nothing about manufacturing airplanes. This turned out to be an advantage—what Beaverbrook did know how to produce was results, and of course how to motivate and when necessary bully men; and he did in fact quickly succeed in increasing aircraft production significantly, despite the fury of the Air Council and the aviation industry at having control over the production of all types of aircraft taken out of their hands by a brash, rude, hard-driving ex-colonial Fleet Street newspaper proprietor. If Beaverbrook did not quite perform the miracles he later claimed—good public relations for himself was one of the things the Beaver understood best—he nevertheless kept the flow of aircraft coming out of the factories in sufficient quantity to meet Fighter Command’s needs, and devised ingenious ways to make new aircraft out of damaged ones, and even out of the Air Ministry’s jealously hoarded stock of spare parts. His most curious accomplishment was that although they were, on the face of it, complete opposites, he and Dowding got along like a house on fire from the very first.

This was only in part because they both had an only son serving as a fighter pilot (the Honorable Max Aitken would go on to become a Wing Commander and win the DSO and the DFC) each of whom called his father every evening to report that he was still alive; Beaverbrook also appreciated the fact that Dowding, like himself, did not hesitate to challenge accepted wisdom, hated meetings and committees, and treated anybody who got in the way of what he wanted as an enemy or an idiot. Dowding’s peculiar (but profound) religious beliefs, his shyness with strangers, and his down-to-earth common sense, earnestness, and distrust of higher authority struck Beaverbrook, a Canadian, as more natural and familiar than these qualities seemed to most native-born Englishmen. Dowding, though he sometimes appeared unworldly, had made a career of shocking people and defying authority (although in his own more quiet way) just as Beaverbrook had, and the two men slipped almost immediately into a comfortable working relationship. Neither Dowding nor Beaverbrook bothered to go through channels, deal with paperwork, or inform the Air Ministry—the most important priority of the war at the time was dealt with by a single telephone call between two busy men every night. Every evening Beaverbrook would pick up the telephone and call Dowding (or Air Vice-Marshal Park, the only one of his commanders for whom Dowding seemed to feel affection, whose No. 11 Group would take the brunt of the losses), and ask how many fighters were needed for the next day; and in the morning the fighters would arrive without fail or fuss, often delivered by young civilian women pilots of the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA).

A flight mechanic’s reaction to that remarkable innovation, on his first sight of an ATA pilot, is quoted in Richard Hough and Denis Richards’s book: “A Hurricane landed and taxied up to the watch office. The pilot switched off the engine and got down from the cockpit, and while walking to the watch office took off the flying helmet and patted up her hair—a ‘flapper’—couldn’t have been more than nineteen—delivering a Hurricane to replace one of our losses. I couldn’t believe it!”

Just like Dowding, Beaverbrook ignored hierarchies. He gave the most important posts in the Ministry of Aircraft Production to successful businessmen, not to RAF officers or to presumed experts from the aviation industry; it was his idea to have women ATA pilots take fighters straight from the factories to the airfields;
*
he rode roughshod over anyone, of any rank, who got in the way; he kept important people waiting while he talked to technicians or craftsmen who could tell him how to produce more Hurricanes, Spitfires, and Merlin engines faster; he made what he thought the RAF should have, not what the Air Ministry said it needed, and delivered it where he (and Dowding) thought it ought to go—the two men might have been made for each other.

Beaverbrook succeeded in part by ruthlessly concentrating on fighter production at the expense of other kinds of aircraft, and in part by refusing to allow for the modifications and improvements in the existing designs continually demanded by the Air Ministry, but he somehow managed to raise the number of fighters produced each month from 261 to nearly 500. It was not a miracle, but it was enough. Like “Stuffy” Dowding, the Beaver was not one to pause and seek anybody’s permission—when thwarted, he went straight to Churchill, or, via his friend Harry Hopkins, to Franklin Roosevelt if the matter involved the United States. Indeed, he made one of the most important decisions of the war, when, fed up with negotiating with a reluctant Henry Ford to mass-produce Rolls-Royce Merlin engines in America, he swiftly changed horses and made a deal with Packard to manufacture them instead. This would lead to putting the British aircraft engine into an American airframe, that of the P-51 Mustang, hitherto powered by the somewhat anemic Allison engine, thus creating the P-51 D, the first successful long-range escort fighter of the war, which would make possible the American daylight bombing campaign against Germany from 1943 on.

From the other side of the Channel there was still, despite British expectations of an invasion or an aerial onslaught at any moment, a certain amount of hesitation. Stepping out of character, the usually cautious General Milch had advised Göring to attack Britain before the British troops had even been evacuated from Dunkirk. Milch’s rival generals in the
Luftwaffe
might make fun of him as an airline official dressed up in a general’s uniform—not to speak of the fact that he was either half Jewish or illegitimate, depending on which story you chose to believe—but his suggestion to Göring was bold and brilliant and might just have succeeded. He saw at once that dive-bombing the British Army at Dunkirk was not going to prevent most of the troops from getting off the beach, and advised an astonished Göring to forget about Dunkirk altogether and attack Britain at once, before the British had a chance to sort themselves out. Use the Stukas to destroy Fighter Command’s forward airfields in southeastern England and to disrupt road and rail communication, drop the elite
Luftwaffe
paratroop division to seize and hold several carefully selected airfields, then fly in as many troops as the Ju 52 transports could carry—undertake, in short, a daring and unprecedented aerial coup de main to gain a beachhead in England, and do it
at once
, while the British were still reeling from defeat in France and Belgium; then follow it up with whatever the German army and the navy could get across the Channel.

Göring was dismayed by Milch’s idea and the vehemence with which Milch urged it on him, and it has since been dismissed by most historians as foolish, but it might in fact have made more sense than sitting around for the next ten weeks or so while the
Luftwaffe
and Fighter Command fought in the skies over the Channel and southern England. True, most of the big airborne operations undertaken in World War II would prove to be disasters, with the exception of the British and American air drops the night before the D-day landings,
*
but who knows what a bold, imaginative move might have accomplished? Certainly, the War Cabinet of May 26, during which Halifax announced that he had been talking to the Italian ambassador about asking Mussolini to inquire of the Führer what terms he would offer Britain for peace, might have taken a very different course if the Germans had been in Kent, rather than on the other side of the Channel.

In any event, Göring turned Milch down, arguing rather weakly that he had only one parachute division, and that the army would not divert any of its forces while fighting was still going on in France. Though few people were closer to Göring than Milch, or more realistic about most things, it was Milch’s misfortune to have retained his illusions about his boss. Göring enjoyed a reputation for boldness, but he remained hopelessly subservient to Hitler, and he knew better than anyone else that Hitler had not yet made up his mind what to do about Britain. Not until mid-July would Hitler finally give the order to proceed with the planning for Operation Sea Lion, as it would be called. And the tone of the eventual order is not the usual crisp “Off with his head!” style of Hitler’s directives to initiate major military campaigns, like the one for the invasion of Czechoslovakia (“It is my unalterable decision to smash Czechoslovakia by military action in the near future”). Rather, it reads: “Since England, despite her hopeless military situation, still shows no sign of readiness to come to an understanding, I have decided to prepare a landing operation against England and if necessary carry it out.”

This is not exactly a stern rallying cry; indeed, it seems to suggest that Hitler was still waiting hopefully for good news from London in the form of a peace offer or a change of government, almost six weeks after Churchill had put an end to Halifax’s cautious feeler. This pause was all the time Dowding (and Beaverbrook) needed to prepare Fighter Command, so long as the fight over the Channel was not allowed to get out of hand and Churchill was restrained from sending any more Hurricanes to France. Very fortunately the downward spiral of the French government, once it had abandoned Paris and set out on a series of moves to shabby hotels and town halls in provincial France, was swift enough to persuade even so passionate a Francophile as the prime minister to “turn off the tap” of Hurricanes to France, in Dowding’s phrase, though not a minute too soon.

Dowding’s own personal situation had not improved, despite the crisis—his command was still scheduled to end on July 14, and even this date had been reached only after a lamentable number of slights, which Dowding strongly resented. In 1937, he had been promised that he would be employed until he reached age sixty (in 1942), only to be told in 1938 that he must relinquish Fighter Command immediately and retire; then, after his replacement was injured in an air crash, he was given a rather grudging reprieve for one year, and at the same time informed that he must leave the RAF by June 1939—a decision made more painful for Dowding by the fact that somebody in the Air Ministry leaked to the press the false news that he had retired long before he was due to. His retirement date was then pushed back until the end of the year, and then extended orally to the end of March 1940. At the last moment, however, his old rival Newall called him “one day before his scheduled retirement and asked him to stay on until July 14th.” One day! This was a deliberate act of rudeness, but Dowding swallowed his pride and did not resign, much as he was tempted to—he was not a vain man, but he knew that nobody else in the RAF could do the job, or understand the system he had built, as well as he could. He carried on a punctilious but increasingly prickly, one-sided, and resentful correspondence with Newall and the Air Staff on the subject of his retirement, and asked—not unreasonably in the circumstances—whether he had the full confidence of the Secretary of State for Air and the Chief of the Air Staff. It is clear enough that he was being treated with remarkable discourtesy, and that many of his fellow air marshals were intriguing against him. Dowding’s own confidence in his political and military masters was not increased by the fact that so much of this was done at the last minute and by telephone in an undignified spirit of hugger-mugger, leaving ample scope for deniability and last-minute changes of mind.

Dowding seems to have behaved throughout all this with quiet dignity—certainly with more dignity than his enemies—and he did not let it affect his job. Nor did he voice any complaints to those around him—he was in any case the polar opposite of the kind of “matey” commanding officer who chats with his subordinates over a drink—or go public on the subject of his ill-treatment by leaking it to the press, and his fighter pilots and the people around him at Fighter Command headquarters therefore remained unaware of the hostility toward their commander.