With Wings Like Eagles (16 page)

As for himself, Dowding was a supreme realist, and so was entirely conscious of the fact that the prime minister was unlikely to have enjoyed being told, at the War Cabinet of May 15, that he was wrong about sending more fighters to France. He had been very conscious that he was putting the remainder of his career at risk when he insisted on appearing at the War Cabinet to make his case. Dowding later said of Churchill and himself that after this meeting, “there was no chance of our ever becoming friendly,” which was putting it mildly. Many historians have argued that Churchill admired Dowding for having stood up to him, but Dowding’s view was surely closer to the mark. Though Churchill covered himself very adroitly in his memoirs, in fact he neither forgot the incident nor forgave Dowding, who could not—and did not—count on the prime minister’s support in any dispute between himself and the Air Ministry.

Dowding was still scheduled to give up his command on July 14, and so, as he surely must have been aware, he would be leaving Fighter Command (and very likely the RAF) just as the force that he had largely created went into action to save the country from invasion. Ironically, the date when Dowding was to leave Fighter Command would be only two days after Hitler finally signed his long-awaited directive to the German armed forces putting the planning for Sea Lion into high gear, and was only extended at the very last minute to October, with considerable fuss and bad feeling, after the prime minister himself learned of it and personally intervened.

There can have been very few other instances in warfare when a commander was required to give up his post on the eve of a decisive battle.

T
o those who still remember it, the summer of 1940 was idyllic—warm, halcyon days; blue skies; perfect weather—or at least as perfect as it gets in and around the United Kingdom. All over southern England, people near the seacoast were being evacuated in anticipation of the invasion—100,000 sheep were also evacuated, to safer pastures farther north—while soldiers dug trenches, built pillboxes, and sited what little they had in the way of artillery and machine guns in anticipation of a German landing. The argument about what should be done with Fighter Command’s forward airfields in the event of an invasion was succinctly settled as usual by Dowding, who sensibly ordered that they were to be “defended at all costs and for as long as possible.” Once the aircraft had been removed, remaining RAF ground personnel were to join the soldiers to defend the airfields with whatever weapons they had, and demolition of the runways, equipment, and buildings should take place only at the last possible moment.

Among Dowding’s many concerns was the continued unreliability of radar in indicating the height of an enemy attack. This was a known defect of the radar system—the vital third dimension of height was a problem the boffins (scientists) had been working on for months, with only spotty success. One of the main reasons for backing the radar chain up with the Observer Corps was that in good weather an observer on the ground with a pair of binoculars and an elementary knowledge of trigonometry could calculate the height of an enemy raid the moment it came into view, but of course there was no way to do so when German raids formed up over the sea or approached their target from above the clouds. Dowding relied in part on the reasonable assumption that the Germans would probably bomb from about the same height as RAF Bomber Command, which was then seldom much more than 12,000 feet, since at the time not all RAF bombers were provided with reliable oxygen or heating equipment. This was a reasonable assumption—most of the German bombing force was not much better equipped in these respects than the British, except for the more modern Ju 88, which had its own problems. Dowding estimated that 15,000 feet would be about the maximum height for German bombers, but of course the escorting fighters would be coming in much higher, well above them, so as to have the advantage of speed when they dived to engage the British fighters that were climbing to attack the bombers.

Throughout the battle to come, Fighter Command would operate with an excellent picture of the course and speed of German raids, a fair estimate of the number of aircraft in each raid, and a somewhat unreliable estimate of their height, unless it had been confirmed from the ground. The system was not perfect—there had not been enough time to make it so—but it would be good enough.

Dowding was more concerned with the need for his group commanders to prevent their pilots from concentrating on the German fighters flying at high altitude and ignoring the bombers below them. He recognized that fighter-to-fighter combat in the tradition of “Von Richthofen and his Flying Circus” during World War I would be an almost irresistible temptation; but the bombers were the more valuable prey, and the objective was to stop them from bombing. In short, he wanted discipline and control maintained over the battle, not a free-for-all in the skies, and achieving this, as it turned out, would give him almost as many problems as the Germans did.

Dowding’s forces included approximately 700 Hurricanes and Spitfires;
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1,400 balloons (or “gas bags”), which, with their trailing wires, would present low-flying German aircraft, particularly the dive-bombing Ju 87s, with serious problems; and Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Pile’s antiaircraft guns and 4,000 searchlights. Many of Pile’s heavy guns were superannuated; he was well below strength in more modern rapid-fire guns like forty-millimeter cannon; and there were never enough to go around to defend every city, port, factory, and airfield in the United Kingdom—before the war the chiefs of staff had estimated that he would need 4,000 guns, their latest estimate was 8,000, and the reality was that he had about 2,000. However, the mere presence (and sound) of Pile’s antiaircraft guns would be a source of comfort to everyone close to them, and volunteers to man them (and the searchlights) would soon include HRH Princess Elizabeth, the elder daughter of King George VI and heir to the throne, as well as a curious assortment of the nobility, writers, poets, artists, and intellectuals.

Once again, just as he had before Dunkirk, Hitler hesitated, with the result that Dowding had a welcome, though unexpected, breathing space to review and consolidate his forces. His fighters were divided into four principal groups, the two weakest being No. 13 Group, covering the north of England and Scotland; and No. 10 Group, covering the west of England. Of the two strongest Groups, No. 12 Group covered the largest area, basically the industrial Midlands; and No. 11 the most likely target area, the south of England and London, as well as the beaches where the invasion would land when it came. No. 11 Group, commanded by Air Vice-Marshal Park, was the strongest, containing twenty-five squadrons (including one Canadian and one Polish squadron); No. 12 Group, commanded by Park’s ambitious and energetic rival Air Vice-Marshal Leigh-Mallory, consisted of nineteen squadrons (including four Polish and two Czech squadrons).

By the end of June, Dowding had just over 1,300 fighter pilots. Most of them were British, and few of them had had any combat experience. During the course of the battle Fighter Command would also draw on fifty-six carrier pilots from the Royal Navy’s Fleet Air Arm, as well as a mixed bag of twenty-one Australians, 102 New Zealanders, ninety Canadians,
*
twenty-one South Africans, two (white) Rhodesians, one (white) Jamaican, nine Irish volunteers, seven Americans, 141 Poles, eighty-six Czechs (one of whom, Sergeant Joseph František, would become the RAF’s second-highest-scoring ace in the Battle of Britain), twenty-nine Belgians, thirteen Free French aviators, and one Palestinian Jew.
¹

Three of the more colorful Americans served together in No. 609 Squadron—they had volunteered to fly with the Finnish air force against the Soviet invaders; journeyed, with numerous adventures, from Helsinki to France when Finland surrendered to Stalin; and from there caught the last Channel crossing to England. They were spending the last of their money in a pub near the Air Ministry at lunchtime and told their story to a sympathetic RAF Air Commodore over a drink who told them “to get in touch with him tomorrow.” The next day they were given commissions in the RAF, and sent out with money to buy their uniforms. Pilot Officer “Red” Tobin from California had worked as a studio messenger at MGM to pay for his flying lessons. Pilot Officer “Shorty” Keough, was, at four feet ten inches, the shortest pilot in the RAF, and needed a couple of inflatable pillows under his parachute to see over the cowling of his Hurricane. Pilot Officer “Andy” Mamedoff, a stunt flier from Miami, had barnstormed his own plane all over America. None of them survived the war.
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By the official end of the battle just over one-third of Dowding’s pilots would be casualties—killed, seriously wounded, or missing. There is a tendency in modern fiction about the Battle of Britain to present Fighter Command as a kind of happy-go-lucky multinational force, full of foreign volunteers and soldiers of fortune, but except for the Polish and Czech squadrons and the one Canadian squadron, foreigners were relatively few and predominantly English-speaking; the vast majority of the pilots were British, middle-class, and very young. That they were high-spirited almost goes without saying—for many it was the great adventure of their life, and a large number of them went straight from school to the cockpit of a Spitfire or a Hurricane.

The Germans’ primary goal during the battle was to destroy Fighter Command, but thanks to Dowding’s cautious tactics—although he was not a card player, he had a deft poker player’s instinctive skill at concealing what was in his hand—they would never come nearly as close to doing so as they fondly believed. Although Dowding always complained that he was short of pilots, his strength actually grew during the four crucial months of the battle, from 1,456 to 1,727; and the number of fighter aircraft available for operations on a daily basis remained constant at about 700, with an average delivery of about 1,000 new fighter aircraft a month to the operational squadrons. At the height of the battle, in August and September, the number of new aircraft in storage units being prepared to operational readiness would certainly dip alarmingly (to the consternation of the prime minister), but at no point would the
Luftwaffe
come anywhere near to crippling Fighter Command, let alone, despite Göring’s boasts, to clearing the skies above the Channel and southern England for long enough to make a German invasion possible, or even plausible.

Although it is usual to portray the Battle of Britain as a kind of modern, aerial contest between David and Goliath, with the
Luftwaffe
playing Goliath, the reality is that although the German bomber force in the three air fleets facing the British was very substantial—nearly 1,000 serviceable bombers on August 10, 1940—the number of single-engine fighters meant to protect them was not all that much greater than those available to Dowding: 805 serviceable Bf 109s versus Dowding’s 749 Hurricanes and Spitfires. In the category of fighter aircraft, the additional 224 Bf 110 twin-engine “heavy fighters,” far from being an asset, would themselves require the protection of the single-engine Bf 109s to survive in air combat.
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(The 261 Ju 87 Stuka dive-bombers would also prove almost useless.
³
)

In pilot strength, the Germans had certain advantages.
Luftwaffe
major generals did not pick up foreign pilots in bars—first, because the vast, covert Nazi training schemes from 1933 on had created large numbers of pilots; and second, because the
Völkische
nature of Nazi Germany meant that service in the air force was limited to those young men of pure German (or Austrian-German) birth, who could satisfy the authorities that they were of Aryan descent. Ultimately, the British were willing (though not necessarily eager) to take anyone who was white (i.e., “European,” American, or from the dominions and colonies) and could fly an airplane, whereas in Germany, aircrew status was limited to those with “pure German blood.”
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The actual number of German fighter pilots available was roughly similar to that of Fighter Command, but mere numbers do not of course tell the whole story. Since the battle would be fought largely over England (or the English Channel), in most cases when a German aircraft was shot down it—and more important, its pilot—would be gone for good, whereas British pilots, if they were lucky, could parachute or crash-land their aircraft on British soil, and might be back with their squadrons and in action again on the same day. (As for the aircraft, Lord Beaverbrook had made elaborate and very efficient arrangements for the immediate repair or salvage of downed Spitfires and Hurricanes, at Civilian Repair Depots, and for salvaging downed German aircraft to produce aluminum for building more British fighters.) The Germans could certainly replace pilots who were killed or captured, but in most cases they were obliged to replace an experienced fighter pilot with one just out of flying school—not the same thing at all.

Thus, German losses of men and machines were final, whereas those of the RAF were not necessarily so. This was a factor that neither Göring nor anyone else in the
Luftwaffe
seems to have considered seriously when contemplating a full-scale aerial attack against Great Britain. Dowding, on the other hand, had given it a good deal of thought, in his typically logical and precise way. It explains his lack of enthusiasm for letting Park’s No. 11 Group loose to tangle with the
Luftwaffe
over Dunkirk, and his reluctance to use Park’s fighters to protect coal convoys in the English Channel from German air attack—in Dowding’s view, such protection was largely an exercise to prove to the Germans that the Channel was still English. Aircraft shot down over the Channel were gone for good, and pilots who parachuted or crash-landed in the Channel were difficult to recover, especially since they didn’t have the inflatable life rafts, fluorescent water markers, and bright yellow flying helmets with which the
Luftwaffe
equipped its aircrews.

Dowding’s stubborn, logical mind often brought him to conclusions that surprised other people, whose judgment was more easily swayed by emotion. It was Dowding’s decision that the slow, cumbersome German He 59 air-sea rescue floatplanes, although painted white and marked with conspicuous red crosses, were not entitled to any protection under the Geneva Conventions. They were picking up from the Channel downed German aircrews who would be used again against Britain as soon as they were back with their units, and were also suspected of radioing back the course and position of British convoys. He ordered Fighter Command to shoot them down, or to machine-gun them if they were on the sea performing a rescue (a position in which they were truly sitting ducks), an unsporting order that surprised his pilots and outraged the Germans. This gave the Germans a short-lived propaganda victory, until they gave up the red crosses, camouflaged the He 59s, marked them with a swastika and black
Luftwaffe
crosses, and armed them with a machine gun.

Who but Dowding could have worked out in his mind, following the same line of reasoning, that under the Geneva Conventions the Germans were entitled to machine-gun British pilots in the air over England as they descended to safety by parachute, because they would return to their units to fight again; but British pilots were not entitled to machine-gun Germans parachuting from their damaged aircraft, since they would be made prisoners of war on landing? This decision struck many of Dowding’s colleagues as either inhumane or ridiculous, but that was because, unlike Dowding, they had not read the Geneva Conventions attentively or unemotionally and had not drawn the correct conclusion. As it turned out, in practice very few fighter pilots on either side were likely to deliberately machine-gun a man parachuting to the ground, or at 300 miles per hour had any way to determine if he was British or German. Dowding himself did not think it was likely; he merely wanted a neat, tidy resolution to the question. It was the kind of mental exercise, however, that did not win him friends among politicians or his fellow air marshals—indeed even the prime minister questioned his judgment, comparing a parachuting airman to “a drowning sailor”
⁴
—and made even a few of Dowding’s pilots wonder if their Commander-in-Chief might be cracked.