With Wings Like Eagles (32 page)

It may be that Dowding was simply too tired by October 1940 to perceive that he was walking into a trap, or that he put too much reliance on Churchill’s promises of support (though given his long experience with politicians that seems unlikely); or perhaps he had simply had enough of repeatedly being given new dates for his retirement. Certainly, he can have had no illusions about the meeting; nor can Park—it was a grim, hanging jury of his peers that he was facing, barely disguised as an impartial inquiry into the facts. His old rival Newall, the Chief of the Air Staff, was too ill to attend, and this ought to have been a warning, since he was replaced at the meeting by Sholto Douglas, now the Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, with whom Dowding had clashed many times before. Douglas was younger than Dowding, sleeker, an altogether jollier and more outgoing personality, at least on the surface, a decorated war hero, happily married, and a good mixer, and he had set his eyes long since on Dowding’s job. The presence of Leigh-Mallory cannot have surprised Dowding—the whole purpose of the meeting was ostensibly to thrash out the differences between Park and Leigh-Mallory—but it must have come as a shock to realize that Leigh-Mallory had brought Bader along to represent the views of the fighter pilots. That Sholto Douglas had allowed Leigh-Mallory to introduce into the meeting a mere squadron leader (the equivalent of a major), however highly decorated and celebrated, to dispute the views of the Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief, Fighter Command, and of Air Vice-Marshal Park, who commanded No. 11 Group, would have been enough to tell Dowding that his neck was on the block.

Nothing of this is reflected in the minutes of the meeting—it took place in England, after all. Everybody gave his point of view politely, making full allowance for the other fellow’s point of view. Park conceded that there was something to be said for the big wing, Leigh-Mallory admitted that there were occasions when an attack by one or two squadrons might be called for, and even Bader was restrained in front of his superiors. Sholto Douglas gave an impartial summing up, and Dowding promised to increase cooperation between the two groups, though he did not suggest how he hoped to achieve this. It was all very polite and English, but there is no question that his failure to get his two principal subordinate commanders to cooperate with each other was being criticized, with some reason.

Reading between the lines in Churchill’s history of World War II, it is possible to wonder if matters regarding Dowding had gone farther—or faster—than Churchill had ever intended. He almost certainly assumed that whatever happened, Dowding could be brought into line, as could his fellow air marshals—Churchill always thought he could deal with senior officers the way he did with politicians, smoothing things over with a strong dose of flattery, a new appointment, or, when all else failed, an emotional appeal to their sense of duty or friendship. It was a mistake he had already made during World War I, with his friend Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher and with that more remote potentate Field Marshal Lord Kitchener of Khartoum. Every great man has his faults, and among Churchill’s was the belief that his powers of persuasion were unlimited, and that when he had concluded an argument he had invariably changed the other person’s mind. He consistently underrated the stiff neck of most senior officers in the armed forces, a mistake he was to make again with Generals Auchinleck and Wavell in the Western Desert, in 1941. Though he had been a cadet at Sandhurst and had begun his adult life as a professional soldier, Churchill was a born politician, not necessarily a born military man, and he never fully understood that whereas politicians could differ and remain friends, or quarrel in public and make up in private, admirals, generals, and air marshals were cut from different cloth—they believed in rank, duty, and what we would now call the chain of command. This was perhaps the one area of statecraft in which Churchill’s wisdom was exceeded by that of George VI, who was constitutionally the head of the armed forces and took seriously the opinion of their senior officers, most of whom he knew.
*

In the end, what brought Dowding down was not the “big wing” controversy but the poor performance of his night fighters. As the
Luftwaffe
moved from day bombing to night bombing, it became increasingly (and embarrassingly) clear that Dowding’s night fighters, for the most part, remained unable to find enemy planes, let alone shoot them down. Politically, this was unacceptable to the prime minister, who not unreasonably felt that the British deserved and expected something better from Fighter Command while bombs and incendiaries fell on them every night. Another committee was set up to examine the matter, this time under the leadership of Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Salmond, another longtime adversary of Dowding’s. Salmond accepted the recommendation of Sholto Douglas that some of Dowding’s fighter squadrons, with their single-engine Spitfires and Hurricanes, should be retrained to fight at night, and that the centralized fighter control system, which Dowding had installed at such pains at Fighter Command headquarters, and which had been one of the principal factors in winning the Battle of Britain, should now be decentralized, to give each Group more direct control over its own fighters. (This was both a blow against Park’s conduct at No. 11 Group and a gesture of support for Leigh-Mallory’s opinions.)

Dowding vigorously resisted both these directives, and wrote a letter to the prime minister rebutting them in detail, which was surely a mistake, since although Churchill wanted results, the last thing he wanted was to be drawn into a technical dispute between feuding air marshals. Dowding certainly understood at once that decentralizing Fighter Command’s operations center was an attempt to take control of the fighter squadrons out of his hands, and he rightly predicted that to send up Hurricanes and Spitfires at night in any meaningful quantity would merely be to sacrifice pilots and aircraft for no purpose, and that nothing useful could be accomplished until Fighter Command received a new twin-engine aircraft—the Bristol Beau-fighter, which was still being flight-tested—suitable for night fighting, and equipped with an improved AI set, as well as a quantity of trained aircrew radar operators, to form a two-man team with the pilot. The solution to the problem of the night fighters depended, therefore, on three things that were still in development: the Beau-fighter, the new AI set, and the fully trained pilot–radar operator two-man crew. There was no way to rush any one of these, or to put one into service without the others.

Although Dowding was absolutely right, the notion that, for the present, nothing could be done about a serious military problem was not one that Churchill would have accepted tamely from any senior officer. He was not about to tell the British people that they should wait quietly and patiently until Fighter Command eventually received the right equipment and revised its training procedures, while in the meantime their homes were being blown up or burned night after night. There is no doubt that he was made aware of this new controversy between Dowding and the Air Ministry—it was the job of Churchill’s old friend Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air, to keep him informed, and even had Sinclair not done so, Sholto Douglas and numerous other people would have found ways to let the prime minister know what was going on at the “Night Air Defence Committee.” In the circumstances, it took no great effort to float the suggestion in high quarters that Dowding was too old for the job and out of touch with the latest technology, not to speak of being tired, stubborn, difficult, and hostile to new ideas.

In any case, Dowding had been commanding Fighter Command for four years, during which he had frequently had to fight off attempts to retire him, and for five months he had been fighting—and winning—the greatest and the most crucial air battle of history to date. It is hardly surprising, then, that not only his enemies assumed he was past his prime, and felt it was time for a change—even his own authorized biographer and those historians of the Battle of Britain sympathetic to him (as most are) take this view. He had been put on notice in August, at the height of the battle, that his retirement date would be postponed to November, and this time it was not extended. On November 25 he at last gave up his beloved command and retired, having been informed rather abruptly that there was no further post available for an officer of his seniority. Those who favor the conspiracy theory of history have, in this case, felt their view to be justified by the fact that Sholto Douglas replaced Dowding at Fighter Command, and that Leigh-Mallory replaced his own antagonist, Park, at No. 11 Group—thus the “anti-Dowding” faction finally won.

In the event, Dowding had a brief, though unhappy, comeback. He was persuaded by the prime minister to take a position of great importance: trying to get “American war aviation developed on the right lines, and lines parallel to ours,” a task for which he warned the prime minister he was completely unsuited. One senses, in Churchill’s note on the matter to Sinclair, a rare tone of guilt and embarrassment. Churchill had neither forgotten nor forgiven Dowding’s attempt at the War Cabinet to stop him from sending more fighters to France, but he recognized that the country owed Dowding a great debt. He managed to overcome Dowding’s objections to this new post (and Sinclair’s doubts about the wisdom of sending him to America), because the assignment was intended to postpone his retirement from the RAF. In the end, however, Dowding was right—hardly anybody could have been less well suited to bringing the Americans a message which they did not want to hear and which they would in any case ignore. He arrived bearing a personal message from the prime minister to President Roosevelt, which the latter received with his usual affability, but neither Dowding’s personality nor his mission was much appreciated by Americans—he had, after all, the uncongenial task of telling them that what they were building was all wrong, and that they would do better to follow the British example. He made the situation worse by warning the Americans against building day bombers at all, although day bombers were the heart of their planning for war if or when it came. He had also been charged with persuading the Americans to build the new Napier “Sabre” aircraft engine and use it in their new aircraft—a lost cause, since the Sabre was troublesome and difficult to manufacture, and turned out to be inferior to the aircraft engines the Americans already had on the drawing board. Dowding’s eccentric remarks in public about other problems in the Anglo-American relationship caused so much bad feeling that Lord Halifax, the British ambassador to the United States, felt obliged to complain about him to the Foreign Office; and Air Commodore Sir John Slessor wrote from Washington to the new Chief of the Air Staff Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, “I hate writing like this about a very senior officer, but in the national interest I must express the fervent hope that you will get him out of this country before he does much more harm.”
¹

It has to be said in Churchill’s favor that his sense of guilt was strong enough for him to intervene several times more on Dowding’s behalf—Dowding was selected to write the official
Despatch
on the Battle of Britain; Churchill recommended him, in vain, to head Army Cooperation Command;
²
then Dowding was appointed to the thankless task of touring RAF commands to suggest economies, a job in which his seniority, high rank, and growing status as a national hero made his suggestions about where and how money could be saved all the less welcome. Unsurprisingly, the latter job finally caused Dowding himself to put in for retirement in the summer of 1942, and by that time he was as happy to go as Churchill was, no doubt, happy to be relieved of the thankless task of finding further employment for him in the RAF.

Dowding’s supporters (who grew in number as the Battle of Britain receded) complained that he was not promoted to Marshal of the Royal Air Force (the equivalent of a British Field Marshal or an American five-star general) on retirement; but the custom was then that this rank should be reserved for officers who had served as Chief of the Air Staff, as Dowding had not, and even the king, who was a Marshal of the Royal Air Force himself, was unable to persuade the Air Ministry to make an exception for Dowding.
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Dowding remarried, happily; and, after some initial bitterness at the way he had been dismissed from Fighter Command, he mellowed, took up the cause of spiritualism, and following the example of his wife, vegetarianism, as well as that of a single universal human language. In compensation for not having been raised to the rank of Marshal of the Royal Air Force, he was made Lord Dowding of Bentley Priory in 1943, and awarded the Grand Cross of the Victorian Order, one of the few honors that remain entirely within gift of the sovereign.

When the official history of the Battle of Britain was published (it sold more than 6 million copies), Dowding’s name was not mentioned in it.
†

Dowding’s biographer Basil Collier called him a “prophet.” Collier was placing Dowding, oddly enough, among such religious cult figures as Madame Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society, and Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, no doubt because he had in mind Dowding’s preoccupation with spiritualism, which became stronger as he grew older.

But in fact Dowding was a prophet of a very different sort. Almost alone, he had prophesied, correctly, the form air warfare would take; and almost without help, indeed against determined opposition, he had invented the means with which to defend Britain against attack from the air, right down to the smallest item. Not only did he prophesy the nature of the attack; he prophesied the kind of tools that would be needed to defeat it—radar, the single-engine monoplane fighter, the centralized operations room—and by a miracle of vision and obstinacy managed to put it all in place by 1940, just when it was needed.