Fifty years on, the pattern of the Battle of Britain appears very much as it did at the time: appears, that is, to the interested British. The Germans, less well pleased with the outcome, for long affected to regard the campaign as of minor importance and swept it under their historical carpet.
At the time, it was agreed by Dowding, Park and everybody else in a position to know, that the Battle had moved through a number of phases.1 During the preliminary, warming-up or redeployment period in July and early August, the Luftwaffe had attacked mostly shipping and coastal targets. Then, during the second week of August, the full assault (Adlerangriff) had opened, at first mainly against radar stations and airfields near the south and south-east coasts. During this period, on 15 August, the Luftwaffe had made an attempt to outflank the southern defences by attacking the north-east with forces from Norway and Denmark – an attempt so costly as never to be repeated. After that, while not neglecting coastal targets, the German offensive had moved progressively inland. By the end of August it was falling with such severity on the southern airfields, and especially on the vital sector stations guarding London, that Fighter Command was coming under a strain which, if prolonged, might have proved fatal. The supply of Hurricanes and Spitfires never failed, but losses were now overtaking production. Most serious of all, the output of new pilots, who must in any case be less experienced than those they replaced, was failing to keep pace with casualties.
And then, at the critical point, the Germans had switched their attack on to the irresistible target of London – ‘a tremendous fat cow tied up to attract the beasts of prey’, in Churchill’s pre-war phrase.2 At once the strain on Fighter Command’s ground organisation had eased; produc tion of Hurricanes and Spitfires, if not of fully operational pilots, had begun again to outstrip losses; and the defeat of the great attack on London on 15 September had presaged the final victory. By October the Luftwaffe had been reduced to fighter-bomber forays by day and the pounding of British cities by night tragic for the many who suffered but, with the scale of attack possible at the time, strategically insignificant.
Equally clear at the time, and since, is that the Germans had been trying to destroy the RAF, and particularly Fighter Command, as the necessary preliminary to invasion. What was not so clear, until post-war access to German records, was the relationship between the air attacks and the timetable of invasion. After the war it was possible to see, for instance, that the vital switch to London, while also satisfying Hitler’s desire for revenge for the raids by Bomber Command, occurred as a step in the invasion programme. Fighter Command, the Germans thought, must come up in strength to defend the capital, and so might in strength be shot down. And massive blows on London, beginning on 7 September, might produce the chaos and collapse of morale which would make invasion possible, if all went well, by the then projected date of 21 September.3
Though there was ample evidence from every kind of source of the German preparations to invade, and later of the dispersal of invasion shipping from the Channel ports, even the Enigma decrypts did not directly point to Hitler’s decision, taken on 12 October, to postpone ‘Sealion’ until the following spring. On that day the Fuehrer had also decreed that preparations should be actively continued, in order to keep Britain under pressure. It was these continued preparations that the Enigma intercepts mostly reported,4 not the strategy behind them – a matter discussed in closed rooms or by landline, not over the ether. But because the threat to Britain seemed to continue, yet nothing happened, the British public began to wonder whether there had ever been any serious intention to invade at all. So began the first, mildest and shortest-lived of the controversies associated with the Battle of Britain. Did the RAF really save Britain from invasion – or was Hitler only bluffing all the time? Post-war investigation amply confirmed that Hitler was far from bluffing, but that he knew he had to beat the RAF first.5 He tried to do precisely that, and failed.
The reasons for that failure were, of course, manifold. The switch to London was certainly one. The superiority of Dowding as a commander-in-chief to the increasingly self-indulgent and remote-from-reality Goering was another. So too was the extraordinary weakness of German intelligence – a surprising feature in view of its excellence before and during the Battle of France. While Fighter Command knew precisely what faced it, the Luftwaffe was ill-informed not only about the complexity and methods of the British defensive system, but also about Fighter Command’s locations and strength. At the lower levels, too, there was a singular lack of information. Fighter pilots in a Staffel never saw an intelligence officer; these, to be found in every British squadron, existed only at Geschwader level for the Germans. The result was that throughout the swiftly moving battle vital experience and information about the British spread among the German crews only casually and informally, sometimes through adjutants or commanding officers, but usually by word of mouth from pilot to pilot.
There were reasons for the German defeat more fundamental than any of these. The British fighters were part of a scientific system of air defence evolved over many years, operating in exactly the role for which they were designed. The German bombers and fighters, in contrast, were attempting an unfamiliar task by a series of improvisations. The Luftwaffe had not been equipped or trained for a campaign of attrition against long-distance, fixed targets, as Luftwaffe doctrine had not for many years envisaged such a campaign. In the 1930s the Luftwaffe, for all its organisational independence, had developed as a closely related partner of the German Army, trained for quick response to calls for support in swiftly moving campaigns.6 In Poland, Norway and France it had played that part with ruthless efficiency, eliminating the opposing air forces as a preliminary to unleashing its full might against enemy troops, communications and strong points. But those opposing air forces had all been weak. In the Battle of Britain it had to face powerful and determined opposition – and there was no German Army at hand to follow up such successes as it achieved.
For the Battle of Britain, there were also fatal flaws in the German equipment. Against German expectations, the bombers proved too vulnerable to operate by themselves and had to be escorted. But the long-range Me 110 could not live with the Hurricane or Spitfire skilfully handled, and the excellent Me 109 had only short endurance. Over London, having wasted fuel while escorting slower bombers there, it had only some ten minutes’ combat time remaining. If it flew beyond the capital more than a few miles, it simply could not fight. To fighter commanders like Adolf Galland, this was the decisive factor in the German failure.7
There were also other factors which told against the Luftwaffe. There was the dreaded Channel, waiting to swallow up damaged aircraft on the return flight; and there was the certainty of the prison camp for any German pilot who baled out over England. By contrast, British pilots who ‘took to the silk’ were usually quickly reunited with their squadron. Such factors, together with their rising losses and the prolonged British resistance, had their inevitable effect on even such consistently brave and determined men as the Luftwaffe aircrews. Flushed with their success over France, they began with an abundance of confidence, which they progressively lost. The RAF pilots, with for most of them the spur of fighting in direct defence of their homeland, maintained with few exceptions a magnificently high morale throughout.
But for its task in hand, perhaps the Luftwaffe’s greatest weakness was one not commonly appreciated. Though it had a big general numerical advantage over Fighter Command, its advantages in the vital single-engined fighters was by no means overwhelming (see page 43 ff). Against skilful and determined opponents operating as part of a scientific system of air defence, the Luftwaffe proved to be simply not strong enough. Quite apart from the collapse of the invasion project, its losses alone were sufficient to force the diversion into the safety, at that time, of night bombing.
The second controversy to bemuse the British public concerned the numbers of aircraft shot down. Throughout the Battle both sides had announced totals which proved, when all was over, to be greatly exaggerated. Between the official beginning and end of the Battle, the RAF reckoned to have destroyed 2,698 German aircraft. It actually destroyed, according to the German records, 1,733. This overstatement was much closer to the mark than that of the enemy, who reckoned to have destroyed 3,058 RAF planes and actually destroyed 915. Fighter Command had overstated by less than twice, the Luftwaffe by more than three times.8
All this was completely understandable. On days of minor fighting the British assessments in fact proved to be extremely accurate, but as soon as two or three dozen aircraft were involved, accuracy disappeared; in the confused fighting more than one pilot, to say nothing of the gunners on the ground, often claimed what must have been the same aircraft. When the actual German losses, based on the replacements called for each day by the Luftwaffe units from the quartermaster general, were revealed in 1947, they of course came as a shock to the public. ‘Battle of Britain Day’, for instance, was celebrated on 15 September not so much for its strategic significance as because it was supposed to have been the day of the Luftwaffe’s greatest losses – 185 aircraft. The actual loss on that day turned out to be sixty, fifteen fewer than on 15 August.
Some of this shock could, and should, have been avoided. During the Battle Park and others began to suspect that the assessments were exaggerated, not least because on no day were more than fifty or so German aircraft found on the ground. Churchill was quickly on to this and quizzed Dowding about it. He asked Dowding, if ninety enemy aircraft were found on the ground, what was the additional number likely to have come down in the sea or been destroyed in landing? Dowding replied, ‘Another ninety,’ thereby perpetuating the illusion.9 More realistic was his answer to Sinclair’s questioning during the Battle when the Americans began to doubt the British claims – because of the completely contradictory claims made by the Germans. Dowding replied, ‘If the Germans’ figures are correct, they will be in London in a week. Otherwise, they won’t.’10
The ‘true figures’ were a nine-day wonder for the general public, who quickly appreciated that it was the result, not the details, which mattered. For more interested parties, however, the debate lingered on. It raised, inevitably, the pertinent but rather embarrassing question of the pilots’ own individual successes. If only something over a half of the German aircraft accepted by Fighter Command as having been shot down had, in fact, been shot down, what should happen to the ‘personal’ scores? Clearly they could not all be correct, yet there was now no means of reassessing them all. It is a subject which, understandably, few chroniclers of the Battle have chosen to explore in depth.
A controversy which became known only gradually outside the Service concerned the tactics of the British fighters during the Battle. There were two aspects of this. The first was about the standard flying and attacking groups within the squadrons, and the standard forms of attack. The second was about the merits of operating squadrons singly, or in pairs, or in three or more squadrons as a ‘wing’.
The first issue took shape within an increasing number of squadrons as the Battle wore on. Pre-war fighter training had placed extreme emphasis on formation-flying as a necessary discipline, as an aid to navigation, particularly through cloud, and as the basis for successful attack and self-defence. With the increasing speed of aircraft in the late 1930s it was not visualised that more than one squadron could maintain formation and manoeuvre quickly enough for interception.11 The single squadron, then, was the main formation, but within this were the basic tactical units – the sections, each of three aircraft, flying in the tight arrowhead or inverted V formations known as vics. In a full squadron patrol there would be four of these vics, all closely grouped together, usually in line astern. The leader of the first section, usually the squadron commander, on sighting the enemy and giving the ‘Tally Ho!’, was then supposed to order one of the standard prescribed forms of attack such as ‘Attack No. 6’ (‘by a squadron from astern against a large formation’), and the squadron then, in theory, went in section by section, swiftly reforming for further action. All the prescribed forms of attack, known as ‘Fighting Area Attacks’ from the days before the formation of Fighter Command, enjoined attack from astern.12
In practice, over France and in the Battle, things had not normally worked out that way. Flying so close behind their leader, Nos 2 and 3 in the section often found themselves unsighted at the very moment of attack; and while concentrating on maintaining tight formation pilots sometimes found themselves ‘bounced’ by an unobserved enemy fighter. Also, once the initial attack had taken place, parade-ground symmetry in the air instantly disappeared, the encounter usually degenerating into a series of unrelated individual combats or dogfights. For these many, if not most, of the British pilots at the outset of the Battle were virtually untrained.
The difference between theory and practice is evident in the recollections of many pilots. One pilot remembered how ‘in air training sessions our CO, Squadron Leader Heyworth, had been very hot on “keeping a cool head and working as a team”. He was leading the squadron on a first sortie when he sighted an enemy formation which, unusually, was below us. He at once shouted, “Tally Ho! There go the bastards,” and rolled over on his back to make a vertical attack.’13
Another pilot, later Air Chief Marshal Sir Frederick Rosier, recalled: ‘My squadron commander in 43 Squadron before the Battle would not agree to dogfighting practice because: 1) It was not needed because enemy fighters would not operate over the UK, and 2) it resulted in dirty aircraft (oil spills).’14 The standard prescribed attacks had, in fact, been evolved to deal with unescorted and largely unarmoured bombers. In the Battle they proved far from ideal against increasingly well-armoured bombers escorted by plenty of Me 109s.
To decrease their vulnerability in the standard tight formation, some squadrons during the Battle detailed a ‘tail-end Charlie’ to maintain a rear-guard watch. If this unfortunate pilot, ‘weaving’ back and forth behind the rest, did not himself get ‘jumped’ and shot down, he tended to run out of fuel. So that was no solution. A better one was to hand, but it was the one practised by the Germans.
As far back as the Spanish Civil War Werner Moelders, most famous of all the Luftwaffe World War II fighter pilots, had employed a tactical formation of four aircraft, the Schwarm, in which the pilots flew in a pattern corresponding to the fingertips of an open human hand. In this analogy the longest finger represents the leader, the index finger his No. 2. The other fingers, Nos 3 and 4, are to the right and somewhat above. In both pairs the wingman flies lower than his leader in order not to risk placing himself against the sun, the area of most danger.
This open position with the fighters some 200 metres apart allowed total flexibility and the greatest possible opportunity for spotting the enemy early. In combat the Schwarm broke into its component pairs, each No. 1 being the prime attacker, and No. 2 covering his tail. ‘The finger four,’ ‘Johnny’ Johnson* later wrote, ‘if properly flown in varying height intervals, is the best means of covering blind spots below individual aircraft. The formation is loose and manoeuvrable. The three pilots following their leader can search their respective areas of sky and keep him in sight without a great deal of uncomfortable neck-twisting…. [It] is easy to fly and much less tiring than the line astern formation.’15
Towards the end of the Battle, only a few of the British squadrons, notably 501 and 605 on their own initiative, had begun to fly ‘finger four’. Almost all, however, had given up the ‘Fighting Area Attacks’ – the drills coded by numbers as if life over southern England in 1940 were a prolonged Hendon airshow. Sheer survival had demanded swift and radical rethinking and new practices, such as head-on attacks, attack from directly above and wide-angle deflection shooting. Recommended by Air Tactics at the Air Ministry and by the Air Fighting Development Unit as early as July, these were discouraged by Dowding but formally approved in August by Park. However, the Schwarm pattern, the excellence of which is proved by its continuation into the 1990s, though it received warm commendation from Park early in November, was not generally adopted in Fighter Command until after Dowding’s departure. Had Fighter Command headquarters or the Air Tactics branch of the Air Staff been quicker to perceive a lesson which might have been learnt from the fighting earlier over France, British casualties in the Battle would surely have been fewer.
As to the relative effectiveness of large or small units of fighters against a mass bomber formation, the Flying Training Manual stated a truism rather than a shibboleth when the authors wrote, ‘The larger a formation is, the more restricted will be its power of manoeuvre.’
In exhaustive exercises shortly before the war, which provided the last opportunity to rehearse for the real Battle twelve months later, it was shown that ‘the school of thought which is in favour of large fighter formations’ had lost its case.
‘It is considered that a fighter tactical unit consisting of more than one squadron’, reported the Wing Commander Operations to Senior Air Staff Officer Fighter Command, ‘would not be able to carry out the role of interception and attack as efficiently as a squadron formation…. Time is the important factor in interception and attack. The aim should be to attack the enemy as soon as possible, and not to wait until we have concentrated in strength before attacking.’16
On the following day, 19 August 1939, Dowding delivered a memorandum to the Under-Secretary of State at the Air Ministry on ‘Tactics v. Massed Bomber Formations’. The pace of tactical development since the introduction of the Hurricane and Spitfire is hinted at in the second paragraph:
It is only a year ago since there existed a considerable body of opinion to the effect that high-speed monoplane fighters would not be able to deploy and deliver a simultaneous attack against an enemy formation owing to the danger of collision and of shooting one another. These fears, though not groundless, are proving to be exaggerated, and sections and flights are now habitually deployed for attack and we are working towards the habitual deployment of complete squadrons….
My own opinion (which I do not wish to over-stress at the moment) is that the squadron will always be the largest tactical unit which it will be practically expedient to employ.
This is as uncompromising a statement of the Commander-in-Chief’s beliefs on deployment as could be, and there is no record that Dowding acquired any evidence that could cause him to change his policy.
This made the more sense in that the attacks were frequent, widespread, and not usually in great strength. Later, as the German bombers penetrated farther inland and became more and more heavily escorted, Park tried to operate his squadrons in pairs, often with a Hurricane squadron assigned to the bombers at around 16,000 feet, and a Spitfire squadron, with its superior performance at high altitude, taking on the protective Me 109s above.17 On the whole this worked well, though there were many occasions when the squadrons failed to make rendezvous before one or other encountered the enemy. At all times Park was determined to meet the enemy as far forward as possible, to prevent him reaching and destroying his targets, such as the vital airfields and aircraft factories. In this his views were completely in accord with those of Dowding.
Up at 12 Group in the Midlands, however, a different school of thought developed. It was clearly asking much of pilots to send them repeatedly into engagements in which they were outnumbered by ten or even twenty to one. Did it matter if the enemy dropped a few more bombs while three or four of the British squadrons became grouped together, as long as he was then met in force and suffered heavy losses? After a few such engagements, he might never come again.
Such was the thinking of the legless Douglas Bader, CO of 242 Squadron at Coltishall, in Norfolk, and in it he was strongly supported by the 12 Group AOC, Leigh-Mallory. On Leigh-Mallory’s instructions, the Duxford Wing had come into being: not a recognised formation, but three or more of the squadrons at Duxford, Coltishall and Fowlmere operating on occasion as a single unit under Bader’s leadership. Bader’s ardent spirit longed to lead this Wing of up to sixty aircraft down into the southern counties, there to hit the raiders with devastating force after they had first run the gauntlet of 11 Group’s initial attacks. Instead, his normally appointed role, in response to Park’s requests to Leigh-Mallory, had been to patrol over 11 Group’s northern airfields, in case they were subjected to attack.
Not surprisingly, Bader thought that his Wing (which he maintained could be assembled in five minutes,18 though critics asserted it took twenty) should be more aggressively used. When set to patrol North Weald-Hornchurch, he not only sped towards the enemy if they came within sight, but also on occasion went looking for them. More than once 11 Group controllers were perplexed by the sudden appearance of what might have been a large hostile formation, but turned out to be Bader’s Wing.19 As the Battle developed, so did friction between Park and Leigh-Mallory.
A clear sign of this, which nevertheless evoked no action from Dowding, was Park’s Instruction (No. 7) to his Group controllers dated 27 August. It told them that whereas they could go on making requests for reinforcements directly to 10 Group, they would have to put their requests to 12 Group through Fighter Command headquarters, in order to ensure that the requests were properly complied with. With remarkable and ill-advised candour in a document likely to be seen by many eyes, Park’s order included the following sentences:
Thanks to the friendly co-operation offered by No. 10 Group, they are always prepared to detail two to four squadrons to engage from the west mass attacks … approaching the Portsmouth area…. Up to date No. 12 Group, on the other hand, have not shown the same desire to co-operate by despatching their squadrons to the places requested. The result of this attitude has been that on two occasions recently when 12 Group … were requested to patrol our aerodromes, their squadrons did not in fact patrol over our aerodromes. On both these occasions our aerodromes were heavily bombed.20
During September, as the Germans struck farther inland against London, 12 Group’s forces became more regularly involved. On at least three occasions Bader’s Wing came strongly into the action and claimed big successes. In the single week 7–15 September the Duxford Wing was, in fact, credited with the destruction of 105 German aircraft, and forty probables, for the loss of only fourteen of its own.21 It was Bader’s confidence in his Wing’s ability to inflict such losses repeatedly, and his exasperation at not being given more chances of doing so, that at length brought this trouble to a head.
It happened that the adjutant in Bader’s 242 Squadron, the well-liked Flight Lieutenant Peter Macdonald, was a Member of Parliament. Knowing of Bader’s frustration, and that Leigh-Mallory was completely behind Bader, he took it upon himself to bring Bader’s views to the notice of two fellow MPs, the Under-Secretary of State for Air (Harold Balfour) and the Prime Minister – no less.22 Wheels turned; and very soon the Chief of the Air Staff was calling a meeting to discuss ‘Major Day Tactics in the Fighter Force’.
This meeting, much written of since, took place on 17 October. Newall being indisposed, the Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, Air Vice-Marshal W. Sholto Douglas, took the chair. Also present were Dowding, his Group commanders Park, Brand and Leigh-Mallory, the Chief of the Air Staff designate (Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal), a signals representative, four members of the Air Staff – and Bader.
The calling of this meeting, and in particular Bader’s presence, have been taken gravely amiss by many of those who fought in the Battle. With loyalties for the most part firmly in the Dowding–Park camp, and convinced that Park’s policy was correct, they have felt strong resentment at the indignity to which they feel their two heroes were subjected. An investigation, as they regard it (and as Dowding and Park came to regard it too), was bad enough. But an investigation in some way prompted by politicians, at which Dowding had to defend his tactics in front of one of his own squadron leaders – intolerable!
It is not necessary to go all the way in sharing this indignation. Macdonald doubtless acted as he thought best in the interests of the country, and there are worse crimes than cutting Service corners. The presence of Bader in such elevated company certainly needs explanation: he was taken along by Leigh-Mallory in the hope that he would be admitted, but apparently without prior arrangement with Sholto Douglas. No one else present at the meeting had actually been involved in the air fighting. If there is a criticism to be made of Bader’s presence, it is that Leigh-Mallory should have consulted Dowding beforehand, and that other active squadron commanders should have been there as well.
The minutes of this famous meeting record no sensational disagreements. Leigh-Mallory spoke of the need to meet the increasingly large German formations with forces as strong as possible, and pointed to the outstanding results achieved by the Duxford Wing. Park, while not disagreeing with the general principle, stressed the importance of the time factor in 11 Group. The raids, he emphasised, must be intercepted before they reached important targets, and a pair of squadrons – sometimes only one – was the most that could be brought to bear in time. The summing-up, by Sholto Douglas, recognised the different circumstances of the two Groups, but suggested that in 11 Group both methods could have a place, with, on occasion, ‘forces from the two Groups co-operating’. Dowding promised that he would arrange for 12 Group wings to participate freely in suitable operations over the 11 Group area, and added, optimistically, that he would be able to resolve any complications of control.23
The minutes suggest a serious discussion on the best policy for the future, with an indication that wing formations could thenceforth play a greater part. They do not at all read like the minutes of an ‘investigation’ into Dowding’s, and Park’s, conduct of the Battle – ‘like putting them on a charge’, as the complaint goes. The minutes, however, do not tell the whole story. When he received them, Park promptly sent in two pages of closely typed foolscap, repeating what he had said and urgently requesting that his remarks should be embodied in the minutes. Apart from stressing the time factor and the need to intercept before the fall of bombs, his statement included sharp comments on the Duxford Wing. It had operated, he asserted, under favourable conditions, arriving in time only to intercept outgoing raids, ‘fairly easy to deal with’. His own squadrons had produced results fully comparable, though under more difficult conditions. And the Duxford Wing had caused great confusion: ‘It had proceeded, unknown to No. 11 Group, to the Kentish coast … thus causing new raids to be originated by the Observer Corps and AA units.’ Air-raid warnings had been prolonged, and 11 Group squadrons ‘had been sent to intercept friendly formations which had been reported as fresh raids’.
In addition, Park wished his view to be put on record that it would be bad for squadron morale if the impression spread ‘that it was not safe to enter the south-eastern area except with four or five squadrons’. He also asked for a note to be included that his views on forward interception were supported by DCAS (Sholto Douglas), AOC-in-C Fighter Command, and Sir Charles Portal.24
As diplomatically as possible, the Air Staff secretariat declined to incorporate Park’s amendments. His statement was held to be too long and ‘out of keeping with the rest of the minutes, which are intended more as an aide memoire than as a detailed report of the discussion’.25
Clearly there were strong currents at this time, not only in 12 Group and the Air Ministry but also among some of the pilots in 11 Group itself, in favour of trying to meet the enemy with bigger formations. On 1 October Park had felt obliged to write to his sector commanders explaining why he did not use three-squadron formations more often, and emphasising the time factor.26*
In considering this issue, historians of the Battle have almost unanimously concluded that in the circumstances of August and September 1940 Park’s use of single and paired squadrons was inevitable and completely sound. The proximity of the enemy, and the desirability of intercepting before the bombs fell, dominated all. And even in the technical aspects of control when a wing was airborne, there was still great difficulty in the summer of 1940. As late as 1 October, only sixteen of the fighter squadrons had been re-equipped with VHF radio:27 HF was patchy and extremely difficult to hear if more than three squadrons were operating together.
Although posterity has largely agreed that Park’s use of single and paired squadrons was right, and brilliantly right, in the circumstances of the Battle, Sholto Douglas and the Air Tactics directorate were more impressed with Leigh-Mallory’s concepts as a recipe for the future. There was a certain irony in this. One great proof of the value of Leigh-Mallory’s ideas was thought to be the big ‘scores’ achieved by the Duxford Wing – 105 in its first five operations. But post-war research has revealed these ‘scores’ to be among the most exaggerated in the Battle, as might be expected from the number of aircraft engaged. The fifty-two German aircraft claimed by the Wing on 15 September, for instance, is not far short of the entire number actually shot down by the whole of Fighter Command on that memorable day.
A further thought about the Duxford Wing is suggested by P. B. ‘Laddie’ Lucas’s absorbing and perceptive biography of his brother-in-law, Douglas Bader. Referring to the movement of squadrons into 11 Group to replace the battered squadrons there, Lucas states that Leigh-Mallory would not allow the Duxford squadrons to be called upon in this way. ‘Around 242, 310 and 19 he threw an iron cordon…. This was L-M’s corps d’élite. Nothing and no one was going to be allowed to disturb it.’28
If this was remotely so, it raises some very curious questions. If Dowding decided to order any of these squadrons south, who was Leigh-Mallory to stop him? So either Dowding partly approved of Leigh-Mallory’s concept – we know that his Senior Air Staff Officer, Air Vice-Marshal Evill, did29 – or else he hesitated to go against Leigh-Mallory’s wishes, or else he did not concern himself personally with the choice of squadrons to move. None of these explanations completely satisfies. What seems a pity is that Dowding, who clearly had to keep a strong force in so vital a sector as Duxford, did not, in fact, order at least 242 Squadron south. Bader was yearning for more action, and in the daily hurly-burly of 11 Group, he would surely have found plenty. In that case this controversy, assuming it arose at all, might never have taken the unfortunate form it did.
The ‘big wing’ issue played a part, though only a part, in the next great matter of controversy – the ‘dismissal’ (i.e. replacement) of Dowding and Park. Towards the end of November, Dowding was relieved at Fighter Command, and Park the following month at 11 Group. To believers in the conspiracy theory of history, and indeed to many who have no theory of history but sympathise with Dowding and Park, it has always appeared that these changes were not unconnected with ambition: for Sholto Douglas moved upwards into Dowding’s place and Leigh-Mallory moved sideways, but also upwards, into Park’s.
It does not need the conspiracy theory, however, to explain or understand these moves. Both commanders had been under enormous strain, and Park was visibly tired. Sholto Douglas and the Air Tactics directorate were keen to experiment with the ‘big wings’, and if these were to be tried there was much to be said for having an enthusiast, Leigh-Mallory, directing the Group which would put most of them into the air. As the senior Group commander, in charge of 12 Group since its inception, Leigh-Mallory had excellent qualifications for the post. His later appointments – as the head of Fighter Command, the Allied Expeditionary Air Force and the Allied Air Forces in South-East Asia – show that he was considered fit for much higher command than that of a Group.
For his part, Park resented leaving 11 Group, which he had commanded only since April. He was offered an Air Staff post, but demurred. He went instead to command a Flying Training Group (No. 23), where his intelligence, energy and recent experience were well applied and where his success set him again on the upward path – to high command in Malta, the Middle East and South-East Asia. Well rewarded in his later career, he received only moderate recognition for his great achievement in 1940 – the CB, often bestowed on upwardly mobile civil servants as their second slice of the honours cake.
Despite all that he had contributed to the victory, there were good reasons for replacing Dowding at Fighter Command. He had held his post for the exceptionally long period of four years and had been scheduled for retirement since before the war. To avoid a change during the Battle and the months leading up to it, his period of command had been three times extended by short periods – so short as to make Churchill complain to Sinclair that it was ‘entirely wrong to keep an officer in the position of Commander-in-Chief, conducting hazardous operations from day to day when he is dangling on the end of an expiring appointment’.30 Now that the daylight battle was dying down the urgent demand was for success in countering the night bombing and then, looking further ahead, for offensive operations over the continent. Dowding seemed to the Air Staff, at this juncture, the wrong man for either task. He was having no obvious success against the ‘night blitz’, and he would certainly resist the use of his fighters offensively over France.
Moreover, by ignoring the Park/Leigh-Mallory dispute until it had become widely known, Dowding had given the Air Staff the impression that he was losing his grip. On 3 November Sholto Douglas felt obliged to tell him to resolve the differences, which seemed to be leading ‘to a good deal of bitterness not only between the two AOCs but between the squadrons in the two Groups’. ‘This obviously cannot go on,’ concluded Douglas, ‘and it is for you to put the matter right.’31
Other matters of dispute had also arisen during October. In view of the ineffectiveness of the defences against the night bomber, the Air Council had recently set up a high-powered Night Air Defence Committee under the greatly respected Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Salmond, a former Chief of the Air Staff.32 Salmond and Dowding were already no great friends; and to two of the Committee’s recommendations, backed by Sholto Douglas, Dowding strongly objected. One was that three of his Hurricane squadrons should be specially trained and given over to night fighting. The other was that, to eliminate congestion of plots from the radar stations and to speed reaction, separate filter rooms should be opened at each Group headquarters to replace the central filtering room at Stanmore. Pungent in expression as always, Dowding on 24 October wrote to the Prime Minister explaining his opposition to the filter-room proposals. His summing up was characteristic: ‘I think we shall pay £100,000 in material and labour in order to secure a slight reduction in efficiency.’ But he clearly regarded the proposal as one more piece of interference from the Air Ministry:
My main grievance … is in the matter of the expenditure of my time in arguing with the Air Staff every intimate detail of my organisation…. I agreed to decentralisation under strong pressure because it is not a matter that is going to lose the war for us, and I have to fight the Air Staff on so many important issues.33
With such divergences between them, it is not surprising that the Air Staff now favoured a swift termination to Dowding’s period of command. Their view was shared by Sinclair and Balfour, who had both paid recent visits to Duxford and learnt something of the ‘big wing’ dispute at first hand. It was also reluctantly accepted by Churchill; apparently he later said the decision was right, but ‘nearly broke his heart’. So on 25 November Dowding had to depart and the cleverer, and much more worldly, Sholto Douglas took his place.
In at least one of the final matters of dispute Dowding proved more perceptive than his successor. In their desperation to beat the night bomber Douglas and others on the Air Staff had urged Dowding to try ‘fighter nights’ – using a fairly large force of day fighters on moonlit nights in the hope of catching the enemy. Dowding would agree to only a limited effort in this direction. The answer to the night bomber, he insisted, could come only from radar and better night fighters – Beaufighters equipped with better AI and operating in conjunction with radar control from the ground (GCI), not yet perfected. It would, he explained, take some months to secure a significant improvement in the number of enemy night bombers destroyed. He was quite right, as Douglas was to find.*
Dowding’s later career tended to justify the view that by the end of 1940 his best days were over. To save him from the retirement intended by the Air Ministry, Beaverbrook, with Churchill’s agreement, found other work for him: they sent him to the USA to head the British Air Mission already there, with the task of ‘selecting, modifying and purchasing aircraft and air armament’. But he soon caused embarrassment to his colleagues by voicing his own personal views – such as that there was no need for the increased production of heavy bombers that the Mission was encouraging the Americans to undertake. Day bombing, he told some of Roosevelt’s chief advisers, was too expensive, and within a few months night bombing would lose its sting, so the Americans had better make tanks. This and other idiosyncratic utterings (for an air marshal sent out to help get the best aircraft and more of them) caused Lord Halifax, the British Ambassador, to forward complaints about him to the Foreign Office, and Air Commodore Slessor, in Washington for staff discussions, to write to the new Chief of the Air Staff, Portal, suggesting his recall. ‘I hate writing like this about a very senior officer,’ wrote Slessor, ‘but in the national interest I must express the fervent hope that you will contrive to get him out of this country before he does much more harm.’35
So Dowding returned, and in June 1941 was asked to write his Despatch on the Battle of Britain, which he did admirably. Gazetted then for retirement on 1 October, he had scarcely been off the active list for a month when at Churchill’s insistence his Service career reopened. The Prime Minister pressed him, much against his will, to undertake a review of RAF establishments, in the hope of achieving economies. It was a task which inevitably aroused opposition. Neither enjoying the job nor considering that he had made much of a success of it, in July 1942 Dowding then retired again, this time at his own request.
Though there were ample reasons for making a change at Stanmore in November 1940, it is more than understandable that Dowding departed feeling aggrieved. After the three very short extensions of his tenure, the latest time-limit, fixed for 31 October, had on 21 August been completely withdrawn. Then, quite unexpectedly to him, he was required to relinquish his Command at a few days’ notice. In later years he even told his biographer, Robert Wright, that in the second week of November he received ‘a sudden phone-call’ from Sinclair telling him he was to relinquish his Command ‘immediately’.36 But here memory played Dowding false. Sinclair, a devoted minister and the soul of courtesy, was not a man to sack a respected commander over the telephone. In fact, he saw Dowding at the Air Ministry on 13 November to tell him that Sholto Douglas was shortly to take his place, and to extend to him the invitation to lead the British Mission in America.37 The telephone call, saying the change at Stanmore was to take place immediately, must have come a day or two later.
Be this as it may, Dowding felt that he had been treated inconsiderately and with scant acknowledgment of his services. He told Wright later: ‘They just got rid of me…. But I want it to be quite clear that I had no grievance on that score. It was the way it was done that hurt, when I was sent away as if I had been rather an indifferent sort of commander.’38
If Dowding’s replacement on the morrow of his great victory has generated controversy, still more so has the question of adequate recognition of his achievement. During the Battle, on 1 October, he was appointed GCB, but on relinquishing Fighter Command and on his two retirements he got nothing. At the time of his second retirement King George VI raised the question whether he should not be made a Marshal of the RAF,39 but official opinion in the Air Ministry demurred. To do so would set a precedent – only the heads of the Service, the Chiefs of the Air Staff, had ever been accorded that exalted rank. Also, Dowding had been quite ‘difficult’; and he had already retired previously. It was left until 1946 for the precedent to be broken, when Sir Arthur Harris, who had never been Chief of the Air Staff, was made a Marshal of the RAF, in compensation for the barony which the Attlee Government denied him.
Six months after his retirement, Dowding received much fuller recognition. On 1 January 1943 he became Lord Dowding of Bentley Priory, the first RAF officer to be ennobled apart from the great Trenchard. By that time the magnitude and decisive nature of his victory was clear to all. It was not quite so obvious in November 1940 when the invasion threat was still a reality and German bombs were raining down night after night on Britain’s cities.
Among the many charges brought against the Air Ministry in its treatment of Dowding is that it put out, in the spring of 1941, a pamphlet describing the Battle in which no mention was made of the Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief.40 This curious omission quickly evoked the ire of the Prime Minister who, like Dowding, thought the pamphlet otherwise ‘admirable’. On 12 April 1941 Churchill wrote in characteristic vein to Sinclair:
The jealousies and cliquism which have led to the committing of this offence are a discredit to the Air Ministry, and I do not think any other Service Department would have been guilty of such a piece of work. What would have been said if … the Admiralty had told the tale of Trafalgar and left Lord Nelson out of it?41
Difficult as this may be for some to believe, it was probably not ‘jealousies and cliquism’ which caused the omission of Dowding’s name. The pamphlet, which cost the Air Ministry £50 in fees to the author and sold six million copies, mentioned no names at all on the British side except that of Churchill, and only two on the German – Goering and Goebbels. The Air Ministry’s Department of Public Relations at that time was trying to avoid the personality cult, and in particular it was trying to discourage the press from building up fighter ‘aces’. This was because adulatory reports about certain individual pilots or squadrons in the early days of the war had tended to create ill-feeling among others equally valorous but less well publicised. In applying a policy of anonymity in The Battle of Britain pamphlet to the extent of not even mentioning Dowding, the Department had clearly taken leave of its senses.
Despite a campaign which has more or less continued to this day, Dowding was never elevated, either in retirement or posthumously – that would have been a precedent – to the rank of Marshal of the RAF. He was, however, buried in Westminster Abbey and then, in the fullness of time, accorded the supreme tribute – a public statue in London, splendidly sited outside the beautiful ‘RAF church’, St Clement Dane’s. He would have thought it entirely appropriate, and it would have pleased him very much to know that the initiative for this came from his own surviving aircrew, in the Battle of Britain Fighter Association, and not in the least from the Ministry of Defence.
From the controversies surrounding the Battle it is a relief to turn to the myths, which have flourished freely. There is the popular myth that the Spitfire alone won the Battle – when there were many more Hurricanes,* which certainly shot down more of the bombers. There are the myths that Dowding’s intervention alone stopped the flow of fighters to France in May and June 1940, and that throughout his time at Stanmore he met with nothing but delay and obstruction from the Air Ministry. There is the myth that Lord Beaverbrook waved a magic wand and lo! there were aircraft where none had existed before. There is the myth that at one time Fighter Command was down to its last few aircraft. If a group of the more persistent of these myths were to be embodied in a pantechnicon sentence it might conceivably run something like this: ‘The Battle of Britain, despite Fighter Command’s being down to its last few aircraft, was won by unfailingly cheerful young officers flying Spitfires magically produced by Lord Beaverbrook and directed by “Stuffy” Dowding, who first had to beat the Air Ministry, Winston Churchill and the French before he could beat the Germans.’
Most of these myths have received some attention in the foregoing pages. Of one which has not, about the unfailingly cheerful young officers, it is perhaps sufficient to point out that very often the officers were non-commissioned ones, in the rank of sergeant; and that though these young men, mostly in their early twenties, were indeed incredibly cheerful, they were not invariably so. Particularly not when, as was always happening to someone, they were dog-tired from flying and long hours at readiness, or tense with nervous strain from repeated danger, or badly wounded, or burnt.
The most recent and sophisticated of the myths seems to have been started by Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham, the RAF Intelligence Officer responsible for liaison with the Secret Intelligence Service and the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. The first revelation to the public that Britain had consistently read the high-grade cypher messages produced by the Germans on their Enigma machine, and transmitted by W/T, came in Winterbotham’s The Ultra Secret (1974), which was soon followed by Ronald Lewin’s Ultra Goes to War (1978). Both painted an affecting picture of Dowding at the famous Air Staff ‘investigation’ of 17 October 1940 unable to defend his tactics properly because he could not honourably mention his most secret sources of information, the Enigma decrypts from Bletchley, since their existence could not be divulged to the others present. The implication was that Dowding, often aware in advance of the enemy’s extensive plans, had to hold back squadrons to deal with later raids he knew were coming, rather than quickly throw in the big formations advocated by Leigh-Mallory.
There is a double myth in this. Dowding himself, according to Martin Gilbert, was not placed on the very restricted list of those who received the actual Enigma decrypts until late October, when the Battle was nearly over.42 But long before that his headquarters, like others, was being kept informed of anything important, or of immediate operational value, which was emerging from the Enigma traffic, without being told its exact provenance. In the same way if he had wished to defend his tactics by reference to secret information, Dowding had no need to divulge the precise source.
Beyond this, the picture of a muzzled Dowding is misleading in another way. Dowding did sometimes have information in advance about German operations, but usually it came too late for any immediate use, or else the operations were cancelled or postponed. He learnt, for instance, from Enigma that a mass attack on London was arranged for 13 September and was then postponed to 14 September. He did not learn that it was then rearranged for 15 September, when it actually happened. Similarly, he knew that widespread raids were planned for 15 August; but the first indication that Stumpff’s forces from Denmark and Norway were approaching the north-east came from radar, not Enigma.
And so it was in general throughout the Battle. Ultra made extremely valuable additions to the many other sources of intelligence, such as the interception of the bombers’ wireless messages in low-grade code or cypher or the monitoring of the German fighter pilots’ chatter over the R/T, but it was not at this stage nearly as important or decisive as it became later in the war. Its myriad gleanings were particularly useful in constructing an exact picture of the Luftwaffe’s organisation, order of battle and equipment, but as yet they rarely produced enough to permit an instant and profitable operational reaction. Information in general had to be built up over a long period and conclusions inferred; very rarely did Ultra speak plain in a single message about a major matter – such as the date projected for the invasion, or where the German troops were to land. The official history, British Intelligence in the Second World War, thus sums up the subject: ‘For all his major decisions C-in-C Fighter Command depended on his own strategic judgment, with no direct assistance from Enigma.’43
It would be too much to describe as a myth the popular impression that the Battle was won by Dowding and a thousand or so dashing young fighter pilots. There is a world of truth in that, but it is an incomplete truth. For the more one studies the Battle, the more one becomes aware of all the complex forces and factors which had to cohere perfectly to get those young men into the air in the right place and at the right time and with the right weapons to deal with the enemy.
Moreover, there were vast organisations right outside the RAF which helped to shape and win the Battle. Quite apart from bombarding the invasion ports, maintaining watch round the British coasts with 200 or more craft on daily patrol, and keeping the sea lanes open, the Royal Navy by its sheer existence constituted the prime obstacle to Germany’s hopes. Since the German Navy could not expect to master the Royal Navy, the Luftwaffe had to do so instead, and for that it had first to master the RAF. It was this single fact alone which determined the enemy’s strategy for the Battle.
Whether the Navy, in actual fact, would have intervened in the Channel in the full strength feared by the Germans, is an interesting question. At a meeting to discuss the anti-invasion plans at the end of July Admiral of the Fleet Sir Charles Forbes, Commander-in-Chief of the Home Fleet, stated firmly that in no circumstances would his heavy ships operate south of the Wash. Churchill, expected to explode by the others present, merely met this ‘with an indulgent smile’. The Royal Navy, he asserted, invariably undertook the impossible when the situation demanded: ‘If two or three nurses were wrecked on a desert island, the Navy would rush to their rescue, through typhoons and uncharted seas: and he had not a shadow of doubt that if the Germans invaded the south coast of Britain we would see every available battleship storming through the Straits of Dover.’44 And while Churchill was in charge, no doubt they would have done. In any case the Admiralty soon went half-way towards justifying the Prime Minister’s belief. During August it agreed that if the German heavy units appeared in the southern North Sea, the British capital ships would follow suit.45
The Army, too, contributed much to the victory, not only by its preparations to meet the invader, in which it would have had stout support from the Home Guard, but by its expertise in the highly dangerous work of dealing with the hundreds of unexploded bombs – including the famous one which threatened St Paul’s Cathedral on 15 September – and by providing most of the vital ground defences. The anti-aircraft gunners, especially those at Dover and the airfields, played an important part from the beginning, the searchlight crews an increasingly useful one as the German night offensive developed. Without these ground defences, far more low-level attacks would have been made, and far more damage done to aircraft factories and Fighter Command installations. Anti-aircraft fire also disturbed the concentration of bombers at higher level on the vital run up to the target. And though the guns hurled a vast quantity of steel and explosive into the sky for every aircraft they shot down, the mere sight and sound of them was a valuable boost to civilian morale.
It should also be recalled that the civil defence services were already highly active during the Battle well before they performed so long and magnificently during the ‘blitz’. The air-raid wardens, full-time and part-time, of both sexes; the heavy rescue services, recruited mainly from the building trades; the firemen, professional and auxiliary; the ambulance teams; the police, whose work was so vastly extended when raids occurred; the Women’s Voluntary Service, who in their green suits and purple blouses (bought at their own expense) seemed to be everywhere, and to undertake anything from supervising evacuation and distributing clothing to tending disconsolate children and serving cups of tea – all these organisations and many more made their essential contribution. And so, of course, did the workers in the aircraft and other factories and in the fields, who well knew how vital their output was to the struggle being waged in the sky.
Some of these groups were more closely associated with the RAF than others. The Post Office War Group, for instance, did magnificent work in restoring shattered landlines and keeping each part of the whole complex defence system in touch with the next. And the 30,000 or so members of the Observer Corps, women as well as men, and mostly part-time, were as essential to the Battle as the RAF’s own radar stations.
There were many more such bodies. The Civilian Repair Organisation, involving scores of garages and workshops, performed an invaluable service in rebuilding damaged aircraft, as many as 150–200 a week. Hurricanes leaving a factory or a maintenance unit on Saturday would often be in action by the Tuesday, suffer damage, be called away for repair and be back again at the squadron by the weekend. No. 1 Civilian Repair Unit, at Oxford, had a working week of nearly 100 hours. Civilians in the RAF’s No. 50 Maintenance Unit helped servicemen to build vast dumps of badly crashed aircraft which could be raided for parts useful in the process of ‘cannibalisation’.46 And when the aircraft were repaired, or were coming new from the factories, the admirable civilian pilots of the Air Transport Auxiliary, women as well as men, were at hand to deliver them to the maintenance units or the squadrons.
Most closely associated of all with the RAF, since they worked alongside, were the members of the WAAF. At the time of the Battle they were still admitted to only half-a-dozen trades, but whether ‘admin.’, or cooks, or clerks or ‘drivers (petrol)’ or telephonists or balloon fabric repairers, they played an essential part. The MT girls, officially limited to driving a car or a 30 cwt truck, cheerfully took on much heavier vehicles and risked the chance of breaking a delicate wrist by cranking up 21/2 tonners in cold weather. Most publicised later – not at the time, for security reasons – were the ‘clerks (special duty)’, the plotters, tellers and others who worked in the ops rooms or the radar stations. They maintained their quiet efficiency even when the bombs were falling nearby or when, emotionally involved with a pilot, they overheard his voice on the R/T to the Controller in the ops room, crying out in triumph or in agony.
Perhaps those most often affected by the cries that came over the air were the girls of the Y (Interception) Service, who monitored R/T over the Channel and southern England. They heard the shouts and screams of the German pilots as well as the British. One WAAF sergeant at Hawkinge, after reporting the regular appearance of a certain cheery-sounding German pilot on his Channel reconnaissance run, then overheard the resulting interception by Spitfires, who shot him down in flames. ‘He was unable to get out and we listened to him as he screamed and screamed for his mother and cursed the Fuehrer. I found myself praying: “Get out, bale out, oh please dear God, get him out.” But it was no use. We heard him the whole way down until he fell below reception range. I went out and was sick.’
These R/T monitors often suffered the additional grief that they were aware of approaching disaster and could do nothing to stop it. They would hear a German leader yell the order to attack and know that he was diving on an unsuspecting RAF pilot below. ‘I would often hear one of the WAAF operators murmuring “Oh God, oh God, please … please look up,” and I knew how helpless she felt.’47
All reports of the WAAF under fire during the Battle speak of their courage, and none more so than those of the ubiquitous Inspector-General. On 20 August, after visiting Tangmere and finding ‘an enormous amount of damage’, Ludlow-Hewitt wrote:
As usual the WAAF have been quite exceptionally good…. The CO reported that the Ops Room was rocking with the bombing, and that the girls stood to their work with admirable coolness, setting an excellent example to everyone…. The really admirable behaviour of the WAAF under the stress of bombardment at very exposed stations such as RDF [radar] stations and aerodromes in the South is beyond all praise….
Three days later, after visiting recently bombed Middle Wallop, he again reported: ‘Everywhere the same story is told of the remarkable calm and courage displayed by the WAAF.’48 Such virtues, taken for granted nowadays in a world of greater sexual equality, made a deep impression in the Service in 1940, and not only on elderly air marshals.
These bare references illustrate the immense contribution to the Battle made by literally millions outside the RAF. And within the RAF itself, the Battle was by no means only the work, as is so often thought, of Fighter Command. Coastal Command, by its reconnaissance, anti-invasion patrols and bombing, played a vital part: Coastal aircraft photographed the assembly and dispersal of the invasion craft, and it was a Coastal stripped-Spitfire which at length, on 29 October, reached out to cover the farthest Baltic ports and bring back the evidence that no invasion fleet was hiding there.49 No less involved was Bomber Command, with its attacks on Berlin, German communications and airfields, and the invasion ports.
In its passive role, Balloon Command also played a most useful part. The balloons could not rise high, but they made it difficult for the enemy to come down below 5,000 feet, where he could bomb more accurately, and they were a death-trap to dive-bombers. They continually suffered losses from enemy pilots and the weather, and probably brought down more British than German aircraft, but the deterrent effect of their cables was considerable and, like the guns, they had a secondary value in cheering up the local civilians. Hanging over the cities or ‘vulnerable points’, the balloons were a brave and reassuring sight.
Within Fighter Command itself, Britain’s shield and sword against aerial invasion, the victory was of course far from being only the work of Dowding and the pilots. Keith Park fought most of the tactical battle and surely deserves a statue too – at the Auckland airport which bears his name, or better still at Uxbridge. And the magnificent aircrews could have done nothing without the intelligent, well-trained and devoted ground crews, both groups alike recruited largely before the war. On these ground crews depended, among a host of other things, the signals traffic, the commissariat, the supply, distribution and fitting of equipment, the servicing of guns and radar, part of the ground defence, the servicing and minor repair of airframes as well as engines – and, usually flat out for speed, the refuelling and rearming of the aircraft after operations.
For months on end, many of these men were kept at the fullest possible stretch. The damage suffered by so many aircraft during the French campaign and the numerous modifications made between June and August 1940 to improve the performance or protection of the British fighters brought an enormous amount of work. One fitter recalled that during these months, in addition to the routine servicing, he had to make about ten modifications to each of his Hurricanes.50*
But when tribute is duly paid to the many contributors to the victory who are sometimes overlooked or forgotten, the mind rightly and inevitably comes back to those superb fighter pilots and their commander-in-chief. Perhaps more than any other victory in history, this one was achieved by a scientific system of defence built up over many years. But systems do not create themselves. In the building up of that system, though it could never have triumphed without the fruits of the genius of men like Camm, Mitchell and Watson-Watt, there was no one who played a greater part than the man whose duty it also was to operate it when the crisis came.
It would not be difficult to show that Dowding was by no means a ready champion of new ideas. His native caution, always demanding proof positive, precluded rapid acceptance. It had taken much to persuade him, for instance, that his fighters’ guns would be far more effective ‘harmonised’ for converging fire at 250 yards instead of 400, and that attacks should be pressed home even closer than that. Even in the all-important field of radar there were several other RAF officers who, in Watson-Watt’s opinion, grasped its possibihties and gave support more quickly than Dowding, who was not even in the radar pioneer’s ‘top four’ for helpfulness. Among those with whom Watson-Watt found collaboration easier were Freeman – ‘he believed in my little team from the first and fought many of its battles for it’ – and, above all, Sholto Douglas, whom he found ‘imaginative, enterprising, receptive and constructive … decisive and vigorous in action’.51 Nevertheless, it was under Dowding as Air Member for Research and Development that radar first made its appearance, and under Dowding as AOC-in-C Fighter Command that it was successfully incorporated into the air defence system. He was a convinced, though far from uncritical, supporter from the early days, and without that support the radar chain would never have been in place to play its outstandingly important part in the Battle.
Similarly, it was under Dowding that the system of fighter control was evolved, without which early warning would have lost half its benefit. He had also supported from their earliest conception the development of the Hurricane and the Spitfire, and had put every ounce of his energy and authority into getting enough squadrons armed with them to win the Battle which he so clearly foresaw. And when, before the Battle, the danger arose that they would be wasted in vain efforts to save the reeling Allied armies in France, his was one of the two decisive voices which ensured that the wastage did not become fatal.
It was in what he did before the Battle, rather than in his conduct of it, that Dowding’s prime achievement lay. In the Battle itself, since control of operations was delegated to Groups and sectors, it was Park, in command of the hardest pressed Group, who bore the main burden of responsibility: who had to decide which raids were important, and which were minor or feints, and what forces should be put up against them. Indeed, so completely did Park fight the tactical battle that Dowding was not even aware, in many respects, of how he was doing it. On 13 October the Senior Air Staff Officer at Fighter Command, Air Vice-Marshal ‘Strath’ Evill, an officer of outstanding quality, found himself obliged to suggest to Dowding that they ought to have much fuller information about operations. The daily return from Groups gave a bare indication of sightings, interceptions and casualties, but provided no real picture of the fighting or the tactics. Evill wrote:
We do not know whether their squadrons are sent up singly or in twos or threes, or to what heights they are sent. We have no indication as to how squadrons in the air are disposed or whether factory areas are specifically covered. There is, in fact, no general statement of the action taken…. We have, I know, received – after calling for it – a report from 11 Group on their method of operation in the first six weeks of this battle…. We have also received from Leigh-Mallory reports as to why and how he employs his wing, and reports from Park as to why he does not. Apart from these communications we do not know a great deal about the way in which they conduct operations, and there is certainly no recognised routine for reports from Groups as to what they are doing….52
Dowding’s was in essence the strategic role, deciding among other things the forces to be kept in each Group. He can be criticised for not ensuring better co-ordination between 11 and 12 Groups, for being slow in assessing and disseminating the tactical lessons of the fighting, and for not insisting that new pilots who came to his squadrons during the Battle had at least some experience of air firing – many had never fired their guns at all, or only once or twice into a hill-side or the sea.53 But his decision to retain squadrons in the north was brilliantly vindicated when the Luftwaffe struck there on 15 August; and his broad dispositions and his reinforcing and replacement arrangements, as did Park’s use of single and paired squadrons, passed the acid test: they achieved victory. Throughout all his period of command, too, there was his splendid example of devotion, determination and integrity. Whatever laurels were withheld from him by the Air Ministry, he has posterity’s.
And the aircrew, Dowding’s ‘chicks’ – a term which delighted him when Churchill used it,54 though one he would have been far too reserved to coin for himself – what more should be said of them? Nothing, perhaps, except that without their skill, their transcendent courage, their devotion and their sacrifice, the scientific system would have been devised in vain. Together, they enabled Britain to escape the devastating clash of armies and the horrors of Nazi occupation.
As the daylight Battle faded, and the bombs descended in full force by night, a new phase of Britain’s resistance began. In the words of Angus Calder, ‘it was the battle of an unarmed civilian population against incendiaries and high explosive: the battle of firemen, wardens, policemen, nurses and rescue workers against the enemy they could not hurt. The front-line troops were doctors, parsons, telephonists…. Where the bombs fell, heroes would spring up by accident….’55
Many of the heroes, as is so often the case, were heroes by force of example. This was a fact which the Prime Minister, himself a hero with a sense of humour even in the most difficult circumstances, tried to impress on Nelson, the black cat at No. 10 Downing Street. When Nelson showed fright at the sound of the guns, Churchill chided him for being unworthy of the name he bore, and added: ‘Try to remember, Nelson, what those boys in the RAF are doing.’56
A week later, on 15 October, Churchill warned the War Cabinet that it would be two or three months before there could be any substantially better results against the night bombers. He added: ‘The people of Britain must stick it out.’57
With no little inspiration from those who had saved them in the great air battles earlier, they did, to the enduring benefit of their country, and the world.
* Later Air Vice-Marshal J. E. Johnson CB, CBE, DFC.
* After the Battle, wing formations soon became standard in the very different conditions of the offensive, when there was ample time for the squadrons to form up before sweeping across the Channel.
* Flight mechanic William Eslick, modifying a Spitfire for night operations, described the process as ‘like trying to make a sow’s ear out of a silk purse’.34
* See Appendix VII.
* P. O’Connor made the following modifications among others:
1) All Merlin engines removed, returned to Rolls-Royce for ‘slipping clutch’ and refitted.
2) Engine coolant changed to different glycol mixture.
3) Flare traps with coarser masks fitted, to prevent choking up.
4) Enlarged atomisers fitted in priming system.
5) Improved hand starter magneto gear fitted.
6) Propellers changed from two-bladed wooden to three-blade de Havilland two-speed type, to three-blade Rotol type with constant speed unit.
7) Carburettor linkings changed from stainless steel to phosphor-bronze.
8) Engine boost increased from 61/4 pounds psi to 9 pounds psi for 100 octane fuel.
9) Improved sparking-plugs fitted.
To these might have been added, at various times, the fitting of armour and later of self-sealing wing tanks.