Then came what we know as the Battle of Britain: ‘A contest like no other in human experience, witnessed by millions of people continuing humdrum daily lives,’ as Max Hastings wrote, ‘newspapers were delivered and honey was served for tea a few thousand feet beneath one of the decisive battlefields of history.’ After the European war ended, Churchill was asked what had been for him the worst moment. Two of them, he replied, ‘when everything was at stake’: the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic.
Dowding’s task, although vital, was strategically simple. He was well aware that he could not achieve victory, but he could avoid defeat until bad weather made an invasion impossible in 1940. When good weather returned, six months later, the British Army should be greatly enlarged, re-organised and re-equipped; coastal defences improved, and the whole air force – not only Fighter Command – would be stronger.
There would have been time for intensive training, more and better aircraft would be on hand, and the Royal Navy would remain on full alert. As Colville, one of Churchill’s secretaries, wrote in his diary for 14 June: ‘If we can hold on until November, we shall have won the war. The holding-on is going to be a grim business, a chance for the whale to prove his superiority to the elephant.’ Grimmer than Colville thought, because he expected Roosevelt to be re-elected President of the United States in that month and to declare war on Germany immediately. Colville was unaware of American military weakness at that time. ‘When the Germans struck in the West,’ wrote Weinberg, ‘the United States army could field fewer than a third the number of divisions Belgium put in the field; there were all of 150 fighters and fifty heavy bombers in the army air force.’
‘Well! Now it is England [meaning, ‘Britain and her empire’] against Germany,’ wrote Dowding to Churchill on 17 June, ‘and I don’t envy them their job.’ In fact, Fighter Command was greatly helped by non-British pilots and ground crews: men from New Zealand, Australia, the United States, France and, not least, from Poland and Czechoslovakia. Many of them were experienced and all of them highly motivated to fight Germans and (for those who did not speak English) eager to overcome language and cultural difficulties. It took some time for Dowding to accept eastern Europeans as readily as he accepted those from France or Belgium. But he did, and after the battle was full of praise for their ‘unsurpassed gallantry’. Hitler would get nothing like the same intensity of support from any of his actual allies or those so-called neutrals who backed him while he seemed to be a winner.
Churchill said on 18 June that the Battle of France was over and the Battle of Britain was about to begin. ‘Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation... Let us act so that future generations will say, “This was their finest hour”.’ Stirring words, even after so many years of repetition and parody, but neither Churchill nor Dowding, nor indeed the brave airmen and devoted ground crews on both sides of the Channel knew that Hitler had no idea what to do next, at this glorious moment for the Nazi regime.
His forces had triumphed everywhere and many unconquered states were eagerly offering benevolent neutrality, if not active alliance. Hitler had good reason to suppose that a peace with Britain on his terms was likely because Chamberlain and his numerous supporters remained influential. Had Hitler taken no action against Britain during the rest of that summer, ‘sensible’ men would soon have raised their heads again to resume their pleas for an armistice. Churchill, who remained unpopular with most of Whitehall and Westminster, would have had no outlet for the inspiring rhetoric that swayed popular opinion in favour of fighting on, regardless of Germany’s superior power.
If the British fought on, Hitler had several options in addition to aerial attack: a blockade of imports, using U-boats and aircraft; an alliance with Spain, Portugal and Eire, permitting use of key points in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic islands and the west coast of Ireland; overthrowing Stalin’s rotten regime in the Soviet Union; encouragement of anti-British sentiment in the Middle East and Asia, pleasing his admirers in Japan; or strengthening isolationist sentiment in the United States.
On 23 June, Josef Goebbels (Hitler’s propaganda minister) had good reason to declare: ‘We are very close to the end of the war.’ Churchill would soon fall, Goebbels thought, and the British people would then set up a ‘compromise government’. In March 1939, Goering had assured Count Galeazzo Ciano, the Italian foreign minister, ‘rearmament had not progressed very far in Britain and France’. His intelligence experts calculated British air production at 300 aircraft a month by the autumn of 1939 (when the true figure was more than double this and rising fast) and also regarded British air defences as markedly inferior to German. The world, in those happy days, was Hitler’s oyster.
There must be a German writer who has said something akin to Shakespeare’s words about fortune following upon taking a tide at the flood, but if so Hitler and his courtiers had not read him. There are, of course, always reasons for missing an opportunity: reasons that only hindsight can clearly reveal. In this case, the Luftwaffe had suffered heavy losses and needed time to set up a ground organisation near the French coast to stock up on fuel, weapons and spares. It was not until 21 July that Goering called a meeting of his senior commanders to consider how to get air superiority in preparation for Operation Sealion, a proposed invasion of Britain. Ten days later, Hitler directed that a major air assault – Eagle Day – be launched from 5 August onwards, and 15 September be considered the target date for Sealion to go ashore.
The British, inspired by Churchill, made good use of the relatively quiet summer weeks between the fall of France and the decision to attempt an invasion of England. On 30 June, for instance, Dowding had fewer than 600 fighters and twice as many pilots available for operations. The early warning system was still ‘a work in progress’. By Eagle Day, however, his fighter strength had increased by a quarter and he had another 200 pilots available in addition to those Polish and Czechoslovak pilots who had escaped from Germany and needed no motivation. Everyone on the ground and in the air was becoming more skilful at his or her job every day. They got a further bonus when bad weather delayed the offensive until 13 August. Even then it got off to a muddled start. As Telford Taylor wrote, ‘the eagle did not swoop to the kill; rather, he fell off the perch’.
The Battle of Britain was, in fact, a campaign, and lasted for at least four months, from July to October. The challenges posed were varied and unprecedented. It was fought, moreover, on the British side by a force that had had little opportunity for realistic combat training in peacetime and suffered the loss of many experienced airmen in France. Their replacements were not merely green in combat, they were less competent as pilots.
By July, Luftwaffe bases lay within close range of many British targets and could spread or concentrate attacks to suit itself during long hours of daylight. Dowding, however, was untroubled. He had lunch with Churchill at Chequers on 13 July and: ‘the only thing that worried him in life was the ridiculous dreams he had every night; last night he dreamt that there was only one man in England who could use a Bofors gun and his name was William Shakespeare. It was, he said, most disturbing.’ Churchill, for once, was lost for words.
In July 1940, Churchill learned that Dowding – a RAF officer whom he had grown to respect – was fending off a fifth attempt to winkle him out of Bentley Priory: this at a time when a critical air battle was just beginning. Churchill sent a well-merited rebuke on the 10th to Archibald Sinclair, an old friend who was leader of what was left of the Liberal Party whom he had made Secretary of State for Air.
Sinclair was an amiable Scottish aristocrat with pleasant manners, easily overawed by senior officers and officials. Churchill had been ‘very much taken aback’ to learn that Sinclair intended to remove Dowding from Fighter Command at the end of October. Dowding is ‘one of the very best men you have got’, Churchill told him, ‘and I say this after having been in contact with him for about two years’. He had ‘greatly admired the whole of his work’, especially in ‘resisting immense pressure to dissipate the fighter strength during the great French battle’. Much of that pressure had come, of course, from Churchill himself, who was big enough – on the very eve of the Battle of Britain – to admit that Dowding had been right to resist.
Churchill thought Dowding should remain in office for the rest of the war and might very well be promoted to replace Newall. Sinclair reluctantly agreed to leave Dowding in office. On 10 August, however – at the height of the battle – he wobbled again and Churchill reminded him forcibly of his wishes. By November, however, although the Luftwaffe’s daytime offensive had been rebuffed, Fighter Command was unable to prevent its offensive in darkness from causing great harm and demand for changes at the top now became intense. Newall had already gone (replaced by Portal of Bomber Command), Douglas (deputy CAS) replaced Dowding and Leigh-Mallory (head of 12 Group in Fighter Command) replaced Park.
The effective resistance offered in south-eastern England led Goering to believe that there could be few fighters available elsewhere. Accordingly, large formations were sent from bases in Norway and Denmark towards northeastern England on 15 August. Thanks to Dowding’s prudence and radar’s early warning, 13 Group had enough fighters on hand to challenge them and the Luftwaffe suffered heavy losses. That victory was vital for Dowding. Had the attack succeeded, his defences would have been dangerously stretched from then on. When the crisis came in September, there was no attack on the north-east. Churchill spent part of that day at Bentley Priory and told Colville to give the good news to Chamberlain, then recovering from an operation, who was delighted to hear it.
‘So he ought to be,’ replied Churchill, ‘this is one of the greatest days in history,’ he added, with typical exaggeration. Dowding’s foresight, he continued in more measured terms, ‘deserves high praise, but even more remarkable has been the restraint and the exact measurement of formidable stresses which had reserved a fighter force in the north through all these long weeks of mortal conflict in the south. We must regard the generalship here shown as an example of genius in the art of war.’ It was on leaving Park’s headquarters at Uxbridge next evening, 16 August, that Churchill uttered his immortal words: ‘Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.’
On 31 August Churchill invited Dowding and Portal (soon to succeed Newall as CAS) to dine with him at Chequers. Colville was present and noted in his diary:
‘Dowding is splendid, he stands up to the PM: refuses to be particularly unpleasant about the Germans, and is the very antithesis of the complacency with which so many Englishmen are infected. He told me that he could not understand why the Germans kept on coming in waves instead of concentrating on one mass raid a day which could not be effectively parried.’
These ‘scattergun’ tactics would not have been followed had Dowding been in command on the other side of the Channel. It seemed obvious to him, and Churchill agreed, that one should use maximum force against targets of the greatest value, as well-led European armies had so often done in the past.
On the morning of 15 September, a day later designated ‘Battle of Britain Day’, Churchill visited Keith Park at Uxbridge. Dowding had chosen him as senior air staff officer in July 1938 and made him responsible for the Command’s fighting efficiency. He had excelled as Dowding’s right-hand man at Bentley Priory and was sent in April 1940 to command 11 Group, which would become, during that immortal summer, the most vital position in Britain’s front-line defence following the German conquest of Western Europe.
If nothing much was happening, Churchill said, ‘I’ll just sit in the car and do my homework’. Park welcomed him, his wife and a secretary and escorted them down to his bomb-proof operations room, fifty feet below ground level. Churchill had a high regard for Park. Although Dowding exercised supreme command, ‘the actual handling of the directions of the squadrons’, wrote Churchill after the war, ‘was wisely left to 11 Group’. Park’s was the group ‘on which our fate largely depended. From the beginning of Dunkirk, all the daylight actions in the south of England had already been conducted by him, and all his arrangements and apparatus had been brought to the highest perfection.’
No sooner had the visitors been seated in the ‘dress circle’ than Park received a radar report that enemy aircraft were massing over Dieppe. Churchill later recalled Park walking up and down behind the map table (on which all aircraft movements, friendly and enemy, were plotted as accurately as possible) ‘watching with a vigilant eye every move in the game’. Everyone was working quietly. Churchill said: ‘There appear to be many aircraft coming in.’ Park replied calmly: ‘There’ll be someone there to meet them.’
That was the day when the Luftwaffe made its greatest bid for victory in daylight. The effort failed and two days later Hitler postponed an invasion ‘until further notice’. 15 September was set aside in 1942 and for every year since as Battle of Britain Day. That battle, wrote Noble Frankland, ‘must rank directly with Drake’s defeat of the Armada and, though less directly, with Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar, as being among the handful of decisive battles in British history’.
Trenchard, however, was displeased. He argued that it was ‘wrong to commemorate a battle that had come to be so closely associated with one command’. A curious point of view, even for Trenchard, whose faith in the bomber and low regard for the fighter (or any other type of aircraft) never wavered. Consequently, ‘he found it difficult to accept that the RAF’s greatest achievement was a defensive victory’.
Boyle claimed in his biography of Trenchard that he was the man who prepared the victory in the Battle of Britain. ‘This is not so’, replied A. J. P. Taylor. ‘The Battle of Britain was won by Fighter Command and radar. Trenchard had despised one and knew nothing of the other. What Trenchard prepared was the strategic air offensive of 1940-1941, which was a total failure... Like Haig, his hero, Trenchard was an extremely resolute and dogged commander’, but the bombers upon which he pinned his faith proved to be inadequate and their crews were under-trained. Men who were wiser and had a surer grasp of aviation problems would be hard pressed to turn Bomber Command into an effective weapon.
Over the whole campaign, Fighter Command suffered more than 1,000 casualties (over half of them killed) out of nearly 3,000 pilots or air gunners who made at least one sortie. A number of British writers have asserted that Fighter Command was not in danger of defeat at any time in the summer of 1940. Even if the Luftwaffe had overwhelmed Britain’s air defences, they believe, it lacked aircraft equipped with armour-piercing bombs or torpedoes, and crews trained in their use that were needed to sink the heavy units of the Royal Navy. If the Luftwaffe had gained control of the air over the Channel and southern England, wrote Hastings: ‘Mediterranean experience soon showed that in a hostile air environment, the Royal Navy would have found itself in deep trouble.’
We will never know, of course, what impact a new daylight offensive would have had, beginning perhaps as early as March 1941, following the serious material and morale damage done to Britain during months of night bombing. A renewed offensive would surely be better planned; it would last much longer; Fighter Command’s casualties would be heavier; and American reluctance to get involved would have been strengthened. Writers can as easily argue that the Germans could not possibly conquer France, Belgium and the Netherlands in a few weeks in May and June 1940, but they did. ‘By great good fortune,’ wrote Terraine, ‘rational military judgement did not decide the issue. Hitler took the astonishing and lunatic course of attacking the Soviet Union while Britain remained undefeated at his back. So Britain was saved by the folly of her enemies.’
Throughout the war, Churchill – and later the Americans – made ever-increasing use of a marvellous source of information about German plans. They did not disclose the secret in their postwar memoirs and it was only revealed in 1974. Churchill had a particular enthusiasm for intelligence information, but he never revealed the source to confound his critics or justify his actions.
In July 1939, Polish code-breaking experts gave duplicates of the German enigma machine to the French and British. Men and women working on ‘Ultra’ at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire intercepted and translated German wireless signals that had been enciphered by that machine, which the Germans believed was invulnerable. That information began to reach the government during the Norwegian campaign, but British armed forces lacked the weapons and skill to make good use of it, as would often be the case until late in 1942.
Ultra provided Dowding with valuable information about the Luftwaffe’s organisation, order of battle and equipment. But its information about the timing, size and proposed targets for particular raids usually arrived in Dowding’s hands (for handing on to Park and his other group commanders) too late to be of help in meeting raids that had already been and gone. Also, it could not tell if the Germans made last-minute changes of plan as weather worsened or improved, or units were found to have more or fewer aircraft immediately available than had been supposed.
Ultra was unable to tell whether Fighter Command would outlast the Luftwaffe because it was silent on the losses and effective strength of German units and the size of reserves, nor could it forecast changes in methods and objectives because such communications went between Berlin and formations in France by landline. ‘For all his major decisions,’ concluded the official historians of British intelligence during the Second World War, Dowding ‘depended on his own strategic judgement, with no direct assistance from the Enigma.’ On 13 October 1940 Churchill was ‘astounded’ to learn of ‘the vast congregation’ allowed into the secret. ‘The Air Ministry is the worst offender’, he said, ordering several recipients to be struck off, and adding Dowding. Until then, perhaps not surprisingly, he had not been on the Air Ministry list.
At about 5 pm on 7 September 1940 the Luftwaffe launched a massive attack on London. During the next hour-and-a-half, nearly 350 bombers (escorted by more than 600 fighters) set fire to docks, oil tanks and warehouses along both banks of the Thames east of the city. They also blasted numerous densely-populated streets. It was by far the most powerful attack yet launched by any air force against any target. For the next seven hours, wave after wave of bombers flew over London, finding fresh targets in the light of fires started earlier. They bombed at leisure, unhindered either by anti-aircraft fire (of which there was little and that ill-directed) or by night fighters (of which there were few and those ill-equipped). Dowding lost twenty-four pilots killed or injured and more than sixty enemy aircraft were destroyed or damaged. During the sixty-eight nights between 7 September and 12 November, there were only ten on which the Luftwaffe did not mount what it regarded as a ‘major’ raid (one that dropped at least 100 tons of bombs).
At that time, Britain’s night defences were not nearly as effective as the day defences. Few heavy anti-aircraft guns were available and all lacked radar assistance to direct fire accurately. Like the barrage balloons and searchlights, they served mainly to keep bombers high. Radio counter-measures effectively upset German guidance beams, but London was an easy target to find without them and it was not too difficult to find other cities in such a small island. As for night fighters, there were, in September, eight squadrons assigned to that duty – six of Blenheims, two of Defiants – all close to useless.
A fighter, specially designed for night work, had begun life as long ago as November 1938, but it would not be until the end of March 1941 that the Bristol Beaufighter, a twin-engined, two-seater, was in regular service. It was very fast, had a long endurance and was powerfully armed. Better still, it benefitted from work done to bridge the gap between scientific research and the solution of the vital practical problem of building a radar set small enough to fit into an aircraft and finding companies capable of mass production. This work was still in progress during the winter of 1940-1941.
Overwhelmed by alarm at the success of German night bombers and anxious to be seen by Whitehall’s other authorities, civilian as well as military, to be taking positive action, the Air Ministry chose Salmond on 14 September to chair a meeting of senior officers, among them Douglas, Freeman and Tedder. After two days of deliberation they produced a list of recommendations. Only then was Dowding asked to comment. He rejected most of the recommendations coming from officers who knew nothing about the difficulties of devising an effective system of night defence.
Salmond felt so hotly opposed to Dowding that he considered making his way to Buckingham Palace and demanding that the king sack him personally. Presumably wiser heads informed him that it was now some years since British sovereigns lost the power to act like that. Still raging, he wrote to Trenchard on 25 September: ‘As you and I know,’ Dowding ‘has not got the qualifications of a commander in the field, as he lacks humanity and imagination.’ Newall should also be sacked because ‘his strategic judgement is completely at fault’. Although Trenchard – the other Ugly Sister – agreed wholeheartedly, he preferred more devious methods of working. ‘I never mention that you and I are working in agreement on the matter,’ he told Salmond on 4 October, ‘as I feel it is more use our apparently being independent, but working for the same cause.’ Historians rightly make much of the inept management of the Luftwaffe by Goering and Udet. Given the opportunity, which they so ardently desired, Trenchard and Salmond would have caused as much harm to the RAF.
Salmond wrote to Churchill next day, 5 October. It was ‘imperative’, he thought, that Dowding go and that was also the opinion of ‘most, if not all, service members of the Air Council’. Churchill, however, was not ready to sacrifice a ‘genius in the art of war’, as he had described Dowding after the Luftwaffe’s attack on northern England. He understood more clearly than a couple of retired air marshals, becoming more eccentric by the month, that the difficulties facing Dowding had no easy solution. On 13 October Churchill again had him and Portal as guests at Chequers. He told them that he was sure Britain would win the war, although just at the moment he could not quite see how.
Vice-Admiral Tom Phillips (vice-chief of the Naval Staff) poked in his oar on 16 October. Knowing even less about the problems than Salmond and Trenchard, Phillips recommended to Churchill that day fighters be used on patrol over London in darkness. Churchill invited Dowding to respond, which he did the same day. German bombers flew too high and too fast to be picked up by searchlights, he said. Only reliable airborne radar sets linked to ground radars would serve in a purpose-built fighter with crews helped by blind-flying apparatus and well practiced in taking off and landing in darkness and bad weather.
‘You will note,’ Dowding ended, ‘that Admiral Phillips suggests no method of employment of fighters, but would merely revert to a Micawber-like method of ordering them to fly about and wait for something to turn up.’ It was an attitude only too common in the Admiralty, which for years advocated sending out ‘hunting groups’ of destroyers to look for U-boats in the vastness of the open seas. Only reluctantly and after a great deal of wasted effort did it turn to more intelligent use of its resources.
Dowding wrote several long and detailed letters in October and November, which he circulated widely, about the problems and solutions being sought. True enough, but dull stuff for men in Whitehall in and out of uniform who felt that something dramatic must be done. During September, the Luftwaffe flew about 6,000 sorties over Britain in darkness and lost only four bombers. They killed or seriously injured more than 50,000 civilians in London and other parts of Britain during the last four months of 1940 and who could say what further disasters in darkness and daylight the new year would bring?
Defeat usually costs commanders their jobs, so out they go. Only gradually would the scale of achievement by Dowding and his colleagues before the Blitz be recognised. Britain had not been obliged to make a deal with Hitler, nor had she been invaded and conquered, but how would she fare in 1941? Dowding and Park were replaced by Douglas and Trafford Leigh-Mallory (formerly head of 12 Group) who claimed to have the answers. In fact, another 40,000 civilians were killed or seriously injured by aerial attack during 1941, most of them before mid-year, when the German assault on the Soviet Union began.
The failure of the Luftwaffe to eliminate Fighter Command in the summer of 1940 meant that its forces available to attack the Soviet Union in June 1941 were actually weaker than in the attack on Western Europe in May 1940. Belief in German invincibility was shaken; resistance began in occupied territories and some influential Americans thought Britain might survive. Neither Spain nor Portugal joined the Axis, therefore the Atlantic islands, Gibraltar and Malta did not fall into enemy hands. Churchill ‘conducted the nearest-run campaign of the summer against the peace lobby’, a large group that adroitly ducked for cover only after the day battle made it clear to everyone – friend, enemy, neutral – that Britain would fight on. But it was Park who wielded the weapon that Dowding created and Churchill decided to use. Had he failed, as he could have done, the efforts of all the others would have come to nought.
The transition of Dowding and Park from Fighter Command in November and December 1940 ‘to quieter spheres,’ wrote Denis Richards in an officially-sanctioned history of the RAF in 1953, ‘though doubtless wise in itself, was not perhaps the most impressive immediate reward that might have been devised for the victors of one of the world’s decisive battles.’ Sir Humphrey Appleby, immortal master of words used to conceal meaning in BBC television’s ‘Yes Minister’ could not have put it better. Sir Humphrey would also have approved of the Air Ministry’s best-selling pamphlet on the battle. Written anonymously by one Hilary St George Saunders, a librarian in the House of Commons, it carefully avoided even mentioning the names ‘Dowding’ and ‘Park’.
Churchill was angered by the Air Ministry’s conduct and in April 1941 asked Sinclair to explain. Although it was a time of serious crises in the progress of the war, Churchill found time to condemn an attempt to make ‘unpersons’ of two outstanding officers. These actions, he told Sinclair, ‘are a discredit to the Air Ministry’. Sinclair waffled away in the best Sir Humphrey tradition: we wanted ‘to tell a simple story of the fighting from the human side and present it rather as the “soldiers’ battle”, which it very largely was’. This is nonsense, as everyone who had anything to do with Fighter Command knew perfectly well. It is difficult to think of any other campaign in recorded history more closely directed from the top, often hour by hour, for months.
Churchill was not impressed and eventually, in August 1943, Sinclair admitted that his petty attitude would not do and saw to the production of an illustrated edition of the pamphlet that not only named Dowding and Park, but even used photographs of them. Tedder, who held a vital office in England throughout 1940 and was well aware of Park’s work in that critical year, spoke much more warmly of him than either Sinclair or Richards. ‘If ever any one man won the Battle of Britain,’ said Tedder (by then CAS, in February 1947), ‘he did. I don't believe it is realised how much that one man, with his leadership, his calm judgement and his skill, did to save not only this country, but the world.’
For years senior officers of the navy and army, civil servants and politicians had been exasperated by the muddle, indecision and conflicting statements regularly emerging from the Air Ministry’s various offices. In Churchill’s opinion, based on years of close observation, an opinion supplemented by a steady stream of information coming from intelligent, but exasperated RAF officers, ‘jealousies and cliquism’ were rampant in ‘a most cumbrous and ill-working administrative machine’.
As long ago as July 1934, a retired air commodore, Peregrine Fellowes, had complained to Churchill about the serious lack of ‘practical knowledge of flying’ among the Air Ministry’s senior officers. Many of them, he said, ‘seldom flew even as passengers’. The Air Ministry’s top brass – under Salmond, Ellington or Newall, with the ‘retired’ Trenchard constantly prowling various corridors – amply justify Churchill’s contempt. He had formed a low opinion of the ministry in 1935 and only a few officers earned his respect during the next decade.
There was a strong belief in the Air Ministry that Fighter Command could have acted more aggressively even during the day battle, and that it must do so in 1941. It was not unreasonable for Churchill and Beaverbrook, such staunch allies of Dowding throughout the summer of 1940, to accept that new men, so strongly backed inside and outside the Air Ministry, could do better. If, however, there had been a second daylight battle in 1941 – as was widely expected by Britons, Germans, conquered Europeans, hesitant allies and apprehensive neutrals – it might well have been lost because Douglas and Leigh-Mallory were far less skilled as operational commanders than Dowding and Park.
On 29 December 1940 came one of the most destructive of all German raids on London. The night-fighter force, admitted Douglas after the war, ‘had no success’. It was not until effective radar equipment, on the ground and in the air, came into service that a significant number of interceptions were achieved. In April 150 German bombers were withdrawn from France for a campaign in the Balkans and more left in May to prepare for the assault on the Soviet Union. Even with greatly-reduced forces, the Luftwaffe was able to carry out the most damaging attack London suffered throughout the war during the night of 10-11 May. The defences claimed twenty-eight bombers destroyed and Douglas considered this ‘eminently satisfactory’.
In fact, only seven of the 550 bombers employed were actually brought down by British defences on the ground or in the air. That raid indicated what a maximum effort, prolonged for months, could have achieved during the summer of 1941. No-one in Britain could know, on the morning of 11 May 1941, that the worst was over. From a German point of view, the worst should just have been beginning.
Trenchard, Salmond and Freeman did not call for the dismissal of Douglas and Leigh-Mallory for their failure. Several senior army officers in the Middle East, abruptly sacked by Churchill, must have wondered why the great man’s beady eye did not fix upon these two. The level of training in Fighter Command during 1941, when there was time for it (unlike 1940) was very low, but Douglas was fixated on ceaseless offensive operations even with pilots not ready for combat. Those airmen who fought in the campaigns of 1940 caused serious damage to the Luftwaffe and significant political damage to the Nazi regime, but those who carried out forays across the Channel in 1941 achieved nothing comparable. They were as brave and determined as the men of 1940, but they should not have been fighting there.
As early as 19 January 1941 Churchill was concerned about the management of Fighter Command. He asked Portal why that command had many more crews than aircraft when 700 aircraft were available in storage units. Portal had no answer. At this time, British forces in the Mediterranean and in the Far East were desperately short of modern aircraft and crews for them. The words ‘advance’ and ‘morale’ never ceased to thrill Trenchardists. As Portal, a devout disciple of the master, said on 13 February 1941: ‘I regard the exercise of the initiative as in itself an extremely important factor in morale, and I would willingly accept equal loss or even more in order to throw the enemy onto the defensive.’ It may be that many of the pilots so ‘willingly’ sacrificed by Portal should have spent more time in training in 1941, pending posting to theatres overseas where their services were really needed, than in attempting pin pricks across the Channel.
The failure of these pin pricks, that kept very few German fighter pilots from either the Eastern Front or the Mediterranean was disguised by extravagant victory claims. In the second half of 1941, the RAF claimed the destruction of more than 700 enemy aircraft over France and the Low Countries. Actually, the Germans lost barely 100 fighters in combat during the whole year (another fifty were lost in accidents or on training flights), but nearly 470 airmen in British service were killed between November 1940 and the end of 1941 for no strategic or political advantage.
They died on two kinds of operation, known as ‘Rhubarb’ (fighters only) and ‘Circus’ (when bombers were present). Crews were not given specific targets and were not firmly discouraged from blazing away at random. Consequently, they killed French civilians and their livestock and made it that much easier for the Germans to rule them. Even at the end of 1941, when most of the Luftwaffe had left for the Eastern Front, Douglas was allowed by Churchill to keep no fewer than seventy-five squadrons of day fighters in Britain, against thirty-four assigned for the whole of the Middle East. It was a misjudgement that helped to delay Allied victory over much weaker forces in that theatre.
While Dowding was still at Bentley Priory, Sinclair told him of the government’s need to strengthen Britain’s organisation in the United States (still neutral) for selecting, modifying and purchasing aircraft and weapons. The appointment of an airman with both professional knowledge and recent experience of combat needs lay within Beaverbrook’s control. He wanted Dowding to have it and Sinclair agreed. Dowding was reluctant, but next day, 14 November, Churchill explained to him the importance of getting American war aviation to develop along the right lines, in step with that of Britain, adding that the ‘public interest, of which I am the judge’, required his consent. Dowding had no answer to that and later Churchill told Sinclair: ‘I think he will perform the task very well, and I will give him a letter for the President.’
Churchill pointed out to Sinclair, who needed constant reminding, that ‘I have a very great regard for this officer and admiration for his qualities and achievements’. Henry Tizard (who had been sent to the United States in August as head of a mission to exchange secret information with American authorities) sent Dowding some notes on 21 November about what he had learned. ‘All members of my mission,’ he wrote, ‘including particularly the service members, were quite definitely of the opinion that even in those directions where the Americans were technically efficient, they had not thought out operational problems, and it is on that side that you may be able to help them most.’
Dowding arrived in Washington early in January 1941 and was warmly welcomed by everyone who mattered, civilian or military. This was partly because he represented Britain at a time when many Americans were becoming convinced that with their help Hitler might be defeated, but mostly because he was the first commander who had withstood a German assault. The press liked him because he was no smiling smoothy, a type – both British and American – with which they were only too familiar. Also, he praised aspects of the American aircraft industry, especially its navigational instruments and bomb sights. He pressed for the urgent production in both the United States and Britain of airborne radar sets. This was done, a decision that proved of great value to both countries.
Having guarded against the danger of losing the war and having, he hoped, made the base secure, Dowding now felt able to consider how it could be won. He thought it could be done by a combination of bombing and blockade, without a massive invasion of the Continent. Here he was mistaken, but he was right to say that U-boats would soon prove to be a greater menace to Britain than bombers, day or night.
On 20 April Dowding set out for Beaverbrook his impression of aircraft plants which he had visited in the United States and Canada. Construction, design and equipment were all, he thought, excellent. But the Americans, naturally enough, knew little about ‘actual war requirements’, especially in armour and the effects on airframes and engines of gunfire. Although the aircraft industry was not suffering from strikes (so far), the pace at which manufacturers got government permission to proceed with orders was as slow as it had been in Britain before the war. As for the Atlantic Ferry Organisation (ATFERO), whereby American-built aircraft were flown to England, ‘the muddle, lack of planning and complete unpreparedness’ were shameful.
When Lord Lothian, British Ambassador to the United States, had died in December 1940, Churchill had taken the opportunity to despatch Halifax to Washington as his replacement. He had arrived, most reluctantly, in January and at once backed a campaign urging Americans to subscribe to the RAF Benevolent Fund. Dowding was a member of the fund-raising committee, but he thought it ‘wrong and humiliating’ to press Americans for help and said so, publicly. Halifax rebuked him, but Dowding was unrepentant: ‘My position on the committee entitled me to object to this barefaced panhandling.’
To accuse a noble lord – ex-Viceroy of India, ex-Foreign Secretary, nearly a Prime Minister – of ‘panhandling’, behaving like a dropout, begging in the street, was a dreadful insult. Protected against unkindness all his life, deeply infected by Victorian ‘high-mindedness and humbug’, Halifax was very aggrieved. Dowding, a man of integrity as well as outstanding ability, would not bow to a man who was notable, as his biographer wrote, for no quality higher than a ‘puzzled rectitude’. General Sir Hugh Tudor, who had known Churchill since their days in South Africa, wrote to him in September 1938 dismissing Halifax as ‘a pious rabbit’. But let us never forget that this lightweight, to put it kindly, could so easily have been appointed Prime Minister in May 1940.
Jack Slessor, Director of Plans in the Air Ministry, had been sent to Washington in November 1940 to set out the RAF’s needs and do what he could to get American help. An able officer, but only too ready to regard most other senior airmen with contempt, he could not believe that Dowding’s presence in the United States would benefit Britain. A man of limitless confidence in his own opinions, Slessor took it upon himself to advise Portal to see that Dowding was provided with detailed instructions and a minder from the embassy to vet all his statements. Portal, wiser than Slessor, took no action and soon learned – especially from Beaverbrook – that most Americans liked what Dowding had to say. Halifax, however, asked Churchill on 25 March to summon him home, on the grounds that his personal opinions contradicted official thoughts, as Halifax understood them. Beaverbrook stood up for Dowding, but he himself had no wish to make a new career in the United States and Churchill eventually agreed that he should come home, which he did early in May 1941.
Halifax remained in Washington, publicly supported but privately bypassed, for the rest of the war. He was allowed no significant role in the constant and vitally important questions arising between Churchill, Roosevelt and their principal advisers. To General George C. Marshall, head of the US Army, Field Marshal Sir John Dill, head of the British Joint Staff Mission in Washington, was the Briton who mattered. Insofar as there was a ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States it was effectively represented by Dill and Marshall from August 1941 until Dill’s death in November 1944. It was at Marshall’s insistence that he was accorded the rare honour for a non-American of burial in Arlington cemetery, Washington. They had become friends, as well as allies, unofficially sharing their opinions and the information that came before them. They were far closer than Roosevelt and Churchill.
Dowding was one of the few Britons of indisputable military quality and personal merit whom Americans had met in recent years: a refreshing contrast to the aloof nonentity Halifax and those of similar stamp who found comfortable lurks in Washington. His stay was brief, but it did help American leaders, civilian and military, to learn that Churchill was not alone in his determination to resist Hitler. From then until the end of the European war, Americans would meet many other exceptional Britons. Dowding, in this sense, was among ‘the first of the few’.
Churchill recommended that Dowding succeed Longmore, sacked in May 1941 as head of Middle East Air Command, but Sinclair and Portal both objected, wisely preferring to promote Tedder, Longmore’s deputy. Early in June Churchill wanted Dowding to take over Army Co-operation Command from Barratt, but Sinclair, backed by Portal, refused. In September Tedder fell out of favour with Churchill, who again urged the appointment of Dowding. Sinclair and Portal, strongly supported by Freeman (Portal’s deputy) objected – even more wisely this time, because Tedder was already proving to be an outstanding commander.
Although the Air Ministry was right to reject Dowding for these commands, Churchill’s advocacy shows the strength of his regard. The fact that Churchill accepted his rebuffs shows also a critical difference between his use of power and Hitler’s.
On 29 June 1941 Dowding was asked to take on a job he could not refuse and no-one in the Air Ministry could deny his right to do it. This was to write a despatch on the Battle of Britain. He would have to work quickly because he was to be retired, for no good reason, as from 1 October. This date was nearly seven months before his sixtieth birthday – 24 April 1942 – the date on which he had earlier been told he must retire. No doubt that piece of information had been misfiled or lost somewhere in the Air Minstry’s bowels. As one would expect, he submitted his report well ahead of the deadline, on 20 August. He had no hand in the production of what was officially regarded as the Air Ministry’s ‘admirable’ pamphlet on the battle and was not even consulted by its anonymous author.
He did, however, review it for the Sunday Chronicle on 26 October 1941, observing that it tended ‘to exaggerate the ease with which the most dangerous assault which has ever been made on this country was beaten off’. Park’s contribution, he added, should be more widely known. ‘His initiative and resource in countering each new move on the part of the enemy, and his leadership of the gallant men whom he commanded, were beyond all praise.’ Heart-warming words from a man not given to praising lightly. Dowding also wrote that the Hurricane was a good thirty miles an hour slower than the pamphlet stated, and Fighter Command was by no means stronger at the end of the battle than before it, as its author (reflecting the opinion of Douglas) asserted.
Numerous experienced pilots had been killed, injured or posted overseas and their replacements were far less skilled as pilots and therefore more vulnerable in combat. Neither Douglas nor Leigh-Mallory ever accepted that one well-trained pilot was worth two under-trained men, however gallant.
The battle, in Dowding’s opinion, really began on the outbreak of war in September 1939. His report is lucid, perceptive and the tone throughout is temperate. His arguments and those of others are calmly summarised. He repeats what was for him the ‘fundamental principle’ of national defence: ‘An adequate and efficient fighter force ensures the security of the base, without which continuous operations are impossible.’ He made the point for the umpteenth time in a letter to the eminent military historian Basil Liddell Hart on 27 February 1942: ‘You can’t win a war with fighters, but you can’t do anything at all without them.’ He outlined the difficulties of defence in darkness: bringing into service an effective night-fighter; getting airborne radar to work adequately; training personnel on the ground and in the air and – not least – trying to do all this in bad weather when German raids were constant. ‘I had to leave the development of night interception at a very interesting stage’, he wrote, but he believed that ‘the back of the problem had been broken’.
In August 1942, a year after he submitted his despatch to the Air Ministry, Dowding told Churchill that it had been withheld even from commanders-in-chief and service members of the Air Council. Churchill asked Portal to explain. He at once assured the Prime Minister that Dowding must be mistaken, but on 12 September was obliged to admit that Dowding had been right: due to ‘an oversight’, wrote Portal, the despatch had not been circulated to all concerned. The oversight was probably not deliberate, merely yet another example of the chronic inability of Air Ministry officials to manage simple routines.
Dowding’s departure from active service was, naturally, a muddle. Although his retirement was duly gazetted and reported in the press, it did not take effect. At least, not for long. He had only been retired for a month when Beaverbrook wrote to tell him on 31 October that Churchill required him for another important job, from which ‘immeasurable benefits will flow’. Churchill had instructed Hastings Ismay on 22 October to inform Sinclair that he could not agree to the retirement, without prior consultation, of such an important officer. ‘This principle is fully recognised,’ said Churchill, ‘by the other service departments.’
Sinclair, suitably abashed yet again, invited Dowding to examine the RAF’s establishments and suggest reductions: a task, Sinclair told Dowding, of ‘extreme delicacy as well as urgency’, given the immense strain on human and material resources in a war that, at the time, Britain was not winning.
Dowding refused, but Churchill again told him that he had a right to demand his service. He went on to say that he had only learned of Dowding’s retirement from the newspapers, and said it again when Dowding expressed astonishment. Dowding replied that he was very reluctant to work with Sinclair because he disliked and distrusted him. Churchill protested that his old friend ‘had never said a word against you, though others may have’. Dowding spent the night of 14-15 November at Chequers, ostensibly to discuss possible methods of saving manpower in the RAF. But Churchill was nicely relaxed with the help of a drink or three and gave Dowding the benefit of his reflections on various subjects, breaking off now and then to join in the chorus of songs from Victorian musicals, issuing from a phonograph. In short, the abstemious (though pipe-smoker) Dowding was no fit companion for an off-duty Churchill. As he later recalled, the evening ‘was not suitable for serious conversation’.
Nevertheless, Dowding took on the task. Portal had already assured Churchill that he ran a lean machine and cuts in RAF manpower were impossible. As long ago as November 1940, when Harris moved from 5 Group to the Air Ministry, he had observed that its staffs were ‘fantastically bloated’ and did what he could to begin ‘an enormous and very suitable clear-out’. However it was no use. Dowding tried hard, travelling widely throughout Britain and enquiring closely into manning levels, but he was handicapped by a lack of expert assistance; a deficiency that Portal and Freeman would not remedy.
By the middle of June 1942 he had had enough and made a typically rude message from Freeman, ‘an excuse for a show of injured dignity’ and resigned on the 18th. Despite crafty opposition, he had found more than 700 officers and 24,000 other ranks tucked quietly away, without real jobs. Sinclair was not pleased and told Dowding that it was ‘an act of disloyalty’ to bring Air Ministry ‘defects’ to the Prime Minister’s attention. Dowding had no answer to such disgraceful words and returned, this time permanently, to the retired list with effect from 15 July 1942. It amused him to reflect that he had served for eighty-one days beyond his sixtieth birthday.
On 17 July 1942 Alexander Hardinge (King George VI’s private secretary) suggested to the Air Ministry, at the king’s request, that Dowding be promoted to the rank of marshal of the RAF. Sinclair certainly consulted Portal and Freeman, probably Trenchard and Salmond and they all agreed, expressing sincere regret, that it could not be done. Only a CAS could hold that rank and the rule could not be broken (although it would be, twice, as we shall see, in 1945). The king was obliged to accept his rebuff.
In May 1943, however, Churchill wrote to Dowding to offer him elevation to the peerage as a baron (not as a viscount) in recognition of ‘your ever-memorable services to this country during the Battle of Britain’. This honour – the first such elevation since Trenchard was made a viscount in 1919 – was in the gift of the king and the prime minister and therefore could not be resisted by the Air Ministry.
Two years passed, the war in Europe ended, and Sinclair wrote to Dowding on 9 May 1945 commending his ‘inspiring leadership’ that helped to save ‘our island citadel... The whole nation, indeed freedom-loving men and women the world over will always gratefully remember you and the gallant “few” who fought and flew under your command.’ Three weeks later, Sinclair wrote more honestly to Douglas: ‘I felt as though I had won a battle when I got Fighter Command into your hands and, looking back, how right I was.’ Hundreds of pilots killed on pointless raids over France in 1941-1942 may not have agreed.
Not even in the glow of victory could Dowding be promoted because he had never served as CAS, but that alleged rule was later waived in the case of two officers whose undoubted merits may be considered to fall below those of Dowding. These were Arthur Harris, whose conduct of Bomber Command during the years 1942 to 1945 has attracted, with good reason, severe criticism as well as high praise, and Sholto Douglas, who held several commands but none at a critical time.
On 20 October 1988, when his particular opponents were all dead or moribund, a statue of Dowding was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, outside St Clement Dane’s church in London. The initiative came not from the Ministry of Defence, into which the Air Ministry had by then been buried, but from survivors of those who actually fought in the battle, on the ground as well as in the air. That honour came late enough, but another twenty-one years would pass before a statue of Sir Keith Park was unveiled in Trafalgar Square. Neither statue is an official tribute. Both were made possible by the efforts of countless private individuals. Park’s statue stood in Trafalgar Square for six months (November 2009 to May 2010) and is now in the RAF Museum at Hendon. Another statue of him now stands, permanently, in Waterloo Place, near New Zealand House, and was unveiled on 15 September 2010, the seventieth anniversary of Battle of Britain Day.