1937 – 1940
In December 1936 Lord Swinton, Secretary of State for Air, submitted to Buckingham Palace the name of Group Captain Park for His Majesty’s consideration as Air Aide-de-Camp. Park had been selected to attend a course at the Imperial Defence College, wrote Swinton, and would therefore be serving in London. Swinton was informed that George VI ‘entirely approves’ his suggestion and early in January 1937 Park heard the good news, together with the information that the appointment carried additional pay at a rate of 10s 6d per day.
He attended the college at 9 Buckingham Gate, only a few yards from the palace which occupied so much of his time in that coronation year. The course was designed to further the education of a group of hand-picked officers of the three services, as well as some Dominion officers and civil servants. It aimed also to provide daily opportunities throughout a whole year for the practice of inter-service cooperation in staff work. Numerous experts were called in to lecture on their specialities: Sir John Reith spoke on broadcasting, Sir Alexander Cadogan on foreign policy, Clement Attlee on the higher direction of war and Hugh Dowding on air defence. That year, the students arranged a debate on Germany’s colonial demands and their exercises included appreciations of war between Britain and Japan, Russia, Italy and Germany respectively.
Several survivors of that course had warm memories of Park. Sir John Balfour considered him ‘a reserved, thoughtful and self-reliant person with a quiet sense of humour. The sort of man with whom one would gladly go tiger shooting – if one was in the habit of shooting tigers!’ C.G. Hope-Gill wrote that ‘that ardent spirit’ was their star questioner: no lecturer got away without going through a veritable barrage of searching questions. He easily topped the ‘Question Championship’ in 1937, even though he was often away on the King’s business.
In December, at the end of the course, Park was appointed to command Tangmere, near Chichester, base for two squadrons of Hawker Fury fighters and one of Avro Anson reconnaissance/light bombers. For a few glorious weeks he enjoyed a last fling as a biplane pilot – flying the Hawker Fury – after three years virtually grounded. Then, in April 1938, he spent a week in hospital with acute streptococcal pharyngitis. That illness had immense consequences not only for Park, but also for Arthur Harris, later head of Bomber Command. In May the Air Ministry decided to send Park to Palestine; Harris was to go to Fighter Command as Senior Air Staff Officer, right-hand man to Sir Hugh Dowding. However, Harris wanted to go to Palestine and had a ‘prolonged argument’ with Cyril Newall, Chief of the Air Staff, about this decision. ‘Eventually, by telling him that I had just got married and that my wife’s trousseau was entirely tropical, I persuaded him to let my overseas posting stand.’ It may be, however, that the result of a special medical examination of Park on 2 June swayed Newall more than Mrs Harris’s new clothes. Park was found temporarily unfit for service abroad and sent on a month’s sick leave, suffering from ‘general debility’.
While on leave, Park learned that he was to go to Fighter Command in place of Harris. Harris’s protest and Park’s illness had together resulted in a decision to permit Harris to go to Palestine and Park to Bentley Priory. Had Harris, instead of Park, later gone on from Bentley Priory to command No. 11 Group, the conduct of the fighter defence in 1940 would have run along different lines. Similarly, the conduct of the bomber offensive would have been quite different without Harris’s masterful direction. The original decision to send Park to Palestine shows that he was not in May 1938 considered a fighter specialist. Nor was he. Apart from his few months at Tangmere, he had not been close to front-line fighters since leaving Northolt in August 1932.
To complete his cure, Park learned that he was to be promoted. Owing to the ‘voluntary and unforeseen’ retirement of Geoffrey Bromet in May, a vacancy for Air Commodore had suddenly appeared and Newall recommended that Park be promoted on 1 July 1938 to fill it. He had been a Group Captain since 1 January 1935 and was twenty-sixth of 108 group captains at the time of his promotion. When a man reached that rank, he was eligible for promotion during the next four and a half years at six-month intervals. If not promoted, he would normally be retired once his current appointment ended. Park, then, still had a year – two chances – ahead of him when he became an Air Commodore.1
Fighter Command had been formed in July 1936 and its headquarters set up in Bentley Priory at Stanmore, Middlesex. As Senior Air Staff Officer, Park became in July 1938 second in command to Dowding and responsible for fighting efficiency. It was by far the most important position yet entrusted to him. He soon earned Dowding’s confidence, however, and alarmed all who worked with him by his capacity for hard work, either in the office or in flying round the command’s units or in sailing his boat at weekends off the south coast. Park was then just forty-six and at the height of his powers. With more than twenty years’ service behind him, mostly in positions of authority and responsibility, he was a confident professional.
When he went to Bentley Priory, there was still resistance among some staff officers to the idea that its operations room should concentrate on broad direction, inter-group reinforcement and the dissemination of information, rather than on direct control. In defence exercises, it went against the grain with those officers not to interfere when the same picture appeared on the command’s plotting table that was appearing on tables at the headquarters of individual groups and sectors. Dowding, fortunately, accepted that tactical control of the air defence could not be exercised from Bentley Priory, nor even, at times of hectic action, from group headquarters. He therefore encouraged the widest possible decentralization. Park grasped the structure of the command’s planned method of operation and helped Dowding improve it. Long before he went to 11 Group in April 1940, where he and the men and women under his command bore the brunt of the Battle of Britain, Park had done much of the work necessary to make that group – and, indeed, the whole command – capable of prolonged and effective defence.
One of Park’s chief concerns throughout his service at Bentley Priory was fighter tactics. At that time, the excellent Hurricane and Spitfire came into service, but so also did the Boulton-Paul Defiant – a two-seater whose sole armament was a four-gun turret firing to the rear. In June 1938, Sholto Douglas – Assistant Chief of the Air Staff – informed Dowding that he must form nine squadrons of these machines because 450 had been ordered. They had been ordered in the mistaken belief that the Defiant would emulate, as Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt, head of Bomber Command, wrote to the Air Ministry, the ‘tremendous success of the Bristols in the last war’. But this overlooked the fact that the Bristol had relied primarily on its forward-firing armament whereas the Defiant fired only to the rear. Although Dowding expressed his anger at such an important decision being taken without his being consulted, Douglas argued that ‘for work over enemy territory a two-seater fighter is best.’ That might well have been true, but no successful fighter aircraft employed in the First World War (or, indeed, in any other war) left the pilot weaponless, facing forward, and required to fly in such a way that a gunner, facing aft, might bring his guns to bear upon a target which the pilot could not see. Donald Stevenson (Deputy Director of Home Operations) supported Douglas. Despite the fact that the Defiant, carrying two men and a heavy turret, weighed at least half a ton more than the Hurricane equipped with the same engine, Stevenson persuaded himself that the Defiant was ‘slightly faster’. It was, in fact, markedly inferior at every point of comparison: level speed, rate of climb and manoeuvrability. Its inferiority to the Spitfire was even more pronounced. However, in response to growing doubts about the wisdom of the turret-fighter concept, Stevenson informed Dowding in June 1939 that he was to have six, not nine, Defiant squadrons. Dowding was still very unhappy: ‘faced with the necessity’ as he told Stevenson, ‘of placing the Defiants where they will do the least harm’, he wanted to use them solely for training, but this was unacceptable to the Air Ministry. In the event, only two such squadrons were actually formed and they suffered appalling casualties on the few occasions when they were used in the Battle of Britain.
Thus the first major issue with which Park was concerned involved Douglas, Stevenson and Ludlow-Hewitt. These three would cause him much heartache between 1938 and 1940. Against its will, Fighter Command was lumbered with an aircraft which it did not want, one which proved a liability in action. Park was given an early opportunity to see that Dowding and he would have to work hard to counter ill-advised interference in shaping Britain’s air defence.
Park informed his staff on 11 October 1938 that the Air Ministry wanted a report on the action taken to meet the recent emergency, the Munich Crisis. What flaws had there been in the arrangements made? What improvements were possible? In Park’s opinion, the command was short of aircraft. Five more regular and five more auxiliary squadrons were needed to give a total of thirty regular and ten auxiliary. More modern aircraft were needed: only five squadrons had monoplane fighters. There was no sector organization in south-west England or in the Edinburgh area. There was a shortage of aerodromes throughout the command and many of those available were inadequate. More labour was needed for guard duty, to fill ammunition belts and to repair bomb craters. More balloons and searchlights were needed and something superior to the Lewis gun was essential for aerodrome defence. Not least, more RDF (Radio Direction Finding, later ‘radar’) stations and wireless equipment were ‘absolutely essential for the efficient operations of fighter squadrons in all areas of the United Kingdom.’ The command’s equipment, he thought, was so deficient in October 1938 that framing fighter tactics was an unreal exercise.
Park attended a meeting of the Air Fighting Committee at the Air Ministry in November to consider a report on tactical trials with high-speed aircraft. It raised questions which were to tax him during the Battle of Britain. How best, for example, should one attack enemy aircraft? How effective were various rates of fire? How dangerous was return fire from bombers? What formations should fighters use and what formations was an enemy likely to use? Another committee suggested to Park in December that guns be mounted at an angle to the line of flight. Park thought such a mounting could be useful for night-fighters. He was right: the Luftwaffe would employ upward-firing guns to devastating effect over Germany. At subsequent meetings, the ‘optimum’ range for fighter attacks was discussed and also their armament. Park asked, in vain, for heavy machine-guns (0.5-inch) instead of rifle-calibre weapons (0.303-inch). Again he was right: the heavy machine-gun served the Americans well throughout the war whereas even the crack shots among Park’s pilots in 1940 found it difficult to bring enemy aircraft down.
At the end of each training year, standard fighter attacks were revised and new ones prepared for the next year. On 29 December 1938 Park sent the commanders of 11 and 12 Groups a draft of the proposed instructions for 1939, together with details of tests he wanted the Air Fighting Development Establishment (AFDE) to carry out. The ‘fire unit’ was a section of three aircraft and although the AFDE considered a V-shaped formation the handiest, Park proposed to try more flexible methods: ‘it is essential,’ he said, ‘that some latitude be left to the leader in the air in order to effect surprise. ‘ But his hands were tied by an official ruling that single-seat fighters could only attack from directly below or dead astern.
A few days later, on 10 January 1939, he seized upon an invitation from the Air Ministry to criticize its Manual of Air Tactics. This assumed, he wrote, that an enemy would use the same methods as the RAF in dealing with raids, but the distribution and despatch of bombers was more difficult for Britain than for such a large state as Germany, whereas the problems of defence were simpler. Low-flying bombers (British or German) would not, as the manual suggested, enjoy ‘comparative immunity’ from anti-aircraft fire; all bomber formations would be at a grave disadvantage if they could be broken up and dive-bombers were particularly vulnerable to fighters. ‘In Home Defence work,’ Park argued, ‘tactics do not interest the leader of a formation until he has been brought in sight of his target by the ground organization.’ That target, he warned, might comprise fighters as well as bombers: ‘The possibility of bombers having fighter escorts even in attacks on London should not be overlooked.’
He sent four copies of a new set of instructions, ‘Fighter Command Attacks, 1939’, to the Air Ministry in February. When submitting them to Dowding for approval, Park characteristically drew his attention to the officers who had actually done the work of sifting ideas, planning exercises and drawing diagrams. These instructions were designed to assist new squadron pilots to learn standard attacks upon bombers flying in formation. They assumed that increased fire power permitted decisive effect to be achieved at greater range. Park emphasized that they were not a set of drills: formation leaders must use their initiative in air fighting tactics. Good teamwork would be important and pilots would have to take advantage of blind areas, cloud and sun; above all, they should seek to surprise their opponents. Inevitably, however, elaborate precautions were laid down for peacetime training. These precautions, in practice, were so carefully followed that the principles of attack were overlooked. For example, day attacks were to be made only in formation and at specified, safe heights; all aircraft were to avoid cloud; pilots were not to change their aim after starting their attack-run and were not to lose sight of other aircraft either in their own formation or in the formation under attack.
Leslie Gossage, commander of 11 Group, wrote to Dowding in March 1939 to say that he had been asked at the Staff College if annihilation of a few was not preferable to the command’s policy of the interception of many. No one, he had replied, doubted the desirability of annihilation, but the command lacked the means and the information to achieve it. The controller assigned enough aircraft to take serious toll of raids of which he had firm information, received early enough to enable him to position aircraft effectively. But if his information was uncertain and part of his force already airborne to deal with the unexpected, he would have to use what he could and reinforce as he could. He certainly could not keep strong patrols aloft in the hope of striking an annihilating blow because they might never get a chance to do anything. The whole matter of interception, thought Gossage, hinged on information. As it improved, so did the prospects for annihilation.
Dowding replied that the intention was to match machine with machine. If too many were sent up, they would be caught refuelling and rearming when a second wave came in; if too few were sent up, there would be losses for insufficient return. But ideal tactics could not even be practised because most squadrons had not yet had their monoplane fighters long enough to be familiar with them and too few target aircraft were provided to permit realistic interception practice. The command’s work was always done in unreal conditions, except that training in small units brought out leadership qualities. The squadron, concluded Dowding, would remain the largest unit, though two or more might be paired against a large force. This exchange between Gossage and Dowding summarizes the principles Park followed and the problems he faced throughout his service in Fighter Command.
In August 1939 the Air Ministry asked Dowding if a fighter formation exceeding squadron strength could be mustered and operated as a single unit in battle. Wing Commander G.M. Lawson, a member of Park’s staff, provided Dowding with the material for his answer. The squadron, in Lawson’s view, was the largest unit able to climb, manoeuvre and attack effectively. A wing formation would have to split up and would in any case be impracticable in bad visibility or at low height. Time was also a vital consideration because an enemy should always be attacked as soon as possible. Lawson did not think that large bomber formations would hold together as tightly as the Air Ministry feared, once fighters attacked them. ‘It might be possible,’ he thought, ‘to train our regular fighter squadrons in wing tactics in peace, but it is doubtful whether it would be practicable to maintain that high standard in war.’ A year later, during the Battle of Britain, Park would exactly follow Lawson’s line.
For some months after the outbreak of war in September, Dowding and Park had little fresh evidence to guide them in shaping fighter tactics. Then, in January 1940, Park received a note from Bomber Command on lessons learned as a result of recent Wellington raids. It stressed the need to fly ‘shoulder to shoulder’; the tighter the formation the safer. He circulated it to the group commanders with a note urging them to instruct fighters to attack in formation, not singly. He was concerned at Bomber Command’s report that German fighters were making beam attacks (from side on), using fixed forward-firing guns. This was a form of attack not seriously considered by Fighter Command in recent years because it was believed that the high speed of modern aircraft made full deflection attacks impracticable. Park still thought they were, for average pilots, though the attempt would be a useful distraction if combined with attacks from other quarters.
In February 1940 the Air Ministry sent Fighter Command a report by General Harcourt, commander of the French fighter units, on recent tactics. The report’s principal disclosure was the paucity of interceptions achieved despite active patrolling. This was because France lacked an RDF system linked to a ground-to-air and air-to-air radio system. Harcourt stressed the importance of fighters keeping together during their approach to enemy formations: ‘an attacking force which dashes into battle without a coordinated plan and proper control’ would be ineffective. Park agreed wholeheartedly with this opinion.
Within a few more weeks, he would have ample opportunity to apply all the lessons on fighter tactics which he had studied since July 1938. Many principles were well enough learned in the biplane age, but others were new. During his term at headquarters few certain answers were found to questions so anxiously asked. Apart from experiments at the AFDE, the main source of information came from Home Defence Exercises. There were many of these and all involved Park closely.2
Bomber Command’s reluctance to cooperate enthusiastically in these exercises caused Park much vexation during the year before the war. He wrote bluntly to Ludlow-Hewitt in December 1938, criticizing the absence from his instructions regarding monthly exercises of any mention of the need to test fighter groups in the control of their sectors and squadrons; nor was any awareness shown of the need to test the RDF and air-raid warning systems. Ludlow-Hewitt’s list of objectives was concerned solely with his own bomber command. Park invited him to revise his instructions. For example, Ludlow-Hewitt permitted his groups to carry out raids by single aircraft, but Park reminded him that in monthly exercises civil aircraft and those of other commands were not excluded from the exercise area. Confusion could only be avoided by instructing observer posts not to report single aircraft. Single bombers would therefore not be reported to operations rooms and would not be intercepted by fighters; no one would benefit. Ludlow-Hewitt, greatly senior to Park, considered these criticisms out of order. Dowding, fortunately, did not – and he was senior even to Ludlow-Hewitt.
After the exercise in January 1939, Park wrote to two bomber group commanders, pointing out to one that he had attached an out-of-date map of the area covered by RDF stations to his operation orders and to the other that he was evidently unaware of the area covered since only two bomber raids had used it. The relevant information had been sent to Bomber Command Headquarters, but not forwarded to the groups. Such slackness contrasts sharply with Fighter Command’s alertness under Dowding and Park.
Even the simplest matters baffled Bomber Command’s staff officers. As Dowding minuted Park on 24 May 1939:
I am a much misunderstood man! I have never asked that ‘one particular type of aircraft’ shall be used to represent friendly bombers. . . . My point is that all aircraft of any particular type shall be friendly or all enemy.
Park tried to explain this to Norman Bottomley, his opposite number at Bomber Command, the next day. Anti-Aircraft Command supported Dowding’s stand, wrote Park, and he therefore insisted on this principle. Park added that although the Chief of the Air Staff had ruled that ail Blenheim squadrons were to be used as friendlies, Dowding would forego the advantages of this ruling in view of Ludlow-Hewitt’s objections. He yielded as often as he dared in an effort to exact genuine cooperation, but to no avail. As Park reported to the Air Ministry, bombers should start their approach 100 miles out to sea if the fighters and RDF system were to have realistic training, but Ludlow-Hewitt refused to permit his single-engined squadrons to proceed more than ten miles from the coast.
Park wrote again to Bottomley on 31 May. It was generally agreed, he said, that the Germans were unlikely to employ single aircraft by day against inland targets. Would he therefore stop using single aircraft in the exercises? In Bomber Command’s opinion, replied Bottomley, the Germans might very well use single aircraft. He flatly rejected Park’s criticism of his command’s strategy and tactics. Park tried again on 8 June. The commanding officer of 2 Group, he wrote, who was so confident of the success achieved in target-finding by his crews, should remember that they were operating over country which they knew by heart. They might not find it so easy over foreign country in poor visibility. Sadly, this warning was disregarded by Bomber Command.
Park was also writing at this time to Bomber Command on behalf of the Research Station at Bawdsey in Suffolk. The superintendent, A.P. Rowe, wanted a copy of bomber raid schedules two or three days before the August exercise. They would be useful, he told Park, where large raids were planned, coming in from far out to sea. With advance warning, scientists would be able to send men to the RDF stations concerned in tracking and study the results. Park did what he could, but Bomber Command was unable to supply the information required and he therefore suggested to Rowe that a special exercise be arranged.
On 20 June Park issued instructions for 11 Group’s exercise on 8-9 July 1939. Bomber Command would simulate an attack on southern England from east of Great Yarmouth under something like wartime conditions. The accepted limitations were that aircraft would approach from seaward not lower than 2,000 feet as far as territorial waters, raids would be distributed over the whole exercise area and not less than three aircraft would take part in each daylight raid. Attacking bombers would take evasive action from fighters and anti-aircraft guns in daylight and from searchlights in darkness. They would not attempt to evade fighters in darkness. No balloons would be flown above 500 feet and blackouts would be enforced from 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. in rural counties. No attempt was made to black out London and the south-east, the obvious target areas. Park sent a similar letter to 12 Group, which exercised on 13-14 July over northern England against an attack coming from east of Hartlepool.
A conference was held at Bentley Priory on the 24th to discuss the lessons of both exercises. Dowding considered the interception rate achieved by 11 Group (sixty per cent) reasonable. The rate achieved by 12 Group was lower because it started on interception technique later and RDF equipment in its area was less reliable. In neither group could low-level raids be consistently identified. There had also been unnecessary delay in allotting raids to sectors. Group controllers were to specify the tactical unit required (squadron, flight or section), but sector commanders were to choose the actual unit. Dowding and Park were gravely disturbed by the fact that too few bombers were made available for a realistic exercise – some observers thought it had been cancelled. Practice against large formations, obviously essential, was impossible before August 1939 because Ludlow-Hewitt refused to provide them.
A week after the August exercise, Trafford Leigh-Mallory, commander of 12 Group, submitted his report on it. Two points alarmed Park and his staff officers. Firstly, a low-level raid caught some of Leigh-Mallory’s sectors by surprise and caused him to put up strong standing patrols for their protection. Park thought Leigh-Mallory overreacted, diverting too many fighters to local defence from their major task of intercepting bombers threatening vital industrial targets. And secondly, Leigh-Mallory’s operations room was actually evacuated for ten minutes during a night attack. Dowding promptly directed Leigh-Mallory to ensure that in future no operations room, group or sector, was evacuated unless so damaged as to be useless. This was not the first time that Park and his staff had expressed disquiet about Leigh-Mallory’s handling of his group and Park clearly had no high opinion of his ability long before their quarrels during and after the Battle of Britain.3
Exercises, like tactics, depended upon control and control depended upon operations rooms. Warrant Officer R.W. Woodley compiled a report on them in 1938. He described the equipment used in every room, outlining the procedures followed in each. Park was greatly impressed by Woodley’s conscientious work and sent two copies to the Air Ministry in September. He asked that a certificate expressing approval of Woodley’s work be placed in his record of service and six months later this was actually done. The Air Ministry also decided to keep Woodley’s report up-to-date and enlarged to include descriptions of the equipment and procedures at command headquarters.
Park and Squadron Leader Raymund Hart, who had a distinguished career ahead of him as a technical expert, worked together on operations room problems: Hart on the equipment, Park on the practical layout. Hart had been attached to Bawdsey in 1936 to supervise RDF training and to act as a link between the scientists there and command headquarters. He convinced Park that the plotting on the general situation map was too elaborate. There were vital questions to be answered before the plot was useful. For example, were the indicated aircraft friendly or hostile? Were there duplications caused by reports from two or more RDF stations or Observer Corps posts? Park therefore introduced a second table on which could be displayed a clean – ‘filtered’ – plot once queries had been settled. Only this filtered plot should be passed to the main table. Dowding rejected the idea of a second table when Park suggested it, so he secretly set it up in the basement at Bentley Priory and had power lines installed or reconnected to suit. For some time all that Dowding noticed was that ‘his general situation map seemed to be much more readable and his Operations Room far more quiet and well-regulated.’ When Park judged the time right, he unveiled his basement secret and Dowding was convinced.
After the outbreak of war, Park was more anxious than ever to improve and standardize interception procedures throughout the command – now extended by the formation of 13 Group (under Richard Saul) to cover the eastern coasts of northern England and Scotland. He proposed to try out ‘certain new items of equipment’ that had been designed at Bawdsey or at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in the sector operations room at Biggin Hill, long regarded as an experimental station for interception methods. In November 1939 he invited the group commanders to suggest improvements. Gossage and Saul responded promptly; Leigh-Mallory – following a prod from Park – sent a brief, formal reply.
The Air Ministry had advised Park in December that it was considering using women from the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, instead of men, in operations rooms. They performed the duties of plotters and tellers admirably and would be properly protected in underground rooms. In forward-surface-rooms, however, they would be required to remain on duty and work with extreme accuracy during action; it would not be practicable for them to take cover and the Air Ministry was reluctant to employ them in such exposed places. Watches in underground rooms should be composed entirely of women, otherwise they would think they were being supervised as potentially unreliable. Park replied on 10 January 1940. He agreed that WAAFs made satisfactory plotters and tellers and had no objection to women in forward areas. They were no less protected there than on other stations nor did he believe that women in mixed watches would feel ‘supervised’. Although he did not know how women would react to air attack, he believed the presence of men would give them confidence. But he was worried in case women were permitted to resign or be transferred out of operations rooms whenever they chose: the continuity of routine would be broken and security jeopardized. He also wanted three women to replace two men because ‘women are less able to stand up to the physical strain than are airmen.’4
Radar was vital to the effective functioning of operations rooms and Park kept in constant touch with the latest improvements. In October 1938 he reported to the Air Ministry that Mr Rowe, superintendent at Bawdsey, had told Dowding that considerable progress had been made since August by RDF stations in counting aircraft approaching from seaward. Until August, they could distinguish between one, two or three and over three up to fifty miles away; between fifty and eighty miles, they could only distinguish between one and more than one. They were now capable of much better, but progress was handicapped by the lack of large numbers of aircraft to use in trials. Since Dowding placed great emphasis on such trials, Park hoped the Air Ministry would arrange for sufficient aircraft to be provided.
An informal arrangement was made between Rowe and Hart for a small group of scientists to move to Bentley Priory in the event of war. A team moved there for the summer exercises of 1939 to observe the operation of Park’s filter room and proved so helpful that Dowding asked for a section to be permanently based in his headquarters. At the same time, a second group was sent by Rowe to observe group controllers dealing with the information provided by the radar chain. They concentrated on control procedures, equipment and techniques for controlling aircraft during an actual interception attempt. This team was released from Bawdsey under pressure from Park and became the Operational System Research Section.
The two sections were established at Bentley Priory by September 1939 and a scientist from Bawdsey called Larnder was appointed to lead the combined team. The unusual step of appointing civilians to an operational headquarters was taken because radar was a new device and the analysis of results was best conducted by scientists (who happened to be civilians). Rowe and Larnder found Park helpful and sympathetic in dealing with the Air Ministry and Bomber Command. They were deeply concerned in the summer of 1939 with the problem of counting aircraft and were grateful to Park for his efforts to obtain the necessary cooperation, even though these were not always successful.
In December, Park told Dowding that group and sector controllers regarded RDF as ‘black magic’. They accepted its reports as totally accurate and this accounted for some failures to intercept. Their over-reliance on it was ‘our fault’ because no information had been issued about its limitations. He proposed to circulate a note compiled from material supplied by Hart out of his long experience with the RDF chain. Dowding agreed and Park’s note appeared on 13 December. The chain of coastal RDF stations between the Isle of Wight and Aberdeen had been hastily erected, he wrote, with ‘scratch equipment’, now being replaced as quickly as possible. There were still gaps in the coastal coverage and stations could not report aircraft flying below 1,000 feet. Group and sector controllers were to bear in mind these limitations in the system: range and position were accurate to within about one mile; height was accurate to within plus or minus 1,000 feet in the Thames estuary and plus or minus 2,000 feet elsewhere; up to three aircraft could be accurately counted, but more than three could mean as many as nine and more than nine any number over nine; the time lag was about ninety seconds from the sighting by the RDF operator to the plot appearing on group and sector tables. A research section had been set up at command headquarters to devise improvements and Park went out of his way to commend Hart’s contribution, although as late as 8 March 1940 Dowding wrote that ‘RDF is very capricious and unreliable, but it is better than nothing, as being the best evidence we have of what is going on over the sea.’5
Throughout Park’s time at Bentley Priory, questions about sector organization and the number of squadrons to be allotted to each sector were regularly under discussion. Leigh-Mallory sent him a memorandum in October 1938 on the air defence of England north of London. It was based on the assumption, as Park told Dowding, that Britain would continue to be defended by two-gun biplanes rather than eight-gun monoplanes. It emphasized local defence at the expense of area defence and showed no appreciation of the advantages gained by the extension of the searchlight area and improved wireless communications. To implement his plan, Leigh-Mallory wanted twenty-nine of the country’s forty-one fighter squadrons, leaving only twelve for London – the most vital area – not to mention Portsmouth or Bristol. Park had spoken to him, but without effect, and suggested that Dowding do so. Dowding agreed. Leigh-Mallory’s memorandum, he told Park, ‘shows a misconception of the basic ideas of fighter defence.’ Unfortunately, Dowding did not seek his replacement.
Park wrote to Gossage and Leigh-Mallory in November 1938 to say that Dowding inclined to transfer Debden sector to 12 Group in order to relieve congestion in Gossage’s operations room. When 13 Group was formed in 1939, it would assume responsibility for northern Britain, leaving Leigh-Mallory ‘a light task’ unless he was given Debden. But Leigh-Mallory replied that he did not want Debden ‘because it means becoming actively involved in the defence of London, which it is felt should be the concern of one commander only.’ Park told Dowding that Leigh-Mallory’s real reason for refusing Debden was that he feared it would weaken his claim to keep Church Fenton sector (covering most of Yorkshire and Lancashire north of the Humber). He had admitted to Park that if Church Fenton went to 13 Group, as intended, he would then like to have Debden. As for Gossage, Park continued, it would be ‘unnatural’ to expect him to give up part of his command, but members of his staff had admitted the difficulty of controlling six sectors and fifteen squadrons. Yet ‘they lightheartedly talk of controlling ten sectors with twenty-eight squadrons.’ As it happened, Debden would form part of 12 Group and Church Fenton part of 13 Group until August 1940. Debden was then transferred to 11 Group and Church Fenton to 12 Group.
4: Park’s round-Britain flight, April 1919
Dowding asked Park in November 1939 if Duxford should not come into 11 Group, but Park thought the groups would be better balanced if Duxford stayed in 12 Group and Dowding accepted his opinion. Unwittingly, Park had made the most fateful decision of his career. If Duxford had gone to 11 Group, Douglas Bader would have come under Park’s direct command in 1940. Bader would then have had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to discuss fighter tactics with Leigh-Mallory and it is probable that there would have been no ‘big wings’ controversy.
Park had ample experience of Leigh-Mallory’s independent methods long before the Battle of Britain. In September 1939, for example, Dowding asked his group commanders not to issue special group orders in addition to command battle orders. Drafted by Park, these covered the movement of units from one station to another. It had to be remembered, wrote Dowding, that squadrons might be freely moved up and down the line in accordance with changing situations and it was important that they should not find themselves in a group where orders which they did not understand were in force. He instanced special action orders issued by Leigh-Mallory on 5 September and ordered him to cancel them.
Leigh-Mallory, however, was unabashed and wrote to his sectors on the 26th about the disposition of their squadrons. Park drew Dowding’s attention to this letter. If Leigh-Mallory had his way, Park wrote, Digby and Wittering would be overcrowded, refuelling and rearming would be slowed and adjoining sectors underworked and weakened. Dowding agreed and wrote a long, carefully argued letter to Leigh-Mallory. ‘I have delegated tactical control almost completely to Groups and Sectors,’ he said, ‘but I have not delegated strategical control, and the threat to the line must be regarded as a whole and not parochially.’ Leigh-Mallory was to remember that units at Duxford, for example, might be urgently needed for the defence of London. Moreover, the organization could not handle more than three squadrons at one aerodrome or four under one sector controller, but Leigh-Mallory proposed, in certain circumstances, to have five squadrons at Digby and no fewer than seven at Wittering. ‘I would only ask you,’ ended Dowding, ‘to remember that the Fighter Command has to operate as a whole.’ Suitable assurances were offered and accepted and the incident closed. Keeping Leigh-Mallory in line with the rest of the command proved an endless task and one which defeated Dowding and Park.6
Problems of aerodrome and coastal defence caused Park continuous concern. Quite apart from the difficulties of obtaining and installing sufficient anti-aircraft batteries to protect vital targets, he faced even greater difficulties in attempting to coordinate the several elements in the defence (aircraft, guns, searchlights, ships in harbour, radar and the Observer Corps) to ensure that enemy aircraft would be challenged promptly and friendly aircraft would not.
Park was warned on 6 October 1939 via agents in Berlin that a major German offensive against British shipping was timed to begin in mid-October. Air attacks would be launched in great strength, now that a convoy system – providing large, slow-moving targets – had been introduced. Together, Dowding and Park drafted a signal to put their sectors on guard against such attacks and Park required one squadron from each sector in eastern England to be at readiness throughout daylight hours from 12 October. During the next few days, he sent numerous signals: on liaison with Coastal Command aircraft; the movement forward of fighters to action stations; the identification of friendly aircraft; the code-names for convoys, and the signals that vessels would display. Even though no offensive against British shipping took place in October 1939, Park’s work was not wasted. He, and the defence system, were given a gruelling exercise to help prepare them for the tests ahead.
Apart from his general concern with the defences of the south and east coasts, Park was particularly concerned with defence of the Thames estuary. He was involved in such matters as the location of guns, balloons and searchlights and negotiations with other commands and naval authorities about their dispositions, effectiveness and the problems of aircraft working with them (as opposed to confusing them or being in danger from them). There was nothing ‘phoney’ about the period September 1939 to April 1940 as far as Park was concerned. In that time, he gained valuable experience in operating under war conditions systems and ideas conceived in peacetime. As well as the expertise he took to the conduct of the Battle of Britain, Park gained experience of operations over water in cooperation with the Royal Navy and land-based anti-aircraft guns that he would later put to good use in Egypt and Malta. It was also during the ‘phoney war’ that he was introduced to the dangers of employing the fighter defence force in France.7
Park wrote to the Air Ministry in December 1939 about the employment of fighter squadrons in the event of an invasion of the Low Countries. The British Air Forces in France had proposed a programme of patrols for two of Gossage’s squadrons which could only be carried out if they operated from French aerodromes and if a servicing wing was established there for them. Dowding, said Park, refused to accept this reduction in his forces. The squadrons might operate over France, but must return to England each evening. It soon became clear, however, that bad weather – apart from rearming and refuelling – made a maintenance base in France necessary. Park recognized the thin end of a wedge: should Germany launch an offensive in the west, Britain’s fighter defence force would be drained away to France. As a result of his efforts to coordinate British and French fighter cover over Channel convoys, he was already aware that France’s air defence system was rudimentary and her fighter force inadequate.
Fighter Command would be required to fill the breach, although its resources were insufficient even for home defence. Ever since May 1939, Park had been forwarding to the Air Ministry monthly statements of the ‘mobilizable’ squadrons in the command: the effective number available, their state of re-equipment with the latest aircraft types, their progress in flying training and the shortage of spares and tools for maintenance work. Between the outbreak of war and 1 February 1940, he reported, eighteen new squadrons had begun forming, but only two (both Gladiator biplane squadrons) were fully equipped. The other sixteen were all deficient in armament, wireless or electrical equipment.
Dowding followed up this report in a letter to the Air Ministry on 10 February. Not only were these new squadrons unready for service, he wrote, but additional duties had been incurred since September 1939. Six squadrons had been sent to France, four more were earmarked for France, four set aside for trade protection under Coastal Command and two each provided for service at Wick in northern Scotland, the Aberdeen coast and a new sector at Middle Wallop in Hampshire. For the protection of the country’s vitals, Dowding concluded, the situation was roughly as it had been on the outbreak of war, despite the creation of eighteen new squadrons.8
Throughout his service at Bentley Priory, Park’s relations with Ludlow-Hewitt of Bomber Command were uneasy. In their differences over the conduct of peacetime exercises, Park was usually defeated or thwarted, but after the outbreak of war he prevailed in an important dispute concerning the bomber liaison section at Fighter Command Headquarters. In October 1939 Park asked Ludlow-Hewitt to upgrade and enlarge that section. Squadron Leader R.W. Stannard, the senior liaison officer, supported Park. Ludlow-Hewitt, however, received the request with his usual coldness. When Park got Hazleton Nicholl (Air Officer in charge of Administration at Fighter Command) to repeat the request, Ludlow-Hewitt recommended the employment of four junior reservists under a squadron leader.
Park tried again on 16 December in a letter to the Air Ministry. Before the war, he wrote, the activity of British bombers over the sea had been restricted, both in number and distance, but much longer journeys were now commonplace and involved irregular reappearances. The liaison section must therefore monitor the movements of all service and civilian aircraft leaving or returning to Britain. The work called for continuous concentration by experienced men because the penalties for mistaken identification were obvious. He questioned Ludlow-Hewitt’s wish to replace the section’s present flight lieutenants by junior officers; their duties compared more than favourably with those of the coastal and naval liaison sections, where no suggestion of a reduction in rank had arisen.
This letter fell on fertile ground. An Air Ministry official recorded on 15 January 1940 that it put the matter in ‘the fairest way’: Fighter Command was responsible for air defences and was thus in a far better position than Bomber Command to judge the section’s needs. The section was enlarged and made responsible for coordinating and controlling the movements of both Coastal and Bomber Commands. Shortly before Ludlow-Hewitt was relieved of his command, on 3 April 1940, the whole establishment was transferred to Fighter Command.9
Park was admitted to hospital on 8 March 1940 and an appendectomy was performed the next day. He was allowed up after a week and sent on three weeks’ sick leave, much against his will, but Dowding threatened (perhaps not in jest) to have him arrested if he appeared at Bentley Priory before 12 April. Park endured his leave as best he could and on 13 April received one of the most pleasant shocks of his life: he learned that he was to succeed William Welsh as commander of 11 Group on the 20th. Welsh had succeeded Gossage in that post as recently as 12 February.
In April 1940 it was not obvious that 11 Group, rather than 12 Group, would shortly bear the brunt of national defence. France, Belgium and Holland had not then been invaded, much less conquered, and until those disasters occurred, air attacks on England would have to be made from German bases and Leigh-Mallory’s territory (the Midlands and East Anglia) would be their natural target. Nevertheless, 11 Group – charged with the defence of – London and the south-east – had always been considered the senior group and treated accordingly in the provision of the latest equipment or aircraft and the ablest personnel. In the appointment of Park as new commander of 11 Group, therefore, Leigh-Mallory was undoubtedly passed over in favour of a junior officer and his feelings were presumably injured. So, too, were those of Gossage (removed from 11 Group after only five months of wartime service) and Welsh (who held that group for barely two months). In wartime, countless changes in command are made, usually quickly and usually without regard for personal feelings. Park would learn this bitter lesson himself in November 1940. Meanwhile, Dowding and his masters at the Air Ministry jointly decided that Park was a man fit to be entrusted with command of the senior fighter group. Following the German conquest of Western Europe, command of that group became the most vital position in Britain’s front-line defence.10