1

THE MAKING OF A SOLDIER

1882–1914

Hugh Caswall Tremenheere Dowding was born at Moffat, Dumfriesshire, Scotland, in 1882. The eldest of four children, son of a schoolmaster transplanted from Wiltshire, England, he descended from long lines of teachers and clergymen, variegated but apparently not greatly enriched by the occasional banker, and distinguished by an admiral (a paternal uncle) as well as a major general (his maternal grandfather). Young Hugh’s formative environment was the gilded late afternoon of Victorian Britain. Five years old at the time of the Queen-Empress’s Golden Jubilee, he experienced the hoopla surrounding Her Majesty’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 as a teenaged schoolboy. The intervening decade, Hugh’s adolescent years, marked in many ways “the high tide and the turn” of British imperial power. The confident, indeed reflexive, midcentury identification of British preeminence with the natural order of things was already, at least in the eyes of the discerning, beginning to fray around the edges.1

As a youth, Hugh absorbed strict principles of conduct and duty: “truth, charity, diligence, and reverence” were exemplified as well as preached by his parents and grandparents, whose lives and outlook embodied the dominant social and cultural attitudes of the early and mid-Victorian generations. Theirs was a universe of hierarchies: the Christian religion was, inherently, the one true religion; European civilization was as self-evidently the greatest of world civilizations as the British Empire was the greatest of the European empires. At home, the classes and the masses alike were bound to elaborately intertwined economic, political, and social hierarchies culminating in the monarch; authority was tempered by responsibility, and deference upward was legitimated by obligation downward. For the midcentury generations, this Victorian worldview never lost its massive intellectual and emotional integrity. As Hugh’s diplomatic contemporary Robert Vansittart put it, the education of their generation “lay entirely within the closing period of Victorian optimism.” For them, the strain of reconciling inherited ideals with changing realities—economic, scientific and technological, military and political, social, intellectual and cultural—was to grow decade by decade throughout their lives.2

Imitating the custom of the British aristocracy, at thirteen Hugh left home and his father’s preparatory school for one of Britain’s historic and elite public schools—in his case, St. Mary College of Winchester. Like many such youths, Hugh was miserable at the time, but like many public-school graduates, later looked back on the experience with some satisfaction. Averse to the classical studies that dominated both public school and university curricula, he enrolled in Winchester’s “army class.” Escaping the conjugation of Greek verbs, Hugh thereby also ruled out following his father’s footsteps to Oxford and, almost inadvertently, set himself on a path to a military career. Such “modern” military majors at schools like Winchester reflected the beginnings of a grudging, slow, and painful adaptation by Britain’s ruling elite to the changing technological and organizational environment of public service, including the accelerating professionalization of military officership.³

In 1899, Hugh moved on from Winchester to the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich. Known affectionately as “The Shop,” RMA Woolwich provided general and technical education to officer cadets seeking commissions in the artillery, engineer, and signals branches of the British army, or service in the army of Britain’s Indian Empire. Sometimes regarded as more intellectually demanding but less socially prestigious than the better-known Royal Military College at Sandhurst, whose graduates were mostly commissioned in the infantry and the cavalry, Woolwich cadets in the middle decades of the nineteenth century had included such celebrities as Queen Victoria’s son Prince Arthur (later Field Marshal the Duke of Connaught) and the Prince Imperial (son of Napoleon III, Emperor of the French), as well as such future British army luminaries as Charles Gordon (later a major-general, world-renowned as “Chinese” Gordon) and Herbert (later Field Marshal Lord) Kitchener.4

As Dowding and his Woolwich classmates were beginning their studies, the long-smoldering conflict between the British and the Boer Republics of South Africa exploded into full-scale war. The South African campaigns of 1899–1902—unexpectedly protracted, costly, and largely inglorious for the British—provoked upheaval in Britain’s military policy and ferment within the British army itself. A minor instance of upheaval was the curtailment of the RMA course from two years to one, to help meet the sudden increase in demand for trained officers. Consequently, in 1900 Dowding was commissioned a subaltern (second lieutenant) of garrison artillery in the Royal Regiment of Artillery (the “Gunners”) and assigned to a battery at the fortress of Gibraltar. Cadet Dowding had aspired to join the Royal Engineers (the “Sappers”) but, distracted from study by his first taste of adult independence, had slipped too far down in academic standing to qualify. This early disappointment seems to have impressed upon Dowding the importance of hard work in his new profession.⁵

Sharing an experience common among newly commissioned military officers through the ages, at Gibraltar Dowding initially found himself inadequately prepared for his actual duties. As with most young officers, experience soon provided useful knowledge and skills the service had failed to impart through formal, professional education and training. Dowding developed a habit of volunteering to serve as range officer, carrying out the “arrangements” for firing practice and field exercises, as well as observing hits and estimating the distances of misses. These were unusually responsible duties for a subaltern; senior officers considered it desirable for their young lieutenants to gain experience by acting as assistant range officers under a captain. It was also an unpopular duty among Dowding’s fellow subalterns, involving not only extra work, but also the high probability that blame for any mishaps would fall on the junior officer involved. Young Dowding, however, apparently relished the extra work and responsibility.6

For all his budding professionalism, Dowding did not enjoy his first station of assignment. With some six thousand men crammed onto “the Rock,” garrison life seemed to him unduly to resemble prison life. The town of Gibraltar he found a disagreeable combination of suburban banality and subtropical squalor, too English to be pleasantly exotic, and too alien for comfort. Dowding quickly seized upon the means of physical and mental escape adopted by generations of British officers and gentlemen: the horse. During the next few years, he purchased, rented, or borrowed a succession of mounts, devoting considerable time and money to fox hunting, polo, and even racing as an amateur jockey. Dowding’s liking for equestrian pursuits, which developed over the years into a broader taste for outdoor sports, may have led at least one of his regimental superiors to misjudge him as a stereotypical, gentleman-amateur type of officer.⁷

A year after Dowding’s arrival at Gibraltar, his battery relocated, first to Ceylon for less than a year, then to Hong Kong. Dowding welcomed the wider social opportunities, and relished still more the increased scope for his rapidly diversifying sporting activities that these two important colonies offered a young officer. There was time for a two-month, sightseeing vacation in Japan with a friend from the Royal Engineers. Although he enjoyed such fringe benefits of peacetime soldiering in the colonies, and despite promotion from subaltern to (first) lieutenant, Royal Artillery, Dowding began to feel an absence of interesting professional challenges. He decided to seek a transfer from the garrison artillery to the mountain artillery, in hopes of more active service. Overcoming the objections of his colonel, ominously known as “Bloody Bill,” in 1904 Dowding secured transfer to a mountain artillery battery stationed at Rawalpindi in the Punjab (since 1947 a province of Pakistan).⁸

Dowding’s transfer to the mountain artillery marked the beginning of some six years of service close to the fabled northwest frontier of Britain’s Indian Empire. He almost had his thirst for active operations satisfied at once, as his new battery had been alerted for an expedition to Tibet, but to his disappointment he was—understandably—displaced in favor of an officer with mountain-artillery experience. Continuing his practice of volunteering to serve as a range officer, this time in the demanding environment of the Himalayan foothills, Dowding soon secured experience of his own. At the head of range parties made up of “native” gunners and drivers, he found himself matching wits with local tribesmen of fearsome reputation, if not active hostility. Mastering the gunner’s art under harsh conditions, Dowding displayed a degree of professional prowess that would have won him considerable distinction in wartime. On one occasion, he improvised a tactical crossing of the Ganges River at flood stage; on another, he moved troops and equipment safely along a mountain path in perilous, landslide conditions.9

The highlight of this stage of Dowding’s career was a field exercise during which, with a two-gun section, he surprised and theoretically annihilated a detachment from the legendary Gurkha Rifle Regiment commanded by another young subaltern with a promising future, Cyril Newall. The subsequent rivalry between the two men in the Royal Air Force, as well as their respective roles in the Battle of Britain, renders the story of their first meeting an irresistible anecdote, but the memory of that day’s maneuvers against the Gurkhas remained with Dowding for a different reason. Dowding’s artillery section had been detailed to support an infantry unit newly arrived in theater, a battalion from another of the British army’s elite rifle regiments. The British riflemen were unfamiliar with the mountainous terrain, and it showed in their performance against the Gurkhas. Dowding never forgot the way professional soldiers from a highly regarded unit quickly fell apart under pressure in an operational environment for which their training and experience had not prepared them.

Eager for professional advancement, Dowding naturally sought to take the next logical step in career progression for a British army officer of his generation: attendance at the Staff College, Camberley. Unfortunately, his commanding officer, a gunner of the old school who apparently disapproved either of Dowding, or of the staff college, or perhaps both, flatly refused to provide the required commander’s recommendation. Not to be denied, Dowding arranged a transfer to a native battery commanded by an acquaintance who was willing to oblige. Native batteries were led by a mixture of British and Indian officers; the enlisted ranks of No. 32 Battery, which Dowding joined at Dehra Dun in the far north of India, were filled by Sikhs and Punjabi Muslims—in segregated sections. Dowding in later life recalled his years with No. 32 Battery as some of his happiest, and the post at Dehra Dun as “the best station at which he ever served.”10

Dowding’s satisfactions at Dehra Dun were personal as well as professional. He sought out sporting activities of all kinds, especially first-rate polo. He continued to indulge his taste for sightseeing, traveling with a fellow officer through the historic Malakand Pass to Kashmir, where they explored the great limestone caves known as the Kashmiri Smuts. Tolerant of solitude, impatient with the tedium of social life in garrison (what a much later era would term “mandatory fun”), Dowding was by no means entirely unsociable. Sometimes, indeed, his social life was memorable. On one occasion he wrote home describing an encounter with a lady who acted as a medium for communication with the spirit world. Although the description was facetious, almost derisory, the letter constitutes early evidence of Dowding being influenced by the fascination with spiritualism that was to become a peculiar characteristic of his generation of Britons.¹¹

In 1910, Dowding obtained extended leave to return to Britain and “cram” for the staff college’s competitive entrance examination. Study certainly seemed to be called for, since at the time only seven places at Camberley were allotted to artillerymen. In the event, Lieutenant Dowding scored highly enough among applicants from the Gunners to become one of the youngest and most junior officers accepted for the 1912–13 class. Successfully arguing that the government should spare itself the expense of another round trip to India, Dowding secured an extension of his leave until his class began, in January 1912.¹² Dowding used some of this extraordinary, if not unique, seventeen and a half months of continuous leave to reconnect with his family. His youngest sibling, Kenneth, at this time introduced his older brother to the newly popular sport of skiing, which became an important part of both their lives.¹³

It was at Camberley that Dowding acquired the service nickname “Stuffy,” which may have attached to him less for a reserved manner, or for his thoroughly conventional appearance, than for the unusual earnestness of his approach to professional military education. Perhaps because of his background as the son of an Oxford-educated schoolmaster, Dowding chafed at the intellectual mediocrity of the staff college. Certainly there was an element of sheer anti-intellectualism in the Camberley atmosphere; Dowding’s nickname may well have been an echo among his peers of Field Marshal Lord Wolseley’s notorious concern lest “bookworms” infest the officer corps. Late in life, Dowding claimed to have been an independent thinker from an early age—less inclined to defer to institutional conventional wisdom than his peers, less willing to accept argument from authority as a substitute for logic. For example, despite his fondness for mounted sports, he did not share the almost religious faith in the military primacy of the cavalry arm that pervaded Camberley.14

Far more important than the nostalgic attachment to horse soldiering, or the simple prejudice of the unread and unthinking, however, was the influence of those army leaders who, in the decade prior to 1914, devoted considerable brainpower to inciting a conservative reaction (what one historian has characterized as a “counter-reformation”) against the technological transformation of the army. This movement was symptomatic of wider, cultural strains afflicting early twentieth-century Edwardian Britain. The happy certainties of the nineteenth-century Victorian era were steadily eroding. British elites, finding their economic wealth, their political power, their social influence, and their cultural values under threat, reacted defensively. In the case of the British military elite, this involved championing a human-centered, as opposed to a technological, understanding of the nature of war. By vigorously reasserting the primacy of traditional, martial virtues, military leaders might defy the implications of new technologies and avert fundamental changes in the profession of arms.¹⁵

In the early years of the twentieth century, therefore, military leaders in Britain, as elsewhere, adamantly insisted on the continuing validity of historic principles of war. They argued that the central problem of leadership and command in modern war was how to apply historically validated principles under novel conditions created by new technologies. The solution that military elites increasingly favored was moral leadership. Past wars, they asserted, had been won by moral force rather than physical force. Ascendancy over the enemy in battle was primarily the product of superior moral force (morale). In turn, superior morale, or moral ascendancy, was a product of superior leadership. Leadership being, inherently, the special province of the traditional elites, this principle thus had the highly desirable effect of renewing their claims to social usefulness, re-legitimating their positions of prestige and power. Hence the endlessly repeated avowal that, “moral force in modern war predominates over physical force as greatly as formerly.”16

The more perceptive military professionals of the day, including Dowding’s near-contemporary, Captain J. F. C. Fuller, were beginning to conceptualize the core problem of modern warfare as one of integrating “the human element” of war with the technological element. Yet even technologically oriented, younger officers like Fuller sometimes succumbed to the dangerous illusion that future wars would be won or lost on the psychological battlefield. Dowding’s early aspiration to join the engineers suggests that he was interested in grappling with the technological challenges of modern warfare. Beyond that, however, his overall outlook suggests an empirically oriented mind, determined to make independent professional judgments based on the facts, as best he could determine them. Dowding’s instinct was to resist the easy acceptance of prevailing attitudes, and challenge the conventional wisdom. This cast of mind would soon be manifested in a fateful decision to establish for himself the facts concerning one of the new technologies emerging during these years: aviation technology.¹⁷

Many senior military officers, including most influentially the chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) General Sir William Nicholson, tended to dismiss the military significance of the first powered flights by heavier-than-air craft. Although the work of the Wright brothers and, after 1903, that of their rivals, evoked interest among political leaders such as the secretary of state for war, R. B. Haldane, not until late 1908 did the British government establish a subcommittee of the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) on aerial navigation, to study the national-security implications. It was only in the spring of 1912, more than eight years after the first flight at Kitty Hawk, that a royal warrant established a flying corps, consisting of a military wing, a naval wing, and the Central Flying School (CFS). This prematurely “joint” organization was short-lived; the Admiralty quickly converted the naval wing into the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) under its own control and with its own flying school, leaving the military wing of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) and the CFS to the Army Council.18

Dowding, newly promoted to captain in the Royal Artillery, after thirteen years of service, was more alert to the professional implications of these developments than most junior military officers, and far more open-minded than most senior officers. For example, Dowding’s course instructor for a staff-college war game was either unaware of, or unimpressed by, the role that scouting aircraft recently had begun to play in the annual army maneuvers. Ridiculing Dowding for dispatching the imaginary aircraft included in his imaginary command to locate the equally imaginary enemy, he insisted that it was impracticable to use flying machines for operational reconnaissance. This experience convinced Dowding that properly trained staff officers should be equipped with some genuine knowledge of the military capabilities and limitations of aircraft. The RFC having just instituted a course to train military pilots open to officers under age forty with a civil pilot’s certificate from the Royal Aero Club, he decided to qualify.¹⁹

Dowding arranged for private flying lessons with the firm of Vickers, which scheduled instruction in the early mornings, well before the staff college’s gentlemanly starting-hour of 10:00 a.m. Exhibiting the same persuasiveness that had secured him a year and a half of leave, he somehow induced Vickers to defer payment of its fees until he was reimbursed by the army—something that would happen only if he first obtained his “ticket” from the Royal Aero Club, and then successfully completed the CFS course. Dowding’s experience at Vickers’ Brooklands Flying School typified the charming informality of the early days of aviation: his teachers included an aircraft mechanic who doubled as an instructor pilot, and he took the Royal Aero Club pilot’s test after a total of less than two hours in the air—including passenger time. Dowding received pilot’s certificate No. 711 on the same day in December 1913 that he officially “passed staff college.”²⁰

During the three-month CFS course at Upavon in his father’s native county of Wiltshire, Dowding first encountered officers who would become the pioneering stock of the future Royal Air Force, and who were to have as great an impact on his life and career as on the development of British air power. Preeminent among these was a temporary lieutenant colonel known as “Boom” for the sound of his voice, which matched his outsized personality. Hugh Montague Trenchard was already leaving his mark on the infant Royal Flying Corps as second-in-command of the CFS. Dowding would later claim that Boom made little impression on him during his brief time at the CFS, but in the grim war years of 1914–18, Dowding would clash more than once with the opinionated and autocratic Trenchard. As one student of both men’s careers put it, the relationship between Trenchard and Dowding proved to be a case of an irresistible force meeting an immovable object.21

In contrast to Dowding’s unruffled early life, Trenchard had to overcome considerable emotional trauma and numerous setbacks just to begin his army career. When he was thirteen, his beloved younger sister died; when he was sixteen, his father’s bankruptcy cost the Trenchard family its money, its home, and its social position. Not necessarily less intelligent than Dowding, the young Trenchard floundered at prep school; he failed to win admission to the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth; he twice failed the Woolwich entrance exam, and needed three tries to secure a regular infantry commission via militia service. Like Dowding, Trenchard learned regimental soldiering as a junior officer in India. Posted to South Africa after the outbreak of the Boer War, he was gravely wounded, but with amazing physical and psychological resiliency, recovered sufficiently to return to the fight. A decade later, Trenchard decided to escape routine, peacetime military duties by learning to fly. He never attended staff college.²²

The struggles of Trenchard’s youth, as well as the suffering he endured from his combat wounds and agonizing rehabilitation, seem to have strengthened his character, rather than breaking his spirit or souring his outlook on life. Entering middle age and approaching broader responsibilities, Trenchard was marked by boundless self-confidence and truly extraordinary perseverance. Nine years older than Dowding, Trenchard had won his RFC wings a year earlier, barely squeaking under the RFC age limit, and despite handling the stick of an aircraft with the same lack of finesse that characterized most of his earthbound activities. As few senior officers were prepared to risk not only their necks but also their careers in aviation, Trenchard was the most experienced army officer at the CFS. Almost from the moment he began the course, the school commandant delegated numerous administrative responsibilities to him. His subsequent assignment as adjutant and second-in-command of the CFS officially recognized a role he had already assumed.23

For his part, Dowding up to 1914 had enjoyed something of a charmed life. Dutiful he was, but without sacrificing the travel, athletic recreation, and select social contacts he valued. Dowding was also precociously skillful at levering out of the army bureaucracy the assignments he wanted. While he had displayed a commendable work ethic in mastering the artilleryman’s trade and regimental soldiering, an unusual seriousness in preparing himself for staff duties, and an instinctive grasp of the military potential of aviation, Dowding had missed the experience of war in South Africa, in many ways a pivotal episode in the professional development of Dowding’s generation of British army leaders. In a service buffeted by the turbulence of modernization and professionalization, there was a noticeable distinction between those rising leaders who had proved themselves on the battlefields of South Africa, and their contemporaries who had not.²⁴

After he qualified for his wings in the spring of 1914, Dowding surprisingly asked that his name be placed on the RFC reserve list. The thirty-two-year-old army captain, veteran of rugged outposts in the Empire, and now pioneer military aviator, decided to revert to the Royal Artillery because his father thought flying was too dangerous. Unlike so many early military aviators motivated by thrill seeking or the romance of flight, Dowding had trained as a pilot not in search of adventure, but as a measure of professional self-development. Out of devotion to his family, Dowding deferred to his father’s wishes, and began catching up on a dozen years of technical developments in coastal defense. Faced with the pleasantly daunting challenge of taking over a top-performing unit, a battery of six-inch guns on the Isle of Wight, Dowding reasserted his professional mettle as a gunner when his outfit scored a perfect twenty “hits” in competition.²⁵

During the summer of 1914, Dowding, as was his habit, combined hard work with recreational athletics, although choosing golf, cricket, and tennis over fox hunting and polo. He also bought a used car, taking up the (in those days not necessarily less strenuous) pursuit of “motoring.” Like many knowledgeable Europeans, however, Dowding expected trouble, writing his mother in late May: “I think we shall have an easy June, & then a mobilization in July.” At the end of June, the murder of the archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Hapsburg throne, set off a sequence of political reactions and military mobilizations during July; by the end of the month, all the Continental great powers were at war. At the beginning of August, Great Britain followed suit, dispatching to the aid of Belgium and France an expeditionary force including the bulk of the British regular army, less the army of the British Indian Empire.26

Basil Collier, Leader of the Few (London: Jarrolds, 1957), 27–33, 38–39; Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), 151–58, 224–32.

Lord Vansittart [Robert Vansittart], Bones of Contention (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1945), 43.

Collier, Leader of the Few, 41–50; Tim Travers, The Killing Ground: The British Army, the Western Front and the Emergence of Modern Warfare, 1900–1918 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1978), 4–6, 26–27; Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 15–16. See also, Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 179, 257–61.

Collier, Leader of the Few, 50; Encyclopædia Britannica, 1947, 23:736.

Collier, Leader of the Few, 50–52; Richard Holmes, ed., The Oxford Companion to Military History (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 137–40. For the impact of the Boer War on the British army, see, for example, Michael Howard, “Men against Fire: The Doctrine of the Offensive in 1914,” in Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 515–21; Jay Stone and Erwin A. Schmidl, The Boer War and Military Reforms (New York: University Press of America, 1988), 11–13, 17–25, 36, 38–49, 55–57, 79, 101.

Collier, Leader of the Few, 54–55, 65–66; Vincent Orange, Dowding of Fighter Command: Victor of the Battle of Britain (London: Grub Street, 2008), 13. Cf., “Extract from the Report of Lieutenant-Colonel A. H. Hewat, Royal Horse Artillery, Camp Commandant, Camp Palipahri,” in General Report of the Practice of the Royal Artillery, Bengal Command, 1900–1901 (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1901), 3, 39, 41.

Collier, Leader of the Few, 52–54, 58, 60–61, 64–65, 68. On the stereotype of the British army officer as a sporting, gentleman-amateur, see Simon Robbins, British Generalship on the Western Front, 1914–18 (New York: Frank Cass, 2005), 5–7.

Henry Probert, High Commanders of the Royal Air Force (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1954), 108.

Collier, Leader of the Few, 52–66, 70–75; Robert Wright, The Man Who Won the Battle of Britain (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 23; Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime, 180.

Collier, Leader of the Few, 73–74.

Ibid, 65–69.

Cf., John James, The Paladins: A Social History of the RAF Up to the Outbreak of World War II (London: MacDonald, 1990), 33.

Collier, Leader of the Few, 79–80, 84–85.

Ibid., 81–83; Travers, The Killing Ground, 39–40.

Travers, The Killing Ground, 39, 44–46, 49; Gerard J. De Groot, Douglas Haig (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 94–112.

Travers, The Killing Ground, 48–49, 55, 62, 88–89, 95, 127.

Ibid., 48–49, 55, 88–89, 95, 62, 127; Collier, Leader of the Few, 81–83; J. E. G. Dixon, Dowding and Churchill (Barnsley, South Yorkshire, UK: Pen & Sword Military, 2008), 127.

Macolm Cooper, The Birth of Independent Air Power (London and Boston: George Allen & Unwin, 1986), 1–8; Alfred Gollin, The Impact of Air Power on the British People and their Government, 1909–14 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 9–22. Also, idem., “The Mystery of Lord Haldane and Early British Military Aviation,” in Albion 11, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 46–65. Cf. Maurice Dean, The Royal Air Force and Two World Wars (London: Cassell, 1979), 4–8, 14.

Collier, Leader of the Few, 82–83; Andrew Boyle, Trenchard (London: Collins, 1962), 95–110; Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality, 12–21.

Collier, Leader of the Few, 83–84; James, The Paladins, 40–41.

Collier, Leader of the Few, 83–84, 86–87, 111–15; Wright, The Man Who Won the Battle of Britain, 27–28; Boyle, Trenchard, 19, 30–58, 104. Also Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality, 27; John H. Morrow Jr., The Great War in the Air (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), 41.

Boyle, Trenchard, 19, 30–58, 90–102; Geoffrey Norris, The Royal Flying Corps: A History (London: Frederick Muller, Ltd., 1965), 141–42; Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality, 27. Cf. Collier, Leader of the Few, 86–87.

Boyle, Trenchard, 19–32; Norris, The Royal Flying Corps, 143–44; James, The Paladins, 20–26, 41.

Collier, Leader of the Few, 50–52; James, The Paladins, 24–25, 40–42; Shelford Bidwell and Dominick Graham, Fire-Power (London and Boston: George Allen & Unwin, 1982), 34; Travers, The Killing Ground, 48–49, 55, 88–89, 95, 62, 127; Harold R. Winton, To Change an Army: General Sir John Burnett-Stuart and British Armored Doctrine, 1927–1938 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1988), 9–13. Cf. Brian Bond, British Military Policy between the Two World Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 2, 36, 51.

Wright, The Man Who Won the Battle of Britain, 28; see also, Orange, Dowding, 17–18.

Collier, Leader of the Few, 89; Marc Ferro, The Great War 1914–1918 (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 39–49.