And although his detractors thought him stubborn and overly prickly, he would have argued that he simply knew his own mind. While others went along with the widely held belief that the bomber would always get through, for example – as the former Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, had put it – Dowding preferred to draw on his own experiences during the last war, when he had seen that a bomber force could be decimated unless supported by a sufficiently superior escort. Furthermore, he recognized that isolated incidents such as the destruction of Guernica in northern Spain should be viewed in context. ‘I have never accepted ideas because they were orthodox,’ he said, ‘and consequently I have frequently found myself in opposition to generally accepted views.’ Unfortunately, this did make him enemies within the corridors of power in Whitehall and amongst other men of power and influence within the RAF.
That said, while it was true that Dowding could have a waspish tongue and he certainly did not suffer fools, he was nonetheless courteous, modest and a good listener, and, when given the chance, had a quick wit. There were also some interesting quirks to this highly dedicated individual. He was, for instance, a fiendishly good skier and polo player, two extrovert sports that were seemingly at odds with his outwardly dour personality; he had even been President of the Ski Club of Great Britain in 1924–5. Perhaps the slightly gaunt, winsome expression he wore belied the personal tragedy in his life. Twenty years before, he had lost his beloved wife, Clarice. In that, if nothing else, he had something in common with Göring.
Hermann Göring had announced the birth of the Luftwaffe to the world in March 1935, and although rearmament in Britain had begun a year earlier, this, combined with German boasts that it had already achieved air parity with Britain, sent the British Government under Ramsay MacDonald into an outbreak of nervous anxiety.
The RAF had not been well served during this time by its Chief of the Air Staff, Air Marshal Sir Edward Ellington, and the Secretary of State for Air, Lord Londonderry. The former had been hopelessly over-promoted, was deeply conservative when dynamism and forward thinking were much in need, and was far too wedded to the Trenchard view that the bomber was pre-eminent. Londonderry, on the other hand, was a fabulously wealthy aristocrat with almost no political muscle whatsoever. They made a desperately ineffective pair.
Despite the widely held opinion that the best way to prevent a German attack was the threat of even bigger force of bombers dropping bombs over Germany, little effort had been made to create this mighty force. Too many committees, too much discussion and too much penny-pinching as Britain struggled to emerge from the Depression had seen to that. In fact, it was Neville Chamberlain, then Chancellor, who had pressed hardest for the build-up of home defence through fighter squadrons and who had argued that the money should be found through reductions in navy and army budgets. Incredibly, Ellington suggested this was an unnecessary over-reaction. Fortunately, Chamberlain, as the man controlling the purse-strings, had insisted on increasing the size of what was then called the Metropolitan Air Force. It was Chamberlain, more than any other individual, who had given the green light to expansion of the RAF.
Increased numbers was one thing but they would not add up to a hill of beans unless they could take on the best the enemy had to offer. The Air Ministry, in a brief moment of enlightenment, had in 1931 issued Specification F7/30, calling on aircraft designers to produce a new day and night fighter to replace the Bristol Bulldog biplane. The remit included a minimum speed of 195 mph in level flight at 15,000 feet, metal construction, armament comprising four .303 machine guns, and a service ceiling of at least 28,000 feet.
Nearly all the British aircraft manufacturers put forward designs, although it was widely held that Supermarine in Southampton would be the likely winners. Although they were primarily makers of seaplanes, it was their sleek, fast monoplane seaplanes that had won three consecutive Schneider Trophies – victories that ensured the trophy remained in Britain for evermore.
Yet the Type 224 produced by their chief designer, R. J. Mitchell, had been a huge disappointment: too slow, with a poor rate of climb, a fixed undercarriage and wings as thick as trees. Dowding, who had been involved in the F7/30 order from the outset, was also disappointed with Supermarine’s effort, but then none of the other designs put forward had amounted to much either. There was even talk of importing a Polish-built fighter instead, although eventually the contract was awarded to the Gloster Gladiator biplane, an aircraft that was serving in France in May 1940 but by then was quite obsolete.
However, R. J. Mitchell, having recovered from an operation on a first bout of cancer, had, by the summer of 1934, returned to work on the Type 224. What soon began to emerge were more than mere changes; rather, he was designing an entirely new aircraft altogether, which he renamed the Type 300 and reckoned would have a top speed of 265 mph. So different was it that the Air Ministry, with Dowding’s backing, decided it should be separate from the original F7/30 specification and instead given backing and funding as an experimental aircraft.
By the autumn of 1934, the Type 300 been given another boost. Supermarine had maintained a close relationship with engine makers Rolls-Royce – the Goshawk engine had powered the Schneider-winning seaplanes – but now, as Mitchell was designing his all-new airframe, a new, bigger, more powerful engine, in development for the past two years, was almost ready. The PV12 was a 27 litre power plant that was expected, with a bit of tinkering, to provide more than 1,000 h.p. Suddenly, Mitchell had an engine that could give his fighter design in excess of 300 mph. Supermarine had been given official backing from the outset, but the PV12 – soon renamed the Merlin – was an entirely private venture on the part of the enlightened men at Rolls-Royce. On 5 December 1934, at a conference held at the Air Ministry and headed by Dowding, it was formally agreed that the Merlin should be used in the Type 300.
At the beginning of 1935, the Air Ministry issued another specification, the F10/35, which called for a fighter capable of at least 310 mph and the firepower of no less than six but preferably eight machine guns. By this time, Mitchell had already decided on the ultra-thin, elliptical wings that would give his machine such a distinctive design and it seemed that his new aircraft, now married to the Merlin, would fulfil all the F10/35 requirements without the Air Ministry having to go through the cost and palaver of a formal tendering process. At the same time, at the Hawker company, the chief designer, Sidney Camm, was also working on a new design in response to yet another earlier specification, the F36/34. Suddenly it seemed likely that in both aircraft the RAF had found what it needed: modern, fast, single-engine monoplane fighter aircraft. By the summer, with official Air Ministry backing, the development of Hawker’s and Supermarine’s prototypes was accelerated.
By the time Göring was telling the world about the existence of his Luftwaffe, the British aircraft revolution was underway, but even so the path from prototype to full-scale production was a long one. It was entirely typical of the top-heavy bureaucratic Government of the time that its response to the existence of the Luftwaffe should be to set up a committee entitled ‘Sub-Committee on Air Parity’.
The difference with this latest committee, however, was that chairmanship was given not to the Air Secretary, Lord Londonderry, but to the Colonial Secretary, Philip Cunliffe-Lister, a tough, decisive Conservative who immediately injected the kind of clear-sighted drive that had been absent from Government policy for so long. Quickly recognizing that governmental support was needed for Supermarine and Hawker, he urged the Cabinet to authorize production the moment the prototypes proved their worth; there was no time to dally on this matter. The Cabinet agreed.
When Baldwin took over as Prime Minister in June 1935, Londonderry was booted out and Cunliffe-Lister made Air Secretary in his stead, gaining the title Viscount Swinton soon after. The Air Ministry was infused with a new urgency and vigour under his leadership. He was determined not to let the development of new fighter planes lag or become mired in lengthy decision-making. The Hawker Hu
rricane, also powered by the Merlin, made its first successful test flight on 6 November 1935. The Supermarine Spitfire, as it was now called much to Mitchell’s disgust, was delayed by a few months but took to the air on 5 March the following year. Reaching 335 mph, after a few minor tweaks it then reached 348 mph in level flight, close to the 350 mph Mitchell had hoped for. The Hurricane was slower, but still reached in excess of 310 mph, as had been required.
The decision to put the Hurricane and Spitfire into production was made by Swinton and Sir Wilfred Freeman, the new Air Member for Research and Development. Like Swinton, Freeman had no interest in Whitehall red tape. On 26 May, Humphrey Edwardes-Jones was the first RAF pilot to fly the Spitfire. Nearly crashing on his first landing, he remembered to lower the undercarriage only just in time, emerged unscathed and, as bidden, immediately rang Sir Wilfred Freeman.
‘All I want to know,’ Freeman asked him, ‘is whether you think the young pilot officers and others we are getting in the Air Force will be able to cope with such an advanced aircraft.’
Edwardes-Jones took a deep breath and then gave his verdict. ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘provided they are given adequate instruction in the use of flaps and retracting undercarriage.’
Within a week, Freeman had placed an order for 310 Spitfires. A short time before, 600 Hurricanes had been ordered. Swinton had wanted to double the Spitfire order, but although Supermarine was owned by the much larger armaments manufacturer, Vickers Armstrong, the initial order was planned to be produced entirely by the small Supermarine factory at Woolston in Southampton and there were concerns over whether they would be able to cope with such an order.
While Hawker, a much bigger enterprise, dutifully got stuck into Hurricane production, Supermarine struggled. The Spitfire was a more complicated design and required new skills and new tools. The Hurricane had, in essence, the same airframe as many of Hawker’s earlier biplanes, so the step up was not so drastic. By February 1938, not one production Spitfire had been completed, even though more than 80 per cent of its production had already been outsourced. A further order for 200 more merely added to Supermarine’s woes. The production of the Spitfire, a plane much vaunted and publicized, was an utter mess, and on 14 May 1938, the very day the first production aircraft finally took to the skies, Lord Swinton was forced to resign.
However, before his fall, Swinton had developed what had become known as ‘shadow factories’. These were factories set up to mirror the work of their parent plants in an effort to cope with the kind of mass production needed for rearmament. Swinton had been keen to bring Lord Nuffield into the shadow factory scheme as his Morris car company was probably the country’s biggest mass producer. However, the two had fallen out and Nuffield had refused to play ball. Swinton’s departure, however, paved the way for another approach to the notoriously prickly car magnate. A proposal was made in May 1938 that he build a huge new factory, in which he would mass-produce Spitfires – no less than an order of 1,000 to be going on with. It was the largest single order of any aircraft Britain had ever made. Nuffield agreed. A vast 135-acre site was chosen at Castle Bromwich on the edge of Birmingham and bought from the Dunlop Rubber Company; work began on developing the site almost immediately. It was agreed that sixty Spitfires a week would be produced once the factory was up and running.
The problem was that the factory had to be built from scratch, engineers had to be trained, and machinery built, and that all took time. In the long term, the Castle Bromwich factory would no doubt pay dividends, but what Britain and the RAF needed was Spitfires now and they weren’t getting them from Lord Nuffield. The first four had finally entered service in August 1938 but fortunately, by that time, many of Supermarine’s production problems had been resolved. Subcontracting issues had been ironed out, while the Woolston plant was now operating to its full capacity, with engineers there working an average of sixty-three hours a week. By the summer of 1939, 240 of the original order for 310 had been delivered. It was a start.
The reason why Dowding had not placed the first order for Spitfires and Hurricanes himself was that at the beginning of April 1936 he had been appointed the first Commander-in-Chief of the newly created RAF Fighter Command. With his now vast experience at the Air Ministry and his primary responsibility for research and development, he had been the obvious person for the post. Yet his was a massively daunting task if Britain was to be in any kind of position to withstand an all-out attack by a resurgent German air force.
He had been intimately involved with the development of radar – or RDF – but training personnel, pilots and aircrew to use it whilst bringing the chain of RDF stations to a sufficient level of operational efficiency had been yet another race against the clock. And radar was not sufficient on its own. The development of the Observer Corps, a tiny volunteer force, had needed to be hastened and expanded in conjunction with the chain of RDF stations. Finally, a system by which all this information could be filtered and passed on to the relevant stations and squadrons of Fighter Command had had to be developed, trialled and honed.
Also falling under his control were the anti-aircraft artillery and searchlight formations, although still part of the army. When Dowding had taken over as C-in-C Fighter Command, there had been only sixty usable but mostly obsolescent ack-ack guns and 120 searchlights. These numbers also needed to be dramatically increased. So too did the number of barrage balloons, which floated on wires above urban areas, key factories, ports, rail heads and other potential bombing targets. A further handicap was the lack of all-weather metalled runways, which had prevented pilots from carrying out much flying or training during winter months. The Air Ministry had argued that concrete airstrips made airfields more conspicuous from the air. Dowding persisted, however, and eventually got his runways.
The struggle to prepare Britain’s home defences had been a constant battle against time. His doggedness and the not infrequent sharp rejoinders he used in his correspondence with the Air Ministry won him enemies – enemies who would later come back and haunt him. Yet by May 1940 he had believed Fighter Command was almost ready. Almost.
Now, though, it seemed as though everything that he had worked for was being frittered away. Despite the efficiency of his early-warning system, despite all the many changes he had implemented, the most important ingredient of all was aircraft and trained pilots, and these were being squandered uselessly over the battlefields of northern France and the Low Countries. Unless this stopped, and stopped soon, and unless something could be done to radically improve the rate of aircraft production, the hard-fought-for development of Britain’s air defences would have been for nothing. For in an all-out clash with the Luftwaffe now, RAF Fighter Command would lose.
9
The Battle is Lost
ON 13 MAY, General Lord Gort moved with his Chief of Staff, Henry Pownall, and a number of other select officers and staff to a new command post in a small chateau in the village of Wahagnies, ten miles south of Lille, but some thirty north-east of the rest of GHQ. In wishing to free himself from the cramped hubbub at Habarcq, Gort was revealing one of the fundamental problems of the BEF’s set-up in France – that it was far too unwieldy and massively over-staffed. With his departure, some 250 staff were left at BEF’s Headquarters under the effective control of two lieutenant-colonels. Communications were already poor in France: there were not enough radios, too many loops to go through to pass on whatever information there was, and too much dependence on an inefficient civilian telephone exchange. By moving to Wahagnies, however, Gort made the system even worse. In the crucial days that followed, vital information frequently failed to reach him or Pownall in time.
On the BEF’s front, things had been quiet that day, but it was clear by evening that to the north of their positions the Belgians were struggling against the weight of the northern German thrust. ‘All the Belgians seem to be in panic,’ wrote General Pownall in his diary that night, ‘from the higher command downwards. What an ally!’ Incredibly, the news o
f the German crossings in the south had still not reached them.
Nor had the truth hit home at the Headquarters of the French High Command. ‘It is not yet possible to determine the zone in which the enemy will make his main attack’ was the conclusion of the final situation report at Gamelin’s HQ. Only at Général Georges’s Headquarters of the North-East Front was the penny beginning to drop. At around 3 a.m. on the morning of 14 May, Georges and his staff were gathered in the map-room, listening to reports coming in and staring aghast at the map spread before them. Georges, sitting in an armchair, looked deathly pale. ‘Our front has been pushed in at Sedan!’ he mumbled, briefly rising. ‘There have been some failures …’ He then slumped back into his chair and began to weep.
It was no good blubbing, however. All three bridgeheads across the Meuse needed to be expanded quickly, yet the situation at Dinant, Monthermé and Sedan was still very precarious for the Germans – especially at Sedan. Despite the mass panic by the French of the previous evening, it had principally been the rear echelon and artillery who had flooded back; much of the 55th Division’s infantry still stood firm. Moreover, the reserve units of the French X Corps, including an armoured battalion, were ready and waiting to move forward, while a further cavalry division was also only a short distance away and could easily have been hurried forward to help at Sedan.
The Battle of Britain Page 14
