Although Dowding was absolutely right, the notion that, for the present, nothing could be done about a serious military problem was not one that Churchill would have accepted tamely from any senior officer. He was not about to tell the British people that they should wait quietly and patiently until Fighter Command eventually received the right equipment and revised its training procedures, while in the meantime their homes were being blown up or burned night after night. There is no doubt that he was made aware of this new controversy between Dowding and the Air Ministry—it was the job of Churchill’s old friend Sir Archibald Sinclair, Secretary of State for Air, to keep him informed, and even had Sinclair not done so, Sholto Douglas and numerous other people would have found ways to let the prime minister know what was going on at the “Night Air Defence Committee.” In the circumstances, it took no great effort to float the suggestion in high quarters that Dowding was too old for the job and out of touch with the latest technology, not to speak of being tired, stubborn, difficult, and hostile to new ideas.
In any case, Dowding had been commanding Fighter Command for four years, during which he had frequently had to fight off attempts to retire him, and for five months he had been fighting—and winning—the greatest and the most crucial air battle of history to date. It is hardly surprising, then, that not only his enemies assumed he was past his prime, and felt it was time for a change—even his own authorized biographer and those historians of the Battle of Britain sympathetic to him (as most are) take this view. He had been put on notice in August, at the height of the battle, that his retirement date would be postponed to November, and this time it was not extended. On November 25 he at last gave up his beloved command and retired, having been informed rather abruptly that there was no further post available for an officer of his seniority. Those who favor the conspiracy theory of history have, in this case, felt their view to be justified by the fact that Sholto Douglas replaced Dowding at Fighter Command, and that Leigh-Mallory replaced his own antagonist, Park, at No. 11 Group—thus the “anti-Dowding” faction finally won.
In the event, Dowding had a brief, though unhappy, comeback. He was persuaded by the prime minister to take a position of great importance: trying to get “American war aviation developed on the right lines, and lines parallel to ours,” a task for which he warned the prime minister he was completely unsuited. One senses, in Churchill’s note on the matter to Sinclair, a rare tone of guilt and embarrassment. Churchill had neither forgotten nor forgiven Dowding’s attempt at the War Cabinet to stop him from sending more fighters to France, but he recognized that the country owed Dowding a great debt. He managed to overcome Dowding’s objections to this new post (and Sinclair’s doubts about the wisdom of sending him to America), because the assignment was intended to postpone his retirement from the RAF. In the end, however, Dowding was right—hardly anybody could have been less well suited to bringing the Americans a message which they did not want to hear and which they would in any case ignore. He arrived bearing a personal message from the prime minister to President Roosevelt, which the latter received with his usual affability, but neither Dowding’s personality nor his mission was much appreciated by Americans—he had, after all, the uncongenial task of telling them that what they were building was all wrong, and that they would do better to follow the British example. He made the situation worse by warning the Americans against building day bombers at all, although day bombers were the heart of their planning for war if or when it came. He had also been charged with persuading the Americans to build the new Napier “Sabre” aircraft engine and use it in their new aircraft—a lost cause, since the Sabre was troublesome and difficult to manufacture, and turned out to be inferior to the aircraft engines the Americans already had on the drawing board. Dowding’s eccentric remarks in public about other problems in the Anglo-American relationship caused so much bad feeling that Lord Halifax, the British ambassador to the United States, felt obliged to complain about him to the Foreign Office; and Air Commodore Sir John Slessor wrote from Washington to the new Chief of the Air Staff Air Chief Marshal Sir Charles Portal, “I hate writing like this about a very senior officer, but in the national interest I must express the fervent hope that you will get him out of this country before he does much more harm.”1
It has to be said in Churchill’s favor that his sense of guilt was strong enough for him to intervene several times more on Dowding’s behalf—Dowding was selected to write the official Despatch on the Battle of Britain; Churchill recommended him, in vain, to head Army Cooperation Command;2 then Dowding was appointed to the thankless task of touring RAF commands to suggest economies, a job in which his seniority, high rank, and growing status as a national hero made his suggestions about where and how money could be saved all the less welcome. Unsurprisingly, the latter job finally caused Dowding himself to put in for retirement in the summer of 1942, and by that time he was as happy to go as Churchill was, no doubt, happy to be relieved of the thankless task of finding further employment for him in the RAF.
Dowding’s supporters (who grew in number as the Battle of Britain receded) complained that he was not promoted to Marshal of the Royal Air Force (the equivalent of a British Field Marshal or an American five-star general) on retirement; but the custom was then that this rank should be reserved for officers who had served as Chief of the Air Staff, as Dowding had not, and even the king, who was a Marshal of the Royal Air Force himself, was unable to persuade the Air Ministry to make an exception for Dowding.*
Dowding remarried, happily; and, after some initial bitterness at the way he had been dismissed from Fighter Command, he mellowed, took up the cause of spiritualism, and following the example of his wife, vegetarianism, as well as that of a single universal human language. In compensation for not having been raised to the rank of Marshal of the Royal Air Force, he was made Lord Dowding of Bentley Priory in 1943, and awarded the Grand Cross of the Victorian Order, one of the few honors that remain entirely within gift of the sovereign.
When the official history of the Battle of Britain was published (it sold more than 6 million copies), Dowding’s name was not mentioned in it.†
Dowding’s biographer Basil Collier called him a “prophet.” Collier was placing Dowding, oddly enough, among such religious cult figures as Madame Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society, and Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, no doubt because he had in mind Dowding’s preoccupation with spiritualism, which became stronger as he grew older.
But in fact Dowding was a prophet of a very different sort. Almost alone, he had prophesied, correctly, the form air warfare would take; and almost without help, indeed against determined opposition, he had invented the means with which to defend Britain against attack from the air, right down to the smallest item. Not only did he prophesy the nature of the attack; he prophesied the kind of tools that would be needed to defeat it—radar, the single-engine monoplane fighter, the centralized operations room—and by a miracle of vision and obstinacy managed to put it all in place by 1940, just when it was needed.
Few prophets have ever had a clearer picture of what was to come—or what to do about it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For their help and advice in researching the story of the Battle of Britain I am indebted to Len Deighton, whose own book Fighter remains the benchmark for anybody writing about these events; to Tim Staples of Diverse Images, whose detailed knowledge of British and German aircraft of the period and enthusiasm were invaluable; to Sir Martin Gilbert, the fount of all wisdom on the subject of Winston Churchill, for his painstaking reading of the manuscript; to my neighbor Alex Kollmar, a pilot who generously refreshed my memory of the many things I have forgotten about airplanes since I left the Royal Air Force in 1953; and to Geoff Simpson, editor of 1940, the magazine of the Friends of the Few. I am also very grateful indeed to my friends Winston S. Churchill and Sir Alistair Horne, CBE, for their careful reading of the manuscript, and for their numerous corrections and sugge
stions. Any remaining errors are, of course, my own.
I would like to express my very special gratitude to Dawn Lafferty, my assistant, for her help in preparing the manuscript; to the invaluable Mike Hill for his dedicated research skills; to Kevin Kwan for photo research; and to Barry Singer, of Chartwell Books, for his uncanny ability to lay his hands on books that have been out of print for decades.
I would never have written this book without the encouragement of my dear agent Lynn Nesbit and my good friend and fellow history lover Morton Janklow, or without the patience and sound editorial judgment of my editor Hugh Van Dusen, and the help of his assistant Rob Crawford, as well as the advice of the incomparable Gypsy Da Silva, whose ambition it turned out to be to go up in a Spitfire one of these days. (This is not an impossible dream—there are at least two Spitfires converted to two-seater trainers for the Irish Air Force still flying, one of them in California.)
Above all, I thank my wife, Margaret, for her patience in putting up with yet another long task of reading and research on my part, and for collecting yet another huge pile of books that fills a room in our house and strains the floorboards.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Addison, Paul, and Jeremy A. Crang (eds.). The Burning Blue. London: Pimlico, 2000.
Battle of Britain Campaign Diary. Royal Air Force, 1940.
Bickers, Richard Townsend. The Battle of Britain. London: Salamander, 1990.
Brickhill, Paul. Reach for the Sky: The Story of Douglas Bader, Legless Ace of the Battle of Britain. Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2001.
“Cato.” See Owen, Frank.
Churchill, Winston S. Into Battle: Speeches. London: Cassell, 1941.
———. Never Give In!: The Best of Winston Churchill’s Speeches. New York: Hyperion, 2003.
———. The Second World War, Vol. II, Their Finest Hour. London: Cassell, 1949.
Clayton, Tim, and Phil Craig. Finest Hour: The Battle of Britain. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999.
Collier, Basil. Leader of the Few. London: Jarrolds, 1957.
Collier, Richard. Eagle Day: The Battle of Britain, August 6–September 15, 1940, 2nd ed. New York: Dutton, 1980.
Deighton, Len. Fighter: The True Story of the Battle of Britain. London: Cape, 1977.
Faber, Harold (ed.). Luftwaffe: A History. New York: Times Books, 1977.
Fisher, David E. A Summer Bright and Terrible: Winston Churchill, Lord Dowding, Radar, and the Impossible Triumph of the Battle of Britain. Berkeley, Calif.: Shoemaker and Hoard, 2005.
Flint, Peter. Dowding and Headquarters Fighter Command. London: Air-life, 1986.
Fozard, John W. (ed.). Sydney Camm and the Hurricane: Perspectives on the Master Fighter Designer and His Finest Achievement. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991.
Freiden, Seymour, and William Richardson (eds.). The Fatal Decisions. New York: Berkley, 1968.
Fuchser, Larry William. Neville Chamberlain and Appeasement: A Study in the Politics of History. New York: Norton, 1982.
Galland, Adolf. The First and the Last. Bristol: Cerberus, 2001.
Gallico, Paul. The Hurricane Story: How a Great Plane Saved a War. New York: Doubleday, 1960.
Gilbert, Martin. Finest Hour. London: Heinemann, 1983.
———. Never Surrender. The Churchill Papers, Volume II. New York: Norton, 1995.
Green, William. Augsburg Eagle: The Story of the Messerschmitt 109. New York: Doubleday, 1971.
Grinsell, Robert. Messerschmitt Bf 109. New York: Crown, 1980.
Hillary, Richard. The Last Enemy. London: Macmillan and Co., 1942.
Hough, Richard, and Denis Richards. The Battle of Britain. New York: Norton, 1989.
Ismay, H. L. The Memoirs of General Lord Ismay. New York: Viking, 1960.
Jenkins, Roy. Churchill: A Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001.
Jones, R. V. Most Secret War: British Scientific Intelligence, 1939–1945. London: Coronet, 1978.
Kaplan, Philip, and Richard Collier. The Few: Summer 1940—The Battle of Britain. London: Seven Dials, 1989.
Kens, Karlheinz, and Heinz J. Nowarra. Die deutschen Flugzeuge 1933–1945. Munich: Lehmanns Verlag, 1964.
Kurowski, Franz. Luftwaffe Aces. Canada: Fedorowicz, 1996; Mechanics-burg, Pa.: Stackpole, 2002.
Mason, Herbert Molloy, Jr. The Rise of the Luftwaffe. New York: Dial, 1973.
Morgan, Eric B., and Edward Shacklady. Spitfire: The History. Stamford, Conn.: Key, 1987.
Mosley, Leonard. The Reich Marshal: A Biography of Hermann Goering. New York: Doubleday, 1974.
Nesbit, Roy Conyers. The Battle of Britain. Stroud, U.K.: Sutton, 2000.
Nicolson, Harold. Diaries and Letters, 1930–1939, Nigel Nicolson, ed. New York: Atheneum, 1966.
Overy, Richard. The Battle of Britain: The Myth and the Reality. New York: Norton, 2000.
Owen, Frank (“Cato”). Guilty Men. London: Penguin, 1998.
Parkinson, Roger. Summer of 1940: The Battle of Britain. New York: David McKay, 1977.
Price, Alfred. The Battle of Britain: The Hardest Day. London: MacDonald and Jane’s, 1979.
———. The Spitfire Story. London: Arm and Armour, 1982.
Richards, Denis. Royal Air Force 1939–1945, Vol. I, The Fight at Odds. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1953.
Rigg, Bryan Mark. Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers: The Untold Story of Nazi Racial Laws and Men of Jewish Descent in the German Military. Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 2002.
Robertson, Bruce. Spitfire—The Story of a Famous Fighter. Letchworth, U.K.: Harleyford, 1960.
Robinson, Derek. Invasion 1940: The Truth about the Battle of Britain and What Stopped Hitler. New York: Carroll and Graf, 2005.
Sarkar, Dilip. Group Captain Sir Douglas Bader: An Inspiration in Photographs. Worcester, U.K.: Ramrod, 2001.
Terraine, John. The Right of the Line. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985.
Townsend, Peter. Duel of Eagles. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1970.
Wellum, Geoffrey. First Light. London: Penguin/Viking, 2002.
Wood, Derek, and Derek Dempster. The Narrow Margin: The Battle of Britain and the Rise of Air Power 1930–1949. Barnsley, U.K.: Pen and Sword, 2003.
Young, G. M. Stanley Baldwin. London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1952.
Notes
CHAPTER 1
1. Young, Stanley Baldwin, 174.
2. Jenkins, Churchill, 608.
3. Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers, 21–22.
4. “Cato” (Frank Owen), Guilty Men.
CHAPTER 2
1. Young, Stanley Baldwin, 61.
2. Churchill, Never Give In! 106.
3. Nicolson, Diaries and Letters, 129.
4. Young, Stanley Baldwin, 174.
5. Ibid., 179.
6. Ibid., 182.
7. Ibid.
CHAPTER 3
1. For the best and most comprehensive account of Dowding’s creation of the Fighter Command Headquarters, and its ramifications for the air defense of the United Kingdom, I am indebted to Peter Flint’s Dowding and Headquarters Fighter Command.
2. Ibid., 4.
3. Price, The Spitfire Story, 11.
4. See www.rjmitchell-spitfire.co.uk: click on Schneider Trophy, “History of the Contest,” October 2, 2006, 1.
5. Price, The Spitfire Story, 16.
6. Deighton, Fighter, 77.
7. Price, The Spitfire Story, 67. See also Robertson, Spitfire, 18.
8. Gallico, The Hurricane Story, 22–23.
9. Ibid., 36.
CHAPTER 4
1. See www.fiskes.co.uk/billy_fiske.htm.
2. Grinsell, Messerschmitt Bf109, 306.
3. Kens and Nowarra, Die deutschen Flugzeuge, 1933–1945, 275–78.
4. Deighton, Fighter, 80–81.
5. Ibid., 81.
CHAPTER 5
1. The best and most detailed account of the differences between the Bf 109 and the Spitfire and Hurricane is to be found in Green, Augsburg Eag
le. I have relied heavily (and gratefully) on his expertise.
2. Deighton, Fighter, 131.
3. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. II, Their Finest Hour, 38.
4. Ibid., 42.
5. Ibid., 46.
6. Richards, Royal Air Force, 1939–1945, Vol. II, The Fight at Odds, 109.
7. Flint, Dowding, 53.
8. Richards, Royal Air Force, 1939–1945, 120.
9. Flint, Dowding, 73.
10. Churchill, The Second World War, Vol. II, Their Finest Hour, 38.
11. Ibid., 46.
12. Collier, Leader of the Few, 192–94.
13. Flint, Dowding, 149.
CHAPTER 6
1. Gilbert, The Churchill War Papers, Vol. II, Never Surrender, 582.
CHAPTER 7
1. Wood and Dempster, The Narrow Margin, 321.
2. Bickers, The Battle of Britain, 37.
3. Ibid., 120.
4. Gilbert, Finest Hour, 766.
5. Flint, Dowding, 93.
6. Gilbert, The Churchill War Papers, Vol. II, Never Surrender, 472.
7. Ibid., 472.
8. Fisher, A Summer Bright and Terrible.
CHAPTER 8
1. The numbers of aircraft available at the beginning and end of each day, as well as RAF losses and RAF civilian casualties, are from The Battle of Britain Campaign Diary.
2. Brickhill, Reach for the Sky, 146.
With Wings Like Eagles: A History of the Battle of Britain Page 28
