A Summer Bright and Terrible

A Summer Bright and Terrible

Winston
Churchill, Lord Dowding, Radar, and the Impossible Triumph of the Battle of
Britain

David
E. Fisher

Shoemaker
&
Hoard

Copyright © 2005 by David E. Fisher

All rights reserved. No part of this book
may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission
from the Publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical
articles and reviews.

Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fischer, David E., 1932—

A summer bright and terrible: Winston
Churchill, Lord Dowding, Radar, and the impossible triumph of the Battle of
Britain / David E. Fisher, p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references. isbn
(10) 1-59376-047-7 (alk. paper) isbn (13) 978-1-59376-047-2

1. Britain, Battle of, Great Britain, 1940.
2. Air warfare—History—20th century. 3. Dowding, Hugh Caswall Tremenheere
Dowding, Baron, 1882—1970. 4. Churchill, Winston, Sir, 1874—1965. I. Title.

D756.5.B7F57 2005 94o.54’2ii—dc22
2005003765

Gallery illustrations: map by Mike Morgenfeld;
Spitfire from postcard by Valentine & Sons, Ltd.; the Hurricane courtesy of
British Aerospace, Military Aircraft Division; radar towers courtesy of Gordon
Kinsey, author of
Bawdsey
(Terence Dalton Limited); Douglas Bader
courtesy of Royal Air Force Benevolent Fund; Keith Park from the collection of
the Walsh Memorial Library, MOTAT, New Zealand, also courtesy of Dr. Vincent
Orange; the Bristol Beaufighter courtesy of British Aerospace, Bristol
Division; Dowding statue photo by Lisabeth DiLalla. Every attempt has been made
to secure permissions. We regret any inadvertent omission.

Book design and composition by Mark
McGarry Set in Fairfield

Printed in the United States of America

Shoemaker Hoard

An Imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, Inc.
Distributed by Publishers Group West

10 987654321

This
book is for Satchel Rhain and Bram Jakob

I was simply frightened that we should
lose. It was a perfectly straightforward fear, instinctive and direct. The
summer of 1940 was an agony for me: I thought that the betting was 5:1 against
us. . . . I felt that, as long as I lived, I should remember walking along
Whitehall in the pitiless and taunting sun . . . in the bright and terrible
summer of 1940.

Lewis
Eliot,

in
The
Light and the Dark,
by C. P. Snow

Contents

In England the summer of 1940 was the
sunniest, driest, most glorious summer in living memory. In that bright and
terrible summer Hitler’s Germany lay spread like a galloping cancer across
Europe. Austria and Czechoslovakia had been swallowed, Poland destroyed,
Belgium, Holland, and France enveloped and subjugated in a new form of warfare,
the Blitzkrieg. Twenty-five years earlier, the German and French armies had
lain supine in trenches for four years, gaining or losing yards at a time. Now
suddenly the armoured Panzer Korps came thundering through the French lines with
dive-bombing Stukas blasting a path for them, and within a few weeks, the
continental bastion of democracy had fallen.

The British army escaped at Dunkirk, but the
soldiers who returned to England were no longer an army. They were a rabble
without guns or ammunition. They had left their tanks, their mortars, their
machine guns and their cannon behind on the bloody beaches of France. As the
summer blossomed, their future wilted.

Winston
Churchill was appointed prime minister on the day France was invaded, and now
he stood like a lion roaring. “We shall fight them on the beaches . . . we
shall fight in the fields and in the streets. . . . We shall
never
surrender.”

It was an empty boast. If once the Wehrmacht
crossed the
English Channel,
there was nothing in England to fight them with. Old men and young boys were
parading around in the Home Guard with broomsticks for weapons, prompting Noel
Coward to write his clever ditty ending with the refrain “If you can’t provide
us with a Bren gun, the Home Guard might as well go home.” It was tuneful, it
was clever, it was pathetic.

There were no Bren guns.

There was only the Royal Air Force.

All Hitler’s hordes had to do in order to rule
all of Europe was cross twenty miles of seawater, but there’s the rub. For as
soon as they clambered onto their invasion barges, which were piling up along
the French coast, and set sail, the Royal Navy would come steaming out of its
port on the northwest of Scotland and sweep them aside, shattering the barges
and tossing the army into the waters of the English Channel.

But wait. Why was the Royal Navy huddled in the
west in the first place? Its normal home port was Scapa Flow, in the north
-
eastern Orkney Islands, positioned
perfectly to disgorge the battleships that would sink the Wehrmacht. The answer
to this embarrassing question was the Luftwaffe.

In the First World War, the battleship had been
the lord of the sea. In this new conflict, it was already apparent that the
lord had abdicated: The airplane was the definitive weapon. Afraid of the
German bombers, the navy had deserted its bastion and retreated west, beyond
the range of the Nazi planes. If the invasion began, the Royal Navy would
indeed come steaming forth in all its bravery and majesty, but they would come
steaming forth to their deaths. It would be the Charge of the Light Brigade all
over again, an outmoded force gallantly but uselessly falling to modern
technology. Just as the horse-mounted officers of the Light Brigade were mowed
down in their tracks by machine guns and cannon, the
battleships and cruisers of the navy would sink under the bombs of
the Stukas.

Unless, of course, the Royal Air Force could
clear the skies of those Stukas.

And so it came down to this: If the Luftwaffe could
destroy the Royal Air Force, the German bombers could destroy the Royal Navy
and nothing could stop the invasion. Once ashore in England, the Wehrmacht
would roll through the country more easily than it had in France, where it had
been opposed by a well-armed army. Churchill might roar and bellow, but the
British would not fight them on the beaches and in the streets, for they had
nothing left to fight them with. The story that as Churchill sat down in the
House of Commons after his famous rodomontade, he muttered, “We’ll beat them
over the heads with beer bottles, because that’s all we’ve bloody got left,” is
probably untrue but it does reflect the truth of the moment.

As the days of that terrible summer rolled
on, America’s eyes turned with a growing anxiety to the tumult in the skies
over England. Americans had long thought of the Atlantic Ocean as an invincible
barrier between themselves and Europe, but if Hitler defeated England and
gained control of the world’s strongest navy, the Atlantic would become an open
highway to the U.S. eastern seaboard.

And to most observers, Hitler’s victory seemed
certain. JFK’s father, Joseph Kennedy, ambassador to England, came home with
his family and proclaimed that England was finished. (The joke going the rounds
in London: “I used to think that pansies were yellow until I met Joe Kennedy.”)
At America First rallies around the United States, Charles Lindbergh was
singing the praises of the German Luftwaffe, calling it invincible, anointing
its fighter planes as the world’s best by far. Hitler could not be defeated, he
shouted, and Congress listened. (And a Hitler victory wasn’t a bad thing, he
went on. The Nazis were clean, efficient, and moral, aside from that
little business with the Jews. And you
couldn’t really blame them for that, he whispered.)

Even as Lindbergh was arguing that Germany’s
air force was unstoppable, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced that
Luftwaffe bombers would soon be able to fly from bases in West Africa to attack
cities as far west as Omaha, Nebraska. Though this technical accomplishment was
a fantasy, something developing in the Peenemunde laboratory of Werner von
Braun was not. It was an engineering feat no one yet knew about: an improved
version of the as-yet-unveiled V-2 rocket. Named the V-10, it would be a true
intercontinental ballistic missile, which could reach anywhere in America. And
just the year before, nuclear fission had been discovered—in Berlin.

So the stage was set. In July of
that summer, when the vaunted German air force began its aerial assault as a
prelude to a cross-Channel invasion, the Allies’ only hope lay in the few
fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force and in the resolute, embattled man who
led them: not Churchill, but the man who had fought Churchill and nearly every
other minister and general in a series of increasingly bitter battles through
the pre
-
war years; who without
scientific training directed the energies of England’s vast scientific aerial
establishment; who had defied the fierce arguments of Churchill’s own
scientific adviser and instead backed and promoted the single technical
device—radar—that would provide the backbone of Britain’s aerial defence and
the slim margin of victory.

Rather incredibly, this was also a man whose
mind broke from the strain at the height of the battle, who talked to the
ghosts of his dead pilots, but who nevertheless was able to keep another part
of his mind clear enough to continue making the daily life-and-death decisions
that saved England. The man whose name today is practically unknown: Hugh
Caswall Tremenheere Dowding, Air Chief Marshal of the Royal Air Force,
Commander in Chief of Fighter Command. Lord Dowding, First Baron of Bentley
Priory.

Lord Dowding

The air defence of England, showing the responsibilities
of Fighter Command Groups, with each Group divided into Sectors. Also shown are
the main airfields in each sector.

Lord Trenchard

The Spitfire

The Hurricane

Radar Towers

Bentley Priory, outside Dowding’s office