A Summer Bright and Terrible (20 page)

Throughout the Bore War winter, the RAF
practiced intercepting every English airplane that flew. Many a student pilot
concentrating on keeping his altitude constant and his nose on the horizon
through a figure eight would be thrown into a sudden panic as a flight of
Spitfires came diving out of the clouds, zooming under him close enough to kiss
and disappearing again in a wild zoom that left the trainer shuddering in their
prop-wash.

And now as the July days followed one another,
Dowding and his chicks were ready.

The first German attacks on convoys and
port towns were small skirmishes, but by the end of the month, the Luftwaffe,
urged on by Goring, was mounting increasingly heavy attacks and Fighter Command
was beginning to suffer. The sky over the Channel waters now seemed to be
raining burning Spitfires and Hurricanes, blazing Messerschmitts and
disintegrating Heinkels; the green fields of the coast were being carpeted with
burned-out hulks carrying black crosses and bright RAF roundels—and
bullet-holed, shattered, bloody, and burnt bodies.

Twenty

The chain of radar stations consisted of
individual stations operating independently, but with their data analyzed as a
whole. Unfortunately, each station was subject to its own distortions of data.
One of the problems was that the performance of each station depended largely
on its position. Height determination, the primary source of error, was made
when a given echo reached the tower by two different routes: one coming in
straight from the target airplane and the other hitting the ground in front of
the tower and bouncing up to be detected a minimicrofraction of a second later.
It was an ingenious and complex system, it was the best they had, and it
suffered because the ground in front of each tower was different, with its own
individual characteristics. Some towers had obstructions, trees or hills, in
front of them; some had flat land; some looked from a height out over the sea;
some had hills to the left and forests to the right; others had hills to the
right and forests to the left. Each of these towers, looking at the same
target, would give different altitudes.

And, of course, each station was manned (or
womanned) by different people with different natural abilities and different
training, most of them by necessity trained as quickly as possible, which meant
not as well as possible. The saving grace of the system was that these problems
didn’t come on them out of the blue, as it were, but had been foreseen from the
beginning, and so efforts had been incorporated to minimize the resultant
errors. The RAF would fly a bomber back and forth in front of each tower as it
was completed, and the radar would plot the position and altitude. These would
then be compared with the real position and altitude, and a correction factor
for each altitude and an azimuth indication for each station would be obtained.

Every station had its own “fruit machine,” a
newly contrived apparatus that resembled a slot machine but was really a
sophisticated calculator. When a target was sighted, the radar operator would
plug its apparent range and direction into the fruit machine, which would then
automatically apply the already tabulated corrections and transfer these by
simple trigonometry into map coordinates. The operator would then repeat the
process to determine the altitude of the incoming aircraft. The areas covered
by the individual CH stations overlapped, so a raid usually would be detected
by at least two separate towers. The data from each one would be sent to the
filter room at Fighter Command headquarters, Bentley Priory. Here the two sets
of data would be combined and analyzed, and with luck, a fairly precise
location and altitude could be obtained and sent down to the underground
plotting room. There, filtering officers on the balcony looked down and added a
further correction: Sometimes towers A and B would report an incoming raid, and
so would B and C. Because of the errors alluded to, the two sets of data would
not exactly correlate and two markers would be placed on the table. The filter
officers had to decide if this was one raid they both alluded to, or two
separate raids coming in close to each other.

Another group of officers, watching as the
markers were moved across the map by the WAAFs, would extrapolate their speed
and direction to guess at the bombers’ targets and thus to direct particular
radar stations to follow them, at the same time alerting the pertinent Fighter
Command Groups. Once the raiders came over the coast, the Observer Corps would
phone their sightings in to their local Group, each of which had its own
operations room, where the filtered radar data were now combined with the
Observer data, and decisions made for a precise reaction to each threat. From
there the information went to sector operations rooms, which would translate
Group’s orders into individual fighter squadron scrambles.

It was too complicated, with possibilities of
error all along the line. If the radar data had been perfect, if the Observer
Corps never made a mistake, it still would have been impossible. The raiders
came over at hundreds of miles an hour, which meant that the plots changed by roughly
four miles every minute. And the Luftwaffe bombers didn’t come in straight
lines, like arrows toward their target. No, they feinted, they had formations
break off and head in different directions, they did all they could to throw
the defenders off.

Now add in the fact that the radar data were
never perfect, the Observer Corps did make mistakes, and the sky was filled
with hundreds of attacking planes heading for different targets. It was
impossible to decide which planes were heading where and at what altitude, how
many of them there were, and which defenders should be sent off to intercept
them.

It was impossible, but it was done, and more
often than not, they got it right.

During July, the fighting was concentrated
in the Channel and along the south-eastern coast, areas assigned to Keith Park’s
No. 11 Group. The squadrons were based on large, permanent aerodromes near
London, such as Kenley and Biggin Hill, but every morning at dawn, Dowding sent
a three-plane flight to a small forward aerodrome near the coast. When an
incoming raid was picked up by radar, the flight would be in position to make
an early intercept to disrupt the raid. More flights would then move up to the
forward aerodrome, or even go right in to the attack if the raid was large
enough.

There were two problems with this strategy.
Obviously, that first flight would meet overwhelming numbers, but this was
unavoidable; the Luftwaffe were able to choose when and where to attack, and
Dowding didn’t have enough fighters to cover the whole area with full
squadrons. The second danger was that the airfields were left unattended while
their planes were attacking the forward raids. The Germans so far didn’t
realize this opportunity, attacking instead convoys and naval ports, but if
they should ever catch on, and if the airfields were destroyed, the British
fighters would have been neutralized, so No. 12 Group was ordered to stand in
readiness to intercept any follow-up raids that might be aimed at 11 Group’s
airfields. The system would work since, although the 12 Group fighters would
have to fly from their own aerodromes to those further south that would be
under attack, the radar system would give them enough time to get there—if 12
Group’s fighters were scrambled efficiently and followed the Sector Controller’s
orders.

This meant that in these early days of the
battle, it was 11 Group that did all the fighting while 12 Group sat home and
waited. In later days, in Vietnam, Korea, and Iraq, you didn’t find many
reserve troops upset because they were being kept out of the fighting. But this
was a different war and these were different warriors. The Few, as they came to
be known, have often described themselves with words like “the gayest band of
warriors that ever flew into battle,” and this war is often spoken of as “the
last good war.” It wasn’t good, of course, and no one is gay when he faces
death daily, but these warriors were fighting for their homes, for survival
against an enemy that was truly evil.

And they were young—oh, so young—and the young
are immortal. Before he wrote
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,
Roald
Dahl was a fighter pilot in the RAF. He describes his war experience: “It was
wonderful. I loved doing it because it was exciting, because the waiting on the
aerodrome was nothing more than the waiting before a football game or before
going in to bat.” After a while, after combat day after day, it began to
change: “But then always going back and always getting away with it . . . each
time now it gets worse . . . it whispers to you that you are almost certain to
buy it sooner or later, and that when you do . . . you will just be a charred
corpse . . . black. . . twisted and brittle.”

The pilots of 12 Group hadn’t yet reached that
second stage. They wanted to go into battle; they yearned for it. Instead they
sat around their aerodromes safely in the north and listened to the fighting on
their radios; they fretted, complained, and battered their superiors with
requests, with demands.

But they were kept where they were. Aside from
the necessity of protecting 11 Group’s airfields if the Luftwaffe should ever
wake up to the realization that they were easy prey, No. 12 Group was needed to
protect the north. Dowding realized that though the French airfields were
closest to England, the original German airfields were still within range, and
if ever Goring thought that there were no fighters left in the north, he would
come there with devastating raids. Unopposed attacks in that quarter could
finally break the British spirit.

So 12 Group was told to obey orders, to sit
back and wait. They saw themselves as backups to 11 Group, as substitutes, as
second-raters, and they didn’t like that one little bit. Ted by their chief,
Leigh-Mallory, they couldn’t understand why the fighting in the south pitted
small numbers of Brits against large numbers of Huns, while they sat on their
arses, as they put it. The pilots waited on their deck chairs in the grass
beside their planes and played cards and grumbled. Leigh-Mallory sat in his
office and fumed.

Of all the 12 Group pilots, Squadron Leader
Douglas Bader was the most charismatic. That was understandable, for he had
something going for him that no one else in the RAF did: He had no legs. He had
lost both before the war, when, during an exhibition of aerobatics, he crashed
a fighter by flying it upside down a few inches above the grass. At the end, it
flew a few inches
below
the grass, the prop dug into the ground, the
plane flipped over and crashed, and Bader was pulled out. That is, most of
Bader was pulled out; his legs—one above the knee, one just below—remained in
the burning wreck.

He awoke in hospital to hear a nurse outside
his door shushing a crowd passing by: “Please be quiet, can’t you? There’s a
boy dying in there.” But Bader was the most stubborn of men, and he refused to
die. He was invalided out of the RAF, and he refused to stop flying, He learned
to walk on his artificial legs without help—well, he learned to hobble on them,
at any rate—and he got back into airplanes and learned to fly them again. He
badgered the RAF to let him back in, he bombarded them with requests and doctor’s
certificates, he flew with his old RAF friends, who all backed him up until,
finally, when the war began and the RAF desperately needed pilots, they took
him back in.

They even gave him a Spitfire. The story goes
that as evening fell one day in March 1940, “Pingo” Lester, the station
commander of Duxford aerodrome, was watching the last Spitfire come in from the
day’s practice. Instead of sailing in at landing speed, it came speeding toward
the aerodrome out of a power dive, levelling off at the last moment to come
skimming across the grass, and then, before Pingo’s unbelieving eyes, it rolled
over.

Inches above the grass, engine roaring at full
power, it turned upside down and skimmed along the entire length of the runway,
rolled back upright, zoomed up into the sky, looped over, and came sailing back
down to make a perfect landing. It taxied up to Pingo, and the cockpit hood was
swung back. The pilot heaved himself upright and then leaned down. With his
hands, he lifted his legs one at a time out of the cockpit, clumped them down
on the wing, stood precariously on them, and slid down to the ground. As he
limped over toward the station commander, Pingo sighed resignedly, “Douglas, I
do wish you wouldn’t do that. You had
such
a nasty accident last time.”

From all over the British Empire and
Commonwealth they came to defend the home country: from New Zealand and
Australia, from India and South Africa, and from Canada. No. 242 Squadron,
composed entirely of Canadians, had been sent to France with their Hurricanes
and had been savaged there. Now back in England, they had lost their squadron
commander, most of their pilots, and all their planes. They were a bedraggled,
dispirited lot, assigned to No. 12 Group to keep them out of the fight while
they reorganized.

They didn’t want to reorganize. They thought of
themselves as wild colonial boys, and they had seen the mess their superiors
had made of the battle in France and they wanted no more of it. They wanted to
go home. Instead, they got a batch of new Hurricanes and they got Douglas Bader
as their new commander.