A Summer Bright and Terrible (31 page)

But he couldn’t have felt any concussion,
because he was at seventeen thousand feet, much too high to feel any concussion
when the bomber hit the sea. There was no other evidence of a kill, but he was
given credit for a probable. The post-war German records show no bomber lost
over Swanage that night.

No other Harrow came even that close to
success, and by the following fall the squadron was reassigned to other duties.
“Mutton” was forgotten, after the expenditure of “millions of pounds and tens
of millions of man hours.”

Lindemann had other ideas, some of which
were better but still wrong. He thought the air force could link its
searchlights to radar beams, so that when the radar caught a bomber, the
searchlight would automatically turn on and follow the bomber wherever it went,
until a night fighter or antiaircraft shell would bring it down. This was an
intelligent concept, recognizing that both radar and light were forms of
electromagnetic radiation and could be coupled, but it showed a complete lack
of knowledge of the technical intricacies involved. Once caught in the
searchlight beam, the bomber would naturally take violent evasive action, and
the current state of radar technology was not capable of following such manoeuvres.
It would take computer control to manage this, and computers of that degree of
sophistication had not yet even been thought of.

Recognizing the difficulty of shooting down an
airplane from the ground, he came up with another way to use radar. To hit a
small, moving target like an airplane that is travelling hundreds of miles an
hour and is several miles high necessitates finding its exact position,
estimating correctly its future position by knowing its exact speed and
direction, and knowing its exact altitude. Even if you could do that—which you
couldn’t in 1940—you would then have to know the exact wind conditions at all
altitudes from the ground up to the target. All this is impossible, even in
daylight. In 1940 the antiaircraft guns did more harm to people on the ground,
when the shrapnel fell back down, as it must, than the weapons did to the enemy
airplanes. The guns were fired only as a morale booster, to show the population
that something was being done to stop the bombers.

Lindemann thought of including a small radar
system in each antiaircraft shell, to send out a radar beam that would be
reflected by the target. The shell would compare the frequency of the outgoing
waves to the incoming waves to determine how close it was getting to the
target. Because of the Doppler effect, the incoming waves would increase in frequency
as the target was approached, and would begin to decrease as the shell sped
past the target. At the moment of the switch from increasing frequency to
decreasing, the shell would be at its closest possible position, and would
automatically detonate.

This was a brilliant idea, but again not
technically feasible in the summer of 1940. Later in the war, a combined
British and American team was able to get it working in time to be put into
action against the Japanese kamikaze attacks in the Pacific, but it was years
too late for the Battle of Britain.

Other ideas from other people bombarded
Churchill and, through him, Dowding. The death ray wouldn’t go away. Liquid
nitrogen was also a favourite, with suggestions ranging from freezing the
Channel and thus trapping the German invasion barges (which would have allowed
the Wehrmacht to step out and walk across the ice) to freezing clouds into
solid bases on which antiaircraft guns could be mounted. These ideas were
summarily dismissed, but some were not so obviously silly and had to be tried
out. One such idea was the Turbinlite.

This concept started by noting that the basic
problem was that you couldn’t see the bombers at night, then went on to note
that the Hurricanes Churchill had insisted on sending up were trying to avoid
this problem by attacking bombers that were caught in searchlight beams. This
scheme didn’t work because the Hurricanes and the searchlights weren’t
integrated and couldn’t possibly be. Consequently, when a bomber was caught in
the beam it would immediately take evasive action and be lost again in the
darkness before the Hurri could turn on to it, aim, and fire. The suggested
solution was to have the searchlights and Hurris acting as a team, and this was
to be done by using Havocs.

The Douglas Havoc was a twin-engine bomber the
RAF had bought from America. It was designed as a tactical bomber, acting, like
the German Stuka, in support of ground troops. The problem was that the British
had no ground troops in action, and so no one knew quite what to do with these
Havocs.

A few of them had been converted into night
fighters, but they were not fast enough to catch the Luftwaffe bombers, and the
machine guns they were fitted with weren’t powerful enough to shoot them down
in a short burst. So the suggestion was to remove the Havocs’ noses and replace
them with powerful searchlights. These Turbinlite Havocs would fly together
with two Hurricanes, and when radar brought them close to an enemy bomber, the
Havoc would turn on its searchlight and the Hurris would shoot the thing down.

Again, Churchill was enthusiastic. Again,
Dowding pointed out the obvious difficulty. The Havoc would have to hold the
bomber in its searchlight beam for at least several seconds while the Hurris
attacked. If it could do that, it could shoot the bomber down itself. The
problem was that it couldn’t do that; it wasn’t fast enough or manoeuvrable
enough. As soon as the light was turned on, the bomber would twist away and
vanish.

And again Churchill growled, and Dowding shrugged,
and the Turbinlite Havocs were outfitted and took to the air. Not a single
bomber was brought down.

Churchill’s growl died down to an ominous
rumble. He explained with brooding impatience to Dowding that he, Dowding, was
the head of Fighter Command. As such he was responsible for the defence of the
kingdom, which was being bombed every damned night with impudent
imperviousness. Had he, Dowding, nothing to suggest? Were the British helpless
against the Hun?

Dowding could only repeat that yes, at the moment
they were helpless. They had the solution in mind, but not yet in hand. The
work on airborne radar was progressing as rapidly as possible, as was the
production of the fast, heavily armed Beaufighter. A not-quite-perfect radar
had been fitted into a not-quite-suitable night fighter, the Bristol Blenheim,
and one success had been obtained.

It happened on the night of July 22. A Dornier
was tracked by ground radar and the Fighter Interceptor Unit sent up one of its
Blenheims. Ground control directed it toward the Dornier until radar contact
was reported by the Blenheim’s operator, who then brought the plane closer and
closer, until suddenly the pilot caught a glimpse of it just overhead,
silhouetted against the moon. He lifted his nose and opened fire. For some
reason the Dornier continued flying straight and level (perhaps the pilot was
killed with the first burst) and the Blenheim was able to pour a full
ten-second burst of bullets into it. Just when he thought nothing was
happening, the Dormer’s fuel tank exploded and it crashed in flames.

Dowding explained that this showed the system
was sound and ultimately would prove to be the answer Churchill was seeking.
What the RAF needed was a mass-produced AI radar that would work consistently
and a fighter with proper armament. Both were nearly ready by the end of the
summer. Flight Lieutenant G. Ashfield, who had shot down the Dornier in July,
was given FIU’s first Beaufighter, and on the night of September 5, he took off
on its first operational interception. As before, ground control found a bomber
for him and brought him in close enough for his own operator to take over.
Tracking him on the airborne set, he closed in—and the radar screen went blank.
The equipment had failed.

And that was the situation, Dowding explained.
They were almost there: The Beaufighters were now coming off the production
line and the airborne radar sets were being improved daily. In another few
months—

“Months?” Churchill’s low rumble burst forth
into a full-throated roar.

Dowding shrugged. There was nothing else he—or
Churchill or Lindemann or anyone else—could do. The night-bombing problem would
be solved, but not just yet. They would have to be patient.

But Churchill was not a patient man, not when
the bombs continued to fall every night. As Sir John Slessor explained, “Mr.
Churchill’s boundless imagination and romantic spirit often soared above the
dusty levels of practical reality.” To him every problem must of necessity have
a solution, and he wanted the solution right away. “All I wanted,” he later
remarked when in a more mellow mood, “was a reasonable discussion [of the
problem], followed by compliance with my wishes.”

At the time, when the bombs were actually
falling, he was not at all in a mellow mood. By the following spring Dowding’s
solution was in effect; airborne radar was working, the Beaufighters were
flying, and the bombers began to fall. By the summer of 1941 the Blitz was
over. But Dowding’s refusal to acquiesce to Churchill’s demands for immediate
help in the autumn of 1940, Dowding’s willingness to admit his helplessness
when indeed he was helpless, left a rankling bitterness in Churchill’s heart.

And so it was that the Luftwaffe’s mistaken
bombing of London led to Churchill’s revenge bombing against Berlin, which in turn
led to Hitler ordering the Luftwaffe to switch its attacks from Dowding’s
airfields to London, which saved England but precipitated Dowding’s downfall.

Thirty-three

Churchill had been Dowding’s staunchest
supporter despite—or perhaps because of—Dowding’s refusal to bend quietly to
his will. Most people were afraid of Churchill, and when he blustered and
ranted they were all too quick to give in to him, whether he was right or
wrong. What Churchill really admired was the man who could argue with him, who
was capable of disagreeing with him, but who would do that by mustering facts
and basing his arguments on those facts.

When Dowding butted heads with him over the
issue of sending fighters to France, Churchill had been angry. But only at
first. Dowding had been right, and Churchill was thankful to him for saving
England from the Luftwaffe with the fighters he had saved from France. When the
Secretary of State for Air wanted to fire Dowding, Churchill had turned on him,
telling him bluntly that Dowding was the best man he had and was not to be
dismissed.

But that was when Dowding had been right. Now,
Churchill felt, he was wrong. When Lindemann’s ideas were actually tested, they
failed, but in September of 1940 those tests were in the future. What was happening
in the present was the Blitz, and Dowding was standing there saying there was
nothing to be done about it. That was unacceptable.

There were other problems brewing for
Dowding. Intrigues, deep and sinister, brewing unseen in stations unknown. It
began with Douglas Bader, that incredibly brave man of action but not of
intellect. To give you an idea, first, of the spirit of the man:

Later in the war he was shot down over France.
He baled out, breaking off one of his prosthetic legs and leaving it behind as
he struggled out of the burning Spitfire, and was imprisoned by the Germans.
His captors, impressed by his reputation and obvious valour, searched the
wreckage and found his leg. It was bent out of shape, but they repaired it,
cleaned and polished it, and brought it to him. He strapped it on, it fit, and
he thanked them profusely, shaking hands with great smiles all around. That
same night, as soon as all lights were out, he tied his bed sheets together
into a makeshift rope, crawled out a window, climbed down, and escaped.

Upon being recaptured, he tried to talk the
Germans, pilot to pilot, into letting him try out one of their Me 109s,
promising just to make one circuit around the field and land. They laughed,
showing that some Germans do have a sense of humour.

But all this was in the future. In the autumn
of 1940, he was trying to inveigle himself past—not the Germans—but his air
officer commanding, Stuffy Dowding. It happened that the adjutant of Bader’s
squadron, Flight Leader Peter Macdonald, was a Member of Parliament. He took
Bader’s cause to Harold Balfour, the Undersecretary of State for Air, who
replied that it was quite wrong for a squadron adjutant to interfere in what
was, after all, a matter of strategy decided by the commander in chief.
Macdonald then used his parliamentary prerogative to seek an audience with
Churchill.

There is no record of Churchill’s response to
Macdonald’s plea that Dowding’s strategy was wrong and was costing unnecessary
casualties, but the Flight Leader’s plea came at the same time that Churchill
was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the way Dowding was handling the
night bombing. (There is also no record of whether Macdonald took this
unprecedented step on the urging of Bader or Leigh-Mallory or if he went on his
own, fuelled only by the persistent complaints that Bader was making in the
mess.)

At any rate, what happened next was a special
meeting called by Cyril Newall, Dowding’s old friendly enemy and now Chief of
the Air Staff, “to discuss major tactics by fighter formations, and to hear a
report on the progress of night interception.” The meeting was held in Newall’s
office, but when Newall called in sick at the last minute the chair was taken
by the Deputy Chief, Sholto Douglas. (Whether Newall truly was sick or whether
he wanted to disassociate himself from what was going to be a lynching is not
clear.)