A Summer Bright and Terrible (32 page)

Do you remember Sholto Douglas? He was serving
under Dowding just after the First World War, when the Air Ministry decided to
court-martial him. Dowding refused to convene the court-martial, at a time when
he himself was balancing on the razor edge of being fired, thus putting himself
at risk but saving Douglas s career.

So here we go on October 17, 1940. Dowding
showed up at the meeting expecting to hold the floor and give the Air Ministry
a summary of his strategy in the battle—which, remember, he had just won—and to
discuss the progress being made by the radar wizards for night interceptions.
Imagine his shock when he entered the room to find, among the dozen assembled
Air Marshals and Air Vice-Marshals, one lowly Squadron Leader: Douglas Bader.

Leigh-Mallory explained that he had brought him
along so they could hear the views of someone who was actually doing the
fighting. That may sound reasonable, but there were many other people also
doing the fighting, and all present knew that Bader’s view was only one side.
For example, Al Deere, a wing commander and one of the highest scorers in the
battle, said, “From a fighter pilot’s point of view, I hold that Bader’s wing
concept was wrong. I know that most wing leaders agree with me, and certainly
those who had the benefit of later experience.” It would have been quite easy
to send for Deere, or anyone else “who was actually doing the fighting,” to
present this point of view, but Douglas did not see fit to do so.

Instead of calling a recess to do this, or even
just turning the floor over to Dowding, Sholto Douglas took the floor himself
and asked the meeting to consider why enemy formations should not be met with
sufficient numbers to overwhelm them. He then went on for quite some time on
this proposition, essentially presenting Bader’s and Leigh-Mallory’s views as
the prime idea and asking why it should not have been the proper cause of
action. In Keith Park’s words, “He asked why [Park and Dowding] had not,
throughout the Battle of Britain, adopted the big wing formations which had
been used so successfully by Leigh-Mallory.” That is, Dowding was presented
with an accusation and with the necessity to prove himself innocent of it,
instead of being asked to present his own views as the focus of discussion.

Douglas then called on Bader, who repeated the
false stories of the Big Wing’s successes. (Keep in mind that he thought the
stories were true, since the claims of enemy destroyed by the Wing were indeed
impressive; it was the actuality that was not.) He pointed out the simple fact
that it was better to face the enemy with equal or greater numbers, rather than
with the penny-packets sent up by Dowding. He ignored, as did Leigh-Mallory,
the equally simple facts that the radar warnings did not give sufficient time
to assemble the Wing and get it to where it was needed, and that to have
committed all of Fighter Command’s resources in large, pitched battles was
exactly what the Luftwaffe wanted.

Keith Park tried to answer, pointing out that
most of the squadrons were equipped only with high-frequency (HF) radio instead
of very-high-frequency (VHF) radio, and HF was inefficient, fading in and out,
making coordinated attacks difficult if not impossible to achieve. For whatever
reason or combination of reasons, he argued, the Big Wing attacks that had been
carried out so far had not been successful at all. But no one seemed to be
listening. Leigh-Mallory then took the floor and said he could get the Big Wing
into the air and on its way in six minutes. No one asked him why, during the
past summer, it had always taken more than a quarter of an hour to do so,
resulting in the Wing being always too late to engage the bombers before they
reached their targets. Instead, he repeated Bader’s lecture on the simple
values of overwhelming force, and the assembled audience very nearly broke into
hearty applause.

In essence, the room was stacked, and Dowding
was bushwhacked. When the minutes were circulated, they were one-sided, with
all criticism of the Big Wing omitted. Park sent a correction memo to Douglas,
asking that it be included in the final copy of the minutes. Douglas refused,
saying that such criticisms were “inappropriate.’’

The official stance of the Air Ministry was,
therefore, that the Battle of Britain had been mishandled. Dowding was, in Park’s
words, “condemned” by the meeting, and the “Wings controversy was used as a
pretext for dismissing Dowding.”

The meeting continued in the afternoon with
a discussion of night-fighting tactics. Just three nights previously, Coventry
had been demolished by a night bombing attack in which not a single bomber was
brought down. This brought home in violent fashion the inadequacy of the night
air defences, which Sholto Douglas pronounced shameful. Dowding presented his
view that there was nothing to be done until airborne radar and the Beaufighter
were ready, and this would take another few months. Douglas replied that he
could see no reason not to take action immediately with what they had. He
advocated sending up Hurricanes with pilots trained to see as best they could
in the dark, and waxed eloquent on the Turbinlite Havocs.

It is hard to imagine how any trained pilot
could think the Turbinlite system would work. If the Havoc could track and
catch a bomber, why not simply shoot it down instead of illuminating it? After
all, if the Havoc shot and missed, the bomber wouldn’t know anything about it,
and so the Havoc could keep on trying. But as soon as the Havoc turned on the
searchlight, the bomber would immediately take evasive action. The pilot of the
Havoc would at the same time be blinded by the sudden light, would lose his
night vision, and would never be able to find the bomber again. It was the
silliest scheme imaginable.

Sending up single-seater Hurricanes was not as
silly, but turned out even worse. Not only did they never shoot down a single
bomber, but several pilots were killed trying to land in the dark.

Dowding had often wondered “why some senior
officers in the Services show all the symptoms of mental paralysis after the
age of forty-five or so.” It was the sort of comment that accounted for the
hostility of the Air Staff. But never mind, the two schemes were endorsed by
Douglas and everyone else at the meeting. Dowding was ordered by the Air Staff
to immediately implement them.

No improvement in night defence followed, and
three weeks later, Dowding was fired.

In the aftermath of the greatest British
victory since Waterloo, Dowding was dismissed as head of Fighter Command. In
his recollections he claimed that out of the blue he received a phone call from
Sir Archibald Sinclair, the Secretary of State for Air, telling him that he “was
to relinquish Command immediately.” Asking what was meant by “immediately,” he
was told “within twenty-four hours.” Dowding replied that it was “absurd” to be
fired like that “unless it was thought I had committed some major crime,” but
he was told that the decision had been taken, and that was that.

But memories are often faulty, and that is not
what happened. A few months earlier, as we have seen, he was told that his
retirement would take place on October 31. Nothing had been said about it since
then, until he was called to a meeting with Sinclair at the Air Ministry on
November 13. There he was told—in person, not by a phone call—that he was to
relinquish his command, not within twenty-four hours, but within the quite
reasonable time of a couple of weeks. Dowding protested, but Sinclair said only
that he “had come to the conclusion that it was right to make the change.”
Dowding replied that he wished to talk to Churchill about it, and he did so;
Churchill concurred with
Sinclair
.

The reasons for his dismissal have long been
debated. Certainly the Big Wing and night-bombing controversies were part of
it, but there were other reasons not terribly hard to discern. Why, for
example, did Sholto Douglas slant the October meeting so drastically against
Dowding? With the best will in the world, one might say that he honestly
believed Dowding was wrong, but who was it who personally benefited when
Dowding was dismissed? Meet Sholto Douglas, the new Commander in Chief of
Fighter Command. (He immediately sent up Hurricanes and Turbinlite Havocs to
combat the night bombers, but met with no success until airborne radar and the
Beaufighter were ready the following spring.)

And why were the members of the Air Ministry so
hostile to Dowding? Just look back on his history with them. He fought them
every step of the way since taking over Fighter Command—for bulletproof glass
in the Spitfires, for concrete runways, for underground telephone lines, for
radar instead of Lindemann’s infrared, for an adequate fighter defence that
involved building fighters instead of bombers—and being right was no defence.
He had already antagonized most of them even earlier in his career, and they
were simply waiting, seething, for the excuse that Bader, Leigh-Mallory, and
Coventry gave them.

Bader progressed no further in the RAF; he was
a fighter pilot, not a strategist, not the stuff of air marshals. But
Leigh-Mallory got his reward. When Park was fired along with Dowding,
Leigh-Mallory took Park’s place, later becoming head of the combined invasion
air forces in 1944. His appointment, however, was not a success, and four
months after D-day he was transferred to command the Allied air forces in
Southeast Asia. On the flight out, his plane flew into a mountain; both he and
his wife were killed.

Although Dowding had brilliantly won the Battle
of Britain and saved the country from invasion, there is a word to be said for
the opposition, for his removal at this time. He was, after all, past the age
for retirement, the date of which had been settled before the battle began, and
as one of his personal assistants remembered, “he was almost blind with
fatigue; he obviously needed a long rest, he was burnt out.” And although his
strategy was perfect for the battle, perhaps now it was time for a change.
Fighter Command was about to go on the offensive, and as it began to fight over
France instead of over England, the Big Wings were the proper formations. Since
Dowding’s outstanding characteristic, so far as the Air Staff were concerned,
was his stubbornness, one can understand how they might well have distrusted
his ability to shift gears and embrace the concept he had forsworn. And
although his stance on night-fighter interceptions was proved correct by future
events, at the time it was certainly frustrating to be told there was nothing
to be done.

Finally, there was the increasing chance of
embarrassment as Dowding talked more and more openly of his rather peculiar
ideas. To be sure, there were plenty of people in every country who called upon
their God for help and who thought they saw evidence of divine intervention in
their affairs, but when he talked of Shakespeare being the only man in the
kingdom who could operate a gun, when he mentioned his conversations with his
dead wife and his dead pilots—which he was beginning to do in private conversations,
though not yet in public—it doesn’t seem wrong to suppose that people might
begin to get worried.

And so, “they just got rid of me,” as he
plaintively said. He left Bentley Priory as he had arrived, without brass
bands, without fanfare. Sholto Douglas was shown into his office to take over
the reins of Fighter Command and found Dowding working at his desk. Without
looking up, Stuffy finished the letter he was writing to his chicks:

My dear Fighter
Boys,

In sending you
this my last message, I wish I could say all that is in my heart. I cannot hope
to surpass the simple eloquence of the Prime Minister’s words, “Never before
has so much been owed by so many to so few.” The debt remains and will
increase.

In saying goodbye to
you I want you to know how continually you have been in my thoughts, and that,
though our direct connection may be severed, I may yet be able to help you in
your gallant fight.

Goodbye to you
and God bless you all.

Air Chief
Marshal Hugh Dowding November 24th 1940

When he finished, he stood up, said “Good
morning” to Douglas, put on his hat, walked out of the office from which he had
guided the free world to its first victory over Hitler, and faded away as old
soldiers often do. He was sent on a public-relations mission to the United
States and succeeded only in antagonizing the Americans by insisting that their
bombers would be useless without fighter escort. When he returned, he met with
Churchill, who told him that “he had never heard of my retirement until he saw
it in the papers. I was so astonished that I said ‘Do you mean to say that you
were really never told about my retirement?’ He said I knew nothing about it
till I saw it in the papers.’”

Dowding was right to be astonished, for
Churchill’s claim was unbelievable. As Lord Balfour, then Under-Secretary for
the Air Ministry, said, “This is pure nonsense. . . . Any Service Secretary of
State would not have made a vital high command change without reference to, and
prior agreement with, the Minister of Defence [i.e., Churchill]. In Sinclair’s
case I know that he would not have changed the AOC of an important fighter
group, much less the Commander-in-Chief, without superior approval. . . . I
would wager any sum that Churchill knew and had approved the change, and also
the name of Dowding’s successor.”