A Summer Bright and Terrible (34 page)

This book began a long incubation more than
twenty years ago in Edinburgh when I happened to pick up a copy of Richard
Hillary’s
Last Enemy,
and then, browsing through the library stacks in
Miami, stumbled into the weird world of Dowding’s
Lychgate.

Although there has been no biography of Lord
Dowding for the past thirty-five years, a vast compendium of journal articles,
histories, biographies, and autobiographies covers the Battles of France and
Britain from every conceivable point of view. The best of these are listed in
the Bibliography Unfortunately, most of them are either out of print or
unpublished in the United States. A good university library is mandatory, and I
would like to thank the staffs at the University of Miami, Southern Illinois
University, and Rice University, as well as those at the Snow Library, Orleans,
Massachusetts. I also thank the Trustees and staffs at the Liddell Hart Centre
for Military Archives at Kings College, London, and the Royal Air Force Museum
at Hendon. Dowding’s personal quotes are from his books, unpublished
correspondence, and the two biographies listed in the Bibliography. Personal
recollections from Gerald Pollinger, Johnny Kent, Denis Robinson, Mrs. “Skip”
Wilkins, and Taffy Bowen were enormously valuable, as was the help of the
staffs at Bentley Priory, Bawdsey Manor Hall, RAF Coltishall, and the Imperial
War Museum at Duxford aerodrome. I am also grateful that Her Majesty’s
Government did not totally dismantle Kenley aerodrome before I was able to
visit it. (Hawkinge and many of the others are now cornfields or estate housing
developments.)

While the military facts of the summer of 1940
are now well-known, their interpretation remains ambiguous—as can be seen from
even a quick perusal of the bibliographic sources—and they are sometimes
conveniently and selectively forgotten. The story told here is, I believe,
correct, but one should bear in mind the classic description first applied to
cosmologists but equally pertinent to historians: often in error, seldom in
doubt.

My wife, Leila L., was, as always, an anchor in
a swirling morass of mud.