A Summer Bright and Terrible (6 page)

“My original intention in learning to fly was
to increase my value as a staff officer,” he explained. He never had any
thought, at the start, of actually flying with the RFC, but by now flying had
gotten into his blood and he saw that the future of the army lay in the air as
well as on the ground.

He decided on a career in the RFC, only to have
his calling halted before it began: His father simply forbade it. The senior
Dowding thought flying was too dangerous, and that was that. Dowding was
thirty-two years old, but it never occurred to him to go against his father’s
wishes. He later said that “the only thing in my life that I held against my
father was that he wouldn’t let me go into the Royal Flying Corps as soon as I
got my ticket, because he thought flying was much too dangerous an occupation.”

But it was 1914, and in August, the Great War
broke out. While that too made life more dangerous for an army officer, even
for one in the artillery, “my father could not do a thing about it.” Although
Dowding was officially in the artillery, he was also a reservist in the RFC,
which called him up within a few hours of the outbreak of war. He was sent to
join a new squadron at a station commanded by Hugh “Boom Trenchard, and it was
there that he and Trenchard had their first run-in.

Trenchard was the first commander of the RFC,
and its architect. He built it from scratch, and like any good architect, he
had his own ideas. His nickname, “Boom,” came from the observation by his
comrades that the telephone seemed redundant when he used it. Speaking from
headquarters to the front lines, he could supposedly
be heard clearly if he just opened the window. The volume of his
voice was a measure of the clarity of his vision; he knew what he wanted and he
didn’t want to be bothered by anyone who had his own ideas. And here came
Dowding . . .

“We thought that the war would be over before
we crossed the Channel,” Dowding said. “I used to go and worry Trenchard about
twice a week about being posted to France.” Trenchard was not the kind of
commander who enjoyed being hassled by a junior, even if it was due to his
enthusiasm, and after several weeks of this, he sent Dowding to France—but as
an observer rather than as a pilot.

The airplanes in France carried no guns or
bombs and were used solely for observation (in the manner Dowding had pioneered
the previous year at the Staff College). The crew consisted of a pilot and an
observer, the latter being largely untrained. “It was by way of being a fearful
insult to send out a qualified pilot as an observer, but I was well enough
content.”

At first the pilots, both German and English,
used to wave to each other as they flew past on their missions, but soon
someone threw a rock instead of waving, and from there it quickly escalated to
shooting at each other. Dowding was one of the first. “I had a Mauser pistol
with a shoulder stump. It was quite a good weapon for the purpose, but I never
hit anything.” Nor did anyone else in those early days.

With two aircraft zooming in different
directions, it was nearly impossible to hit anything. It quickly became
apparent that the best way would be to point the airplane at the opponent and
fire straight ahead, but in that case, the bullets would hit your own
propeller. A Frenchman named Roland Garros took the first step when he fit his
propeller blades with steel deflectors, so that the bullets that didn’t slip
through the whirling blades would just be knocked away. This worked beautifully
for a while, but eventually the constant battering weakened the blades. When
one of them shattered, Garros was forced down behind German lines. Anthony
Fokker, a Dutch
airplane
designer working for the Germans, was shown Garros’s setup and quickly improved
it by installing an interrupter gear.

With this installed, the machine gun fired only
when the path between the spinning propeller blades was clear. Fokker’s new
monoplane quickly initiated the “Fokker scourge,” sweeping the skies clear of
British and French aircraft until one of the Fokkers crashed behind the Allied
lines and they were able to copy the system and restore the balance of power.

But now the war in the air had been irrevocably
changed. With the realization of the utility of their own observation planes
came the concomitant knowledge that the enemy’s were just as useful to them.
The solution was obvious: Shoot them down. The air became a killing ground.

Five

The observation planes were being shot down
like flies, which didn’t bother the generals too much. After all, they were
losing a thousand men a day in the trenches; war is hell, and that’s just the
way it is. But what did bother them was that for the observation planes to
bring back their observations, the observers had to return home, land, and hand
over their notes. So an observation plane shot down was a plane that didn’t
bring back any information.

By 1914, ships at sea were just beginning to be
equipped with radio sets. Eventually, it dawned on the Royal Flying Corps that
if they could fit radios into their airplanes the information could be sent
back while the observers were still up in the air, perhaps even over enemy
lines. Then, even if the plane were lost, the information would still be
received. In 1915, a year after being sent to France as an observer, Dowding
was posted as Flight Commander to the newly formed Wireless Squadron, which was
established to investigate the possible use of radio as a means of
communication between airplanes and the ground.

After several months of hard work, he
determined that the system would work. Dowding himself was the first person in
England—perhaps in the world—to sit in an airplane several thousand feet high
and talk to someone on the ground. But there were snags to be
hammered out, as in any new technology, and
the brass hats grew impatient. The War Office, ignoring Dowding’s progress
reports, finally informed the squadron that they had determined that “radio-telephonic
communication between air and ground was not practical,” and that was the end
of that.

After the Wireless Squadron was disbanded,
Dowding was sent to command No. 16 Squadron, part of the wing commanded by
Trenchard, who was now a Lieutenant Colonel and who hadn’t forgotten his
earlier annoyance with Dowding. Unfortunately, Dowding had barely taken up his
new position when a problem surfaced: The squadron was shipped the wrong
replacement propellers for their airplanes. He complained to Trenchard, who
impatiently reminded him that there was a war on and that he should improvise,
as any good commander in the field must. Dowding replied that in this case it
was impossible; the propellers simply didn’t fit. Trenchard retorted that he
had been informed on good authority that they could make the propellers fit by
simply drilling a larger central hole for the spinner. Dowding argued that
drilling would weaken the wooden shaft. Trenchard turned to his adjutant, who
had operated an automobile sales and repair agency in civilian life. The aide
smiled and said that this was nonsense, implying that Dowding was being
unreasonably obstructive. Banging his fist on the desk, Trenchard boomed out at
Dowding, telling him not to be so damned persnickety and to just get on with
it!

Airmen didn’t wear parachutes in those days. If
Trenchard was wrong and one of the propeller blades broke off in flight, the
unbalanced propeller would probably throw the plane into an uncontrollable spin
and the pilot would be killed. But there comes a time when you can no longer
argue with your superior officer. So Dowding returned to his aerodrome and had
the larger hole drilled. The mechanics then fit the modified propeller on his
plane, and Dowding, unwilling to risk the life of one of his pilots, took the
plane up himself to see if the propeller would break off. It didn’t, and he
landed in one piece, not quite sure if he
was relieved to be alive or irritated to be wrong.

No sooner had he landed than the telephone
rang. It was Trenchard, with as close to an apology as Boom was able to make,
telling him that he had been misinformed. Realizing after Dowding left his
office that he should talk to someone with more engineering background than his
adjutant, he had called in his engineering officer and asked his opinion. The
engineer had said that Dowding was right, the propeller would probably fall off
in flight. Brusquely, now, Trenchard told Dowding to forget about drilling the
hole; he would arrange for new propellers to be shipped. Understandably miffed
but less than diplomatic, Dowding expressed his regret that Trenchard had
preferred “to take the word of some half-baked motor salesman against mine.”
After a moment’s silence, Trenchard said that new propellers would be sent and
hung up.

By 1916, Dowding was himself a Lieutenant
Colonel and in command of a frontline fighter squadron. A poignant description
of him at that time is found in the autobiography of one of the fliers he
commanded. Attempting to disguise any real names, he refers to Stuffy Dowding
as “the Starched Shirt,” and describes their first meeting as the youngster
joined the squadron and was introduced to him in the mess: “The Starched Shirt
gave me a limp hand together with a tired smile, and if I had not been so
nervous myself I should have seen at once that, amongst other things, he was
cursed with shyness. After I had returned to my place dead silence reigned
which he attempted to break by speaking to everyone in turn. But it was always
with that same tired little smile, in a quiet, rather nasal voice, his eyes
half-veiled like a coy maiden’s, ready to turn hastily away from embarrassing
talkativeness. . . . And yet he was in many ways a good man. In the long run I
came to esteem him as much as any member of the squadron. He was efficient,
strict and calm; he had a sense of duty . . . and my heart warmed to him.”

The pilot, Duncan Grinnell-Milne, toward the
end of the book
gives an ironic
prophecy when he tells an even younger fighter pilot Dowding’s name: “‘Never
heard of him,’ murmured Shutters. And somehow I found his answer full of
meaning: the Starched Shirt was a General now, in charge of training or
something, a successful senior officer, not a bad fellow at heart. . . . Yet
the younger generation of war pilots had never heard of him’; his name would
not be remembered when the far-off days of peace brought airmen together to
talk over old exploits, his name would never figure upon the honours roll of
any squadron.”

Ironic, indeed, or perhaps merely an
illustration of how vaguely we can read the future. Neither Grinnell-Milne nor
the anonymous Shutters is remembered now, but wherever fighter pilots gather
today a toast is raised to the memory of the Starched Shirt, old Stuffy
Dowding.

His fame, however, would come later. In 1916
he was still serving under Trenchard, who was now a major general and in
command of the entire RFC in France. During the battle of the Somme, Dowding’s
squadron was decimated, and after the battle was over, he requested rest leave
for the battered survivors. Trenchard immediately said no.

Dowding renewed his request, although he was by
now well aware of Trenchard’s contumely. The classic film
Dawn Patrol
and an updated Second World War version,
Twelve O’clock High,
were based
on what happened next. The story is that of a commanding officer ordered to
send his men to their deaths day after day, of his attempts to give them a
rest, and of the relentless orders from his superiors to keep on going, day
after day after day.

Dowding’s request was denied. Again Dowding
repeated himself, and then again and again. Continually he badgered Trenchard,
protesting against the practice of sending new replacements directly into
battle, and demanding that his squadron be pulled out of the
line for a rest. The strain was growing too
much for his men, whose life expectancy was measured in weeks for the veterans
and quite literally in mere minutes for the fledglings, who were sent out from
England with insufficient training and only a few hours in the air. As they
desperately strove to stay in formation while simultaneously keeping their nose
on the horizon, the wings level, and the ball-and-needle balanced, they were
usually shot down in flames by the first wave of attackers, whom they never
even saw.

Dowding saw no sense in such madness. He did
not want to be one of those who, in Siegfried Sassoon’s words of 1918, “speed
glum heroes up the line to death.” Trenchard was not impressed by the poetry. “He
grew very angry,” Dowding said, “though our casualty rate was 100% a month.” As
one of Dowding’s junior officers later wrote, “It was out of his anxiety over
the severity of those losses that there developed in Dowding’s mind the intense
feelings that he came to have about casualties; and that, in part, was the
cause of the rift between him and Trenchard that came to perplex so many of us.”

Angry
is not a
strong enough word for Trenchard’s reaction. He stormed about his headquarters
and, as soon as he could, got Dowding promoted out of his hair and sent home in
charge of a training command.

In France the slaughter went on. Dowding no
longer had to give the daily orders to send men to their deaths, but he was
removed from that horror only on the surface. As commander of the Southern
Training Brigade back in England, he was continually ordered by Trenchard to
send more pilots to replace those being lost over the trenches of France.
Dowding replied that it took time to train a pilot properly. Trenchard replied
that he would have to forget the word
properly.
“There’s a war going on
over here!” he bellowed. “I need more pilots!” He ordered Dowding to cut the
training period and send him pilots, half-trained if necessary, but pilots of
whatever calibre, to fill the empty cockpits.