A Summer Bright and Terrible (7 page)

Dowding refused. New pilots, even with a full
period of training,
were no
match for experienced aviators in their Fokkers. To cut the training program,
to send them over without the best training he could give them, would be
tantamount to murder. He would not do it. Trenchard’s answer came booming back
across the Channel: “If you won’t give me the bloody recruits, give me their
instructors!” Dowding refused angrily. To do so would destroy even the
possibility of giving the chicks a decent chance of life over there. He was in
command of training, and he would run the command in his own way! He very
quickly then learned the facts of life, as an immediate order came in from
Headquarters, Royal Flying Corps, transferring nearly all his instructors to
the front. He was left with just one for each training squadron.

This was disastrous, Dowding railed. The
instructors would soon be killed in France, and with only one instructor per
squadron, the flow of new pilots would be so drastically curtailed that the RFC
would soon cease to exist. But Trenchard was the power in the new service, and
the order was repeated. So Dowding made one last effort, writing to Trenchard’s
Senior Personnel Staff Officer (SPSO) and asking him to intercede, to explain
that the training brigade simply couldn’t afford to lose its instructors. But
the SPSO hadn’t reached his exalted position by being blind and deaf. He knew
better than to try to explain to Trenchard anything that the boss didn’t want
to hear explained. Instead, he showed him Dowding’s letter, and the resulting
boom was heard clear across the Channel, frightening the gulls from Dover to
Brighton and unborn children in their mothers’ wombs. “That finished me with
Trenchard,” Dowding realized.

Six

In the summer of 1940, all the hopes of the
free world would hang by the threads strung together by Dowding to frustrate
and foil the Nazi Huns. During the late 1930s, first as director of research
and then as head of Fighter Command, he would form the technical weapons, the
support facilities, the new generation of fighters, and the interlocking
operational support to make possible a defence against the bomber—a defence
that everyone else thought was impossible. Alone among his colleagues, he would
fight and argue and somehow put it all together, barely in the nick of time.
Looking back today at all the other senior commanders of the Royal Air Force
and His Majesty’s government, it is impossible to identify anyone else who
could have done it.

He was, as a contemporary general put it, “a
difficult man, a self opinionated man, a most determined man, and a man who
knew more than anybody about all aspects of aerial warfare.”

Some twenty years earlier, when the First World
War ended in 1918, he had very nearly been drummed out of the service.

As the War to End All Wars came to its
flawed conclusion, the impetus to close down the armed forces was strong. Boom
Trenchard emerged as the strongman of the Royal Flying Corps. Taking office as
Chief of Air Staff when it was reformed as the Royal Air Force (RAF), he saved
it from a bewildering array of parliamentary cost cuts, and he did so by
considering who was essential and who was not.

And of all the nonessential officers in that
war just ended, Hugh “Stuffy” Dowding was high on his list of those to be
discarded. Kicked out of France by Trenchard, he had at least survived the war,
while most of his contemporaries had not. In consequence, by 1918 he was one of
Trenchard’s most senior officers, but soon after the cessation of hostilities,
he was informed by mail that “your services will no longer be required in the
Royal Air Force.” He was dismissed from the RAF, with orders to return to the
Garrison Artillery.

In light of his steadily worsening relationship
with Trenchard, he had not been expecting promotion, but this sudden dismissal
was an unexpected and most serious blow. The officers of the Garrison
Artillery, with whom he had trained in the early years, had served in that
service throughout the war and had gained experience and reputation there,
while Dowding had been away playing with airplanes. So although he had
seniority in the RAF, he had none in the artillery. Luckily for him, despite
Trenchard’s animosity, there were a few highly placed RAF officers who took up the
battle on his behalf—though he didn’t make it easy, as for example in the case
of the court-martial of one of the officers under his command.

Dowding was then commanding No. 1 Group when he
received orders from the Air Ministry to bring court-martial charges against
the young officer, a fighter pilot named Sholto Douglas. A fatal accident had
occurred at the Flying Training School, which was part of Dowding’s group, and
the Court of Inquiry found that it was due to faulty maintenance of the
aircraft. Because the commanding officer of the school had been off base at the
time, the Air Ministry decided that the Chief Flying Instructor, Douglas, was
to be held responsible.

Instead of immediately convening the
court-martial, Dowding
investigated the situation
himself. Quickly concluding that Douglas had done nothing wrong, he refused to
proceed with the court-martial. The Air Ministry, he said, “were being stupid.”
His stubborn stand prevailed, and the future Marshal of the Royal Air Force
Lord Douglas of Kirtleside had his career saved. (On an interesting note, when
Dowding was summarily fired after he won the Battle of Britain, it was largely
Sholto Douglas’s doing. What goes around comes around, they say, but sometimes
it comes back with reverse spin.)

Despite this perfect example of Dowding’s
stubbornness and the animosity it naturally begat in the Air Ministry, his
friends eventually prevailed on Trenchard to recognize that his stubbornness
always manifested itself as concern for those serving under him, never for his
own advantage. Furthermore, they argued, he had demonstrated a devotion to duty
and a level of competence far above the usual, and finally, with Trenchard’s
grudging acceptance, he was granted a permanent commission as Group Captain in
the Royal Air Force.

He settled down again into the comfortable life
of a peacetime officer, and at the age of thirty-six, Stuffy Dowding fell in
love. Clarice Vancourt was a gentle and caring soul, a nurse, and a cousin to
one of his brother officers. Somehow she saw in this inarticulate, reserved
officer a shared gentleness, a soul longing to care for and to be cared for,
and she managed to communicate with him in a manner beyond words. They married
soon after, had a son the first year, and in the second year she suddenly took
sick. Before anyone had time to realize how serious it was, she died. She was
with him so suddenly, coming at a time when he had begun to think that such
things were not for him, and then just as suddenly she was gone. His unmarried
sister Hilda moved in with him to take care of the child, and Stuffy buried
himself in work.

There are those for whom the life of
romance is not intended. For Dowding it had been a brief excursion into another
world. His son would grow up to be a fighter pilot under his command; his wife,
so soon lost, would return to comfort him in his worst time of need. But he
knew nothing of that as yet. He breathed a prayer of thanks for having been
briefly blessed, a sigh of regret for the necessities of his fate, and returned
to the austere life of a bachelor in His Majesty’s service.

His stubbornness never abated, for he never
recognized it as stubbornness. Unlike most of his fellows and superiors, he was
always open to new ideas; he took great pleasure in catching a glimpse of
possibilities dimly seen. But it never occurred to him to defer to those who
outranked him, simply because of their rank. It never occurred to him to give
up, or indeed to compromise in the face of an official decision that he felt
was wrong.

Despite this, his integrity and competence
shone through, and year by year he advanced through the ranks. Though Trenchard
continued to regard him with suspicion for a while, he finally began to
recognize the hard work and clear thinking that Stuffy showed, and once he came
around he came completely. “I don’t often make mistakes,” he told Dowding, “but
I made one with you.” By 1930, with Trenchard’s blessing, he had been knighted,
promoted to Air Marshal, and given a place on the Air Council as the Member for
Supply and Research.

It could not have been a more suitable
appointment. Throughout the 1920s, the prevailing view among both members of
the government and senior commanders of the RAF was that all available funds
should be used to build more and more bombers since no defence against them was
possible. Alone in the corridors of power, Dowding began to wonder if that were
true. Alone among his peers, he decided that it wasn’t necessarily so.

It was a ridiculous position to take, and if
you or I had been there at the time, we would have regarded him—as so many
did—as a fruitcake. At least I would have, for that was the reaction I had to a
remarkably similar situation: the silliness of President Reagan some fifty
years later in the matter of Star Wars.

The first I heard of Star Wars was in 1983,
when the great physicist Edward Teller visited the physics department at the
University of Miami. In the course of his seminar, he mentioned that we no
longer had to worry about Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Afterward, at lunch, I asked him what he meant. He said that he and several
other scientists had worked out a defence against the missiles, but that it was
a secret that President Reagan would soon announce. Teller was a physicist of
renown and I tended to trust him, so you can imagine my shock when Reagan made
his public announcement a couple of months later.

Consider the Star Wars situation during those
Cold War days. The (Soviet) enemy has intercontinental ballistic missiles
capable of delivering multiple nuclear warheads to any spot on earth. These
missiles are released from remote Siberian outposts or from submarines anywhere
in the worlds oceans; rocket-propelled, the missiles climb vertically into the
stratosphere and then arc over, travelling well above the altitude and beyond
the speed of any defending fighter planes. Arriving over enemy (American)
territory, they release their multiple warheads, which then plunge down at
speeds of many thousands of miles per hour, far beyond the capabilities of our
defenders to catch up to them and destroy them.

Enter Star Wars. We position satellites
overhead in continuous position to monitor the sky. They are equipped with
laser guns; the laser energy, travelling at the speed of light, is fast enough
to easily catch the missiles and destroy them.

What’s the catch? First, we do not have the
technology to put satellites up there and keep them serviced for years, perhaps
decades, to be ready to react within seconds when a missile launch is detected.
Second, we cannot put up enough satellites to react to the thousands of
warheads the Soviets are capable of sending at us in hundreds of missiles.
Third, a laser must lock on to its target for a finite time to deliver enough
energy to destroy it, and this our lasers cannot do. Nor do we have any other
weapon capable of knocking out the missiles. Finally, even if we could someday
solve all these problems, the Star Wars system by its very conception is
designed to destroy weapons zooming through the stratosphere. The Soviets could
then simply use low-flying cruise missiles to zip under our defences, while any
terrorist nation could use even simpler, cheaper means of delivering nukes:
suitcases lugged by people on foot, perhaps, or automobiles crossing our
infinitely long and easily penetrable borders.

The system just could not work, and to this
day, it hasn’t, despite the continuous inflow of governmental moneys. Nor, in
the 1930s, could Dowding’s. First, the British fighters couldn’t catch the
German bombers, which could speed along at upward of 250 miles an hour, faster
than the fastest British fighters. Second, even if the fighters could manage to
reach and fly above the bombers, so as to use the speed of a dive to catch
them, the fighter planes carried only two machine guns, which fire low-calibre
ammunition intermittently through the propeller. The fighters wouldn’t be able
to hold a bomber in their sights long enough to deliver enough bullets to bring
it down. Third, they couldn’t manage to be above the bombers when arriving in
the first place, because the bombers wouldn’t be sighted until they crossed the
coast. At that point, the enemy’s primary target, London, would only be ten
minutes’ flying time away, whereas it would take the British fighters nearly
twenty minutes to reach the operational altitude of the bombers.

So every other RAF staff officer’s belief that,
as Stanley Baldwin put it in a 1932 radio address to the nation, “the bomber
will always get through,” is not only understandable but correct. The only defence
against being bombed is to have enough bombers to rain even greater destruction
on the enemy, and so to deter them.

Why on earth can’t Dowding see that?

Well, there is one difference in the two
situations. In the 1930s, bombers are the only threat. Dowding doesn’t have to
worry about cruise missiles or spies sneaking nuclear bombs into the country,
since neither cruise missiles nor nuclear weapons have yet been invented. His
only enemy is the bomber. He is free to concentrate on stopping the bombers,
and his powers of concentration are enormous. For “powers of concentration,”
read “stubbornness,” and you have the opinion of everyone else in the Royal Air
Force.