With Wings Like Eagles: A History of the Battle of Britain

by Michael Korda

  Nobody could have put the situation in simpler or more brutal terms, and there is no doubt to whom Dowding was referring when he wrote, “not one fighter will be sent across the Channel however urgent and insistent the appeals for help may be.” His letter made an instant convert of Newall—no mean feat, considering the degree of enmity between the two men—but it is hard to judge what effect it had on Churchill, who does not even mention it in Their Finest Hour, since it would have contradicted his statements that Dowding told him he needed only twenty-five squadrons. In the end, Churchill continued to press for more Hurricanes to be sent to France at the request of the French, but with increasing reluctance and alarm, while Dowding came up with the idea of basing the Hurricanes in southern England and flying them over to makeshift airfields in France for the day as a kind of sop to the French. Neither was satisfied, and the drain on Dowding’s stock of Hurricanes continued until France surrendered.

  In Their Finest Hour, Churchill is lavish with praise for Dowding—even, perhaps, suspiciously overlavish—but given what was to come on the subject of Dowding’s future in the RAF one senses a carefully orchestrated attempt on Churchill’s part to disguise a certain degree of dislike and resentment toward a man who not only had contradicted him but had turned out to be right. For Dowding’s estimate of the number of squadrons he needed was exactly right, and even then he won the battle by only the very narrowest of margins. He had, as he surely guessed when he asked to present his case to the War Cabinet—again, Churchill confounds matters by suggesting that he invited Dowding to attend, whereas, in fact, it was Dowding who had insisted on being there—forfeited his future in the Royal Air Force. He would never become a Marshal of the Royal Air Force, the ultimate “five-star” rank, despite the personal intervention of the king; nor would he hold another active command. His enemies would be promoted over his head, and even his strategy for winning the Battle of Britain would be questioned officially, as if he had lost the battle rather than winning what was perhaps the most important victory of the war. Yet despite all this, it is Dowding who is rightly remembered as the man who won Britain’s first victory in World War II, and who saved Britain from invasion. On a bronze plaque honoring him at Bentley Priory, his headquarters, the last paragraph reads,

  TO HIM THE PEOPLE OF BRITAIN AND OF THE FREE WORLD OWE LARGELY THE WAY OF LIFE AND THE LIBERTIES THAT THEY ENJOY TODAY.13

  In that sense, at any rate, it is “Stuffy” Dowding who had the last word.

  CHAPTER 6

  Round One:

  “Der Kanalkampf”

  With the return of more than 250,000 British soldiers from Dunkirk, there was a short interlude in the war. That is not to say, of course, that people were not dying—at sea, the Royal Navy and the German submarine fleet sparred; in France the fighting would continue until the French surrendered; in the air German and British aircraft fought when they saw each other; in Poland forced labor camps for Jews and frequent shootings and pogroms marked the first stages of the as yet unnamed “final solution.” But both the Germans and the British were frantically (or systematically) preparing for what each knew was the next act of the war: the Battle of Britain.

  The Germans first had to organize the military occupation and political control of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and most of northern France; and the Luftwaffe had to begin moving two entire Luftflotten—General Albert Kesselring’s Luftflotte 2 and General Hugo Sperrle’s Luftflotte 3, a total of nearly 3,000 aircraft and all the personnel, equipment, and supplies needed to maintain them—forward to new airfields, a mammoth task. (Luftflotte 5, commanded by Colonel General H.-J. Stumpff, was installed in Norway and was intended to bomb the north of England.) On the British side, the fighters and fighter pilots returning from France had to be refitted as squadrons, and the aircraft lost between May 10 and the completion of the Dunkirk evacuation had to be replaced—a total of 453 of Dowding’s precious fighters had been destroyed in combat, in accidents, or on the ground.

  This was the period in which the British prepared themselves for invasion—the period of the Local Defence Volunteers (as noted earlier, Churchill would shortly produce for them the more inspiring name Home Guard) training with antiquated weapons on the village greens of southern England and harassing motorists at improvised roadblocks; the period in which the troops who had returned from Dunkirk were rearmed, reintegrated into their regiments, and transformed back into “real soldiers” with shiny boots and gleaming brass by drill sergeants and sergeant-majors at regimental depot parade grounds all over the country; the period in which children by the thousands were evacuated to the countryside, or, in some cases, across the Atlantic,* in anticipation of the battle to come. Rumors spread fast and wide—that German parachute troops had descended in Belgium disguised as nuns to seize or blow up vital points (this rumor prompted policemen and busybodies to harass puzzled and indignant nuns all over southern England); that the bodies of thousands of German soldiers had floated ashore onto the Channel beaches after a failed invasion attempt; that German spies had placed numbered metal markers on the telephone poles leading inland from the beaches to guide the German invading forces toward London (these were of course the GPO’s standard tin tags identifying the poles as post office property). Road signs were hastily removed, to the great inconvenience of travelers, and a brash and newly promoted lieutenant-general, Bernard Montgomery, first came to the attention of the prime minister by suggesting that his corps should be held as a mobile reserve and transported to where it was needed in confiscated tour buses when the invasion came.

  President Roosevelt had responded politely with a discouraging message about the fifty destroyers Churchill had requested—the fact was, and Churchill sensed it better than anyone, that although the “miracle of Dunkirk” had won guarded admiration in America, it was nevertheless a defeat. Backing Britain was still a bet against the odds. From London, the United States’ ambassador, Joseph Kennedy, sent home to Washington deeply pessimistic messages about Britain’s chances of survival,* and despite Churchill’s rhetoric there was widespread doubt throughout the neutral world that the British could or would resist Hitler when the crunch came. Britain needed not only American destroyers, but rifles, ammunition, steel, oil, aviation gas, aircraft of all kinds, beef from Argentina, wheat from the Midwest, and above all unlimited credit with which to purchase all these things and more. The only way to secure that credit was with a victory—an evacuation, however heroic and successful, would not persuade hardheaded bankers, businessmen, politicians, and treasury officials to loosen their purse strings. The British Army was clearly in no position to provide one, and the world at large was apt to take for granted any victory at sea by the Royal Navy. The only people in a position to provide a convincing display of the British will to fight—and, more important, to deliver a victory—were Dowding’s young fighter pilots, his “chicks,” as he liked to call them, of whom he had at this time just over 1,000.

  To put this in perspective, in the early days of June 1940, when the attention of the entire world was turned toward Britain, its survival depended primarily on four things: (1) Dowding’s 1,000 “chicks,” (2) the daily output from the factories of enough new Hurricanes and Spitfires (and the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine which powered them) to make up Fighter Command’s losses, (3) the efficiency of Dowding’s “system,” and (4) the validity of his strategy.

  This fourth point was to become a fiercely controversial issue between Dowding and his critics, no doubt in part as a result of his reluctance to communicate or share with others what he had in mind. He took it for granted that the Germans would outnumber the forces at his disposal (in this he was perfectly correct), and therefore did not want to fight big air battles, which might give the enemy a chance to calculate the real strength of Fighter Command. His approach was that of a skilled poker player—he intended to bluff the Germans by never revealing what he had in his hand. In order to achieve this, Fighter Command would attack them in squadron stren
gth, an endless series of lethal pinpricks that would inflict on the German bomber force a rate of loss it could not afford to sustain in the long run, while at the same time allowing the Germans to believe that Fighter Command was much weaker than it was. He did not want a big battle, a kind of aerial Trafalgar or Waterloo; he wanted to wage a war of attrition that would keep the Germans guessing. Göring’s inflated overconfidence was an asset Dowding counted on: he wanted the Germans to think that Fighter Command was at the end of its resources, so they would keep on coming—and continue to take heavier losses than they could replace. He also wanted his pilots to concentrate on the German bombers, not the fighters, because the bombers were more expensive to produce and carried a highly trained crew of four, much harder to replace than a single fighter pilot. In short, Dowding’s strategy was to surprise and baffle the Germans—it was his answer to the unavoidable fact that the Germans, when they came, would outnumber him in men and machines. Above all, he wanted to hide from the Germans the fact that radar and ground control were Fighter Command’s most important assets.

  Unfortunately for Dowding, whose tactics (and character) in some respects resembled those of General Mikhail Kutuzov, the heroic historical figure who appears in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, neither his colleagues at the Air Ministry nor some of his senior commanders nor many of his pilots understood what he had in mind. His intention was to bleed the Luftwaffe to death, not to prevent it from bombing England, which he had not the strength to do—and not to encourage fighter-to-fighter combat, which was a waste of men and machines.

  The difference between Dowding’s strategy and what the War Cabinet and the Air Staff wanted became apparent as soon as the Luftwaffe took over airfields in northern France and launched a series of initially small-scale attacks against British coastal convoys sailing through the Channel. The Germans had moved their Stukas to the new airfields first—with its fixed landing gear and robust construction the Ju 87 was easy to maintain and to fly off relatively primitive grass airfields, and of course was ideal for providing the equivalent of aerial artillery for the German army. It was also, at least in theory, the perfect weapon for sinking British coastal steamers and Royal Navy destroyers as they plodded through the English Channel in small convoys on their way from Belfast, Liverpool, Cardiff, or Bristol to London. Dowding would have preferred to eliminate the convoys altogether, which in his opinion would merely have put a somewhat greater strain on the British railway system, rather than to waste precious fighters and fighter pilots defending them, but here he confronted a firmly entrenched element of British pride going all the way back to the days of the Spanish Armada and beyond—neither the prime minister nor the Royal Navy could contemplate conceding control of the Channel to the Germans. Whatever value the convoys had—the bulk of what they carried was coal—there could be no question of allowing the Germans to stop them. Attempts to equip the convoys of small, slow steamships with barrage balloons trailing long wires did not discourage the German attacks on them, and Churchill complained that the precautions taken for the safety of the convoys were “utterly ineffectual”—indeed when one of them lost thirteen ships out of twenty-one, he described it, with pardonable exaggeration, as “one of the most lamentable episodes of the naval war as it has so far developed.”1

  As the two German Luftflotten settled into their new airfields, the Kanalkampf heated up. For the Luftwaffe, it was both a trial of strength and a good way of training crews for what was coming. The single-engine Ju 87s were soon joined by larger twin-engine bombers like the Ju 88s, and covered by an escort of Messerschmitt fighters, and by early summer a considerable air battle was taking place every day over the English Channel.

  This was a source of concern to Dowding—the German airfields were so close to the Channel that there was not enough time for his radar operators to give the fighter squadrons of No. 11 Group sufficient advance warning to be useful, and the German bombers often flew too low for the radar beams to pick them up, and also took the opportunity of carrying out hit-and-run rooftop raids on English coastal towns. This meant that Dowding’s fighters had to fly patrols over the Channel, and that the fights inevitably degenerated into disorganized aerial brawls at low altitude, wild “mix-ups,” as British pilots described them, just the kind of uncontrolled chaos Dowding most wanted to avoid. The Stukas had at first been easy prey—they were slow, and when they pulled out of a dive they were completely vulnerable to fighters attacking from above—but as the Messerschmitts began to protect them from above, British losses started to mount up. During June and July Fighter Command lost ninety-six aircraft, and the Germans 227.* The Germans were actually losing more than twice as many aircraft attacking the coastal convoys as Fighter Command was losing defending them, but that was no consolation to Dowding, who wanted to build up his strength, not to dissipate it protecting coal.

  Some hard lessons were learned on both sides. One was that the Germans were far better provided with emergency equipment in case they came down in the sea. German aircrews not only had rubber dinghies that rose to the surface and inflated automatically but also had bright yellow flying helmets that, along with fluorescent dye, made their airmen more visible in the water to the crews of German rescue seaplanes. Many British pilots, by contrast, would die of hypothermia, bobbing in the sea in their Mae West jackets within sight of the bathing beaches of southern England. Air Vice-Marshal Park finally managed to secure a few Lysander reconnaissance aircraft to operate with the eighteen motor launches that should have been in service long before, but the rescue of airmen from the sea remained one area in which the Luftwaffe continued to act with more efficiency and apply greater resources than the RAF.

  As for the Germans, they could hear the calm, steady voices of the fighter controllers on the ground talking to the British fighter pilots, and they concluded that each squadron of British fighters was directly controlled. In short, they assumed that the organization of British squadrons was both local and too rigid for squadron commanders in the air to make tactical decisions on their own, exactly the opposite of what was true—and above all they failed to guess the degree to which the whole system depended on radar and was centralized at Bentley Priory under Dowding’s constant supervision. Since Dowding deliberately kept his attacks small, the Germans also jumped to the conclusion, early on, that the British had far fewer fighters than was really the case, and that these would soon be worn down to an insignificant number.

  The air battles over the Channel gave Dowding a chance to rethink his strategy. Clearly, the situation that had faced Fighter Command in 1938 and 1939 was radically altered, because the Germans now held the French side of the Channel. The short distance from the German airfields there to London meant that German bombers could carry their maximum capacity of bombs, vastly increasing their “weight of bombing,” to which would have to be added the bomb loads of Stumpff’s 129 bombers in Luftflotte 5, in Norway, although they would have to attack without fighter cover, since the distance was too great for the Bf 109s to accompany them across the North Sea.

  Dowding therefore faced a number of serious new problems, with very little time to correct them. First of all, the prewar assumption that the thrust of the German attacks would come from northern Germany over the Netherlands in a westerly direction was no longer true. The bulk of the attacks would now be coming almost directly north from Belgium and France instead, and at a much closer range. This necessitated an expansion and a quick reconfiguration of Dowding’s radar coverage, which would also have to be extended to the north of England and Scotland to cover attacks from Norway, particularly those aimed at the Home Fleet’s vital anchorages in the north. It also required the refinement of his plan for dividing the United Kingdom into independent but mutually supportive Fighter Groups. There were now four Groups: No. 13 Group in the north, with its headquarters near Newcastle; No. 12 Group in the Midlands, with its headquarters near Nottingham; No. 11 Group to cover the southeast of England (including London) from a line drawn fr
om Southampton to Bury Saint Edmunds, with its headquarters at Uxbridge; and No. 10 Group to cover the southwest of England and Wales, with its headquarters near Bristol. Since Dowding anticipated that the major German attack would be made around the greater London area, Group No. 11—under the command of Air Vice-Marshal Keith R. Park, DSO, DFC, a New Zealander—was the strongest of the groups in numbers of squadrons, aircraft, and airfields. To Park’s north, No. 12 Group was commanded by Air Vice-Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, CB, DSO (a brother of the ill-fated British mountain climber who had become a national hero when he died attempting to climb Everest). Leigh-Mallory, a pugnacious and independent-minded commander, was no friend of Park’s, nor, when the time came, particularly loyal or even obedient to Dowding.

  The boundaries of each group were drawn with great care, and had been carefully thought out by Dowding. They might be invisible from the air, and at 300 miles per hour it was easy enough for pilots to overlook them, but they served a purpose in his plan and he did not intend them to be ignored when the serious fighting began. In this he was optimistic, or perhaps naive—certainly, throughout his career Dowding expected (and deserved) more loyalty than he got.

  The most significant exception was, of all people, the dynamic and widely distrusted press tycoon Lord Beaverbrook, millionaire owner of the Daily Express and the Evening Standard, whom Churchill had made Minister of Aircraft Production over the strong objections of the king (and the queen). “The Beaver,” as he was known to those close to him (Evelyn Waugh caricatured him triumphantly as “Lord Copper,” owner of “the Daily Beast,” in his novel Scoop), was one of Churchill’s most loyal friends, and one of the very few people on whose advice Churchill counted in both his political and his private life. (Another was Brendan Bracken, against whom the king and queen had raised even stronger and more outraged objections when Churchill eventually made him Minister of Information.*) Beaverbrook was mischievous, temperamental, shrewd, demanding, mercurial, capable of great charm when it suited him and brutal when it did not, and endowed with a sharp, boisterous sense of humor (though largely at the expense of other people), as well as being a world-class hypochondriac, gossip, and womanizer. He ran his newspaper empire like a dictator. William Maxwell (“Max”) Aitken was by birth a Canadian (hence his choice of Beaverbrook for his title). He had been a power behind the scenes in British politics since before World War I, and had made and unmade prime ministers, amassing a huge fortune and many enemies along the way. Beaverbrook and Bracken, both adventurers from humble (and in Bracken’s case, somewhat mysterious) backgrounds who had risen to wealth and power in England, were generally described by more conventional Conservatives, whose instinctive loyalty was still owed to Neville Chamberlain, as “gangsters.” (Anthony Eden and the circle around him were known derisively by the same kind of people as Churchill’s “glamour boys.”)