I think that it is important that this difference of opinion should be resolved as quickly as possible, since it seems to be leading to a good deal of bitterness not only between the two A.O.C.s but between the squadrons. This obviously cannot be allowed to go on and I think it is for you to put the matter right by an authoritative statement of your views. This could be far more satisfactory than for the Air Ministry to try and act as the referee.1
Tellingly, though, Sholto Douglas also observed in the same letter: ‘I have a feeling – which may not be justified – that Park has a subconscious aversion to another Group coming down and fighting in his area.’ This was the insinuation that shocked Dowding. The entire point about his system was that it was based on careful calculations, and on knowing exactly who was where; this alternative laid open the possibility of anarchy in the skies, a shoot-out free-for-all that Fighter Command at Bentley Priory would not easily be able to follow, preventing them from issuing effective orders for battle.
The ebb and flow of power is ceaselessly fascinating; there comes a point at which one is simply going to lose the argument, even if all the logic is in one’s favour. The Battle of Britain was a tremendous psychic shock to the nation, for all of the blithe insouciance relayed by the newspapers and the newsreels. The country was facing an enemy that had already forced it into a miserable and utterly humiliating retreat off the beaches of northern France; that same enemy was now soaring high above every night, dropping hundreds of tons of bombs on vulnerable civilians. The mass psychology of helpless anger was intense; which was why, even at the height of the Battle of Britain, the brave pilots were turned into something approaching a cult. And it was Douglas Bader who best expressed the outrage and the fury; it is wholly unsurprising that the Air Ministry was so receptive to his bellicosity. He was a hugely skilled, hugely courageous warrior; exactly what was needed to inspire the other pilots. Looking at the austere, unsmiling, late middle-aged figure of Dowding, perhaps his superiors in the Air Ministry subconsciously wondered if such a careful, fastidious figure was any use against an enemy so unprecedentedly ruthless. Even if all his arguments had been accepted, would Dowding really have survived?
There is, in the archives, a crisply written and deeply felt memo from Dowding to Winston Churchill, dated 24 October 1940 and headed simply ‘Prime Minister’. It was an impassioned defence against a hostile briefing that Churchill had received from the Air Ministry:
The Secretary of State’s minute contains a few inaccuracies. Only one of these is really important. This is the statement that it is an undoubted fact that time is saved in getting Squadrons into the air by filtering at Group Headquarters. If this were a fact, it would be a very valid argument in favour of decentralisation; but it is substantially untrue. Plots are ‘told’ to Group headquarters from my table without delay, and the average lag in the transmission of a plot is less than 15 seconds.
And who was the architect of this system? ‘The fact is,’ continued Dowding, ‘that the metaphorical edifice which you have seen in my Operations and Filter Room has been built up, brick by brick, under my own eye, during the past 4 years.’ After addressing several other points, in a tone that was unmistakably aggrieved, Dowding wrote: ‘The system which I have devised may not be perfect; but it cannot be improved by disruptive involvement on the part of people who do not understand it as a whole.’ He went on – via means of an appended diagram – to explain the positioning of 11 and 12 Groups, and the radio direction finding system, and how, if both groups spotted an enemy aeroplane on their systems, and if they both independently decided to act without telling each other, the result would be dangerous chaos. ‘I mention these, perhaps trivial, points to show what a number of things one has to think about when coming to a decision in these matters.
‘My main grievance, however,’ Dowding added, ‘is in the matter of the expenditure of my time in arguing with the Air Staff every intimate detail of my organisation. Surely a Commander-in-Chief should be left to manage his own affairs if the general result is satisfactory.’2
The protests were not enough; the foundations of Dowding’s command were being corroded beyond saving. For months and years, he had been kept dangling on the subject of his retirement. At the height of the Battle of Britain, the Air Ministry had the goodness not to stipulate a specific date at which they wanted him gone. But after his Air Ministry meeting with Leigh-Mallory and unexpected guest Bader, Dowding once more felt that chill, seemed to understand that any authority he had had was fast draining away. Even more of that command flowed away when he received a copy of a report by Harold Balfour, Under-Secretary of State for Air, which was sent on to the Air Ministry. Balfour had visited Bader’s station – Duxford – and had heard a series of complaints from the pilots there about Fighter Command: the way that they were never told in time about raids; the way that Air Vice Marshal Park’s 11 Group wanted to keep them out of the action; and the way that their carefully practised wing formations were all in vain as they were never given the chance ‘to shoot down Germans’. Worse yet was a suggestion that 11 Group pilots were suffering from damaged morale being forced day after day to take on incoming forces in such small numbers, knowing that their colleagues in 12 Group operated in much bigger packs.
There are times when one can argue with all the vigour in the world; but the people listening are firmly set, and are now only hearing the tone of one’s voice. And so when Dowding was forced to respond, he was lethally also forced to voice criticism of Douglas Bader, as well as the author of the report, Harold Balfour. Balfour himself had been a pilot of great skill. He was no pin-striped politician. Nonetheless, Dowding complained of ‘the question of an Under-Secretary of State listening to the accusations of a junior officer against the Air Officer Commanding Group, and putting them on paper in the pious hope that the officer will not get into trouble. Balfour has been in the service and ought to know better.’ Then there was Douglas Bader, who ‘whatever his other merits suffers from over-development of the critical faculties’.
Dowding added: ‘This might give an opportunity of moving young Bader to another station where he would be kept in better control. His amazing gallantry will protect him from disciplinary action if it can be possibly avoided.’3
But that amazing gallantry stood in sharp contrast to what must have looked like grey desiccation. Since then, all sorts of 11 Group pilots have come forward to testify that Bader was wrong; that their morale throughout the Battle of Britain remained high. James ‘Ginger’ Lacey, a pilot with the second-highest ‘score’ of hits against the Luftwaffe, later said: ‘If anyone’s morale should have been affected, it should have been ours, but it was not. We were tired, and frightened, and under strength, but we were never lacking in morale, and certainly not over the fact that we weren’t using big wings. Far from morale being affected by the lack of big wings, with the job we had to do in 11 Group, we preferred to be without them.’4
Further discussions took place to which Dowding was not invited; night after night, as the German bombing campaign over London echoed across to the hill on which Bentley Priory stood, he worked into the early hours, seeing off paperwork. It was in mid-November, against this backdrop of a city being ruthlessly smashed, that he received the telephone call from the Secretary of State for Air. As Dowding recalled years later:
He told me that I was to relinquish my command immediately. I asked what was meant by immediately, and I was told it would take effect within the next day or so. Since that was tantamount to my being given 24 hours notice, and verbally at that, I pointed out that it was perfectly absurd that I should be relieved of my command in this way unless it was thought that I had committed some major crime or something like that. But all I could get in reply was that the decision had been reached, and that was that, with no explanation for such a precipitate step being taken.5
It is sometimes said that, the term ‘fair’ is for the playground; and though it still seems shocking that Dowding could have been treated
so peremptorily, his wounded feelings have to be balanced against the day-to-day context. Over that weekend – 16 and 17 November – London and coastal towns in the southeast were once again pounded. ‘Hospitals, churches, chapels, a rest centre for the homeless … were all selected as targets,’ reported The Times. But over and above those cases was the now notorious bombing of Coventry on the night and early morning of 14/15 November. By the moonlit midnight, the night the fires were so intense that iron pipes melted and ran molten and orange along street gutters. There were hundreds of deaths, and hundreds of casualties: and because of the relatively small size of the city, the damage was much more focused. To this day, controversy about whether it was known in advance that the city was to be bombed continues to flicker. There was a theory – promulgated by an early book about the work of Bletchley Park – that the codebreakers had intercepted messages revealing that Coventry was to be the target. According to this theory, it might have been possible either to stage an evacuation or send in extra air reinforcements – but nothing could be done. For if the Luftwaffe saw that the town was prepared, then they would know that their codes had been cracked, and they would ramp up the security of Enigma to a point that would render it unbreakable in the future. The story has been dismissed consistently – Bletchley Park knew only that a town in the Midlands was to be targeted, and it became totally clear only when the bombers were approaching that it was Coventry, and not Derby or Birmingham, that had been selected.
Coventry was ringed with industry; but on that clear November night, the bombers reduced the historic town centre to a bloody inferno. By the Monday morning – when Air Chief Marshal Dowding knew that he was to be removed from his job – the thick smoke was still rising above the city. The King and Queen had been to visit. The broken bodies were still being accounted for.
And it was on that same Monday, 18 November, that – as often seemed to be the case with the beleaguered Air Chief Marshal – his new job was announced to the world via page four of that morning’s edition of The Times. ‘At the special request of the Minister for Aircraft Production,’ the report ran, ‘Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, who has held the post of Air Officer Commanding in Chief, Fighter Command, since July 1936, is being seconded to his department for special duty, in the United States of America.’ His successor was announced as Air Vice Marshal Sholto Douglas.
Readers must have been a shade puzzled, especially given that America was not yet in the war; what would Sir Hugh Dowding be doing over there at this crucial point? And why at the behest of Lord Beaverbrook? There was one more turn of the screw for Dowding: Sholto Douglas was not quite ready to assume command. Still reeling from his sacking, Dowding got home in the early hours that Monday morning to receive this letter:
The Secretary of State has asked me to consult you about the announcement and date of Douglas taking over from you. There has unfortunately been a slight leakage to the Press which we all much regret and therefore we want to announce a list of appointments … Douglas cannot be made available to take over until Monday week the 25th, and what I am asking is whether you would agree to carry on in command until the latter date.6
It was a resounding final insult: yet one more postponement after years of being told that his time was up. Yet it had a further shading of cruelty. The house in Stanmore was there at the disposal of the commander-in-chief. Dowding and his sister Hilda would have to move out – very quickly – to make way for Sholto Douglas.
What did the Prime Minister make of it all? Such internal upheavals and furious politicking were not unknown. Just months before, General Lord Gort had been replaced as commander-in-chief of the British forces evacuated from Dunkirk; he was sent off to oversee matters of training. A little later on in the war, Commander Alistair Denniston, director of the Bletchley Park codebreaking operation, would be bumped sideways to another department back in London while his younger, more aggressive deputy Edward Travis took over. Dowding met with Churchill not long afterwards, and the Prime Minister asked him how he had felt about being replaced. There was a curious sense – clearly fostered by Churchill – that he had known nothing of these behind-the-scenes conflicts, and that moreover he was powerless to interfere in such matters.
Yet it is inconceivable that he knew nothing of the distaste for Dowding in the Air Ministry. And psychologically, from what we know of Churchill the warrior – from the headstrong adventuring journalist onwards – it is fair to speculate that he would instinctively have sided with the gung-ho Trafford Leigh-Mallory and the roaring Douglas Bader. Dowding never made any secret of the deep hurt he felt. Later he said: ‘That is what I have never been able to understand. Everything seemed to go by the board: courtesy, good manners, the customary practices, the drill or procedure or whatever you like to call it. The whole way in which it was done was so hole-in-the-corner, just as if … well … as if something had to be hushed up … So many times I have asked myself why this extraordinary situation was forced upon me.’7
Squadron Leader Douglas Bader later expressed his feelings on the way that events turned. He was, he let his biographer know, ‘deeply upset’. But the sacking was reconfigured as a ‘reshuffle’.8
The same fate was visited upon Air Vice Marshal Keith Park the following week; to his own horror, he found himself being replaced by Trafford Leigh-Mallory, the group commander who had in his own view done so little to support him. Park had been working on the technical issues surrounding night fighting, and any chance that there might have been of taking on the Luftwaffe under cover of perfect darkness. Different planes – Beaufighters – would take the place of Hurricanes and Spitfires with their all too visible exhausts. The tactics would have to be different too. Yet for Park, all of this came to a juddering halt; he was told that he was to be relieved of his command. He later wrote to the Commander of 13 Group, Rand Saul: ‘As I was told that the only reason for my leaving 11 Group was because I had carried the baby long enough for one man and was due for a rest from the responsibility, I do not quite see why I should be stuffed into a very busy office job at the Air Ministry.’9
Given the place that he now occupies in history, the treatment of Keith Park is startling in its abruptness. He himself recalled that his successor Leigh-Mallory did not even ‘attend to the usual formality’ when it came to one man handing command to another. Just a week or so later, though, Park was swiftly honoured: he travelled to Buckingham Palace to be invested as a Companion of the Most Honourable Order of the Bath. Park’s pilots appeared to be unified in their astonishment at the idea of him moving on. It was the Hornchurch station that provided the most heartfelt send-off, not least because of Park’s friendship with Group Captain Cecil Bouchier, who wrote to tell him that Park first coming to 11 Group meant that ‘we gained the one man above all others in our Service who by his own infinite efforts and personal example would not only ensure ultimate victory but inspire it.’
Group Captain Peter Townsend was astonished by events as well. Writing of Dowding and Park, he said: ‘The two victors thus realised the sad truth: that men are seldom grateful for their saviours. But in this case, the British people, themselves under heavy fire from the enemy, could be forgiven for not knowing they owed their salvation to Dowding and Park, especially as both men had remained in the background throughout the battle.’10
He went on to quote Park’s comments given a few years later: ‘To my dying day I shall feel bitter at the base intrigue which was used to remove Dowding and myself as soon as we had won the Battle of Britain.’
Park had been thinking confidently ahead to a ‘spring offensive’; all the warmest words and honours could not conceal the anger that he was to nurse for decades afterwards. The work at Bentley Priory and Uxbridge, and at the fast-multiplying stations across the country, would take on quite a different flavour. Douglas Bader was transferred to 11 Group and on top was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. It in part made up for his frustration that the RAF seemed unable to prevent the nightly onsl
aught, the bombing raids in the dark. Technology was evolving too; Bader’s squadron was getting used to the new generation of Hurricane Mk 2s. Paul Brickhill wrote that these new planes brought out a kind of glee in Bader. They had ‘more power, were faster, could climb higher and all had the new and better VHF radio. Now in the routine of unexciting readiness, Bader sometimes swashbuckled about, jabbing his thumb nostalgically on an imaginary gun-button with an accompanying “raspberry” to signify the rattling guns.’11
It is greatly to Bader’s credit that even after the events of the last few weeks and months, that essentially exuberant spirit could not be repressed. And with the Battle of Britain over, life for the pilots and for the hundreds of WAAFs working alongside them was to take on a range of different dimensions as well.
Chapter Seventeen
A Dog Called Heinkel
Even the most extraordinary lives can come to seem normal; and in the war, the women as well as the men adapted quickly to the demands being placed upon them. At seventeenth-century Rudloe Manor in Wiltshire, there were moments of high comedy and irrepressible spirits. Patricia Clark and her coterie of privately educated young women were especially amused at the way, in the early days, the command system worked. ‘The men were very lax with us,’ says Mrs Clark. ‘Think about it – think about a forty-year-old man, a regular officer, in charge of the camp. He suddenly gets this English boarding school girl on a charge in front of him. What’s he supposed to do?’ There was an awkwardness; the officers didn’t feel able to bark orders at genteel young ladies. But there were also wider questions of rules, and when they could be bent or broken.
The Secret Life of Fighter Command Page 23