With Wings Like Eagles (13 page)

The meeting began with Air Chief Marshal Newall in the chair, and those present included the First Sea Lord, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff (i.e., the three service chiefs), General Hastings Ismay as Churchill’s chief of staff in the latter’s novel dual capacity as prime minister and minister of defense, as well as a good number of their deputies and staff officers. At ten-thirty the meeting was briefly adjourned, and almost immediately resumed with Churchill himself in the chair. He reported on his telephone conversation earlier that morning with Reynaud, and added that the French prime minister had requested ten more fighter squadrons, to be sent to France immediately. At this point, Dowding, who had been waiting outside, was brought into the meeting, along with the Vice-Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Richard Peirse.

Dowding was not a complete stranger to Churchill—for one thing, he had commanded four squadrons of RAF bombers sent to Iraq in 1920, shortly after Churchill, T. E. Lawrence, and Gertrude Bell had created that country by drawing a line on a map of the former Ottoman Empire in a hotel suite in Cairo, to demonstrate that the warring Iraqi clans, sects, and tribes (united only in their dislike of British rule and of the Hashemite, Sunni king the British were about to impose on them) could be more cheaply and effectively subdued by bombing them than by maintaining a large and expensive garrison of British and Indian troops there. Since then, Dowding had clashed from time to time before the war with Churchill’s prickly, imperious scientific adviser Frederick Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell), stubbornly rejecting some of his (and Churchill’s) pet ideas on air defense. (For example, Dowding had defended radar in its infancy against Lindemann’s mistaken belief that infrared rays were a better way of detecting aircraft.)

Stubborn, stiff, argumentative, unyielding, and of course as “stuffy” as his nickname promised, Dowding would not normally have been the kind of man who appealed to Churchill. Churchill’s admirers always claim that he was a good listener, and there was some truth to that, but having listened, he expected to win the other person over to his side of the argument. Warmth of personality usually went a long way to win Churchill’s respect for a man—that and a robust sense of humor—but nobody has ever claimed either of those qualities for Dowding. It was just as well that Churchill did not know that Dowding was a firm believer in the spirit world and thought he received guidance from his dead pilots as well as his late wife.

Churchill may also not have known that Dowding was a man with a grievance—actually several grievances. First, Dowding believed that he had been promised the post of Chief of the Air Staff, which his rival Newall now held; second, he had been fighting what he called the “inertia of the Air Staff” for years, and threatening to document in writing their neglect of Fighter Command’s needs; third, the Air Staff had already retaliated by making it clear that no mercy would be shown to him when his appointment as Commander-in-Chief of Fighter Command ran out on July 14, 1940, and that he could almost certainly expect to be retired. (Although it was by far the youngest of the three fighting services—at the time only twenty-two years old—the RAF had more than its share of rivalry, mutual contempt, intrigue, and backstabbing among senior officers, and there were hardly any of his fellow air marshals whom Dowding had not at one time or another offended.) Churchill would have been made aware by Sinclair and Newall that Dowding was stubborn and difficult, if he did not already know it, but this cannot have been in the forefront of his mind that morning, when so much else was going on. Finally, apart from the grievances, and the long-standing hostility with the Air Staff, Dowding was also a man with a mission: to prevent the prime minister from doing what he wanted to do.
⁹

Under any circumstances this would have been difficult for a mere Air Chief Marshal
*
to accomplish, but when the prime minister was Winston Churchill, as formidable a figure as British politics has ever produced, it was almost unthinkable. Churchill had clashed with senior military and naval officers from the very beginning of his career, starting with no less imposing a figure than Field Marshal the Earl Kitchener of Khartoum, and including along the way Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher, by far the most feared and respected First Sea Lord of his time, and Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig. At no time, whether in or out of office or uniform, had Churchill ever hesitated to reject military advice or to confront even the most distinguished brass hats with his criticism and opinions. He was not, in the best of circumstances, a man who took opposition to his own plans, or even criticism of them, lightly or easily, and circumstances could hardly have been more difficult than they were on the morning of May 15. In short, Dowding was about to step on a hornet’s nest, and knew it.

Neither this knowledge, nor the scowling presence of the prime minister seated in his wooden armchair at the table, apparently prevented Dowding from making a clear statement of his case. This moment in British history has been much embellished over the years with such stories as that of Dowding getting up, putting his charts of fighter strength in front of the prime minister, and forcing Churchill to look at them while leaning over his shoulder, drawing Churchill’s attention to the important numbers by tapping at them impatiently with his pencil. But that seems unlikely, and those who were present do not mention it; nor does there seem to be any credible foundation for the story that Dowding threw his pencil down on the table “in exasperation,” though he may very well have felt like doing so. Dowding was courageous, but not foolhardy or rude, and by nature he was not a man for flamboyant displays of temperament. All we know for sure is that Dowding, with his usual common sense, interjected into the discussion of the first item on the agenda that he “welcomed the proposal to attack the Ruhr,” and sensibly deprecated fears of German retaliation, since this was “bound to come sooner or later”; and on the second item, the vital question of dispatching more fighters to France, he “solemnly warned”
*
the prime minister and the members of the War Cabinet against the danger of sending any more fighters.

The matter of how many squadrons Dowding needed had been brought up by Newall at the previous day’s War Cabinet meeting—Dowding thought that fifty was the absolute minimum, wanted (and had been promised) sixty, and now had forty-six, of which the prime minister was proposing to strip ten—but it was not discussed at this meeting. Less than one-fifth of the meeting, in fact, was spent on the subject of the fighters—the main subject of discussion was the decision to start bombing the Ruhr.
†

However, Dowding’s warning was “solemn” enough to impress on the War Cabinet the need for caution on the subject of fighters. That is hardly surprising, since Dowding’s manner was deeply solemn to begin with, even over trifles. Newall, asked by Churchill to give his opinion, replied, for once agreeing with Dowding, that he would not advise the dispatch of any additional fighters to France, and to Dowding’s great relief the War Cabinet decided then and there that the prime minister should so inform Reynaud—another disagreeable conversation to which Churchill can hardly have been looking forward.

Perhaps because Churchill’s mind was fixed on bombing, and because Dowding was telling him only what Newall had predicted, the prime minister seems to have come away from the meeting firmly (or conveniently) convinced that Dowding required only twenty-five squadrons with which to defend Britain. At any rate, this number stuck in Churchill’s mind. In fact, when he wrote about it after the war, he went so far as to claim that Dowding had personally assured him that “twenty-five squadrons was the final limit.”
¹⁰
This number is not reflected in the minutes of the War Cabinet meeting, and Dowding not only denied it vehemently to the end of his life but contradicted any such assumption in writing the next day.

Of course the significance of the number twenty-five in Churchill’s mind was that if Dowding had forty-six squadrons and ten were sent to France he would still have more than the minimum number he needed to defend Britain. This would seem to indicate that while Churchill had heard Dowding (and Newall) out patiently, and subscribed to the decision of the War Cabinet, he retained “mental reservations” on the subject, and did not feel obligated to stop sending fighter squadrons to France, whatever Dowding might think about it.

Perhaps too, with all that was on his mind, he was neither listening nor doing sums in his head as carefully as he might have been. That being the case, it is easy enough to see how the prime minister may have mistaken the twenty-five
additional
squadrons that Dowding wanted for the total number he needed. In any event, Churchill was as likely as the rest of us to hear what he wanted to hear, and he was in a position to carefully rewrite history after the battle was won to show that his decision to send the fighters to France was in accord with Dowding’s requirements.

Churchill devoted a lot of space, ingenuity, and thought to this subject in
Their Finest Hour
, Volume II of
The Second World War
, but for once he fails to be altogether convincing, since the only way he can show that he was doing everything he could do keep France in the war and defend Britain against attack is to claim that Dowding had promised him he could do so with twenty-five squadrons of fighters. Given Churchill’s skill as a stylist—repetition is not one of his faults as a writer—the number of times he repeats this as a fact is a fair indication that it wasn’t true, and that he knew it wasn’t true.

As events proved, Dowding’s “victory” was short-lived. The next day, further bad news from France (it was rumored, mistakenly, that German armored forces were within a day’s march of Paris), together with the agonized calls for help from the French—and urgent signals from Air Marshal Barratt, the RAF Air Officer Commanding in France, to report that his fighter squadrons were being destroyed piecemeal rapidly, since they “had to deal every day with waves of 40 bombers every hour, heavily escorted by fighters,” and that exhausted pilots were carrying out “4 to 5 sorties a day,” despite “great numerical inferiority”—persuaded Churchill to overrule the War Cabinet’s decision and send six more fighter squadrons at once to France. Newall, pointing out that this directly contradicted what Dowding had been told the day before, eventually managed to persuade him to reduce the number to four. Later in the day, however, the prime minister flew to Paris to meet with the French war cabinet, where the climate of pessimism and defeat was now so strong that when he went back to the British embassy late that night, “impressed by the moral gravity of the hour” and deeply concerned by the fact that the French were united in blaming the failure of their army on the lack of sufficient British fighter planes, he cabled the War Cabinet to increase the number of squadrons to be sent to France from four to ten.
¹¹

Either Dowding lost confidence in what the War Cabinet had promised him as soon as he was back at his desk at Fighter Command headquarters, or something that was said during the War Cabinet meeting triggered his doubts. Dowding was tactless; he never hesitated to tread brutally on the toes of his fellow air marshals and politicians; and he sometimes seemed inhumanly remote—but he was nevertheless a shrewd enough judge of men to tell when he was being led down the garden path (or “fed a line,” in RAF slang). He did not trust Newall, and apparently he was not entirely convinced by Churchill’s promise not to take away any more of his precious fighter squadrons. He therefore sat down to write surely the most important letter of his career, and put on the record exactly what he required to defend Britain:

I have the honour to refer to the very serious calls which have recently been made upon the Home Defense Fighter Units in an attempt to stem the German invasion on the Continent.

 

2. I hope and believe that our Armies may yet be victorious in France and Belgium, but we have to face the possibility that they may be defeated.

3. In this case I presume that there is no one who will deny that England should fight on, even though the remainder of the Continent of Europe is dominated by the Germans.

4. For this purpose it is necessary to retain some minimum fighter strength in this country and I must request that the Air Council will inform me what they consider this minimum strength to be, in order that I may make my dispositions accordingly.

5. I would remind the Air Council that the last estimate which they made as to the force necessary to defend this country was fifty-two squadrons, and my strength has now been reduced to the equivalent of thirty-six squadrons.
…

9. I must therefore, request that as a matter of paramount urgency the Air Ministry will consider and decide what level of strength is to be left to the Fighter Command for the defence of this country, and will assure me that when this level has been reached, not one fighter will be sent across the Channel however urgent and insistent the appeals for help may be.

10. I believe that if an adequate fighter force is kept in this country, if the Fleet remains in being, and if Home Forces are suitably organized to resist invasion, we should be able to carry on the war single-handed for some time, if not indefinitely. But, if the Home Defence Force is drained away in desperate attempts to remedy the situation in France, defeat in France will involve the final, complete and irremediable defeat of this country.
¹²

 

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.