With Wings Like Eagles (20 page)

Assigned to a fighter squadron, he might have become just another boisterous regular fighter pilot. But while showing off in response to a dare by doing aerobatics at ground level in his Bristol Bulldog, he caught a wingtip in the ground and crashed, partially severing both legs. After several excruciating bouts of surgery he lost one leg above the knee, and the other just below it. Bader was slipping quietly into death when he heard one of the nursing sisters outside in the corridor say, “Don’t make so much noise. There’s a boy dying in there.” Bader decided then and there that he would live, and eventually by sheer determination mastered walking on his “tin legs” (being Bader, he refused from the beginning to even consider using a cane). Retired from the RAF because it would no longer let him fly, he married; learned to play golf to a very high standard, as well as tennis and squash: drove his old MG; and of course turned up at the Air Ministry when war began. The elderly Warrant Officer who presided over medical appointments shook his head when he saw Bader and said, “’Ullo, sir. I thought you’d be along. What’s it this time?” “Same again,” Bader said. “I think they might pass me this time.” Shocked, the Warrant Officer said, “Not A.1.B., sir. Never.”
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²

But in 1939 the RAF needed pilots badly enough that somebody took the trouble to look through
King’s Regulations
and found there was nothing in them requiring a pilot to have legs, and except for having no legs Bader was as fit as a man could be. Soon he had gone through Central Flying School with flying colors and the judgment, “Ability as a pilot—excellent.” Over Dunkirk, he made his first “kill,” a Bf 109. Bader “rammed stick and rudder over…. A 109 shot up in front; his thumb jabbed the firing button…. A puff of white spurted just behind its cockpit…then a spurt of orange flame mushroomed around the cockpit and flared back like a blow-torch.”
³
That afternoon he caught one He 111 bomber and killed the rear gunner. Within a few days he was promoted to command No. 242 Squadron, a squadron of recalcitrant, embittered Canadians who felt that they had been buggered about from one end of France to the other. He overcame their instant reaction that being given a new commanding officer with no legs was adding insult to injury by climbing into the nearest Hurricane and doing the same daredevil ground-level aerobatics that had cost him his legs in the first place. By that time he was on his way to becoming one of Fighter Command’s most aggressive pilots, and had already made the acquaintance of Air Vice-Marshal Leigh-Mallory, after crashing a Spitfire by trying to take off with the propeller in coarse pitch. Despite the loss of the Spitfire (Leigh-Mallory merely remarked, “That was very silly, wasn’t it?”
⁴
), the two men seem to have struck up a relationship that was unusually friendly and close, given the great disparity in their rank. Certainly, they were both “hard thrusters” and bluff extroverts, not at all like the remote and sometimes otherworldly Dowding, but it seems very likely too that Bader played the role of Iago to Leigh-Mallory’s Othello, and managed, whether by design or by accident, to bring out the worst in the character of No. 12 Group’s Commander-in-Chief—his ambition; his taste for backstairs intrigue and gossip at the Air Ministry; his desire to be popular with his own pilots; his resentment at having to follow Dowding’s orders and play, as he saw it, second fiddle to Air Vice-Marshal Park, a “colonial” from New Zealand. From the first, Bader wanted to form a “big wing” and clobber the Germans in equal numbers, and was impatient with the strict (and from a pilot’s point of view, artificial) geographic limits imposed on each of the four fighter groups, as well as the stream of precise orders being radioed to the pilots by the group fighter controller on the ground (or, more often, well below it, since by now the control rooms were deep underground) and by his WAAF subordinates “filtering” information about the enemy raiders. He managed to persuade Leigh-Mallory that the “big wing” would work—an attempt which cannot have been all that difficult, first because Bader could be persuasive as well as forceful, and second because Leigh-Mallory was shrewd enough to see in this dispute over tactics a way of undermining not only Park, but perhaps even Dowding himself. It did not hurt that the idea of massing a large number of fighters to give the enemy a bloody nose, instead of a long-drawn-out battle of attrition, was exactly the kind of aggressive thinking that always appealed strongly to the prime minister. Even though Dowding was winning the battle, it was not difficult, given the number of his enemies at the Air Ministry, to make it seem that his tactics were too cautious, and Air Vice-Marshal Sholto Douglas, with whom Dowding had clashed so many times, was right in his judgment that Dowding was too old and that it had been too long since he had been up in a fighter himself.

Thus, the Germans’ assumption that No. 12 Group had been feeding reinforcements to No. 11 Group in the south, and could be prevented from doing so by attacking the Midlands and the north of England with
Luftflotte
5 from Denmark and Norway, was essentially mistaken, and was compounded by the fact that Stumpff’s bombers would have to go without an escort of single-engine fighters to protect them, because the distance was too great for the fuel capacity of the Bf 109.

Indeed, the Germans’ expectations for the big attack on August 15, however ambitious in scale, were a curious mixture of optimism and doubt. Göring, far from controlling the battle from Blanc-Nez, watching through powerful military binoculars as his aircraft passed the white cliffs of Dover, as he liked to pretend for propaganda purposes, was in fact at his palatial, grandiose hunting estate, Karinhall (named after his beloved first wife) in conference with the entire
Luftwaffe
high command, including field marshals Kesselring and Sperrle, whom he had summoned to Karinhall but who would have been undoubtedly better placed at that moment in their own headquarters, nearer to their air fleets, and in control of events. (Sperrle lived in almost as luxurious a style as Göring, in Paris. Kesselring’s more Spartan headquarters were underground at Blanc-Nez, as close to England as possible, in what was referred to by those who were in awe of him as the “Holy Mountain.”) Göring was, in any case in a querulous frame of mind. Bomber losses—particularly among the Stukas—and losses of his much-vaunted Bf 110 “Destroyers” had caused him to look for a scapegoat, and he had found it among his own fighter pilots, whom he accused of seeking glory in air duels with Fighter Command’s Spitfires and Hurricanes, rather than doing their job, which was to protect the bombers. Göring’s alarmingly swift mood changes and frequent irritability were not just a reflection of the fact that he had promised the Führer more than he had so far been able to deliver. He was by this time already addicted to paracodeine tablets, which he swallowed in handfuls, scooping them from antique Venetian cut glass bowls scattered all around his house, behavior that was typical of the weaknesses of the most senior Nazi leaders. (It is hard to imagine Dowding, for example, popping pills, or losing his temper at his own air marshals and pilots.)

Göring had already had this argument about the role his fighters should be playing in the battle with his two leading fighter pilots—Adolf Galland and Werner Mölders—while presenting them each with the Gold Pilot Badge at Karinhall. He demanded that they give the bombers “close and rigid protection,” and when the two airmen tried to explain that because of the difference in speed and altitude between the Bf 109 and the bombers, this was impossible—that the best way of protecting the bombers was not to slow down to their speed, but to fly well above them, maintaining the critical advantages of height and speed, then dive down to attack the British fighters as they rose to attack the bombers—he was indignant and at his most bullying. He wanted the bomber crews to be able to see their fighter escorts close by. Galland and Mölders attempted to explain that while it might be dismaying and demoralizing to the bomber crews not to see the fighters flying wingtip to wingtip along with them, the fighters could do nothing to help them by making themselves visible, that speed and height were a fighter pilot’s best weapons, and giving these up would increase fighter losses without reducing those of the bombers. But the
Reichsmarschall
, irritable, sweating heavily, and raising his voice, was in no mood to listen to reason, even from his best fighter pilots.

Galland was and would remain the most famous German fighter of World War II (his eventual total “score” of “kills” would be 104). A product of Germany’s “glider schools,” he became a fighter pilot in the new
Luftwaffe
, and after a crash in 1935, his face had been totally rebuilt, giving him a flattened nose and a rakish but rather threatening expression, accentuated by a thick, jet-black moustache and an ever-present strong black cigar (he even had a cigar holder and an ashtray built into the cockpit of his Bf 109, so he could smoke while flying). The crash also cost him most of the sight in his left eye—indeed, the only way he was able to pass the medical examination to resume flying duties again was by getting a friend to copy the letters on the doctor’s eye chart so Galland could memorize them overnight. Galland learned his trade fighting with the German Condor Legion in Spain, and by August 1940 he had already made seventeen “kills” and been awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross, known among German fighter pilots as the “tin tie,” since it was worn around the neck, sometimes suspended from a woman’s garter. He had every quality a great fighter pilot needed—courage, physical and mental toughness, amazing skill as a marksman despite the fact that he was essentially blind in one eye, and a survivor’s instincts as well as a killer’s (he had made three kills in one day early in May 1940, and would be fished out of the Channel twice). He was also intelligent, outspoken, and a gifted leader. He was cast from the same mold as Bader—each admired the other and had overcome injuries that would have stopped most men from ever flying again—and it would be one of the typical small ironies of war that when Bader was finally shot down over France and taken prisoner it was Galland who gave him a luncheon party and let Bader sit in the pilot’s seat of a Bf 109 before was sent to a POW camp in the Reich.

Mölders was Galland’s greatest rival in 1940, but he was more of an intellectual than Galland, more interested in devising new tactics than in simply racking up a high score—the basic German fighter formation, the much-imitated
Schwarm
, was an idea of his. He liked to compare himself to
Hauptmann
Oswald Boelcke, the great German fighter pilot in World War I who invented most of the tactics that became standard for aerial combat and remain so today, while leaving to Galland the swashbuckling role played by
Rittmeister
Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen,
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the legendary Red Baron, a born fighter pilot and a killer with ice-cold blood in his veins.

Göring had been infuriated by his two star pilots’ argument against sticking close to the bombers—though he himself, as a former fighter pilot, should have known it was the truth—and the two fighter aces had left Karinhall depressed and angry, despite the decorations and the promotions they had received. Even the normally ebullient Galland complained that the entire German war effort was like a huge pyramid “turned upside down, balancing on its apex,” that apex being a scant few hundred German fighter pilots flying over the English Channel—a remark that might have been echoed by British fighter pilots, who found themselves in the same situation, as the whole war and indeed the survival of Britain rested briefly on their shoulders. Galland recalled the words of von Richthofen—“Fighter pilots have to rove freely in the area allotted to them, and when they spot an enemy they attack and shoot him down: anything else is rubbish.” Even Galland, not normally cautious in expressing his opinion, had not dared to quote von Richthofen to the man who had taken command of Richthofen’s famous squadron, the “Flying Circus,” after his death—Hermann Göring.

The two
Luftwaffe
field marshals and the remainder of the
Luftwaffe
high command were receiving a longer version of this diatribe from Göring, and his anger was enough to subdue even the redoubtable Field Marshal Sperrle, who, immensely tall, impassive, imposing, and weighing almost 300 pounds, was known throughout the
Luftwaffe
as “the elephant with the monocle.” Since Kesserling and Sperrle were not fighter pilots, they too did not quote von Richthofen to Göring, but it was ironic that the biggest and most critical day of the Battle of Britain took place with the
Luftwaffe
high command several hundred miles away, arguing about strategy, and dealing with their commander in chief’s prickly and swiftly changing moods.

Perhaps even more irritating for Göring was the fact that the day began not with the perfect weather that had been forecast, but with fog over the Channel. The attack was duly canceled while the
Luftwaffe
commanders breakfasted luxuriously at Karinhall, then settled down around the vast gilt-bronze inlaid conference table. By mid-morning, however, the weather had improved dramatically (the RAF meteorologists cheerily reported “High pressure giving fine, warm weather”), and in the absence of anybody else with authority the chief of staff of II
Fliegerkorps
, a mere colonel, gave the order to proceed. The
Luftwaffe
’s most critical day of battle would take place, therefore, with the leaders of its air fleets in Berlin, away from their commands and the telephone—another mistake on Göring’s part.

By half past ten in the morning, German aircraft began to assemble over the Channel in such quantity that they swamped the British radar operators’ ability to estimate their number. This was the beginning of a day that was intended to destroy Fighter Command, and came very close to doing so. More than 100 enemy aircraft crossed the coast at Dover at eleven that morning, followed by seventy-plus at noon, more than 200 at two-thirty in the afternoon, 300 and 400 in the late afternoon, and another seventy or more in the early evening, all of them aiming for Fighter Command’s airfields and for the radar stations.