With Wings Like Eagles (23 page)

The flow of information was channeled and centralized as it made its way from the radar posts and the Observer Corps to Dowding’s headquarters at Bentley Priory. But once it had reached there, it was “filtered” so that personnel at each Group headquarters received only what they needed to know as quickly as possible and passed it on in turn to Sector headquarters, from which it would be transmitted to the Sector’s fighter squadrons, leaving the Sector commanders free to devise their own tactics. On paper, the system looked inflexible and overcentralized, but in practice it gave each Sector and that Sector’s fighter squadrons almost complete freedom of action in determining how to meet the approaching threat, and as much information as possible in precise, coherent form, and in what we now call real time. This was a vital factor for squadron commanders in the air, who measured time in seconds and wanted an instant reply to the basic questions: “How many? What height? What direction? What course do I have to fly to meet them? How far away are they?

This information was spoken to them by their Sector ground controller and his staff (“tellers,” as they were called, many of them young women), who got it from the Group controller, who got it in turn directly from the Fighter Command controller at Bentley Priory, where the “big picture” of German attacks was being continually plotted on the map table by the WAAFs as they received the information through their headphones. (The controller at No. 11 Group was none other than Lord Willoughby de Broke, future steward of the Jockey Club, whose firm, clear, authoritative voice, a prerequisite for a fighter controller, and total unflappability were admired even by so critical a judge of these qualities as Winston Churchill.) Since all this depended on secure telephone lines, Dowding’s insistence in 1937 on having them buried underground and protected by concrete shielding against bombs was justified over and over again.

Life was a good deal rougher on the forward airfields than on the larger Sector airfields, in terms of comfort and facilities—practically speaking, they were satellites of their Sector airfield, and very few of them had its creature comforts and resources in terms of messes and buildings. In both places, the pilots spent their day, from before dawn to sunset, in their squadron “dispersal hut,” usually a wooden barracks building at Sector airfields, sometimes no more than a camouflaged caravan (trailer) on the more primitive forward airfields, never more than a minute’s run from their aircraft. Pilots wore their second-best uniform (“battle dress” had not yet been issued in the RAF), a Mae West inflatable life jacket at all times (since this jacket was difficult to put on in a hurry, and easy to forget), and calf-high black leather “flying boots.” In the less formal surroundings of the forward airfields they might wear a white roll-neck sweater under the tunic, but this practice was discouraged at Sector airfields, where a collar and tie were insisted on by most station commanders. (The station commander was normally referred to by all ranks, though never to his face, as the “Groupie,” short for Group Captain). In the more glamorous Auxiliary Air Force squadrons, whose pilots were often wealthy or sporty types, it was often the custom to wear a silk scarf and leave the top button of the tunic open. A few of the older, regular, prewar RAF pilots, NCOs and officers alike, still wore the bulky “Sidcot” flying suit, a heavy, canvas-like one-piece overall, with many zips, pockets, and flaps, that was a relic of open-cockpit flying. Normally, a pilot placed his parachute on the port stabilizer or wing of his aircraft first thing in the morning, so he could grab it quickly as he ran to “scramble.” There was no time to put it on before entering the cockpit—the pilot simply threw it onto the seat as he stepped up onto the wing (it served as his seat cushion), jumped in after it, then buckled the parachute straps on tightly as soon as he was seated. One of the ground crew usually helped the pilot fasten the Sutton harness that secured the pilot to his metal bucket seat—the straps were usually draped carefully over the sills of the cockpit, to avoid any risk of their getting caught up in the straps of the parachute harness—while the pilot pulled on his flying helmet, with the oxygen mask and flying goggles already attached; plugged in the cord of his microphone and headphones; then twirled his right index finger in a wide circle, as a signal to the ground crew to start the engine. From the dispersal hut to takeoff took less than a minute. (Once in the air and going into combat, the first thing a pilot did was to lower his seat, giving himself a better view of his reflector sight, then tighten his Sutton harness even more, so he would be firmly held in his seat even in the most extreme maneuvers at high speed.)

The dispersal hut was the pilot’s private, clublike world, one in which rank counted for less than a pilot’s wings sewn on the left side of the tunic. Here, sergeant pilots and officers were still not quite equals, but they were as close to equality as they ever got on the ground. The atmosphere was a combination of the locker room in an athletic facility and the run-down, messy, untidy common room of a boarding school, with odd pieces of furniture scrounged from anywhere, big worn-out leather armchairs, a ratty old sofa on which a pilot or his dog was always sleeping, sometimes a Victrola and a stack of records, old magazines, newspapers, cards, a chess set (or draughts, the British equivalent of checkers, for the less “brainy”), untidy piles of raincoats and flying clothes (many of them belonging to dead pilots) hung from hooks on the wall, peeling strips of “sticky tape” on the windows to prevent the glass from imploding in splinters in case of attack, and a few dog-eared paperback books. (James Hadley Chase’s hard-boiled, risqué thriller
No Orchids for Miss Blandish
was a favorite, with a sexy blond on the cover. Also popular were the doings of “Jane,” another bosomy, sexy blond who was always coming out of her clothes or having them torn off her in the famous
Daily Mirror
cartoon strip of the same name. Many people, including the prime minister, considered Jane the biggest morale booster of all for British servicemen.) The air was a thick fug of cigarette and pipe smoke—this was an age when almost everybody smoked, and in any case fighter pilots knew that it probably wouldn’t be smoking or drinking that would kill them. There were the obligatory cork bulletin boards, thick with notices, lists, and warnings; a blackboard with the daily list of aircraft and pilots in chalk; and dusty air recognition models of German aircraft hanging from the ceiling. In the warm summer months the pilots scrounged canvas deck chairs and sat outside in the sun, or lay in the grass, smoking and waiting. An aircraftman sat at a desk near the door to answer the telephone, and every time it rang, the pilots tensed. Often it was a harmless message like “The tea van is on its way,” or a routine order or inquiry from the station bureaucracy, which was proceeding on its stately way, filling out forms and holding inspections as in peacetime, and the pilots would go back to whatever they had been doing to calm their nerves and deal with the stress of waiting for the call to scramble. The sharp, loud noise of a telephone ringing was enough to make some pilots go outside and throw up, and haunted many pilots for years to come.

In some of the most exposed forward airfields at least one flight might be kept manned from first light on, with the pilots sitting uncomfortably in their aircraft, ready to take off at a moment’s notice—for the distance from the lighthouse at Beachy Head on the Channel to RAF Biggin Hill was less than sixty miles, or about fifteen minutes’ flying time for German bombers, and if they elected to come in low over the Channel the radar operators might not pick them up until it was too late to intercept them.

This thought had occurred to the Germans as well, and it was to form a major part of their strategy for the 18th.
*
This was to be a precise, surgical strike on two vital parts of Fighter Command, the first by Field Marshal Kesselring’s
Luftflotte
2, and the crews were briefed with more than the usual attention to detail. German reconnaissance aircraft had brought back photographs of Kenley and Biggin Hill, and pilots and bombardiers were told exactly what to hit. The bomber crews themselves were impressed by the clarity of the photographs, eight-by-ten-inch glossies, which everyone agreed were superb, and which were studied carefully and passed around from hand to hand at the briefings.
†
Every building was clearly shown, and crews—especially those of the dive-bombers—were assigned specific targets, as well as carefully planned approach routes. The attack was to consist of a combination of heavy bombing from twin-engine bombers and pinpoint, low-altitude bombing by dive-bombers, with large fighter sweeps to draw British fighters away from the bombing forces. It was hoped that the low-altitude attacks would go undetected by the British until it was too late, and that Fighter Command would have to divide its forces in order to deal with the simultaneous attacks. The low-altitude attacks were to go in literally at “rooftop level,” the crews navigating by road and railway maps, and stay where it would be hard for British fighters to spot them or shoot them down. The plan called for a simultaneous raid by sixty He 111s on Biggin Hill, and an attack on Kenley by forty-eight Do 17s and Ju 88s. The attack on Biggin Hill would be a conventional high-altitude attack; that on Kenley would be more complex, and split into three separate phases—first there would be a “precision” dive-bombing attack carried out from a high altitude on the vital structures of the airfield, then a high-altitude raid to destroy the runways and the airfield’s defenses, and finally an attack at rooftop level to destroy whatever was left standing. The exact timing of the attacks and the approach routes were worked out with exemplary precision, and were intended to surprise and overwhelm both the British fighters and the antiaircraft guns around the airfields.

As it happened, there were two surprises in store for the
Luftwaffe
. The more serious one was that nobody in
Luftwaffe
intelligence had picked out the site of the Sector operations room at Biggin Hill or Kenley, the destruction of which would indeed have paralyzed the fighters of Park’s No. 11 Group for a time. The Germans had no idea that each Sector had its own operations room, linked by underground telephone cables to the Group operations room, and from there to Fighter Command, or that radar information was flowing constantly down to the level of the Sector airfields. The fact that the operations room in every Sector airfield was merely in a wooden hut aboveground,
*
protected at best by a blast wall, haunted Dowding, but there had been no time to put them underground like those at the Group level, and once the battle had started it was too late to do anything more about this. Thus, the one absolutely vital (and unprotected) target at each of the Sector airfields, aboveground and vulnerable, was unknown to the German planners.

The other was the existence, at Kenley, of six parachute and cable launchers (also referred to as UP, for unrotated projectile, and as PAC, for parachute and cable device), one of Churchill’s most cherished secret weapons.
†
This was the brainchild of his long-term scientific adviser and friend Professor Frederick Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell, but always referred to by those around the prime minister as “the Prof”). The Prof and Dowding had clashed sharply on numerous scientific and technical matters in the past, but in the case of the parachute and cable launchers, which everybody in the RAF and the Royal Artillery dismissed as a waste of time and money, Churchill’s will prevailed (as it had over the big guns at Dover), at least to the extent that the system was installed on a trial basis at Kenley, despite Dowding’s objections, which prompted Churchill to remark, “Dowding has the reputation of…not being receptive to new ideas.”
⁵
A weapons system that might have been conceived by Rube Goldberg or Heath Robinson at their most whimsical, UP consisted of a rocket, which, when fired, rose 600 feet high and released a small parachute suspending a 480-foot-long stout wire cable in front of enemy dive-bombers. In the event an enemy aircraft ran into the wire, a second, smaller parachute opened at the bottom end, ensuring that the wire, even if didn’t tear off a wing or do other structural damage, would drag the aircraft to the ground. It was, in effect, a more sophisticated development of the barrage balloon, a device first used early in World War I, which dangled a cable from a height of about 500 feet to discourage low-flying enemy aircraft. Some 1,500 barrage balloons were then in service at important sites throughout Britain. The difference between them and the UP was that the barrage balloon was a passive defensive device—the balloon itself was clearly visible, and low-flying aircraft could simply avoid it—whereas UP was an aggressive device, more in keeping with the prime minister’s nature, just the kind of “dirty trick” he liked to play on the Germans, and in theory it could be used to ensnare enemy bombers by night or day, dragging them down out of the sky. The problem was statistical, as the Air Staff instantly perceived—it would require a phenomenal number of UPs to have any chance of working; you would have to throw a haystack up into the sky to catch a needle. Nevertheless, judging from the number of testy “Action This Day” minutes that Churchill wrote on the subject in 1940, and the fact that he was often willing to interrupt his busy day to observe tests of the UP, most of them disappointing, it remained dear to his heart, a hobbyhorse from which the prime minister was unwilling to dismount.

As was so often the case, the meteorologists got it wrong. The weather looked perfect, as predicted, but no sooner had the German aircraft taken off in the early morning of August 18 than they were recalled because a layer of haze over the targets was discovered that would make the low-level attacks impossible. The bomber crews were obliged to land their aircraft with a full load of fused bombs, never an easy task. Keyed-up, fully kitted, and ready to go, the German aircrews were then obliged to hang around their aircraft until shortly before noon, when they reboarded them and started out again, reconnaissance planes having reported that the haze over the targets had lifted.