With Wings Like Eagles (5 page)

The radar sites were to be placed so that they overlapped, giving complete coverage of the eastern and southern coasts of England, and were easily able to pick up signals from aircraft in the skies over the Netherlands, Belgium, and northern France, though of course nobody on either side in the mid- to late 1930s had any reason to suppose that the Germans would one day have bases there. By 1937 the first of these sites was in operation, and by 1939 there would be fourteen more—an immense job of construction and a huge expense for a scientific will-o’-the-wisp that might not work, all of it initially authorized by the supposedly lethargic Stanley Baldwin, and carried forward by his successor as prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, who is better remembered for Munich.

Looked at in this light—as it seldom is—the policy of appeasement, which was later to come in for such scorn, may be seen, at least in part, as a successful effort to buy time. The CH radar network would not be fully operational until 1939, and the government knew it; nor would Fighter Command begin to receive its Hurricanes until 1937 or the first of its Spitfires until 1938. Given the fear of bombing and the widespread belief that a modern war would begin with an effort by the Germans to destroy their enemies’ major cities from the air in one blow (a belief shared by the left and by the right, and by such very different personalities as H. G. Wells, Stanley Baldwin, and Winston Churchill), it is hardly surprising that Neville Chamberlain, who was also faced with a succession of French governments even more determined not to be bombed by the Germans than the British were, chose to propitiate the Führer rather than to threaten him with war. We know now, of course, that a knockout blow against London or Paris was the last thing Hitler had in mind, and that the
Luftwaffe
was in any case in no position to carry it out, but at the time nobody could be altogether certain of that. Since the general public was unaware of the existence of radar, or of what would be its vital importance in protecting Britain, most people still believed, as Baldwin did, that “the bomber would always get through,” and hardly anybody argued otherwise. Dowding’s towers were in fact the first step in making that assumption false.

Interestingly, the towers aroused very little curiosity or comment at the time they went up, beyond the concerns of bird lovers; nor do they appear to have kept anybody in the
Luftwaffe
awake at night. Radar was not in itself a secret—like nuclear physics, it was a well-known, if specialized, area of scientific research, and it was being experimented on, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and success, in the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union as well as Great Britain. It was not so much that the British had made a scientific breakthrough as that—unlike anybody else—they had taken the experimental equipment out of the laboratory and placed it in the field. At first it was literally in
a
field, where it was tested against an RAF bomber. Then the British worked out by trial and error how to make practical use of it as a long-range early warning system; began to train operators—not scientists, but ordinary airmen (and soon airwomen)—to read and interpret the amorphous blips and squiggles as they appeared and pulsated on a radar screen; and drew up ambitious plans to put the whole system in place as rapidly as possible, and on a huge scale. The Germans had nothing like it; nor did the Americans; and neither did the unfortunate French—in fact, the lack of radar would be one reason for the total failure of the
Armée de l’Air
in May 1940. The French had no radar, no central fighter command, no strategy for using the fighters they had in abundance; even the far superior British Hurricanes sent to France to support them were wasted, just as Dowding had grimly predicted they would be, since without ground-based radar and fighter control their pilots were no better equipped to find the German aircraft or concentrate against them than fliers had been during World War I.

As for the Germans, although they sent the last great dirigible, the
Graf Zeppelin
, out to cruise the British coastline in bad weather in order to analyze the signals from Dowding’s radar towers, they were thwarted by the fact that the radar operators, who could hardly fail to miss an object as large as the
Graf Zeppelin
, stopped transmitting during its flight around the coastline. The Germans failed to understand the means by which these signals were transformed into an orderly system of command and control. Yet, it was not radar that would escape their attention; it was the neat, methodical mind of Sir Hugh Dowding.

Throughout 1936 and 1937 Dowding painstakingly built the foundations of his strategy to protect England, putting the pieces together like those of a gigantic three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Almost as soon as he took command he sent in a modest request for £500 to construct his Operations Room at Bentley Priory, and chivvied architects, builders, the General Post Office (the GPO, which in the United Kingdom controlled and installed telephone lines), and the Office of Works to give him something that had existed before only in the form of sets for a futuristic film like
Things to Come.

Today, of course, all this is old hat, familiar from countless movies and from innumerable televised rocket launches at Cape Canaveral, but in the mid-1930s it was the only thing of its kind in the world. Dowding moved fast, transforming the ballroom of Bentley Priory into a big, crowded amphitheater for a new kind of war, and using the graceful rotunda next door for the necessary teleprinters and switchboards. On the floor of the ballroom, he built an enormous, irregularly shaped table to represent the southern coast of England, the English Channel, and the northern coast of the continent, “from Edinburgh to the French coast, to Cherbourg, and from the Welsh border to the East of Belgium.”
²
The surface of the map table was divided into squares, each one marked and identified with a letter of the alphabet. This was the “Filter Room.” Around the table would sit or stand a dozen or so young airmen and airwomen (at first the women were the wives of officers serving at Fighter Command Headquarters who had volunteered for the job, but by 1939 most of the “filterers” would be young women in the blue-gray uniform of the WAAF, who would soon be known, predictably, as the “beauty chorus”), each supplied with a box of counters, rather like those used in playing chemin de fer or roulette in a casino, and long stick with a bar at the end like that used by the croupier at the roulette table. Each “filterer” wore earphones, and some of them also wore a microphone suspended around the neck. Above the filterers was built a “gallery,” where the whole table could be observed from above by the officers charged with warning each Fighter Group of the situation as it developed on the board below, as well as by the naval liaison officer, a senior Royal Artillery officer with a direct line to the headquarters of the antiaircraft gunners and searchlight operators, and officers linked by direct lines to the Observer Corps, the police, the fire services, and those in charge of sounding the air-raid alarms. The filterers received information as it came in from the operation room in each Fighter Group, from the radar plotters on the coast, and from the observers on the ground; and once an enemy raid had been identified, they set up an identifying marker for it, showing its present position, the projected course of the raid, the height, and the number of enemy aircraft it contained, moving the marker with their long sticks as it progressed from the “enemy” coast, across the Channel or the North Sea, and toward one of the four Fighter Groups, each defending its own “Sector.” From the very beginning it was assumed, correctly, that the
Luftwaffe
attacks would not follow a straight, predictable course—there would be feints, sudden changes of direction and altitude, “phantom” attacks intended to draw the British fighters away from the intended targets and to create the maximum confusion. All this would have to be recorded instantly on the board, and analyzed.

Behind the table, on the wall facing the gallery, there was another big board with rows of colored lights on it, known, inevitably, as the “Tote Board” (after the board at a race track that shows the horses competing in a race and the latest odds on each one), that displayed the readiness of each fighter squadron (on standby, available, refueling and rearming, or in the air). A large, prominently placed clock, with time segments marked in different colors, allowed the filterers to instantly plot the exact position of a raid—for everything would be taking place in real time at 200 to 300 miles an hour, and the fighter squadrons in the air would need to know where the enemy they were approaching was
now
, not where it had been two or three minutes before. Equally important, they would need to be “scrambled” in time to climb, if possible, to a height above the enemy’s and to attack from behind. (The Spitfire, when it came into service in 1938, would require just under eleven minutes to climb to 25,000 feet, and complex and precise mathematical calculations would need to be made in split seconds to bring fighter squadrons to exactly where they had to be for successful “interception.”)

The senior Fighter Command officer present could tell at a glance from his seat in the gallery down to the board below how many air raids were forming up, how big they were, and what their course was, as well as how many fighter squadrons were available, and at what state of readiness, to attack them. An innovation that Dowding quickly introduced was to place experienced fighter pilots in the Filter Room for a tour of duty alongside the filterers, so the pilots would gain confidence in the system (which they could then spread when they returned to their squadrons), and also so they could explain to the filterers what the pilots could and could not do, and what they needed to know, the object being that the fighter pilots must have absolute trust in the instructions they received from the ground, even if the voice was that of a young woman who had never been up in an airplane in her life.

Dowding’s genius was to have built a system that economized on his fighter strength—there would be no wasteful “patrols” of fighter aircraft searching for, or trying to intercept at random, groups of enemy aircraft, and losing sight of them in the clouds. Dowding was not a romantic, at least on the subject of air warfare—he sought efficiency. The fighter squadrons nearest to each raid as it passed through their Group could be scrambled at the last possible moment to attack the enemy as he drew close to them; this procedure would also help to conserve the amount of fuel they had for combat at full power. In effect, the system acted like a multiplier to Fighter Command’s strength, as well as imposing the firm control of Fighter Command Headquarters over the whole air battle (a matter which was to cause great and bitter controversy in Fighter Command later on), for Dowding correctly foresaw that the German raids would come from many different directions simultaneously, at different heights, and attacking different targets spread out all across Britain, and that the only way to beat them was to look at the “big picture,” then decide where, when, and in what strength to intercept them.

By definition, no air battle can be static—the RAF could not defend every city, port, factory, and airfield in the United Kingdom. Instead, the British fighters would have to attack in relatively small formations, perfectly timed so that as one squadron ran low on fuel and ammunition, another could take its place as it landed to refuel and rearm, thus inflicting on the
Luftwaffe
a constant, and in the long run unacceptable, rate of loss. This concept, too, would become a major issue between Dowding and his critics during the battle.

Ambitious as Dowding’s Operations Room was, it was more in the nature of an experiment, or trial run. Almost before it was up and working Dowding was seeking more funds to duplicate it underground at Bentley Priory so that it could not be put out of action by German bombing, and in view of the increasingly aggressive foreign policy of Nazi Germany he was eventually authorized to proceed, despite the Air Council’s continuing skepticism on the subject of fighters. His new Operations Room was to be deep underground, built of reinforced concrete (ferroconcrete), and the GPO placed the innumerable telephone lines leading to it in deep trenches, protected by concrete. It was as secure as possible against a direct enemy attack and would be in full operation early in March 1940, just three months before it was needed. By that time, the system had proved itself again and again, through experimentation, trial and error, and constant refinement and improvement.

But of course all this would have been no use without the right fighter aircraft.

If there was one thing that prime ministers Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, and Neville Chamberlain had in common, it was that each was a “belt and braces man,” an English phrase used to describe somebody so cautious that he wears both a belt and suspenders to hold his trousers up, thus avoiding potential embarrassment in case one of the two should fail. Whenever the current Minister of State for Air had been consulted about Britain’s air defense, the Air Council’s reply had always come back that the only effective defense was a bomber force so powerful that no country within striking range would dare to attack. No British government in the 1930s had been eager to fund such a bomber force (and none would have been eager use it, had it existed), but each government was bound to accept the professional advice of the air marshals, albeit with a grain of salt. Once Hitler came to power and the European situation began to deteriorate into a succession of nerve-racking crises, exacerbated by the panicky demands of the French for support and assistance, each prime minister pressed the Air Ministry for some credible scheme of home defense, if only as a way to reassure the public.

The Air Ministry remained stubbornly wedded to RAF dogma, but in order to soothe the increasingly nervous politicians—who were, after all, its masters and provided the funding for the armed services—it took a few reluctant steps in the direction of ordering more modern fighter planes, at first more in the spirit of window dressing than as a serious change in strategy. Still, although the initial intention was to soothe the politicians (and the public) while continuing to plan for the construction of more and bigger bombers, in part thanks to Dowding and a few other visionaries the fighter airplane soon captured the attention of the public, and took several rapid giant strides ahead of the bomber in technology and performance.