With Wings Like Eagles (12 page)

Bomber Command, as it happened, was as reluctant to commit its medium and heavy bombers to supporting the Allied Forces in France against German attack as Dowding was to release his Hurricanes—it took the view that the best way for its bombers to support the Allied armies in France was to bomb the vital points of German industry.
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This was the theme song of “strategic bombing,” which would be replayed again and again from 1940 to 1945. (Though the air marshals were loath to admit it, the big bombers had in any case very little chance of hitting small targets near the front line, like bridges or road junctions, by day, and none at all at night, and were unlikely to survive against sustained flak and fighter attack.)

The reluctance of Bomber Command to come to the rescue of Air Marshal Barratt if requested to do so was nothing compared with Dowding’s feelings about letting even a single one of his Hurricanes get out of his hands. At the very beginning of the war, Dowding had been indignant to learn that four squadrons of his fighters were to go to France as part of the Component Force, and even more upset when he discovered in “the small print” that six more might be taken from him “if necessity arose.” He was astute enough to know that necessity would almost certainly arise, and protested vehemently, in person and in writing, to the Air Council, the Secretary of State for Air, and the Chief of the Air Staff, but got nowhere except to confirm in everybody else’s mind the notion that he was difficult, unreasonable, and the victim of an idée fixe. Dowding was doubly indignant because he had always made it clear that the absolute minimum number of fighter squadrons he required for the successful defense of Great Britain was fifty (this number was later raised to sixty), and he had been given to understand that the four squadrons for the BEF would not leave Britain until he had his fifty squadrons in place. Instead, they had been removed while he did not yet have even half that number, and as an experienced military bureaucrat he knew that once they were out of his hands, he would never get them back.

Also, as he constantly tried to explain, the fighters and their pilots were only a part, admittedly the most glamorous part, of an intricate and well thought-out system, in which numerous participants played vital roles: the young women drawing up the plots at the radar stations; the “beauty chorus” moving the markers on the big board at Fighter Command Headquarters; the GPO telephone engineers installing and keeping in good repair the hundreds of buried telephone lines from Bentley Priory to and from the Group commanders and the radar stations; the “boffins” constantly perfecting and improving the radar network; the civilian ground observers, with their helmets and their binoculars; the fighter controllers; and even the men driving the big Scammell trucks (known as Queen Marys after the giant ocean liner), who transported damaged Hurricanes and Spitfires to civilian-staffed regional repair centers where they could be repaired and sent back to fighting units quickly. The fighters on their own, without this organization in place, could not save Britain even if Dowding had his fifty (or sixty) squadrons, and could certainly not save France.

Sending Hurricanes to France was, in Dowding’s view, turning on a tap which the politicians and the Air Council would never have the courage to turn off, and through which Britain’s lifeblood would pour. Removed from the structure of Fighter Command, spread out on makeshift airfields with inadequate maintenance facilities, and sent into battle without radar or ground control to guide them, the Hurricanes and their pilots would simply be wasted. On the subject of this vital point, nobody wanted to listen, and no matter how hard Dowding tried, Churchill never grasped it, or perhaps, to do the prime minister justice, he never
wanted
to grasp it—a fact it might be, but it was an inconvenient fact, and if he wanted to keep France in the war he could not afford to accept it.

As early as October 1939, Dowding had clashed sharply with the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Cyril Newall, who had wanted him to make advance preparations so that fighters could be sent to France quickly, if necessary. Dowding smelled a rat, and replied, crushingly and with no hint that he was willing to compromise, that “the French difficulties are largely due to the pathetic inefficiency of their Interception System. I have not been told what steps they are taking to set their house in order, even at this late date.”
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Far from sharing Newall’s belief that Britain could lose the war in France from a lack of fighters there, Dowding believed that France was a lost cause anyway, and that Britain could survive the French defeat if—and only if—he had enough fighters to protect British ports and aircraft factories from the enemy, and to maintain air control over the Channel.

Events in France between May 10 and the evacuation of Dunkirk just over two weeks later served to confirm Dowding’s opinion. The French air force was incapable of making any impact on the enemy, and indeed hardly even tried; and the RAF forces were rapidly destroyed. On the very first day, of the thirty-two Fairey Battles sent to bomb the advancing German columns (over the vehement objections of General Gamelin, who wanted to avoid “a bombing war” for fear of German reprisals against French cities), thirteen were shot down and all the rest severely damaged. A force of Battles sent to attack the bridges over the Albert Canal at the urgent request of the Belgians was completely destroyed—the raid accomplished nothing but the subsequent award of two (posthumous) Victoria Crosses. By May 14 General Gamelin, now reacting with something approaching panic to the speed and unexpected direction of the German advance, had changed his mind and was begging the RAF to bomb the bridges over the Meuse River. Although it was well known that a bridge is almost impossible to hit from the air, and that the only reliable way of destroying one is to mine it and blow it up before the enemy reaches it, the French had neglected to destroy the vital Meuse bridges. Air Marshal Barratt nevertheless obliged General Gamelin with a raid in which forty out of seventy-one bombers sent were shot down—the highest “rate of loss”
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that the RAF had ever experienced in an operation of this size. The operation did almost no damage to the bridges, and slowed the German advance down by at best a few hours. The Hurricanes sent to protect the slow, vulnerable Battles and the poorly armed Blenheims performed prodigies, but, inevitably, Dowding’s darkest predictions had come true—the forces of the RAF in France were being destroyed piecemeal for no possible gain. The tap had been turned on, and nobody wanted to face the political consequences of turning it off.

Four squadrons of Hurricanes had been sent to France at the start of the German attack, in addition to the six that were already there. By May 13, as anguished demands for fighters poured in from the French, as well as from the foundering Dutch and Belgian governments, the question of sending more Hurricanes to France had become the hottest of political hot potatoes. It was discussed at a meeting of the War Cabinet, where the new Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair, who had been Churchill’s second in command during the brief period when the prime minister had commanded the Sixth Battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers in Flanders in 1916, reminded the War Cabinet of the Air Staff’s estimate that sixty squadrons were required to defend the country against German attack, and that only thirty-nine were available.

When it came time to write his own version of these events, in 1948, Churchill naturally chose to portray himself in a concerned and judicious role, balancing the demands of the French against the requirements of the Air Staff, but in fact most of those who were there that day remember him as a glowering, overbearing presence, at his most obstinate and difficult. Against this, it must be said in describing Churchill at the time that the phrase “bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders” comes to mind. The Dutch were being overrun and would surrender in two days, the Belgians would surrender not long afterward, and the first signs of incompetence and defeatism in the French army were already clear enough to see, much as the prime minister did not want to see them. Perhaps hoping to gain time, or to postpone the decision to send more fighters to France, the Chief of the Air Staff cannily suggested that before a decision was made to reduce the number of fighter squadrons in this country by sending further squadrons to France, the Commander-in-Chief, Fighter Command, should be given the opportunity of expressing his views, and pointed out that Dowding would almost certainly not want to release more Hurricane squadrons unless he was overruled by the War Cabinet. In short, Newall, who already knew very well what Dowding’s position was—he had heard it many times before—was passing the buck to Dowding, and at the same time warning everyone that Dowding not only would oppose sending more Hurricanes to France, but would certainly also go on the record as having opposed it.

Newall was present at the War Cabinet above all because the prime minister wanted the RAF to begin bombing Germany at once—something the French government opposed vehemently, and would continue to oppose to the very end out of fear of German retaliation. Despite the objections of the French, turning Bomber Command loose against the Ruhr was the chief subject on Churchill’s mind at the cabinet meeting of May 13 so far as the RAF was concerned, rather than the French demand for more British fighters, or Dowding’s reluctance to send them.

The idea that Bomber Command could strike a crippling blow against the Ruhr, the heart of German heavy industry and war production, was an illusion still shared by Churchill and many others, even Newall, who should have known better. The scenes of mass destruction predicted by H. G. Wells (and by Churchill too in his speeches in the late 1930s) were still affecting everybody where the subject of bombing was concerned. The idea terrified the French, and of course made Churchill all the more anxious to turn the bombers loose on the Ruhr for what he imagined as a decisive blow. He was not much concerned by the possibility of German retaliation against Britain—on the contrary, he expected it, and indeed hoped it would draw German air strength away from the battlefield, thus allowing the French army to form and hold a line, and to counterattack in force from the south and cut off the German “bulge.”

What had not yet occurred to anybody (except perhaps Dowding) is that bombing the Ruhr would produce merely a damp squib, as opposed to a dramatic shock that would bring Hitler to his senses, or to his knees. In fact, Bomber Command had as yet neither the aircraft nor the navigational skills nor the scientific and technical expertise to seriously damage German industry. By day, its aircraft were too slow and too poorly armed to survive in the skies over Germany, and by night they had, even in clear weather, no reliable way of locating their targets. What seemed to the prime minister, and to those around him in the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street, a grave, difficult decision, with far-reaching consequences, we can now see, with the benefit of time and hindsight, to have been of no importance at all compared with the threat to reduce the number of Dowding’s fighter squadrons in the United Kingdom.

In the event, Dowding did not get his chance to make his case before the Chiefs of Staff Committee of the War Cabinet until two days later, on May 15—an indication of his comparatively low position on the scale of Churchill’s priorities. By that time a flood of bad news from the continent had increased Dowding’s anxiety about further reducing the number of his fighter squadrons in the United Kingdom. On the 14th the Germans, anxious to prevent any delay in the timetable of Army Group B’s attack across the neutral Netherlands toward the Dyle River by continued Dutch resistance, however slight, decided to teach the Dutch a lesson in
Schrecklicheit
by bombing Rotterdam. The city’s historic center “was devastated, 20,000 buildings destroyed, 78,000 people rendered homeless and nearly 1,000 of the inhabitants killed.” There was no resistance—the Dutch air force had been destroyed on the ground the day before, and Rotterdam had no antiaircraft guns. The
Luftwaffe
pilots took their time, methodically bombing from an altitude of only a few hundred feet at their leisure, and set off “a raging inferno” in the heart of the city. The next day, the Netherlands surrendered. Here was exactly the scenario that the French feared most, and not surprisingly they dug in their heels even more firmly at the idea of bombing Germany. But to the British it demonstrated, on the contrary, the power of bombing, and erased whatever doubts and scruples remained in the War Cabinet about bombing the Ruhr for fear of inflicting civilian casualties there.

In fact, the tragedy at Rotterdam was not one the Germans could repeat over Paris or London, even had they wished to. Rotterdam was a small city, easily visible against a flat landscape, completely undefended, easy to find in clear weather (all you needed was a good road or railway map), less than 100 miles from the German border, and within easy range of numerous
Luftwaffe
bases—like Guernica, it was the air war equivalent of stealing candy from a baby.

If the bombing of Rotterdam shook the French government, it set off a full-scale political crisis in Belgium, the next neutral country in the path of Army Group B. Belgium would surrender less than two weeks later, and the attitude of King Leopold III was already raising serious concern among British representatives in Brussels, including Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes, a member of Parliament. Churchill’s pugnacious old friend Keyes had been sent to serve as the prime minister’s personal emissary to the king of the Belgians.

The meeting of the Chiefs of Staff in the Cabinet War Room at ten in the morning on the 15th, a meeting at which Dowding was to make his case in person, was not, as is sometimes imagined, small, select, serene, and orderly. People came in and out with news or information, and the prime minister, who was in any case late to arrive, was visibly distracted despite his formidable powers of concentration. He had had, as the saying goes, a lot on his plate during the past twenty-four hours. The day before, he had left 10 Downing Street briefly to greet Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and the Dutch royal family,
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who had fled to London to avoid becoming prisoners of the Germans; in the early morning of the 15th he had been awakened by Reynaud’s panicky call from Paris about the German breakthrough at Sedan; Admiral Keyes was already reporting rumors that the Belgian government was considering leaving Brussels; in the afternoon, Churchill would be drafting the first of his numerous long letters as prime minister to President Roosevelt, among other things requesting fifty destroyers from the United States.
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The dominant issue on everybody’s mind was of course the unexpected speed of the German advance, and the increasingly apparent chaos, dislocation, and defeatism of the French army.