With Wings Like Eagles Read Online Free

himself almost entirely to spiritualism), and perhaps for that reason unafraid of new or seemingly crackpot scientific schemes and of challenging authority—indeed, as we shall see, he probably saved Britain by standing up to Winston Churchill during the great crisis of France’s defeat, and paid a stiff price for his blunt, outspoken refusal to be bullied, persuaded, silenced, or coerced by the prime minister. In his own gruff, shy way Dowding was strangely sentimental about his fighter pilots, whom he sometimes referred to as “my chicks,” and in his official farewell letter to them on giving up his beloved command, he addressed them, like a Mr. Chips in uniform, as “My dear Fighter Boys.”
    It would be difficult to imagine a person less like Göring or Göring’s commanders. So far as one can tell, Dowding had no hobbies or recreations—to a remarkable degree, he felt the hot wind of war at his back, urging him on to prepare Fighter Command for battle, despite doubt, interference, and hostility, and, as it would prove, he succeeded just in time. His technical expertise and his imagination on the subject of air warfare were the impetus that produced radar, the eight-gun Hawker Hurricane and the Supermarine Spitfire, and the “brain” of Fighter Command, a centralized Fighter Control, the futuristic Operations Room at Fighter Command Headquarters, which was in constant communication with the radar plotters and the fighter squadrons, and from which the battle could be systematically observed, controlled, and led.
    Above all, in 1936 Dowding was perhaps the one man of consequence in the United Kingdom—perhaps in the world—who did not believe that the bomber would “always get through.”
     
     
    Stanley Baldwin’s statement in the House of Commons represented accepted wisdom in the 1920s and 1930s. Toward the end of World War I the Germans had made a major effort to bomb London and coastal cities in the south of England, first using zeppelins, then using big Gotha biplane bombers with twin Mercedes motors and a seventy-seven-foot wingspan, hoping to weaken British resolve by the application of Schrecklicheit (frightfulness), always the fallback position of German policy. Though compared with what happened in the next world war the damage and the number of deaths were small (835 British civilians were killed and 1,990 wounded), the bombing campaign, not surprisingly, made a huge impression. Unfortunately for the Germans, however, the net effect was merely to increase British determination to win the war.
    Once the war was over, and aircraft gradually started to become larger and more powerful (by very small degrees—in 1932, when Baldwin made his remark about the bomber, the bombers of the world’s air forces still resembled those of 1917 and 1918 much more than they did those of 1939), the belief grew that the next war, if there was one, would begin with huge bombing raids that would annihilate great cities on the first day. This illusion was in part the work of military propagandists for “strategic bombing,” such as General Giulio Douhet in Italy and General “Billy” Mitchell in the United States, and in part the work of senior air force officers, who promised the politicians that a big bombing force would serve as the best deterrent to war, and would be much cheaper to build up and maintain than a big army—an argument that appealed both to those who sought peace and to those who sought economy in governmental spending.
    Of course, nowhere did these fleets of bombers exist: the United States, for instance, was thousands of miles away from any country it might possibly need to bomb, and in any case was in the middle of the Great Depression and was resolved never to fight another war. But strangely enough, the idea of the bomber as the inevitable, ultimate weapon of the future became more widely accepted in Britain than in any other country, to the dismay of the admirals, who still believed the