By 1940, some were already claiming that Göring had proved Douhet right. The capitulation of Poland and the Netherlands had followed quickly after the bombing of Warsaw and Rotterdam respectively. Even sceptics were beginning to believe that this was cause and effect. Certainly it seemed to provide Göring with a trump card. If his overall programme of air attacks against military targets in southern England failed, he had only to switch his whole attack to London itself and the British government would seek terms. Douhet said so, and history proved it.

Unfortunately for Göring there were, in Britain, some young flyers who had never read Douhet, and an elderly disbeliever named Dowding.

PART TWO

Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, Commander in Chief Fighter Command

(General Officer Commander in Chief Anti-Aircraft Command, 1939-45), of Dowding.

It is difficult to imagine a man less like Hermann Göring than was Hugh Dowding. In 1914, already 32 years old, Dowding qualified as a pilot. His father heard about it and forbade him to fly because it was too dangerous. Hugh Dowding obeyed his father.

Both his parents came from the sort of upper-middle-class families that supplied senior men to the Church, India, and the armed forces. His father, a kind and conscientious man, had founded a successful preparatory school in Scotland. There were four children, three boys and a girl.

As the eldest child of the school's head-master, Hugh Dowding was expected to set an example of duty, manners, patriotism, and industry. Like his father, he went to Winchester, a public school reputed to produce inscrutable intellectuals. Dowding's subsequent career did little to change the Wykehamist reputation.

At Winchester he found that joining the Army Class was a way to avoid Greek verbs. Later Dowding said that he went into the army rather than learn Greek, but in 1899 when he entered the Royal Military Academy Queen Victoria's scarlet-coated soldiers were just about to fight the Boers in South Africa. The British, after many years of widespread contempt for men and matters military, were undergoing a bout of hysterical jingoism.

In response to the crisis, the army shortened its Royal Military Academy course to one year. Dowding's family could not have afforded the private income that their son would have needed in a smart regiment. Instead Hugh Dowding went to Woolwich but failed to get the exam results necessary for a commission in the Royal Engineers. He had to be content with gunnery. Second Lieutenant Dowding, of the Garrison Artillery, graduated but never fought the Boers. Instead he served in Gibraltar, Ceylon, Hong Kong, and with the Mountain Artillery in India.

By the time he returned to England the world had fundamentally changed: the Wright brothers had built their flying machine, and a Frenchman, Louis Bleriot, had flown the Channel. The idea of learning how to fly attracted Dowding, in the same way that polo and skiing did. By getting up in the early hours he was able to have flying tuition at Brooklands before arriving at the Camberley Staff College each morning. The Royal Flying Corps had been formed the previous year, and anyone who could fly and was accepted by it could get the cost of his flying tuition refunded. Dowding persuaded the flying school to teach him on credit until he got the refund. It was on this 'fly now, pay later' arrangement that Dowding was able to afford his Royal Aero Club certificate. The school assigned a mechanic to be his instructor and he got his 'ticket' after a total of one hour and forty minutes in the air.

After a further three months' instruction at the Central Flying School, Upavon, Dowding received his wings. Until then he had considered flying as a sport, or at best a help to his army career. But his short time with the men of the Royal Flying Corps — still a part of the army — made him think that he would like to stay with them. His father's veto did no more than delay matters. It was 1914. Within weeks of getting his wings, war with Germany began. Dowding's qualification as a pilot required him to serve with the RFC.

Dowding went to France. By 1915 he was a squadron commander. Dowding was considerably older than the average wartime pilot — ten years older than von Richthofen for instance — and, as the RFC expanded and became the RAF, his military background brought him rapid promotion. By the time the war ended, Dowding was a Brigadier-General. Many rungs lower on the promotion ladder were three young squadron commanders. They were all to play vital roles in the Battle of Britain almost a quarter of a century later.

Commanding an army-cooperation squadron, there was Major Leigh-Mallory, who was to continue with this speciality in the peacetime air force. Leigh-Mallory, who later became Dowding's severest critic, was ten years younger than Dowding. He had taken an honours history degree at Cambridge before becoming a soldier and, in 1916, an airman. Trafford Leigh-Mallory was a thick-set man with heavy jowl and a small, carefully trimmed moustache.

Major K. R. Park, M.C. and bar, D.F.C. was an astounding New Zealander who had fought at Gallipoli, been wounded on the Somme, and then, by losing his medical records, transferred to the air force and shot down twenty German aircraft.

Keith Park was a popular and persuasive man. He had quelled a near mutiny in 1918 by assembling the airmen and talking to them on random subjects and in such a monotonous voice for so long that all rebelliousness was destroyed by fatigue.

Thirdly there was Major W. Sholto-Douglas, D.S.O. M.C, a fighter pilot credited with five victories. In another example of post-war Angst, Dowding was instructed by the Air Ministry to court-martial Sholto-Douglas over something that was in no way the young officer's fault. In spite of a rather delicate situation that obtained between Dowding and the Air Ministry over his own retention in the RAF, Dowding refused to take any action. For this, Sholto-Douglas seemed suitably appreciative.

Dowding was an enigmatic man. His inability to make intimate friends will probably keep him so. It is difficult to reconcile a man who put on his hat before stepping into the next office, with a ski champion who seldom missed a season on the slopes, and eventually became president of the Ski Club of Great Britain. There was Dowding the diligent administrator, and Dowding the impatient technician; Dowding the devout and courteous, and Dowding of whom the Air Ministry was afraid. If Dowding remains an enigma there can be little doubt that that is exactly what he wished.

Already an abstemious and dedicated man, his social life virtually disappeared upon the tragic death of his wife after only two years of marriage. He was left to care for an infant son. Withdrawn and reflective, Dowding now devoted himself entirely to his work. Some mistook this attitude for ambition.

In the early 1930s Dowding was appointed to the Air Council as Member for Supply and Research. One of his first dicta was that wood must no longer be the structural base of combat aircraft. During Dowding's time in this vital job, the RAF changed from biplane fighters to metal monoplanes. It was not done without strong opposition from the biplane lobby. In 1935 the first Hurricane flew, and the prototype Spitfire came a few months later.

It was on Dowding's authority that Robert Watson-Watt of the National Physical Laboratories demonstrated the way in which an aircraft could reflect a radio beam (in this case a BBC overseas programme). They watched a pinhead of light on a cathode-ray oscillograph stretch to a tiny green line. It was the crude beginning of Britain's radar.