From the High Command's point of view, however, the new German tactics were effective. These tight formations forced their way through to the targets, and sometimes devastated them.
On 26 August the smouldering dispute between Park and his severest critic Leigh-Mallory, commanding 12 Group, flared up. As was the usual practice, Park asked his northerly neighbours to patrol threatened airfields north of the Thames Estuary while he put his own fighters forward to intercept German raids. Park's airfield at Debden, Essex, was left undefended. The Germans bombed it. Park asked why Leigh-Mallory's fighters were not there, and the latter replied that he was asked too late.
The dispute was part of a long-standing disagreement between the two men. Unwittingly the bad feeling was fanned by the theories of the legless fighter pilot, Douglas Bader, who now commanded one of Leigh-Mallory's squadrons.
Bader, a 30-year-old Squadron Leader, was a graduate of the new RAF College, Cranwell. He had crashed very soon after graduation. Both legs had to be amputated. In spite of a demonstration that he could fly with tin legs better than most men could fly with real ones, the RAF refused to let him continue, so Bader's career seemed to be over before it had begun. Throughout his many years of civilian life Bader made continual applications to go back to flying, but not until November 1939 did the Air Ministry relent. The same courage and determination that had enabled him to conquer the double amputation made him a fabled fighter pilot. Within six months of his return he caught up with his Cranwell contemporaries.
Leigh-Mallory had much the same interest in Bader's career that Dowding had shown in Leigh-Mallory, Park, and Sholto-Douglas, who had been his subordinates a generation before. Squadron Leader Bader took command of 242 Squadron in June 1940, just in time for the Battle. Already his name was known throughout Fighter Command.
Bader argued that Park was wrong to put his fighters up in squadron-size units. Bader said that only very large formations of fighters, attacking together, could deal a lethal blow to the German formations.
These 'big wings' (they were sometimes called Balbos, after a famous Italian aviator) took a long time to form up in the air. For 12 Group, who usually had generous warning of a German attack, they were more practical than for the front-line needs of 11 Group. The big-wing advocates, however, were heard to say that it was better to decimate a German raid after it had bombed than to scratch at it before it had bombed. Such reasoning failed to take account of the importance of the sector airfields or of the whole control system. Yet, for that very reason, it appealed to men who felt constricted by the Controller's orders. For Leigh-Mallory, Bader provided an outspoken critic of two men he particularly disliked: Park and Dowding. And so it was a heaven-sent circumstance that had provided for Bader an adjutant who was a Member of Parliament of some fourteen years' experience.
It was a curious circumstance, and for Dowding it perhaps proved a fateful one. According to Bader's biographer, Paul Brickhill, this MP spoke directly to the Air Minister about the squadrons' problems. So it was arranged that he should spend an hour and a half with Churchill, who "next day began sending for various Group commanders." As we shall see, this astounding revelation shed light on later events that for many years remained a mystery.
Some of the most high-spirited pilots of 12 Group envied the 11 Group squadrons, who were constantly in the fight. Flying on the leash of strict ground control was particularly chafing for veterans of an era of open-cockpit flying. To be sent to guard the airfields of the pilots who were doing the fighting must have seemed the last straw to such men. Even the least critical members of this school of thought believed that ground Controllers should advise and ask rather than order. Squadron Leader Bader believed that very large formations of fighters should have enough latitude to engage the enemy at the time, the place, and in the fashion that the formation leader saw fit.
Had it not been for the times when German raids heavily bombed 11 Group's airfields entrusted to 12 Group's protection, the big-wing theories might have gone unremarked in spite of Bader's adjutant and those discussions with higher authority. But Park reacted sharply to having his fighter airfields left open to bombers. Leigh-Mallory's response was to criticize Park's entire strategy and to mention Bader's theories to his friends, among them Sholto-Douglas, by now Air Vice-Marshal and Deputy Chief of Air Staff.
The exaggerated combat claims by both sides were usually in proportion to the number of aircraft in action. (This was because several pilots would take a quick shot at an enemy plane, and then all report it as it went down.) Inevitably Leigh-Mallory's big wings benefited from this fundamental law of air fighting. On one occasion, the big wing claimed fifty-seven Germans downed, when post-war scrutiny of German records showed that only eight of the raiders failed to get home. Usually 12 Group's big wings met the Germans at the extreme limit of the Bf 109's range. This gave them a reputation for being able to turn the German raids back. And so it was that the big-wing theorists captured the imagination of the Air Ministry, and probably of Churchill too.
The attacks upon the sector airfields brought more people into the Battle. As electricity, telephones, teleprinters, sewage, and transport were destroyed, fighter aerodromes relied upon the ground staff, and civilians, to put the pieces back together. At Manston on Saturday 24 August, Post Office engineers sat down next to an unexploded bomb and sorted through hundreds of severed wires to reconnect the Operations Room and the fighters to Group Headquarters. Electricity workers, WAAFs, and fire brigade men were taking risks as great as the pilots, but it was not everyone's finest hour.
RAF Manston, built on a cliff-top alongside the sea, was suffering not only the scheduled bombing attacks, but also spontaneous ground-strafing from fighters which came in low over the sea and crossed the airfield at near ground level. Many airmen had been sitting in the air-raid shelters ever since the attack that Fink had delivered to the airfield at lunchtime on 12 August. (About one hundred raw recruits arrived just before the heaviest raids.) Now the terrified men would not budge, and the accountant officer could not even find enough airmen above ground to hold a pay parade. Squadron Leader J. A. Leathart, of 54 Squadron, had only just prevented another officer from going into the shelter to shoot the first man who refused to come out.
The chaplain disarmed an officer who was threatening to kill everyone in the Mess. While the RAF were in the shelters, local civilians took the opportunity to loot the damaged buildings for RAF tools and spares.
Manston was not the only airfield where men spent week after week petrified in the shelters. The provision that some far-sighted Air Ministry official had arranged to deal with bomb craters had now gone badly wrong. The civilians, who had been receiving wages for doing nothing until the action started, now decided that it was too dangerous to work while an air-raid alert was in force. So they, too, sat in the subterranean shelters, and the few men left to service the aircraft and keep the airfields and Operations Rooms running went out with the shovels and filled in the craters too. By this time most pilots had learned something of the job of refuelling and rearming the fighters.
But even the less glorious moments of the Battle retained their class-conscious nature. Europe's cataclysmic movements of nations and races and their social aftermath were still to come. This war in the air belonged to varsity men, with technical-school graduates as travelling reserves. Sharing the same middle-class values as their opponents, the Stuka crews — like those of Bomber Command — frequently carried their bombs back to base if they failed to identify their military targets. And at least one German flyer was reprimanded by Molders for attacking such 'an unmilitary target' as a train. The survivors would live to wonder at such niceties.