K. R. Park, MC and bar, DFC, 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, DSO, MC, 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 Withdrawn and reflective, Dowding now devoted himself entirely to his work.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.
Boldly Dowding assumed that radar would work, and went ahead with plans for a control system, and fighter tactics, on that assumption. Until radar was ready, the fighters emitted radio signals like echoes, so that plotting could be set up.
Because the original (10-metre) radar network could not detect low-flying aircraft, Dowding took the navy’s more complex 1.5-metre radar sets that were designed to detect ships. These sets had aerials that revolved, to scan the whole horizon. Adapted for the detection of low-flying aircraft, these sets became Chain Home Low (CHL). By 1940 Dowding was devoting a great deal of his time to the development of airborne radar fitted into night fighter aircraft.
In 1936, with the growth of Göring’s air force more and more in evidence, the RAF decided to reorganise into specialist Commands. All of the bombers in Britain would come under Bomber Command, sea reconnaissance units would be organised as Coastal Command, and training would be done by Training Command.
In March 1936, as the Spitfire prototype took to the air for the first time, and the radar he had nursed into being made rapid strides, Dowding ended his job as Member for Research and Development (the supply part of his original task had been given to another member of the Air Council). With a neatness usually only found in the pages of fiction, Dowding was now appointed to prepare these weapons and take them to war.
This appointment, to Commander in Chief of Fighter Command, was not due to any friends that Dowding had in the Air Ministry. On the contrary, plans were afoot to deprive Dowding of the promotion to Chief of Air Staff which had already been promised to him.
In July 1936 Dowding made a first visit to Bentley Priory, HQ of the newly created Fighter Command. Bentley Priory was an old Gothic house on a hill to the extreme north-west of London. At one time it had been a girls’ school. It was typical of this idiosyncratic man that instead of arranging the ceremony that would normally take place, he arrived at nine o’clock in the morning, unannounced and all alone. The guard was extremely reluctant to let him through the gate but after inspecting his papers, he handed him over to the most senior man there, a sergeant from the Orderly Room. The two men wandered through the grounds and then through the empty rooms. Selecting a room with a southerly view, Dowding asked the sergeant to put his name on the door, thanked him, and left.
By this time Dowding was 54 years old, a tall, thin, rather frail-looking widower. He set up house with his sister, just along the road from his office. Dowding’s son was preparing to go to the RAF College at Cranwell. In 1939 he would graduate and come under his father’s orders, as a Spitfire pilot in Fighter Command, just in time for the Battle of Britain.
Meanwhile there was the gigantic task of reorganising the fighter defences of Britain. Working with Dowding, as his Senior Air Staff Officer, there was a man who was perhaps the RAF’s foremost expert on fighters. Keith Park, now a 44-year-old Air Commodore, had followed his success as an ace fighter pilot of the First World War with time at the staff college and a short spell commanding a fighter station. Park was a tall, neat New Zealander of Scots origin. Thin-faced, with a military moustache, he had the springy step and confident manner of a bank official. He liked flying and never missed a chance to use his personal Hurricane. During the Dunkirk evacuation – where Park had special responsibility for air cover – he had logged more than 100 flying hours, in order to see what was happening to his men. One fighter pilot of the pre-war days at Tangmere remembers him as an austere man who was never heard to utter a damn or a blast. Park is also remembered for his curious habit of wearing a steel helmet over his flying helmet when flying his plane.
Trafford Leigh-Mallory commanded the fighter squadrons of 12 Group and so was responsible for defending one of the large areas into which Britain had been divided by the new Fighter Command system. Leigh-Mallory’s Group, in central England, was vital for the defence but not so vital as 11 Group, which covered south-east England and London, a region which would undoubtedly bear the brunt of enemy attack, and which contained the greatest number of fighter squadrons.
In the spring of 1940, as the war began to heat up, Dowding changed his Group commanders. Many would have said that Leigh-Mallory, who had commanded 12 Group since 1937, must be a prime choice for command of the more vital 11 Group. Instead, Dowding assigned his SASO, Keith Park, to this command. If Leigh-Mallory felt himself slighted it is possible to understand why.
The separation of the RAF’s resources into specialised Commands was partly a response to the political atmosphere that Hitler’s aggressive speeches had generated. The senior ranks of the RAF remained convinced that Bomber Command was the key to victory, but after the Munich crisis the inadequacy of the defences gave some priorities to Fighter Command.
And the Munich crisis gave Dowding an importance that had not been foreseen by the Air Ministry. He was the Commander in Chief of a command that included not only the fighter squadrons but the control network, the balloon barrage (steel cables suspended from balloons to impede low-flying attackers) and anti-aircraft guns. Although technically the latter were under army orders, Dowding’s suggestions were never ignored. Now he pressed for money to be spent on the Observer Corps (volunteer skywatchers who reported aircraft movements across the whole of Great Britain). He also asked for Operations Rooms at all levels of Fighter Command and all-weather runways at the fighter airfields.
It was in this year of the Munich crisis that Dowding received the first of a series of official letters, terminating his
