A Summer Bright and Terrible by David E. Fisher Read Free Book Online

reconnaissance
machines, replied that “aircraft could not fly at less than forty miles per
hour, and it would be impossible for anyone to see anything of value at that
rather high speed.”
    A major problem in any military operation is to
know exactly where the enemy are and how strong they are. Dowding decided to
use his six aircraft to fly around and find them. The instructor overseeing the
operation of the exercise told him that the plan was ridiculous; aside from the
obvious impossibility of seeing anything clearly at “that rather high speed,”
the aeroplanes would never be able to find their way around. That is, he said,
they might fly from point A to point B, but they couldn’t simply get up there
and fly around in circles looking for the enemy, and, if they should find them,
have any idea where they were or how to get home again to make their report.
    Dowding replied that they could simply follow
the railway lines that crisscrossed England in those days. The instructor
laughed: If they all tried to follow the same line, they’d crash into each
other.
    Nevertheless it was Dowding’s prerogative to
ignore the instructor’s advice, although this would be putting his future
career in peril. And so he did use the aircraft, and they did find the enemy
and observed them clearly. With this information, he won the exercise
overwhelmingly since he now knew exactly where the enemy was whereas they had
no idea where he was.
    Considering the result, and comparing it to the
instructor’s ignorance, Dowding had decided that “the army might as well have
some staff officers who knew something about flying,” so he decided to learn to fly. Official policy was that the
Central Flying School of the Royal Flying Corps (RFC), which had been
established just the previous year, would accept only officers who already knew
how to fly; they had to get a civilian license at their own expense. So Dowding
got his civilian ticket by taking lessons at daybreak, before his official
duties began. He passed the RFC flying test on the day of his graduation from
the Staff College.
    “My original intention in learning to fly was
to increase my value as a staff officer,” he explained. He never had any
thought, at the start, of actually flying with the RFC, but by now flying had
gotten into his blood and he saw that the future of the army lay in the air as
well as on the ground.
    He decided on a career in the RFC, only to have
his calling halted before it began: His father simply forbade it. The senior
Dowding thought flying was too dangerous, and that was that. Dowding was
thirty-two years old, but it never occurred to him to go against his father’s
wishes. He later said that “the only thing in my life that I held against my
father was that he wouldn’t let me go into the Royal Flying Corps as soon as I
got my ticket, because he thought flying was much too dangerous an occupation.”
    But it was 1914, and in August, the Great War
broke out. While that too made life more dangerous for an army officer, even
for one in the artillery, “my father could not do a thing about it.” Although
Dowding was officially in the artillery, he was also a reservist in the RFC,
which called him up within a few hours of the outbreak of war. He was sent to
join a new squadron at a station commanded by Hugh “Boom Trenchard, and it was
there that he and Trenchard had their first run-in.
    Trenchard was the first commander of the RFC,
and its architect. He built it from scratch, and like any good architect, he
had his own ideas. His nickname, “Boom,” came from the observation by his
comrades that the telephone seemed redundant when he used it. Speaking from
headquarters to the front lines, he could supposedly be heard clearly if he just opened the window. The volume of his
voice was a measure of the clarity of his vision; he knew what he wanted and he
didn’t want to be bothered by anyone who had his own ideas. And here came
Dowding . . .
    “We thought