Читать книгу Engineering Hitler's Downfall - Gwilym Roberts - Страница 61

An austere character, Dowding was originally a Royal Artillery officer; he joined the Army in 1899 and in 1912 learned to fly at his own expense. He transferred to the RFC in 1914 and was for a period in the First World War in command of a wireless experimental establishment at Brooklands. Lucky to escape compulsory retirement at the end of the war, he then commanded RAF stations in London and Baghdad until 1930, when he was appointed to the Air Council as Air Member for Supply and Research. In this capacity he oversaw the introduction of a new generation of fighter and bomber aircraft and worked closely with Watson-Watt in establishing the radar network. In 1936 he was appointed commander in chief of the newly formed Fighter Command and established the integrated Ground Controlled Interception (GCI) system that operated the fighter aircraft during the Battle of Britain. He was then already past retirement age; despite the battle’s victorious conclusion, he was removed from office in late 1940 prior to retiring in 1942 after heading the Air Mission to the USA. His statue was erected outside the RAF’s church, St Clement Danes, in the Strand, London.

Dowding and Park (and they alone) received copies of German signals that had been decrypted at Bletchley Park, initially via the Air Ministry but later directly by dedicated teleprinter. The information was filtered and then disseminated to Group 11 headquarters at Stanmore, north London, and to other group headquarters when necessary, and thence to sector operations rooms, the final link in the command chain. The sector controllers were the key men who bore the great responsibility of putting the squadrons in the air, positioning them, having executive authority over them until they saw the enemy, and eventually guiding them back to their bases. These controllers needed ‘a sense of judgement amounting to an intuition’, and they regarded themselves as much servants as commanders of the pilots they controlled.

This integrated monitoring, communications, and control system was essential in enabling RAF fighters to be airborne and in the right place and height to attack the incoming bombers.

Dowding GCI System of Monitoring, Communications, and Control

Meanwhile, since October 1936 a small group of army scientists had been attached to Watson-Watt’s radar establishment. Over the following years they used radar-derived techniques to develop means of improving the accuracy of gun laying (GL) for anti-aircraft guns. The original techniques using 6 metre GL sets gave indifferent results, although the arrival of centimetric radar improved performance fivefold. Shooting down a raider in 1940, for example, on average required firing 20,000 rounds, but this was reduced to 4,000 rounds by the following spring. Proximity fuses were also created and proved to be very powerful anti-aircraft devices; they were likewise designed for use in shells, rockets and bombs. Details of their development were among the scientific secrets shared with the Americans by the Tizard mission in 1940.

As for the Germans, they were later discovered to have been developing their own ‘Freya’ radar system, though it was too late for the Battle of Britain. Indeed, Major (later General) Adolf Galland, who flew Messerschmitt 109s during that conflict, wrote: ‘The British had, from the first, an extraordinary advantage, never to be balanced out at any time in the whole war: their radar and fighter-control network. It was for us and for our leadership a freely expressed surprise, and at that time a very bitter one, that Britain had at its disposal a close-meshed radar system, obviously carried to the highest level of current technique, which supplied the British fighter command with the most complete basis for direction imaginable ... We had nothing like it.’