This Is My Kind Of History

Yeah, I didn't buy any comics today. I'm sure they came in, but I think I only had one comic, and I actually can't remember if I ordered a copy, and if I did, I'm not sure I want it after all. So I didn't go. Also, I'm taking a trip starting tomorrow, so we'll be entering no posting mode, unless my friend received his new laptop (and set up an Internet connection).

For today, With Wings Like Eagles, by Michael Korda. I've mentioned a couple of different times that I like books about military aviation, especially pertaining to World War 2. So a book about the Batlle of Britain, as well as the preparations on both sides for it, was right up my alley. If there's a main character, it would be Hugh Dowding, leader of Fighter Command until November 1940. Dowding is a serious man, uninterested in playing politics or sugar-coating things for people, and unswayed by sentimentality. On the plus side, this helps him devise a strategy for using his fighters in such a way they can be effective in defending Britain, without being annihilated, in the face of others demands to be more aggressive or more supportive of the French*. On the other hand, a man prone to bluntly speaking his mind makes enemies, in Dowding's case quite a few of them, with few friends to protect him. Also, he didn't show much interest in settling squabbles between Air Vice-Marshall's Park and Leigh-Mallory, two of his direct subordinates, and that gave Leigh-Mallory the opportunity to go up the ladder on him.

Korda devotes some of the earlier chapters to the development of the important technology in the battle. This includes the origin of the Spitfire, Hurricane, and Messerschmitt fighters, as well as the origin and establishment of radar towers along England's coasts. Since Dowding was pushing for the radar towers, their approval didn't come easily, especially since most of the higher-ups were counting on their bombers to protect them**. The Spitfire had its origin with seaplane racing, where aircraft routinely flew 100 to 150 miles per hour faster than any plane any air force had at the time. Messerschmitt had difficulties even getting the Luftwaffe to accept his design, because he'd made an enemy of Goering's righthand man, Erhard Milch. I'm not much of an engineer, but reading the struggles and accomodations the engineers had to make with regard to reducing drag, while still having space for weapons, wireless radios, and so on, was interesting.

The details of the Battle itself is fairly well-done. Korda alternates the information he provides. For a few pages, he'll discuss the Luftwaffe strategy, when they were sending bombers, how many, where the fighters were, how the British responded. Then he'll spend a few pages discussing it from the pilot's point of view, or those of the Women's Auxilary Air Force, who were often in the observation posts at the airfields, even as bombs were dropping all around them. These sections tend to focus on the British side, and it works to depict the exhaustion the people defending England's shores were experiencing, especially as the Germans ramped up the size of the attacks from mid-August into September. Presumably, the German crews weren't flying five, six sorties a day, and so weren't passing out in their planes upon landing. Nor were their ground crews at risk of being blown up by British bombing, so it's a somewhat different circumstance.

I feel the alternating focus lets Kroda discuss the battle at both a large and small scale. It's still the early stages of the war, the Americans and Soviets haven't even gotten actively involved yet*** , but it is the first progress the Allies have had, but it's costing everyone. Dowding's whole strategy was to send up his fighters in small swarms (to disguise the strength of his force, it worked), and focus on the bombers, because they have more crew members than fighters, so shooting down one them removes 4 enemy soldiers, rather than the one lost with a downed fighter. On a more personal scale, these are people dying as part of this strategy, in the air and on the ground, and Kroda makes sure to keep that in the near background at the very least.

The book also has a couple of sections of photographs of the principals involved, and even two lovely paintings, one by John Howard Worsley of the crash of American Billy Fiske. If you look under "Echoes of the Home Front" on the John Howard Worsley website you can see it.

* One thing that doesn't seemed to have helped Dowding is that he would bluntly inform Churchill that it was a waste of time to be sending Britain's Hawker Hurricanes to try and help the French, because the French were hopelessly disorganzied, and poorly prepared. As the squadrons sent across the Channel were being rapidly wiped out with no coherent plan or direction, Churchill got the message, but he still didn't like telling the French "No".

** The belief of the day was that bombers were invincible. They flew too high, too fast, to be caught by a fighter, and were too well-armed for a fighter to survive to shoot them down if they could catch up. The feeling was bombers always get through, and safety was relying on mutally assured destruction. You send your bombers, we'll send ours, we'll both be destroyed, and nobody wants that. Except, of course, the bobmers can't escape the fighters, the bombers don't always get through, and as parties on both sides demonstrated, unless you can destroy a city in one blast, the people don't surrender.

*** Unless you count FDR's Lend Lease program, which I'm not.