The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

It has been argued that the knives were already out for Dowding even before the crisis over night-fighting erupted in October 1940. A secret memorandum circulated in September claiming, among other things, that Dowding had ‘a very slow brain’, reached Churchill’s close colleague Brendan Bracken.¹⁶⁰ Dowding was certainly not widely popular but did enjoy the backing of Churchill and the chief of the air staff, Sir Cyril Newall, with whom he had worked closely to mould the air defence system in the 1930s. Dowding’s stubborn insistence that there was nothing very effective he could do about night-interception until the technology was ready was used against him, particularly by Churchill’s friend Lord Beaverbrook, appointed Minister of Aircraft Production in May 1940, whose angry claims that aircraft production was facing a calamity as a result of bombing played an important part in the campaign to get Dowding finally retired. When Beaverbrook asked for aircraft squadrons to be stationed next to aircraft factories to afford them protection from night attack, Dowding refused. Dowding offered more anti-aircraft guns, but in October 1940 there were only 158 guns defending the entire aircraft industry, from Scotland to southern England.¹⁶¹ By then opinion in the Air Ministry had hardened against him. On 2 October Air Chief Marshal Newall, his firmest ally, was forced to retire, to be replaced by Air Marshal Charles Portal, who remained chief-of-staff down to the end of the war.¹⁶² A few days later Salmond wrote to Churchill insisting that Dowding should step down at once, and that all the senior commanders in the air force agreed.¹⁶³ Dowding’s testy response to the effort to expand night defences in October must have convinced even Churchill that it was time for him to go. On 13 November Dowding was notified that he was to be succeeded by Air Vice Marshal Sholto Douglas, who was one of his many critics in the ministry. Dowding was the most senior casualty of the German bomber offensive.

Sholto Douglas tried immediately to demonstrate that he was more willing than his predecessor to find a way to challenge the German night offensive, but he soon found that Dowding’s reservations had been justified. Douglas requested a minimum of 20 night-fighter squadrons, including 8 squadrons of Hurricanes, but by March 1941 he still had only 5 squadrons, while the introduction of the Beaufighter Mark II (now designated the principal night-fighter) and of Airborne Interception (AI-Mark IV) radar for night-time operations was much slower than required. In December 1940 Portal rejected Douglas’s request for further expansion of the night force with the argument that there was not a single crew capable of regularly shooting down night-bombers. He allocated Beaufighter production to the war at sea.¹⁶⁴ The figures for night-fighter interception made it evident that Portal, and before him Dowding, were right. In the raids against Birmingham in mid-November 1940 there were 100 British aircraft airborne but only one German casualty, a victim of accident. Only a handful of bombers were shot down before the advent of the more effective AI-Mark IV radar sets in March 1941, almost at the end of the campaign. In January 1941 the RAF needed 198 sorties for every German aircraft shot down, but in March the figure fell dramatically to 47. During 1941 the night defences claimed a total of 435 German planes, but 357 of them from April onwards.¹⁶⁵ In January 1941 the first 6 inland Ground Control Interception (GCI) radars for tracking a single fighter on to an incoming bomber became operational, but they were faced with regular teething troubles and only began to work as planned by the summer, when 17 static and mobile stations were available out of a planned network of 150.¹⁶⁶ As with so much of the British response to the German campaign, improved operational and technical effectiveness came only after the bombing was almost over.