The rooster and his 'chicks' who saved Britain in WWII | Richmond Times-Dispatch Horatio Nelson and Francis Drake rank 1-2, or 2-1, in the pantheon of England's military heroes. When you read Michael Korda's latest history, you wonder if the list should also include a third individual -- Sir Hugh Dowding. For four years, from 1936 through most of 1940, Dowding was chief of the Royal Air Force fighter command. He took over when the RAF fighter arm was poorly equipped, even antiquated, and got the job done, just barely in time, to defeat Nazi Germany's Luftwaffe in a series of desperate air battles in the late summer of 1940. As Winston Churchill so memorably observed, "Never in the field of human conflict have so many owed so much to so few." Having conquered so much of Europe by mid-1940, the Germans looked to invade England. That would have required sending a huge force across the English Channel from the Nazis' new base in France, and Germany's military leaders saw the invasion as vulnerable to RAF fighter attack. Therefore, they set out to crush the RAF before a cross-channel invasion was made impossible by the onset of constant bad weather. Dowding and his "chicks," his term for his fighter pilots, stood athwart the German plan. From the strategic standpoint, Dowding divided England into four sectors, all reporting to a centralized operations center. He assured his communications by burying phone lines in concrete. Until the very end of the battle, he always held portions of his force in reserve because he didn't want the Germans to know the RAF's true strength. According to Korda, Dowding was "a remote, stubborn, difficult man with strong opinions." In addition, he was also "humorless, exacting and unafraid of challenging authority." He did not hesitate to disagree even with Churchill. Dowding's strategy worked because of the skill and bravery of his pilots, their air crews and the forward observers, many of them women, at unprotected radar stations. "Despite the danger," writes Korda, "to most fighter pilots it was an exhilarating, adrenaline-producing, incredibly intense experience, very often over -- one way or the other -- before there was even time to be frightened by it, and repeated day after day until the inexorable law of numbers caught up with you." After a failed, all-out air attack on Sept. 15, 1940, the Germans withdrew to lick their wounds. The bomber blitz of London was in the future, but the invasion of England would never happen. According to Korda, Dowding "was always obliged to fight on two fronts, one against the Luftwaffe and the other against his enemies" in the RAF high command. "He was victorious in the first battle, defeated in the second." Little more than two months after the Battle of Britain was won, Dowding was retired. And when the official history of the battle was written by the RAF, a history that sold 6 million copies, Dowding's name was never mentioned.
Not quite. He divided the United Kingdom into four Groups - Sectors were the sub-divisions of the Groups. 10 Group covered the South West and the lower half of Wales 11 Group covered the South East and London 12 Group covered the Midlands 13 Group covered norther England and Scotland
