Free With Wings Like Eagles by Michael Korda Page A

of its guns close together (that roomy wing again!) made it a steadier gun platform. Both aircraft were at least the equal of the Bf 109E in 1939 and 1940, and would remain in production, in updated versions, until 1945. Dowding fussed over the details of both his fighters, as he fussed over the details of everything, finally persuading the Air Ministry, after an epic struggle, to order the manufacturers to put a thick piece of laminated, optically flat, bulletproof glass in front of the pilot in 1939, just in time for the war, and to install hot-air ducting into the wings to keep the breeches of the guns from freezing solid at high altitudes.
    With radar in operation, the details of fighter control worked out, and two different types of eight-gun monoplane fighters in service, Dowding had good reason to feel confident that he could meet the enemy on equal terms, if the politicians and the Air Council let him do his job.

CHAPTER 4
     
“The Other Side of the Hill”
     
    —The Duke of Wellington *
     
     
    A cross the North Sea, in Germany, the Luftwaffe was developing in a very different way, and under a radically different leadership. The contrast between the two air forces was remarkable. The RAF as the junior of the three British services suffered from something of an inferiority complex, which manifested itself in a combination of bravado—an example, later in the war, was Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Harris’s stubborn belief that RAF Bomber Command could win the war all by itself, if given the resources—and a prickly relationship between officers and “other ranks,” which Len Deighton captured perfectly in Bomber , and whose spirit pervades T. E. Lawrence’s famous book on the RAF in the early 1920s, The Mint . Because the RAF lacked the ancient regimental traditions and identity that were the backbone of the British Army, and the sense of being shipmates sharing the same risks and dangers that made shipboard discipline in the Royal Navy more tolerable, the gulf between officers and “other ranks” was in some ways wider than in the other services. The fact was that the “other ranks” thought of themselves (and were officially described) as “tradesmen,” unlike soldiers or sailors, and brought with them into the service some of the sullen attitude toward authority of skilled workers and union members in civilian life; while the NCOs in the more specialized trades took on something of the role of union shop stewards in a factory, becoming in effect intermediaries between management and labor. Eight weeks of “square bashing” and polishing his boots were seldom enough to turn a skilled engine mechanic into an obedient soldier-in-blue who accepted the authority of commissioned officers as natural.
    A certain respect for pilots (and, to a lesser degree, for aircrew in general) pervaded the RAF, but flying was also a trade. Almost half the pilots in the RAF were NCOs, not officers (in the Battle of Britain 42 percent of the fighter pilots would be sergeants, flight sergeants, or warrant officers), as were many of the navigators, bombardiers, flight engineers, and wireless operators, and all of the air gunners—indeed, it was only the war that put stripes on the sleeves of many of these men, partly because flying duties made their mealtimes erratic and the sergeants’ mess was better suited to flexible mealtimes, and partly because RAF aircrew would be afforded better treatment by the enemy as sergeants if they became prisoners of war.
    Traces of old-fashioned class-consciousness pervaded the organization of the RAF, despite the fact that it was the most “modern” and technologically minded of the three services. An example was the so-called Auxiliary squadrons. In order to permit rapid expansion in the event of war, the RAF relied on three separate and distinctly different schemes. The first was the RAF Reserve, consisting of regular officers who had retired from the service, or had completed their