June 29, 2013

Finest Hour 135, Summer 2007

Page 55

Heroes of the Air: Archibald Sinclair and Hugh Dowding

Winston & Archie: The Letters of Sir Archibald Sinclair and Winston S. Churchill 1915-1960, edited by Ian Hunter. London: Politico’s, 530 pages, hardbound, £30, member price $36.

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“Winston” needs no introduction but “Archie” may not be familiar to FH readers. Sir Archibald Henry MacDonald Sinclair (1890-1970) was the leader of the fading Liberal Party from 1935 to 1945, and served as Air Minister in Churchill’s wartime coalition government. The two men had been introduced long before —by American Maxine Elliott—and despite a sixteen-year difference in age, they became good friends. Both had American mothers. As with all upper class Britons (Sinclair was a Scot), they wrote reams of letters, often long and detailed. Luckily for us, many of those letters were saved despite occasional notes at the end of one or another that because of its content it should be destroyed after being read.

Ian Hunter, a longtime Churchill Centre member and London-based author of three earlier books on business management, as well as articles in The Journal of Liberal History, has painstakingly pulled most of the surviving letters together and annotated them to describe people and events mentioned. Many of the letters (the originals are either in the National Archive at Kew, or the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge) have not appeared in print before. Alas, others by Sinclair are sadly lost, thanks to the wartime bombing of the Liberal headquarters, and a post-war fire at his home at Thurso. Over several periods, we have only Winston’s letters. What does survive, however, is both fascinating and insightful.

Hunter has arranged the letters and events in five parts. The first concerns World War I, both before and after Churchill’s service on the Western Front, following his departure from the Admiralty in the crisis over Dardanelles policy. In August 1915, we see Sinclair —an officer until invalided out in 1917—urging WSC not to come to the fighting front as he would rapidly become frustrated with military policy that he could not affect. He would be more useful in London, Sinclair said, even in his depleted political state (19).

After Churchill left the war planning group in November, however, his tone and that of Sinclair changed. Sinclair was seconded (at Churchill’s request) to serve under WSC in 1916 for the several months that WSC was in active service, commanding a unit of Scots. Their letters back and forth when one or the other was on leave in London provide a peek at front-line life and lore, along with their assessments of political warfare at home.

The second part focuses on the brief, bitter war against the Russian Bolsheviks after World War I, when Sinclair served as principal military secretary to Churchill, who was Secretary of State for War. The scattered missives (much has been lost) are nearly all annotated for context, and some show the pressures Churchill was under with de-mobilization of Britain’s conscript army on the one hand, and trying to shore up the White Russians on the other. Included is Churchill’s controversial (even acerbic) memo on the possible use of gas against insurgents in India and Afghanistan (64). Many of these letters (really inter-office memos) are more formal in tone, given the roles of the two men in the same ministry—and mostly from Sinclair to Churchill.

The third section centers on the fifteen years from 1924 to 1939, when both men saw varied roles, Sinclair entering Parliament and becoming a political figure in his own right. They remained close friends, and eventually political allies with their mutual concern over Nazi Germany by the late 1930s. This period, marked by brief and scattered memos, includes Churchill’s wilderness years (1929-39), the early part of which saw Sinclair in the National Government. The Liberal decline is evident in each succeeding election, until Sinclair takes over the severely depleted party in 1935.

The longest part of Hunter’s collection, and perhaps the one of primary interest, concerns the air war from 1940 to 1945. As Secretary of State for Air, Sinclair was the senior civilian official to whom all RAF marshals at least nominally reported. He was such a staunch supporter of their recommendations and campaigns, however, that many saw him more as a representative of their views rather than as the RAF’s political master. The letters and memos (more selective than in other sections given the huge amount of material) show occasional heat as wartime pressure built on both men.

There is a scattering of “Action This Day” notes and more than a few expressions of asperity on Churchill’s part. There is constant reference to the friction between Lord Beaverbrook, at the Ministry of Aircraft Production, and Sinclair’s Air Ministry. Two factors jump out in many of the memos exchanged—Churchill’s well-known detailed interest in the war effort, and the role that statistics played in monitoring operations and in policymaking. Also evident—as Hunter makes clear in his useful editorial insertions—Sinclair played a stronger role in developing air policy than Churchill would give him credit for after the war.

A final brief section covers the last fourteen years of the relationship, from 1946 to 1960, five years before Churchill’s death and a decade before Sinclair’s. Having lost his 1945 bid to retain his seat in the House of Commons, and another attempt five years later, Sinclair became a member of the House of Lords as Viscount Thurso in 1952, part of the first Honours List of Churchill’s postwar government. He suffered a stroke that year (he was 62) and would not actually sit in the Lords until 1954. Four years later another stroke sadly ended his active career and left him an invalid for the remainder of his life.

Collections of letters are hugely valuable windows into both the correspondents and their era. Edited as well as this one, with careful editorial guidance as to what we are reading and about whom, they are fascinating as well. We can only hope that more “Churchill and…” correspondence will appear covering other Churchillian friends and colleagues.

A Summer Bright and Terrible: Winston Churchill, Lord Dowding, Radar, and the Impossible Triumph of the Battle of Britain, by David E. Fisher. New York: Shoemaker & Howard, 304 pages, hardbound $26, member price $20.80.

An engaging if sometimes odd work bbegins with a piled-up title, which tries to push every sales button all at once. In fact it is mainly devoted to the dour and enigmatic Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh “Stuffy” Dowding. Despite suggesting that the story has not been told, Fisher covers ground others have trod more successfully because they didn’t try to stretch their coverage as far as Fisher does.

Divided into four chapters or parts, one for each season of 1940, the bulk of it covers the Battle of Britain in the summer and early autumn of that year. But Fisher also provides background— the just-in-time development of radar (a later American term for radio direction finding) and the Spitfire fighter aircraft. The two protagonists, Churchill and Dowding, face off in June 1940. The former wants to send more British fighter aircraft to help the crumbling French; Dowding warns that England will be defenseless if he does. Unlike most who went up against the new Prime Minister, Dowding carried the day in an unusual appeal directly to the War Cabinet—and was proved right when the Luftwaffe attacked Britain after the fall of France.

In November, after the worst of the German onslaught seemed past, Dowding was relieved by the Air Ministry. Churchill, who had earlier backed him strongly, apparently made no move to save him. Granted, Dowding had planned retirement and had reached retirement age, but the Air Ministry (Air Minister Sinclair and chief of staff Portal, among others) did seem rather cavalier, given all he’d done to meld radar, radio, and telephone networks into a Fighter Command that probably saved Britain by controlling the air.

Fisher is an experienced writer with an eye for narrative. There are parts of this volume that take one back to the English countryside on a warm, dry September day, looking up at the crossing contrails of German and British fighters, dueling while Luftwaffe bombers plod toward London and other targets. Or one could be on an RAF airfield, as fighters are scrambled to meet the latest onslaught—or cramped in one of the control buildings of the new radar system, trying to gauge how many German aircraft are coming and where they are headed.

Fisher is excellent at describing the many facets of Dowding’s personality, including (and here many earlier accounts have been silent) his belief in the supernatural, which at times appeared to give him strength to persevere. He went so far as to “speak” with some of his lost pilots (his “chicks” as he referred to them), as well as with his deceased wife. It is to the author’s credit that Dowding comes across in these scenes as understandably exhausted and concerned, rather than as a mere flake.

Fisher also describes and defines Dowding’s two chief lieutenants, Air Vice Marshals Trafford Leigh-Mallory (backer of the “big wing” notion of massing defending fighters) and Keith Park (who agreed with Dowding’s “bits and pieces” use of defending aircraft). Flying hero Douglas Bader (who flew with artificial legs owing to a prewar flying accident) served under Leigh-Mallory; thus we get a pilot’s-eye as well as command view of the conflict.

Though the Dowding/Park tactics succeeded, Leigh-Mallory replaced Park, while Air Vice Marshal Sholto Douglas, a critic of Dowding’s approach, took over Dowding’s post in what seemed to some as a coup. The issues and personalities involved in these changes in command have been debated by historians ever since. Fisher clearly is sympathetic with the embattled if cold and “stuffy” Dowding.

A nuclear chemist and professor of “cosmochemistry” and environmental science at the University of Miami, Fisher has authored a number of earlier popular science histories with his son: notably Tube, a history of television. His scientific background combines with an ability to make technical topics like radar and aeronautics easier to grasp. There are many past and present accounts of these gripping events and players. But Fisher offers a readable melding of them, especially for those unfamiliar with the story.

Dowding, after two other postings which did not work out, retired in mid-1942 and was later raised to the peerage as Lord Dowding, his first Battle of Britain command post, Bentley Priory, being his territorial designation. He is the unappreciated hero of Fisher’s tale.