ISBN 1-59376-047-7
xvi + 287 pages

Preface; photos; Epilogue; Acknowledgments; Bibliography; Index

   David Fisher has written an eccentric, off-the-beaten-path, pop-oriented history of Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding and the Battle of Britain. It's a highly entertaining book, but it won't win any awards for being the most heavily researched or thoroughly footnoted tome to come down the pike this year. In fact, it's not footnoted at all. Futhermore, from the perspective of the kind of history we usually review here, A Summer Bright and Terrible seems stylistically more like fiction when Fisher writes sentences such as "A cold chill began to settle deep in his spine" and "Leigh-Mallory's mouth went taut and smoke began pouring out of his ears" and "...General Wolfgang Martini (a man unique in that each of his names reflects a singular glory of Western civilization)." Even more, the author's approach to his material allows him to toss off facile lines such as claiming the German army was "armed with the best tanks in the world" with no indication of how he's arrived at that verdict.
   As a result, readers will need to suspend disbelief and allow themselves to be swept along by style rather than historicity throughout much of the book, but those willing to do so will enjoy an interesting ride.
   In keeping with his style, Fisher opens the book with the story of the Daily Mail newspaper offering a prize for the first person to swim the English Channel and, subsequently, a prize for the first person to fly across the Channel. The first chapter goes on to discuss the development of airpower in World War I, still taking a rather glib and peripheral approach to the subject matter. The second chapter continues in the same vein, describing British efforts at colonial peace-keeping with airpower and circling back to discuss the plans of an Italian priest in 1650 to conduct bombardment from the air. Fisher next imagines how the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo could have been altered had Napoleon simply utilized observers aloft in tethered balloons.
   The third chapter moves onto firmer ground as it begins to investigate Hugh Dowding. "We don't know very much about Dowding's early life...." Fisher writes, but (in what might be a bit of wry foreshadowing about the airman's communication skills) he points out that Dowding was the first person "to communicate directly from an airplane to a ground station." In regard to such dramatic scientific and technological advances, the author explains "Nothing was impossible, though much remained mysterious, only dimly glimpsed, going bump, bump, bump in the forests of the night." That kind of juxtaposition—an interesting factoid coupled with breathless prose more often found on the covers of tabloids in supermarket check-out lanes—recurs constantly throughout the book.
   In any event, Fisher describes Dowding's apparent willingness to antagonize senior officers with his imaginative ideas, his early interest in flying, and his stint as an air observer at the beginning of WWI. Dowding went on to command a squadron of fighters, but ran afoul of Hugh Trenchard and found himself transferred to a training position where he still managed to antagonize Trenchard by refusing to shorten the curriculum for trainee pilots.
   In the midst of following Dowding through the inter-war years, Fisher suddenly shifts into first person and launches into a bit of a tirade about his own opposition to "the silliness of President Reagan" in regard to the Star Wars anti-ballistic missile system, with his personal conclusion: "The system just could not work...." Switching back over to Dowding's inter-war effort to determine the best defense against enemy bombers, Fisher begins utilizing present tense for dramatic effect. All these stylistic devices make for flavorful, easily digested morsels of text but sometimes threaten to sugarcoat the hard historical facts. Of course, Fisher has plenty of legitimate cotton candy to serve up in the form of "scientific" death ray projects and all-too-earnest plans to make clouds firm enough to use as airfields.
   From such schemes the book segues into the invention of radio direction finding, a/k/a radar, of which Dowding approved and authorized the original RAF expenditures. In the midst of pages on the science of invisible rays, Fisher interrupts the thread to provide a short history of spiritualism in England and various cases in which it was "proved" by noted scientists that the dead could communicate with the living. Here A Summer Bright and Terrible moves into areas not usually associated with the study of the Second World War, and territory well suited for Fisher's approach to history.

   So when Watson-Watt tells him that invisible rays can detect an aircraft, does Dowding dismiss this as the ravings of a madman? Of course not. On the other hand, does he believe him? No, he does not; instead, he asks for a demonstration. Then, when Mr. A. P. Rowe tells him that he has seen it work, he does believe. So why should he not believe two of the world's top scientists, Lodge and Crookes, when they tell him they have seen people communicate with the dead?
   Just as the reported demonstration of the invisible rays of radar gave him hope that England was not doomed, the reports of Lodge and Crookes gave Dowding hope that Clarice [his deceased wife] was not lost to him forever.
   But it is one thing to believe, for example, the testimony of others that a man named Jesus lived, and quite another to believe you are Jesus. It would be a few more years before he would take that next step, which would lead him right around the bend.

   Following that chapter on spiritualism, Fisher returns to scientific developments in the UK in the inter-war years, introducing Frederick Lindemann, who would eventually become one of Churchill's most trusted advisors and an opponent of Dowding. Dowding returns to center stage at the point when he became chief of Fighter Command in 1936, but to the mundane facts of assuming command Fisher writes that Dowding would in that era lie in bed at night and wonder if his dead wife was trying to reach out to him. By day, however, Dowding focused on Fighter Command and insisted on concrete runways for his fighters, bullet-proof glass for Spitfires, and underground phone lines to connect headquarters and airfields, and he butted heads with Bomber Harris about production of fighters vs bombers. (Fisher gets the bit about the "plum appointment" of Harris to head Bomber Command wrong here and elsewhere in the book; that didn't happen until 1942.) Most importantly, Dowding strongly supported the plan to build the Chain Home line of radar towers along the southeastern coast of England to provide early warning of enemy air attack. As described by Fisher, the Chain Home system seems to have generated less resistance in the RAF than Dowding's insistence on concrete runways.
   After more than a hundred pages leading up to the event, Fisher reaches September 1939 with Chapter Fourteen. This proceeds quickly to the story of the BEF, the Advanced Air Striking Force, and the German blitzkrieg in France and the Low Countries.
   In one of the key parts of the book, Chapter Fifteen is taken up almost exclusively with the story of how Dowding alone was willing to face down Churchill in a meeting on 15 May 1940 on the issue of siphoning off Fighter Command's meager resources for the hopeless defense of France. Fisher tells in dramatic fashion how Dowding, "white in the face with strain" according to one eye-witness, single-handedly convinced the PM, at least for the moment, to retain the fighters for the air defense of Great Britain. Told largely from Dowding's perspective (and apparently from his own recollections), this episode stands out as one of the defining moments of his career, a critical moment in the war, and a memorable part of the book.
   Fisher follows up with a surprisingly melodramatic and mythical version of Dunkirk featuring the heroic Hurricanes and Spitfires previously withheld from France at Dowding's behest. The chapter ends with Churchill's stirring "their finest hour" speech before moving to the Battle of Britain.

   Well! The man certainly had a way with words. And he kept it up. After France surrendered but before the Battle of Britain began, Lord Halifax led a coterie of Englishmen seeking to negotiate a peace with Hitler. When Hitler replied that he had no demands on England, that England could keep its empire and he would keep the Continent he had conquered, Churchill bellowed. No! Not bloody likely! "All the conquered people of Europe shall share the gains—aye, and freedom shall be restored to all. We abate nothing of our just demands; not one jot or tittle do we recede. . . . Czechs, Poles, Norwegians, Dutch, Belgians, have joined their causes to our own. All these shall be restored!"
   The man was magnificent. As Hitler, furious at this rebuff, geared up to invade England, Churchill warned him and warmed the hearts of every free person: We shall defend our island whatever the cost may be, he roared. "We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender!"
   Of course, he had nothing to fight with. The army had come home from Dunkirk, but they had left all their weapons behind. They brought back no tanks or artillery, no machine guns or bullets. They had no hope of defeating the powerful Wehrmacht, which was flushed with victory and armed with the best tanks in the world and what appeared to be the most powerful air force.
   The British had only one thing going for them: the courage that sprung like a lion out of Churchill's heart and reverberated with his gruff voice throughout the land.
   And, oh yes, they had the defensive system of radar, Spitfires, and Hurricanes that Dowding had put in place.

   According to Fisher, at the time of the surrender of France Dowding was already having "experiences" with the dead, and those nightly communications assured him that God had intervened to allow the rescue of the BEF from France. "Dowding had no doubt that he was literally marching arm in arm with the Lord of Hosts. How could he doubt it? The spirits told him so. Later that summer his own wife, Clarice, would appear to him, confirming all this." Whatever the nature of all that nocturnal spiritualism, Dowding continued to function as the chief of Fighter Command, facing by day the all too real threat of the Luftwaffe.
   At this point Fisher begins dealing with the Battle of Britain, reviewing Dowding's strategy—not to defeat the Luftwaffe, the author explains, but simply to ensure Fighter Command's survival until the advent of bad weather—and introducing his chief lieutenants, Keith Park and Trafford Leigh-Mallory. Leaving his third-person description behind again, Fisher moves into first person (or perhaps second person): "We may as well get this straight from the outset. The heroes here are Dowding and Park; the villain of the piece is Leigh-Mallory.... You may disagree, but first listen to the tale as I believe it should be told." The tale as Fisher tells it involves a "sober, patient" strategist (Dowding), a disobedient Group commander (Leigh-Mallory), and a hotshot squadron leader (Douglas Bader). Indeed, Dowding seems scarcely to have conceived that some of his subordinates were not only disobeying him, but actively working to have him removed from command.
   In the middle of the strain imposed by the battle, Dowding, according to the author, returned one evening to his darkened home where he found, dozing in the corner, one of his dead fighter pilots. After carrying on a conversation with his commander, the dead pilot was escorted away by Dowding's deceased wife. "That was the first time he saw Clarice after she died. Soon she became a regular visitor as he helped her guide his dead pilots to their afterlife." Fisher quotes from Dowding's Lychgate about the Air Marshal's ongoing communication with his departed wife and reiterates that Dowding was being quite literal in his belief that he was seeing and speaking to Clarice during the Battle of Britain, and that she was relaying God's assurance that the RAF would triumph. "With all the goodwill in the world for his accomplishments, one has to accept that Dowding was quite mad."
   The book returns to the air campaign, which at this point, according to Fisher, found Leigh-Mallory instructing Bader to ignore everyone else's orders and conduct his squadron as he wanted, not in accordance with Fighter Command directives. That meant taking too much time to form up a "Big Wing" in an effort to mass all his aircraft, and ignoring vectors provided by Controllers in favor of his own estimates of the best plan of attack. This, Fisher continues, allowed the Luftwaffe to hit targets unopposed. While Bader claimed the losses his massed fighters inflicted after the bombing runs made German attacks untenable, in fact Luftwaffe losses were not nearly so great as Bader's pilots claimed. (Fisher previously noted how Dowding was able to accurately determine losses for both sides by the location and number of wrecked aircraft on the ground, but he makes no mention of Fighter Command correcting the inflated claims of Leigh-Mallory and Bader.) And in some cases, the delay caused by organizing the "Big Wing" formations in the air meant the interceptors missed the attackers entirely.

   The sun came out, and so did the Luftwaffe. They came swarming out of France like angry hornets whose hive has been attacked. At 8:30 in the morning a hundred bombers and fighters hit Dover, which was not a particularly important target. The reason became clear at ten o'clock, when the bombers turned for home. At that point, a new group of German fighters swept in, hoping to catch the exhausted defenders low on fuel and ammunition. The radar operators were alert, however, and the defenders retired, leaving the Me's wandering over the English countryside free and sassy, but impotent.
   The raids resumed shortly after lunch, this time in earnest. Every one of 11 Group's airfields was attacked. Some of the raids were beaten off, but Tangmere, Hornchurch, and Manston were devastated. Every squadron of 11 Group was engaged, and radar picked up still more bombers. In accord with Park's instructions, the Controllers called on 12 Group to protect the North Weald aerodrome, and three minutes later, Bader's 242 Squadron was scrambling. But instead of racing off to North Weald, the first Hurricanes to be airborne turned and circled around, following Bader's orders, while the next section took off. And then both sections circled again while the third section took off.
   By the time the entire squadron was scrambled it was too late. They arrived over North Weald to find the skies empty except for a black cloud slowly rising, twisting in the wind, blanketing the burning aerodrome. Bader called the Controllers for instructions: Where were the bloody Huns?
   They were gone, sailing safely home, leaving behind battered and burning airfields at Hornchurch and Hawkinge, at Manston and Croydon, at Tangmere and Middle Wallop, at all the fighter airfields ringing London. They left Fighter Command battered and bruised, teetering on its last legs. Another few weeks of such attacks, Dowding realized, and Goring would be right: The invasion could take place unimpeded.
   And then the Lord God intervened once again, in a very mysterious way. His wonders to perform. That night, the Germans bombed London.

   Fisher quotes Dowding as stating that the Luftwaffe attack on London "was a supernatural intervention." Whatever deity might have been involved, whatever the efficacy of Dowding's strategy, whatever the insubordination of Leigh-Mallory and Bader, all agree that the Luftwaffe's decision to concentrate on bombing British cities gave the RAF a desperately needed respite when the destruction of its airfields had taken Fighter Command to the edge. The remainder of the story of the Battle of Britain is quickly told, with the Royal Air Force squadrons surviving and the Luftwaffe unable to achieve victory through the bombing of cities. Operation Sea Lion was soon postponed, the crisis passed, and Dowding's battle won.
   Despite winning the battle, Dowding was quickly fired from Fighter Command and soon forced into retirement. On 17 October 1940 Sholto Douglas convened an important meeting to review the lessons of the Battle of Britain at which, according to Fisher, the true agenda was Dowding's ouster. In this account, Dowding was pilloried for failing to utilize the "Big Wing" tactics of Leigh-Mallory and Bader. As a result, he was sacked. Sholto Douglas, the man who chaired the meeting that found Dowding's strategy wanting, took over Fighter Command. Leigh-Mallory, having taken Bader to the meeting to explain how the battle should have been fought, replaced Park and went on to even more important positions. Although he initially indicates Dowding was ambushed in a choreographed plot by officers who disagreed with (and disliked) him, Fisher enumerates a number of reasons why it was not unreasonable to appoint a new head of Fighter Command. Besides having been exceedingly worn out by the stress of the battle, Dowding's age meant that his official retirement date had already been postponed a number of times. In addition, Fisher notes that Dowding had increasingly divulged his conversations with Clarice and his dead pilots, which could not have reassured the RAF in regard to his mental condition.
   The final chapter carries Dowding's story beyond the Battle of Britain. Before the war ended, he was already speaking publicly about his visitations with ghosts and writing books on that subject and his mystical religious beliefs in general. He remarried the widow of an RAF airman—acting on advice received from the dead pilot—but maintained his conversation beyond the grave with Clarice.
   Perhaps because of the controversy—or embarrassment—surrounding such beliefs, Dowding according to Fisher failed to receive his due for winning the Battle of Britain. Few books, the author claims, acknowledge how Dowding single-handedly prevented Churchill at the 15 May meeting from denuding the air defense of Great Britain during the Battle for France after "Dowding waited for Newall or Sinclair to speak up, but they remained silent."
   Actually, according to the official minutes of that meeting (as discussed by John Terraine in his serious, deeply researched, and copiously footnoted A Time for Courage), Newall did speak: "...the Chief of the Air Staff said that he would not, at this moment, advise the despatch of any additional fighters to France." Likewise, while Fisher appears to take Dowding's version of the meeting (unlike the Air Marshal's communion with spirits) at face value, Terraine diplomatically points out there have been "[s]ome decidedly over-excited accounts of the War Cabinet's proceedings on May 15...." and "...Dowding himself was responsible for a fair amount of the highly-coloured presentation of this undoubtedly significant moment in history...." and that in regard to the meeting some of Dowding's "...flights of fancy are not helpful." While Fisher might have done his homework, given his lack of documentation it's difficult to determine if his pop-flavored version of the meeting is more accurate than Terraine's thoroughly referenced account.
   Much the same is true regarding different interpretations of the October meeting with Sholto Douglas, Leigh-Mallory, and Bader. Terraine presents a much tamer, less predatory version of events while Fisher seems mostly to follow the line of Robert Wright's biography of Dowding which in turn seems to rely on Dowding's memory of the affair. The consensus of reputable historians appears to be that Dowding's post-war recollection of that meeting was not entirely sound, he wasn't ambushed, and he really was due for retirement. Regarding the manner in which Dowding's service ended, Terraine notes "[t]he whole subject has an odour which refuses to die away," but he detects far less of an anti-Dowding conspiracy than Fisher. As to their insubordination during the battle, Terraine's book, by the way, is at least as harsh on Leigh-Mallory and Bader as Fisher's book, and it's rather more precise in reviewing the technical and tactical details of air combat.
   Although Fisher indicates Dowding failed to receive a full measure of credit for winning the Battle of Britain and his "...name today is practically unknown," Terraine rates Dowding as the "...brilliant scientific designer of [aerial] battle..." and writes this summation: "Dowding was the unquestioned victor of the Battle of Britain, which, it could be said, he had begun to win years before it was fought." Len Deighton says of Dowding and Park "...they had proved their theories right." Peter Townsend names Dowding "the architect of victory" and writes "...Dowding and Park had gained a unique, decisive victory." Hough and Richards put it this way: "Whatever laurels were withheld from him by the Air Ministry, he has posterity's." Only one history of the Battle of Britain readily at hand includes the other aspect of Dowding's life: Richard Overy calls Dowding a "commander of real distinction" and mentions in passing that after retirement he "...indulge[d] his enthusiasm for paranormal phenomena."
   It's worth comparing all those evaluations of Dowding with what Fisher has to say, because, although the Battle of Britain forms the background, this is mostly a book about Dowding, and it's a book written from an interesting but odd perspective. In some ways, unlike those written by Terraine, Deighton, Townsend, Hough and Richards, and Overy, this isn't a history book at all, but rather Fisher imitating Churchill's bombastic style of speaking, or perhaps the narration for a Discovery Channel show. It sometimes reads like a lecture delivered by an eccentric professor accustomed to entertaining undergraduates. But maybe all that is intentional, in that the eccentricity of Fisher's style is simply designed to complement the eccentricity of Dowding. Again and again the book's approach drives home the strange dichotomy between the Air Marshal's clear-headed scientific foresight and his unlikely immersion in mysticism.
   That's the real selling point of the book. While Fisher's descriptions of the key military-related material prove adequate, there are many better works (including A Time for Courage and others quoted above) offering much greater detail about all the aspects of the battle discussed in A Summer Bright and Terrible. Except Dowding's spiritualism. For anyone who wants to dabble in ghosts, Fisher provides a quirky, oddly written, but thoroughly fascinating glimpse of a side of Dowding mostly forgotten—or ignored—by traditional military historians.
   Indeed, this reviewer found it difficult to avoid skipping over the unremarkable chapters on the conduct of the air war in order to get to the nuggets about Dowding's odd beliefs. If anything, the book might have been improved by concentrating less on military matters and providing more emphasis on exactly how Dowding moved down the path from merely believing in conversations with the dead to actually becoming a practitioner of the art. But perhaps it was a simple and natural step for the man who first conducted transmissions between an airplane and a ground station to move to the next level and communicate by extraordinary means with an entirely different sphere of existence.
   Available from online booksellers, local bookshops, or directly from Shoemaker & Hoard.
   Thanks to Shoemaker & Hoard for providing this review copy.