With Wings Like Eagles: A History of the Battle of Britain

by: Michael Korda

Published by: Harper Collins

Reviewed by Paul Markowitz

In 1940, as Germany swiftly ravaged one European country after another with its fearsome blitzkrieg, the Reich looked desirously across the 21-mile English Channel at the only remaining undefeated western European country, England.

Germany’s air force, the Luftwaffe, was one of the most powerful air powers in the world. It was led by Herman Goering, a former fighter pilot who was also Hitler’s second-in-command. After Britain failed to placate the Germans with a policy of appeasement and the election of an unrelenting Winston Churchill, the stage was set for a dramatic air war: The Battle of Britain.

According to Korda, much of the success of Britain in this horrific battle was due to the unheralded work of Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowling, the chief strategist of the Battle of Britain. Dowling was a difficult, demanding, and remarkably self-assured career officer with horrendous diplomatic skills, who was hated by both his military and political superiors.

But what Dowling lacked in social skills, he more than made up for in his insightful and farsighted strategic planning. With the limits imposed upon him, Dowling managed to better the Germans through a convergence of his thoughtful overall strategy, an insistence on a uniform command and the use of emerging technology, specifically radar.

Germany suffered unacceptable losses to its aircraft and pilots, despite relentless bombing runs on British airfields, industrial plants, and even cities through August and September of 1940. Hitler finally postponed and eventually cancelled Operation Sea Lion, the planned invasion of England, and turned his intentions east to the Soviet Union.

Dowling quickly came to the end of his military career due largely to the difficulty of his personality and the responses it engendered. The negative reactions to Dowling were so intense that in the official history of the Battle of Britain his name is never mentioned.

Korda also describes the travails and gives appropriate credit to the pilots, the thousand young men who Churchill credited with saving Britain in his oft-quoted speech to the British public in August 1940, “Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.”

Armchair Interviews says: Interesting look at a military commander who has been left out of the history books.