Book Review The Secret Life of Fighter Command: The Men and Women Who Beat the Luftwaffe

Discussion in 'Books, Films, TV, Radio' started by Charley Fortnum, Jan 1, 2020.

  1. Charley Fortnum

    Charley Fortnum Dreaming of Red Eagles

    As it's way past bedtime and I'm suffering from jet-lag, I'll hammer out my thoughts on the in-flight entertainment:

    The Secret Life of Fighter Command: The Men and Women who Beat the Luftwaffe by Sinclair McKay (London: Aurum Press, 2015).​

    This is a book that I liked less the more I read of it. The first thing to note--and this has to be the most serious charge against any publication--is that the title does not describe the contents well, for this book is really a potted description of matters concerning RAF Fighter Command from 1936 (at its inception) until (roughly) late 1941. There is (lamentably) much material included that overspills even this broad window, but the only parts that I can find that answer to the adjective 'secret' are the (brief) discussions of the WAAFs sexual dalliances and class transgressions; there are no new sources mined, and the book is very nearly completely derivative of a handful of more fundamental publications.

    It begins (seemingly as ever) in media res on 7 Sept 1940, the date on which the Luftwaffe changed targets from the airfields to the cities, the day that heralded great devastation yet ensured that German air-superiority would never be won and the 'long-advertised' invasion would never arrive.

    Alas, we are soon dragged back, not merely to 1936 or even the Great War, but as far as early military uses of balloons. And from there much time is spent discussing the pre-First and inter-war fears of the destructive potential of bomber forces and how public morale might break in the face of major raids. Now, a significant part of Fighter Command's purpose was to counter such strikes, so the tales are entwined, but the story has been told much more effectively elsewhere (notably by Max Hastings, but also in more scholarly accounts), and far too much time was devoted to this preparatory issue. I read this book to find out how Fighter Command worked and what the people involved did.

    Doubly alas, there is far more to come: the establishment of the RFC, the development of the RAF, the post-war contraction of the military, the Nazis' support of gliders to circumvent air-force limits, the international spirit of airmanship, the backgrounds of pilots, Mitchell's design of the Spitfire, the advent of radar etc. These last two are painfully lacking in detail. I am no scientist, but I fancy that with a good teacher I could grasp how RADAR actually works and how IFF distinguished friendly from unfriendly aircraft. No good teacher was available. Likewise, aeronautics are not something I've looked into much, but a comparative diagram or two could have given me a working notion of what made the required specifications for the post-biplane fighters so demanding, and how the Spitfire 'implemented all of the latest innovations' (not a direct quotation but a typically vague statement). More: W.E. Johns, the public and official interest in 'death rays': we're now past sixty pages and only about four or five models of plane have actually been named.

    Finally Bentley Priory appears and we also get some discussion of the (later 'Royal') Observer Corps. To the author's credit, he whetted my appetite for both, but to his discredit he failed to deliver on either: we get the history of the building and the wrangles over its status, development and accommodation, but there is no plan of the place and the photographs (throughout) fail to illustrate most of what has been described. The only glimmer of success here are some direct quotations from the young women doing the 'plotting' and 'filtering', but half of these (I think four) ladies have published their own books from which the quotations were drawn; only a few lines here or there come from fresh interviews. There probably has been a thoughtful book written on the fresh opportunities military service afforded young women of the era, and the author does make several feints in that direction, but as with everything else the depth isn't there to warrant the gesture. The material quoted is also slightly repetitive, but, for what it's worth, those heavily-taxed WAAF books are:

    Love Is Blue: A Wartime Diary by Joan Wyndham
    One Woman's War by Eileen Younghusband.

    As I have said, there is no plan of the building or the grounds of Bentley Priory, and we really only hear about what Dowding and the WAAFs were doing there--nobody else. Plus, the descriptions are so desultory that I never composed a mental picture of what a typical working day was for anybody. The author's previous work (which I have not read) is titled The Secret Life of Bletchely Park; I rather wish he had written The Secret Life of Bentley Priory, but I fear he hasn't put in the research to do so.

    On the other score, the ROC, I was quite taken with the 'trainspotterish' caricature of the hard-working and underpaid observers with their cold shifts and flasks of warm tea led by former RAF officers of advanced years, but we hear almost nothing first-hand from them themselves--surely there are plenty of memoirs to mine for this? A missed opportunity, doubly so give how many pages are wasted later on.

    At around page 90, we return to the pilots and planes, and things get worse. The author is massively reliant on a few publications, all much more worth reading than his. They are:

    First Light by Geoffrey Wellum.
    Duel of Eagles by Peter Townsend.
    Reach for the Sky - The Story of Douglas Bader by Paul Brickhill.
    The Last Enemy by Richard Hillary

    In other words, some of the most famous books by the most famous pilots to have flown--the ones that the reader is most likely to have read. There's nothing essentially wrong with the writing here, but there's curiously little combat description and the vocabulary employed does begin to grate: we all have our 'pet words'; McKay's are 'haunting', 'metaphysical', 'leitmotif' and, above all, extemporise--he loves this word and stoutly refuses to acknowledge the existence of 'improvise', 'spontaneous' or 'temporary'. I'm only an English teacher, but to me 'an extemporised table' (yes, the furniture) just sounds peculiar... I could also have done with a map of the British Isles showing the various Groups and stations, but there is not a single map in the whole book. Other readers here, I know, would have the man dragged into the street and shot in front of his family for this. The nadir of this brand of slapdash production is when a photograph is described to us at length--why in the name of God's green Earth is this photograph not shown?

    From here it's a loosely chronological account of the Battle of Britain, mostly through authorial narrative, but partly via the (few) characters we have been introduced to. At the same time come the political wrangles between Leigh-Mallory and Douglas Bader at No. 12 Group and Park at No. 11 with support from Dowding. Churchill and the top brass pop up now and again, but the reader never really gets the structure of command explained to him. This was all just about readable, but again it was massively reliant on a few famous books (I was beginning to realise that the 'secret' in this 'secret history' is that there is no secret):

    Leader of the Few: the authorised biography of Air Chief Marshal the Lord Dowding of Bentley Priory by Basil Collier.
    A Biography of Keith Park by Vincent Orange.
    Dowding and the Battle of Britain by Robert Wright.

    I wouldn't have minded a rehearsal of the whole 'big wing' debate in miniature, but the problem was that the author seems determined to see all sides even where he has just quoted sufficient evidence of Bader being both pig-headed and short-sighted. I think it would have been fairer (and a better to read) to say who was wrong and then try to account for why they thought otherwise. A fence-sitter is not an attractive narrator. National Archives AIR files and (less frequently RAF Archive files) are cited at points, but they're invariably for reports and overviews, not granular detail.

    When we finally come full circle and return to the Luftwaffe's change of tactics (to bomb London and other urban concentrations), and Fighter Command take to running 'Rhubarbs' into occupied France (seemingly to keep morale and training sharp), the book simply breaks down: there is pretty much no structure to the theme of the anecdotes, and once or twice I was left wondering 'why are you telling me this?' Moreover, the chapter titles are no help--they may as well be numbers. Each is simply a short quotation from one of the individuals involved, but as the chapters are by this point chronological rather than thematic, these have nothing to do with most of the topics covered. One, for instance, is entitled 'A Dog Named Heinkel'. Suffice to say that the dog is not the main topic of the chapter or even an exemplar of some wider point. This anecdotal soup flows throughout the later era of V1 and V2 attacks. It all seems to have been written carelessly and in a great hurry, but McKay has saved the worst for last: the final chapters are basically a jumbled list of what happened after the war to a selection of the most famous characters who served in Fighter Command. There is then a greatly summarised sketch of what has happened to Bentley Priory and the RAF up until the modern day. Many of the characters never appear in the book up until this point (Ian Smith, leader of Rhodesia, Raymond Baxter from Tomorrow's World!?), and the non-existent thread with which he attempts to draw them together is that their post-war lives were indelibly coloured by the fact that RAF pilots were non-conformists/individualists who had partaken of the 'metaphysical' experience of military aviation. No real evidence or explanation is offered for this. To add insult to injury, we are treated to a seemingly random discussion of post-war films and TV series that borrow thematically from the fated air of the Few. There's a whole book written on that latter subject and it's in the bibliography:

    The Flyer: British Culture and the Royal Air Force by Martin Francis.

    Overall, this is a popular history, seemingly written to order, that makes no false claims (that I can see) by cleverly refusing to cover anything in any depth.

    2/5 - Gift shop fodder. Could not recommend. The best thing about it is the (short) bibliography that will send you to better titles.


    Edit: Also, all but zero German voices.
    Edit 2: More expert reviewers than me say that some of the figures quoted are duff.
    Edit 3: I now recall that I did spot one error: he claims that the officer cadets were addressed by their Flight Lieutenant instructors as 'Sir'. That must be 'Fight Sergeant instructors'.
     
    Last edited: Apr 8, 2023
  2. Markyboy

    Markyboy Member

    That review pretty much sums up every book I’ve ever had bought as a gift from thoughtful but misguided family members who frequent garden centre bargain book tables. Bravo Sir!
     
    CL1 likes this.
  3. Vintage Wargaming

    Vintage Wargaming Well-Known Member

    But did you like it?
     
  4. Charley Fortnum

    Charley Fortnum Dreaming of Red Eagles

    I had two books in my bag: this one and Eric Ambler's The Mask of Dimitrios.

    I think I picked the wrong one to start with, but I was stubborn enough to finish it!
     

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