Hi guys.
What happened to Sir Hugh Dowding after the Battle of Britain? Did he retire or was he sidelined?
I understand that there was some friction between him and Leigh-Mallory.
Thanks.
Do you think that he was put aside because he was thought (?) be one Chamberlain’s men?
And therefore, an “appeaser”?
No I think he was cast aside because of his enemies in the Air Force and the influence they had. Pure power politics I think. Although maybe what you say may be a part of it.
Senior members of the British armed forces take great pride in being as non-political as possible, so as not to appear to be considered to be in any political camp.
By all accounts Churchill had the greatest respect for Dowding, and tried to find him suitable employment after his retirement from Fighter Command, and ensure he was rewarded for his part in the BOB.
The trouble was, Dowding was a rather odd and stuffy person who wasn’t very good at playing ‘office politics’ within the RAF, so when his long overdue retirement date* came up again, his enemies within the RAF used it as an excuse to push him to one side.
- He was first officially due to retire in 1938,
As has been said, he had been due to retire before the war but had been asked to postpone it for a while. All that happened was that his retirement was finally implemented.
In addiion to being “stuffy” and otherwise inept at playing politics Dowding had the ability to think ‘outside the box’. He supported the earliest experiments with using radio waves to locate aircraft in flight, and grasped how that could be used within a system for coodinating interceptor defenses. Unlike many military (or business) leaders he had the ability to see the possibilities in other peoples ideas and connect several seperate ideas together, sucessfully. The centralized yet flexible command and control system of Fighter Command would not have existed without a man of his ability.
A least one historian also claims Dowding was using clarivoiants or similar people to attempt contact with the spirit of his deceased wife. Which to somemone born in the 1890s is not any weirder than the idea that electical currents in a glass tube can tell you where a airplane is.
He was interested in spiritualism, and wrote a book about it.