Sir Hugh Dowding portrait.

The Battle of Britain was a 'damn close run thing' as Wellington said earlier (Waterloo). So, maybe it is lost to history. I looked around but my computer skills are probably inferior to yours.
 
Just watched a documentary about how the British developed radar, and the chain home line of stations. His name was mentioned as a staunch believer in radar, even when an early demonstration had failed. Some in the military wanted to scrap the effort right then but he held out for continued development.
Turned out to be one of the factors (among many) that helped the RAF to hold out long enough to discourage an invasion of Britain.
 
I do not know who made the photo but I feel very sorry for "Stuffy" (got to love those old boys school nick names) who fell victim to rivalries within the service. His careful husbanding of the RAF and its relatively tiny resources during the Battle of Britain could have easily been undone by less prudent souls who wanted to engage the Luftwaffe in an all out struggle - a very British Götterdämmerung.
But still, even though he was correct in his strategy, his actions and his actions, he was knifed and pensioned off once the battle was won. Such is the nature of intra office politics. I know them well. It is never advisable to succeed at the cost of alienating higher ups even when you were proved. right. Correction....especially when you are proved right. And more especially if you forget to kiss up in a sufficiently self abasing lip puckered manner.
To my way of thinking Dowding's victory in the Battle was similar in some ways to Wellington's at Waterloo especially in the way that Wellington played a defensive game and marshalled his ill trained and piecemeal resources until Blucher reached them. Just as Wellington had planned. Wellington was feted and rewarded by the nation. Dowding was flipped the bird.
 
peterm1 said:
I do not know who made the photo but I feel very sorry for "Stuffy" (got to love those old boys school nick names) who fell victim to rivalries within the service. His careful husbanding of the RAF and its relatively tiny resources during the Battle of Britain could have easily been undone by less prudent souls who wanted to engage the Luftwaffe in an all out struggle - a very British Götterdämmerung.
But still, even though he was correct in his strategy, his actions and his actions, he was knifed and pensioned off once the battle was won. Such is the nature of intra office politics. I know them well. It is never advisable to succeed at the cost of alienating higher ups even when you were proved. right. Correction....especially when you are proved right. And more especially if you forget to kiss up in a sufficiently self abasing lip puckered manner.
To my way of thinking Dowding's victory in the Battle was similar in some ways to Wellington's at Waterloo especially in the way that Wellington played a defensive game and marshalled his ill trained and piecemeal resources until Blucher reached them. Just as Wellington had planned. Wellington was feted and rewarded by the nation. Dowding was flipped the bird.
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Thanks Peter. I have always found the photo fascinating. It looks like it was shot on the fly "Jane Bown Style" and in this case I think the eyes show an honesty and gritty determination but also a hint of the exhaustion and weight of the massive task he undertook so selflessly.
 
The date of the portrait is unknown but by the catalog number, D 1417, I think it approximates to very early in the pre-war planning period of the MOI in 1935-1939.

Haven't been able to track down a list of photographers who worked for the MOI from this period. Probably non-military.
 
zuiko85 said:
Just watched a documentary about how the British developed radar, and the chain home line of stations. His name was mentioned as a staunch believer in radar, even when an early demonstration had failed. Some in the military wanted to scrap the effort right then but he held out for continued development.
Turned out to be one of the factors (among many) that helped the RAF to hold out long enough to discourage an invasion of Britain.
Click to expand...

The proposed invasion was real enough to have been named. "Operation Sealion" depended on air superiority and when that was denied, it was postponed indefinitely.
 
John Bragg said:
The proposed invasion was real enough to have been named. "Operation Sealion" depended on air superiority and when that was denied, it was postponed indefinitely.
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Yes, I think this is where Dowding's instinct really came to the fore. He understood that the immediate challenge for Britain was just to hang on like Mr. Micawber (who was a Dickens character known for asserting his faith that "something will turn up.") Oddly, Churchill's strategy was the same so it always struck me as particularly cruel that he sacked Dowding.

Fortunately for Britain and the free world, Hitler's personality was such that he could not resist bombing civilian centres in Britain in revenge for bombing Berlin and his change to blitz tactics with attacks on civilians immediately took the heat off the RAF which then doomed his plan for invasion. He also had a personality which was bound to push him to turn his aggression somewhere else once his initial ambition to defeat or at least take Britain out of the war by other means were delayed. So eventually he even gave up to some extent on the blitz and turned his eyes to the east. And of course the Bolshevik USSR was his first and main hatred. It may have been predictable, even then, to those who thought deeply about it and understood his psyche that he would inevitably turn his focus elsewhere at least in the short term, buying Britain the time it needed - though given his non aggression pact with Stalin not many might have expected an attack on Russia at this time.

Perhaps that is reading too much into it though as it is too easy to be wise in hindsight so perhaps Dowding's strategy of hanging on was driven by nothing more than a blind desire to stave off immediate defeat (as he would have then been known as the man who lost the war). But with hindsight I have to say I think that Adolph Hitler was the free world's greatest ally in defeating Germany - his war time decision making was so bad. It been said that some in the allied high command felt the same way as in 1944 a plan to assassinate Hitler was considered and rejected on the grounds that it may be better to keep him in power, he was doing such a terrible job of running Germany's war. (Though this may be apocryphal).
 
peterm1 said:
He also had a personality which was bound to push him to turn his aggression somewhere else once his initial ambition to defeat or at least take Britain out of the war by other means were delayed.
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That and, reportedly, a steady diet of methamphetamine. Reports were that Goring preferred morphine. Add bat-sh*t crazy to pure evil, apparently.
 
Benjamin Marks said:
That and, reportedly, a steady diet of methamphetamine. Reports were that Goring preferred morphine. Add bat-sh*t crazy to pure evil, apparently.
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Yep all of those. I have read about his doctor, Doctor Morell (himself a sick puppy) who was pumping him full of meth and other drugs - coke, opiates and some weird hormones and such (we used to refer to them in less politically correct days as "monkey glands". Which is probably not far from the truth actually.)
 
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