With Wings Like Eagles by Michael Korda

dirigible, the Graf Zeppelin , out to cruise the British coastline in bad weather in order to analyze the signals from Dowding’s radar towers, they were thwarted by the fact that the radar operators, who could hardly fail to miss an object as large as the Graf Zeppelin , stopped transmitting during its flight around the coastline. The Germans failed to understand the means by which these signals were transformed into an orderly system of command and control. Yet, it was not radar that would escape their attention; it was the neat, methodical mind of Sir Hugh Dowding.
     
     
    Throughout 1936 and 1937 Dowding painstakingly built the foundations of his strategy to protect England, putting the pieces together like those of a gigantic three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle. Almost as soon as he took command he sent in a modest request for £500 to construct his Operations Room at Bentley Priory, and chivvied architects, builders, the General Post Office (the GPO, which in the United Kingdom controlled and installed telephone lines), and the Office of Works to give him something that had existed before only in the form of sets for a futuristic film like Things to Come.
    Today, of course, all this is old hat, familiar from countless movies and from innumerable televised rocket launches at Cape Canaveral, but in the mid-1930s it was the only thing of its kind in the world. Dowding moved fast, transforming the ballroom of Bentley Priory into a big, crowded amphitheater for a new kind of war, and using the graceful rotunda next door for the necessary teleprinters and switchboards. On the floor of the ballroom, he built an enormous, irregularly shaped table to represent the southern coast of England, the English Channel, and the northern coast of the continent, “from Edinburgh to the French coast, to Cherbourg, and from the Welsh border to the East of Belgium.” 2 The surface of the map table was divided into squares, each one marked and identified with a letter of the alphabet. This was the “Filter Room.” Around the table would sit or stand a dozen or so young airmen and airwomen (at first the women were the wives of officers serving at Fighter Command Headquarters who had volunteered for the job, but by 1939 most of the “filterers” would be young women in the blue-gray uniform of the WAAF, who would soon be known, predictably, as the “beauty chorus”), each supplied with a box of counters, rather like those used in playing chemin de fer or roulette in a casino, and long stick with a bar at the end like that used by the croupier at the roulette table. Each “filterer” wore earphones, and some of them also wore a microphone suspended around the neck. Above the filterers was built a “gallery,” where the whole table could be observed from above by the officers charged with warning each Fighter Group of the situation as it developed on the board below, as well as by the naval liaison officer, a senior Royal Artillery officer with a direct line to the headquarters of the antiaircraft gunners and searchlight operators, and officers linked by direct lines to the Observer Corps, the police, the fire services, and those in charge of sounding the air-raid alarms. The filterers received information as it came in from the operation room in each Fighter Group, from the radar plotters on the coast, and from the observers on the ground; and once an enemy raid had been identified, they set up an identifying marker for it, showing its present position, the projected course of the raid, the height, and the number of enemy aircraft it contained, moving the marker with their long sticks as it progressed from the “enemy” coast, across the Channel or the North Sea, and toward one of the four Fighter Groups, each defending its own “Sector.” From the very beginning it was assumed, correctly, that the Luftwaffe attacks would not follow a straight, predictable course—there would be feints, sudden changes of direction and altitude,