Harry Turtledove (Editor) - Alternate Generals II

Dowding wrote that we need never have crossed the Channel to have won the conflict, but that the Luftwaffe must. Said we should have let them ditch in the Channel after tangling with our Spitfires. After the Spitfires had sent the MEs packing, the Germans' underpowered bombers would have been easy fodder for the Hurricanes and the Ack Ack guns. Said we threw away our advantage.

Dowding would not even have dispatched interceptors for those German fighters who came over two by two on free hunts. Just let the pairs of MEs come buzzing over for a jolly, stitch up the tarmac, and return to France. Those Dowding would have left to the sector guns. Said he would not have been provoked into an aerial battle. Did not want to expend the aircraft.

"Stuffy, you wouldn't have spent them at all!" Dick Trafford shouted at the manuscript. Provoked. "Aircraft are not a defensive weapon! The RDF faced out ! You use it to guide bombers and fighters to their target and home again, you pompous twit! The Hun knows how to use aircraft!"

Had come out of his chair. Sat back down. Glanced self-consciously about. Hoped his shouts had not carried through the walls.

Returned to his labour, reading how we should have sat and let the Germans shoot us. Wait for the bombers before we did anything.

Dowding criticized the RAF's lack of adherence to a single coherent plan-his.

Hit nearly home with that one. Plans. The RAF had no want of plans. Everyone was an expert. Too many plans and no commitment to one . That killed us.

But to say that this one, Hugh Dowding's, was the one that would have saved England was as absurd as it was arrogant.

Stuffy had particularly strong words for the Big Wing approach, wherein vast numbers of enemy aircraft were met with vast numbers of interceptors. A natural plan of action. But Stuffy faulted the time it took to muster a Big Wing, then to find the enemy without the help of an Observer Corps.

A Big Wing put all one's resources in one place. When that place had been on the ground, refueling, a second huge wave of the Luftwaffe's limitless attackers had destroyed much of our Big Wing on the ground.

Did not hindsight make any man appear brilliant?

In what was surely the most bald stroke of impudence, he called Douglas Bader a truly heroic young man of unquestioned courage and ardent patriotism with a faulty grasp of tactics and none of strategy. A junior officer given too much credence.

Trafford snarled at the page: Douglas Bader died in defense of his country. How generous of you not to question his courage.

In parting, this mother hen complained bitterly of the RAF's sending up untrained pilots. Did he think he could have told the Hun to wait while we got enough air under our pilots' bums to qualify? The battle would have been lost by the time Dowding let them fight!

Turned the last page. The end, none too soon. The anger stayed. Felt like telling the Reichsmarschall to shoot him.

They should have put Stuffy out to pasture long ago. The unmitigated conceit of this old man that he could be one of those rare souls upon whom events of the world pivot.

Dowding returned to the jeweler's shop. Like the tongue that probes a chipped tooth again and again, making sure that nothing changed in the instant between visits, he could not stay away. He stood, helpless, before the gutted, blackened wound.

Sensed someone pass behind him on the pavement. Glanced after passerby.

A young man kitted up like a Pilot Officer at dispersal, complete with yellow Mae West over his wool jersey. No swastika on his arm. He wore his second-best blue trousers and fleece-lined boots.

Wondered if the young man knew he was dead.

Dowding had never before seen a ghost, but knew one when he saw him. A little startled that he was not more alarmed.

Followed the young man into a church. Took off his cap. Slid into the pew beside him. "Are you lost, son?"

The Pilot Officer nodded, gaze far away. "I was looking for heaven, actually. It should be here."

" Here? " Dowding asked.

The Pilot Officer nodded again. "Here. This. This England ." Depth of feeling in the name. "But it's not here."

"No," Dowding said sadly. "It is not." Eyes to the cross, "How could He let this happen?"

"How could you?"

Dowding floundered. "How could I ?"

The Pilot Officer looked at him at last. "It is your fault."

Deeper and deeper under water Dowding floundered. "How is this my fault?"

"You weren't here for us."

"I–I was retired." How very puny and unacceptable that sounded to his own ears.

And deeper. "Are you sure you did not ask for it?"

Dowding coughed, surprised. "I never! Would never!"

"Did you not?" said the youth, then, in a voice not his, " 'Almighty Father, anything but this. I cannot bear it. Let this cup pass away from me. Did you not? As the bombs fell and we flew to our deaths, with only you piloting this ship through the worst storm of its existence. Did you not let go the tiller, leave your heavy burden to someone else, and go merrily to attend your pretty daughter's wedding and sleep in your warm wife's bed?"

"How dare-" Stopped himself. This boy had died for England. And he, he was preparing his pretty daughter's wedding.

"Are you sure you did not ask to get out of what needed to be done? Did not say 'It is too much for me? »

A searching moment. A croaking groan, "No. I didn't. I wouldn't. I would give anything for my country. Anything."

"Would you, Abraham?"

"My name is not-oh. Oh my." Gave him pause. Felt the quiver in his chin. The sacrifice of Abraham. "My family are dearer to me than life."

"Your life is not what hung in the balance."

"But… my son!"

"Your son. Your wife. Your daughter. Your happiness. Your sanity."

"Why them? Why my wife? Why my-" Could not talk. Was dangerously near to weeping again.

The Pilot Officer produced a sheaf of papers from his boot. Dowding recognized his manuscript. Part of it. "You say you should have devoted more effort to organizing communications and to developing the capabilities of the RDF. You should have. But it was not the task for a happy man to be wholly focused on the RDF, the links between the spotter corps and Ops and dispersal and the pilots in the air." He bounced the pages. "This calls for a strict taskmaster. Detailed. Blunt. Undistracted."

A man with a loving family was not so disagreeable and difficult as the time demanded.

"You weren't there, Hugh Dowding. And you were needed. And now you dare say you could have made a difference." He presented Twelve Legions of Angels.

"I never had the chance! I feel there is no one else who could fight as I do!"

"To make the hardest decisions ever demanded of a man, when God Himself is silent? To stay the course without knowing for sure that all would be well in the end? With only the conviction of your own rightness and trust in what you cannot see?"

"I would have. By God, I would have. I never asked to be relieved! I never would ask, had I the chance."

"Your children will never have been born."

Too many thoughts ramming together. Dizzy between hope and crashing despair. Drew breath with difficulty. "You're saying it can be done again!"

"It can be done the way you decided. What did you decide?"

Would have jumped at the answer, but for the cost. "What of the souls of my children? If they are never born, do I condemn them to the outer darkness?"

"None of us has the power to damn any soul but our own."

Sat silent, gazing at the stained glass windows.

The Pilot Officer stood up. "Be here Saturday at eleven o'clock if you did not ask to be spared."