Duel Of Eagles – Peter Townsend, 1969 ★★½

Death over England

There are two kinds of war books. Some inspire with tales of heroism and adventure. Others depress by recounting tragedy and betrayal. I was expecting this to be the first kind. I was wrong.

An RAF fighter pilot, Peter Townsend was a veteran of history’s most critical air battle. When Great Britain stood alone against Hitler in the Battle of Britain, Townsend led a squadron of Hurricanes to defend his land. From July to October, 1940, the RAF beat back the Luftwaffe, inflicting a 2-to-1 casualty ratio.

Townsend notes again and again he was not sorry about those he saw go down to his guns; most of the death inflicted that summer of the Blitz was on British civilians. But his account of the battle is relentlessly sober, tinged not by triumph but melancholy:

Some strange protecting veil kept the nightmare thought from our minds, as it did the loss of our friends. Their disappearance struck us as less a solid blow than a dark shadow which chilled our hearts and passed on. We seemed already to be living in another world, separate and exulted, where the gulf between life and death had closed and was no longer forbidding.

At bottom, the Battle of Britain was for defenders a struggle for survival, national and personal. Casualties ran high. “Not counting the wounded and the burned, escape was a one in five chance,” Townsend writes.

Attrition wasn’t so terrible in the beginning for the Luftwaffe, coming in as they did with a sizably stronger air armada. Over southern England, where Townsend himself was based, 2,000 German fighters and bombers faced 312 RAF fighters. But as the battle raged, and the toll mounted, German morale plummeted. For the first time, Hitler’s juggernaut had met its match.

How was it stopped? Through courage and luck, as well as the incompetence of the German high command. Townsend explains the strategy of Hitler and Hermann Goering, how poorly focused it was to begin with and how ineptly it was carried out:

The Luftwaffe had knocked out the Polish and French air forces in a few days, particularly on the ground, where damage to communications threw everything into confusion. And here was Fighter Command’s vital, vulnerable radar-ground control system, wide open to the heavens. Yet the Luftwaffe planners forgot the lesson of Poland and France and decided to go first for the RAF fighters in the air.

Hermann Goering, in white, confers with Adolf Galland, with mustache, one of Germany's greatest aces and a regular combatant during the Battle of Britain. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/741545894868022547/.

Still, the margin of British victory was wafer-thin. Only after weeks of heavy fighter losses came a needed reprieve. Angered by British bombing raids over the Ruhr Valley, Hitler sent his Heinkel He 111s and Dornier Do 17s bombers against London for the first time.

This was the start of the Blitz, a dark cloud in British history but ironically its own silver lining. By going after London, Townsend notes, Goering took pressure off the British fighters and their bases just as they were reaching the breaking point. “As long as that great city drew the enemy’s fire, Fighter Command would have a chance to repair its shattered communications and restore its ruined ops rooms,” he writes.

Duel Of Eagles is not just about the Battle of Britain. Townsend spends ample pages covering German-British air clashes in the First World War, the rise and fall of Manfred von Richthofen (a. k. a. “The Red Baron”), the abolition of the German air force under the Treaty of Versailles, and how Germany got around that by setting up a secret training facility in Lipetsk, deep within the Soviet Union.

It makes for a long prelude, easily forgotten once you get to the Battle of Britain. Townsend was a fine writer with a educated prose style, but while able to elaborate on many different people and ideas, he doesn’t connect these pieces together well. Often Townsend gives the impression of an insider (which he was) writing for other insiders, referencing people for the first time as if already familiar to readers. In his day, perhaps they were.

Townsend’s most challenging narrative device is tying together the stories of airmen who fought on both sides in the Battle of Britain. This begins on page one when Townsend describes shooting down a German Heinkel over the English coast. Later, he brought cigarettes to the hospital where one of the surviving German airmen, Unterofficizier Karl Missy, lay wounded. “Afterward I thought often of the mute, pathetic look he gave me and the way he clasped my hand, never that I should see him again,” Townsend writes.

A Heinkel He 111 medium bomber. Before the war, German aviation leaders tried unsuccessfully to interest Goering and Hitler in heavy bombers. Their lack would prove decisive in the Battle of Britain. Image from https://www.flickr.com/photos/wingmanphoto/6877041860

While researching Duel Of Eagles, Townsend visited Missy at the latter’s home in Rheydt, Germany, to get his version of what happened:

We and a few hundred others on both the German and British sides were of the second generation of airmen, born when the airplane too was in its infancy. My story tells how some of us came to fight each other to the death over England in the summer of 1940.

Flipping back and forth as Townsend does between different characters should have gripped me more than it did. Instead of developing his players enough to make them distinguishable from one another, Townsend emphasizes the same traits over and over, namely a sense of duty and a willingness for sacrifice. His intention is honorable, but the result drains them of needed humanity.

Townsend also focuses on clashes at high command, on both sides.

Attacking Great Britain by air was presented by Goering as a slam dunk. Take out the British air force, he told Hitler, and you mightn’t even need an invasion. If you have to invade, it will be a cakewalk:

“By delivering a series of very heavy blows I plan to have this enemy, whom morale is already at its lowest, down on his knees in the nearest future so that our troops can land on the island without any risk.”

Hitler, hungry to attack the Soviet Union, liked this plan. Others around Hitler ridiculed Goering and joked about the strategy of capturing a country by shooting down its air force. While supposedly overseeing his battle plan, Goering spent his days in France on picnics or in a specially-designed train car, doped up and out of touch with his commanders.

Even Hitler eventually found Goering’s victory proclamations hard to take: “You have apparently shot down more aircraft than the British ever possessed,” he told his portly Reichsmarshall.

Defeating Hitler should have brought acclaim to British Fighter Command leader Hugh Dowding and Keith Park, whose No. 11 Fighter Group saw the brunt of the fighting. But after winning the Battle of Britain, Dowding and Park were stripped of their commands and exiled to the backwaters of training.

It was a dark chapter in Britain’s management of the war. Townsend blames the ambitious British commander of No. 12 Fighter Group, Trafford Leigh-Mallory, even incredibly claiming Leigh-Mallory vowed to bring Dowding down before the battle began.

During the battle itself, Leigh-Mallory did hesitate to send reinforcements to Park’s hard-pressed fighters. Leigh-Mallory called Park’s and Dowding’s tactics unsound. He advocated instead a massed attacking formation of fighters, the “Big Wing” strategy.

Park was livid: “By persistently declining to give fighter cover to my sector aerodromes…in late August and early September, No. 12 Group jeopardized our victory in this critical battle,” he later declared.

After the battle, Leigh-Mallory moved in for the kill. Aided by a senior RAF commander, William Sholto Douglas, he had Dowding and Park brought to an informal tribunal to answer for their defense plan. Their dismissals soon followed.

Air Vice Marshal Keith Park. After getting pushed out of his command by Leigh-Mallory and Sholto Douglas, he made the best of a bad situation by successfully directing the British air defense of the island of Malta, a critical if overlooked component to final victory. Image from https://www.rafbf.org/tags/keith-park. 

Townsend’s sympathies in this ugly affair are not hard to see; our first glimpse of Sholto Douglas has him hiding under a pool table during a German air attack in World War I. Leigh-Mallory’s callow gamesmanship is brought up often – as is its cost in lives.

Townsend calls Park’s tactics of “flexibility and speed” essential:

For this he had to maneuver his defense in squadrons of twelve; wings of three or more squadrons would have been too slow, too cumbersome, and would have cost him the battle.

The best part of Duel Of Eagles is when Townsend lays down his one-sided-historian monocle and puts you in the cockpit with him. His battle accounts are curiously detached, though, suggestive more of the confusion that reigned than anything won or lost:

Our job was defense. German fighters could do no harm to Britain. German bombers with their deadly loads were the menace. Our orders were to seek them out and destroy them. Only when their Me. 109 escort interfered did it become a fleeting battle between fighter and fighter. But we tried to avoid them, not to challenge them.

Townsend’s take on the Supermarine Spitfire, the fighter plane credited with British victory, both illumes and amuses. Townsend is well aware of the Spitfire’s reputation, and resents it. He himself flew the other British fighter, the Hawker Hurricane, thank you:

The Hurricane lacked the speed and glamour of the Spitfire and was slower than the Me. 109, whose pilots were to develop contempt for it and a snobbish preference for being shot down by Spitfires. But figures were to prove that during the Battle of Britain, machine for machine, the Hurricane would acquit itself every bit as well as the Spitfire and in the aggregate (there were more than three Hurricanes to two Spitfires) do greater execution among the Luftwaffe.

Townsend further declares the Hurricane had the best armament and were more nimble in turns. Its one key disadvantage: a Merlin engine prone to cutting out on steep dives. Given time, pilots could be trained on maneuvers to counter this.

Peter Townsend exiting his Hurricane in 1940. According to Townsend, German pilots who were shot down often expressed embarrassment when they learned the plane that felled them wasn't a Spitfire. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Townsend_(RAF_officer).

But time was often elusive in the air war. Back in World War I, Townsend writes, British fighter pilots suffered a casualty rate of about 100 percent each month. During World War II, fresh pilots were brought to airfields so quickly they had to learn by fighting.

Townsend at times reveals a callous, elitist outlook about the war. A fighter pilot to his fingertips, and an ace at that, he looked down on other RAF activities and rebelled at a stint with a coastal support unit. When the Luftwaffe leveled that airfield later on, Townsend claims he “would have cheered” had he known of its fate then.

Even when humor creeps into the narrative, tragedy is never far behind. Shot down over the English Channel, embarrassed because his killer was a bomber, Townsend is rescued by a passing trawler. They dress him warm, give him rum, speak to him in broken English, and send him on his way. Soon after, the trawler is sunk by bombs.

War is brutal. Reading Duel Of Eagles, sometimes you get the feeling luck can be the most brutal thing about it. Townsend serves up insights and tells engaging stories, but I finished it sure he could have delivered as much worthwhile content with much less book.