"To him the people of Britain and of the free world owe largely the way of life and the liberties that they enjoy today"

"..By the end of June,Dowding had just over 1.300 fighter pilots. Most of them were British, and few of them had any combat experience. During the course of the battle Fighter Command would also draw on 56 carrier pilots from Royal Navy's Fleet Air Arm, as well as a mixed-bag of 21 Australians, 102 New Zealanders, 90 Canadians (including a few americans - border crossers), 21 South Africans, 2 Rhodesians, 1 Jamaican, nine Irish volunteers, 7 Americans, 141 Poles, 86 Czechs, 29 Belgians, 13 Free French avaiators, and one Palestine Jew."

"..Although it is usual to portray the Battle of Britain as a kind of.. David and Goliath.. The reality is that.. (aside from the nearly 1000 serviceable bombers avialable to the Germans.. August 10,1940. ) the number of single-engine fighters.. available..

805 serviceable Bf 109's vs Dowding's 749 Hurricanes and Spitfires..

...the additional 224 Bf110's ..far from being an asset, would themselves require the protection of the single-engine Bf 109's to survive in air combat..

..In pilot strength, ...
...The actual number of German Fighter Pilots available was roughly similar..

"Throughout 1936 and 1937 Dowding painstakingly built the foundations of his strategy to protect England, putting 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 (L)500 to construct his Operations Room at Bentley Priory.. to give him something that had existed before only in the form of sets for a futuristic film like 'Things to Come'..
..in the mid 1930's it was the only things of its kind in the world.

Dowding moved fast, transforming the ballroom of Bentley priory into a big, crowded amphitheatre 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.'

The surface of the map table was divided into squares each one marked and indentified with a letter of the alphabet. This was the 'Fitter Room.' Around the table would sit or stand a dozen or so young airmen and airwomen.. each supplied with a box of counters, rather like those used in playing chemin de fer or roulette in a casino, and a long stick with a bar at the end like that used by the croupier at the roulette table. Each 'filter' 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 liason officer, a senoir Royal Artillery officer with a direct line to the headquarters of the anti-aircraft 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 filters recieved information as it came out of the operation room in each Fighter Group, from the radar plotters on the coast, and from the observerson 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.'...

..Behind the table, on the wall facing the gallery, there was another big board with rows of colored lights on it, known inevitably as the 'Tote Board.'..that displayed readiness of each fighter squadron (on standby, available, refueling and rearming, or in the air).
A large prominently placed clock, with time segments marked in different colors, allowed the filteres to instantly plot the exact position of a raid - for everything would be taking place in real time at 200 or 300 miles an hour, and the fighter squadrons in the air would need to know where the enemy they were approaching was now, not not where it had been two or three minutes before. Equally important, they would need to be 'scrambled' in time to climb, if possble, to a height above the enemy's and to attack from behind.

(The Spitfire, when it came into service in 1938, would require just under eleven minutes to climb to a height of 25,000 feet, and complex and precise mathematical calculations would need to be made in split seconds to bring fighter squadrons to exactly where they had to be for a sucessful interception.)

..Dowding's genius was to have built a system that economized on his fighter strength - there would be no wasteful 'patrols' of fighter aircraft searching for, or trying to intercept at random, groups of enemy aircraft, and losing sight of them in the clouds.
Dowding was not a romantic, at least on the subject of air warfare - he sought efficiency.
The fighter squadrons nearest to each raid as it passed through their Group could be scrambled at the last possible moment to attack the enemy as he drew close to them; this proceedure would also help to conserve the amount of fuel they had for combat at full power. in effect the system acted like a multiplyer to Fighter Command's strength."