A Summer Bright and Terrible by David E. Fisher Page B

specification F.1O/35 was sent out
for an eight-gunned fighter, with the bombing requirement lifted.
    The premier biplane fighter designer of the
1920s, a man named Sydney Camm, was working for the Hawker company. Convinced
of the basic rightness of Mitchell’s ideas, he came up with his own monoplane,
the Hurricane, which would prove to be inferior to the Spitfire but easier to
produce and maintain. Dowding recommended that the biplane winner of the 1935
competition be dropped and the Hurricane and Spitfire be built instead, and
eventually he got his way. As it turned out, it was in the nick of time.
    So he had, or would soon have, fighters that
could reach up to the bombers’ altitude, catch them, and shoot them down. He
had one problem remaining: Even in the case of war, he clearly would never have
enough fighters to keep a continuous patrol in the air waiting for the bombers.
And even the new “Spits” and “Hurris” took more than twenty minutes to climb
from the ground to the bombers’ cruising altitude, whereas in half that time,
the Luftwaffe would cover the thirty miles from the coast—where they would
first be spotted—to London. So back to square one: “The bomber would always get
through.”
     
     
    Nine
     
    And back to the death ray, and to Winston
Churchill. By the time of Rowe’s memorandum and the demise of the sound
location system, Churchill had been out of the government for five years.
Always true to his principles rather than to party politics, he was scorned by
both the Liberal Party he had left ten years before and the Conservative Party
to which he now belonged. And he was no more popular among the people at large.
    Twenty years ago, he had been the coming man;
now he was a has-been who had never quite been. His voice roaring out the dangers
of Nazi rearmament was a living example of the Zen riddle: If a tree falls in
the forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?
    Nobody wanted to hear it. The horrors of the
past war were too near, the horrors of any future war too horrible, the horrors
of the present were bad enough. The heroes of the Great War had come home to
find the economy in ruins, and the sudden eruption of the worldwide depression
had made things all the worse. Unemployment in towns around England ranged from
an unacceptable 10 percent to an unbelievable 68 percent. So the people of
England did not want to hear about the plight of the German Jews or about the
statistics of aircraft production in the Ruhr.
    Yet Churchill roared on, in Parliament and
newspaper articles and political meetings, scorning the scorns—indeed, at times
seeming to revel in them—stubbornly presenting the facts that the world wanted
to ignore. And always searching for more. How he found his facts, everyone
suspected and no one knew—and everyone suspected someone else. Some said agents
in MI5, disaffected by the waffling of His Majesty’s government, fed the gadfly
their secrets. Others blamed Brendan Bracken, a friend so intimate that many
thought he was Churchill’s bastard son, whose house in North Lord Street became
the headquarters for those fighting against Chamberlain’s appeasement policies.
Some said Churchill communicated with spirits; others said his wife was
sleeping with someone in the cabinet.
    The prime minister harried his security people.
Perhaps it was some of these people, perhaps others, perhaps all of them.
Whatever his sources, Churchill seemed to know more than anyone else about what
was going on in Germany, about what the British government knew about what was
going on in Germany, and about what was going on in the corridors of the
British government.
    And so he found out about the Rowe memo, and he
faced Wimperis with it. What was being done, for instance, about the death ray?
“It’s all nonsense,” Wimperis very properly responded, but Churchill would have
none of that. He reminded Wimperis of the tank, of how that too was deemed
nonsense until he, Winston, had