Michael Korda "With Wings like eagle- A history of the battle of britain" A tribute to Hugh Dowding, the man you never heard of who saved civilization. The book gives the big picture of Dowding system to beat the Luftwaffe and the little picture of what it's like to be a young man (they were mainly very young on both sides) in a fighter cockpit. Skimps on the middle tiers.

Dowding is a prophet. He forsaw a time when Britain will stand alone in 1937 or so and went about figuring out how to win the BoB before anyone else knew it was going to be fault. The radar network is his, which feeds into the command posts, which vectors the fighters towards the enemy formations. He insisted on small squadron level combat which attrited the German bombers by pirahna sized bites until they were no longer able to continue daylight bombing. While his contemporaries wanted a big wing strategy. The fatal flaw with big wing is that the inteceptors didn't have time to form up large formations before the bombers would be past them. Dowding wanted to fight over Britain so he could often recover the pilot and sometimes cannibilize the wreck. He can even recycle German wrecks for the aluminum. When the RAF fought over France, these advantages are reversed.

For his trouble Dowding was cashiered out of the air force in Nov. 1940 and into obscurity. His subordinates like Leigh mallory go on to have more famous or infamous careers planning the strategic bombing offensive.