Beds - Murphy Bed Plans

An eccentric but essential World War II leader's story
November 27, 2005


A SUMMER BRIGHT AND TERRIBLE: WINSTON CHURCHILL, LORD DOWDING, RADAR, AND THE IMPOSSIBLE TRIUMPH OF THE BATTLE OF BRITAIN
By David E. Fisher
Shoemaker & Hoard, $26, 281 pages
REVIEWED BY MARTIN SIEFF

This book is a strange mixture of contradictions in many respects. It tells an important, almost unknown, exceptionally heroic and riveting true story and it does so execrably badly. It is a heartfelt tribute to an extraordinary and admirable man of vast historic importance and global destiny and utterly bungles the job. It is also the story of a man who by any standards of conventional society would be regarded as a ridiculous crank, but who also happened to be one of the most successful and brilliant air generals the world has yet known.
Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding directed Fighter Command through the Battle of Britain, the first great air battle in history. He was not a macho, confident, bright young wonder but a vegetarian, teetotaler and prickly old fellow almost 60 years old who was despised by the bomber barons who ran the Royal Air Force and was kept on as little more than an afterthought only because there was no one with comparable experience or credentials to fill the job. He was more responsible than any other man for the fast, heavily armed, monoplane fighters that fought and won the Battle of Britain and for the pioneering system of radar stations and visual observers feeding information back to a central command headquarters who directed them. He ranks with the great U. S. aircraft carrier Admiral Raymond Spruance, victor of the Battles of Midway and the Philippine Sea, as a cool, scholarly commander who was ignored by the hero-making media moguls but who never made a single significant mistake in their conduct of amazing victories against overwhelming odds.

Beds - Murphy Bed Plans

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