Hubert Raymond Allen (1919–1987)

One begins this book expecting the out-of-control youngster to gradually give way to an adult, but sadly that never seems to happen. Allen's painterly way with words is picturesque and deft, but most of this skill is spent describing binge-drinking, partying, and absolute contempt for anyone not a pilot and whose duties are of no interest to him. As a result, the book spins in circles over long years and heads nowhere, and the reader closes it grateful that the constant carping has finally show more stopped.

If Geoffrey Wellum's sublime memoirs are "the story of a boy who became a man over the skies of Great Britain," then Allen's memoirs are the story of a man who remained a boy. The contrast is profound and unfortunate between Allen's chapter in "Ten Fighter Boys," where as a 21 year old he writes of youthful hijinks with at least some reserve, and this book where he writes of them in late middle age with the unfiltered, un-self-aware crassness of a frat boy. It's an unflattering contrast compared to the autobiographies and memoirs written by other pilots which head in the opposite direction.

Many of his contemporaries were violently robbed of the chance to settle into the mantle of adult manhood, when awareness of the world and the people in it starts to extend beyond the present tense and one's own appetites. Allen survived to have that opportunity, but apparently chose never to pick up the mantle. He was a good pilot and an uncommonly gifted wordsmith, but had no interest in becoming much of anything else and so didn't.

I should state that this may well have been caused by the difficulties with adjusting to peacetime that ran rampant throughout the entire United Kingdom, to say nothing of the veterans. But Allen does seem to have been the most obstreperous of the Few whose memoirs or autobiographies I've read. (The biographies written by others sometimes drew a curtain of charity across this sort of thing, which I do have to keep in mind.)

One thing that stood out to me to illustrate this was Allen's description of the South African ace Sailor Malan, whom he admired but considered a monkish martinet as a commanding officer for such unreasonable treatment as demanding his pilots go to sleep at sane hours and fly at least mostly sober. If this was true, and I have no reason to think it wasn't, Malan wasn't a martinet but merely a stand-in dad trying to keep a bunch of unruly kids alive and help them succeed at a brutal job where one mistake sent your fragments home in a can. Allen's tragically decimated squadron would have benefited from such treatment. show less

After encountering Hubert Allen in "Ten Fighter Boys" and enjoying his perceptive, affectionate view of his fellow pilots as well as his own stories, I read this book for its reputation as a "contrarian" look at the Battle of Britain. It's always worthwhile to read a book that goes against the grain, as it at least gives one an idea of how many different structures can be assembled from the same basic facts.

However, I was not persuaded by most of Allen's arguments. He had a stubborn blind show more spot for any topic where the opinion of a nerd with a slide rule is the deciding factor. And like it or not, that's often in the military. He was mystified as to why the Air Ministry ordered so many Hurricanes relative to Spitfires, and then made a nebulous comment about the Spitfire's engineering complexity causing delays, when in reality it was the complexity of manufacturing that caused most of the delays. And those are two very different issues; tooling and jigs for a next-gen design with no straight lines don't fall out of the sky. Allen also seemed unaware of the delays associated with putting the ineffective Nuffield in charge of Castle Bromwich, which left the Air Ministry with no choice but to order what they could since they knew they'd get zero Spitfires however many they ordered.

Moreover, several times after emphasizing the superiority of the Spitfire, Allen would then described the exact advantages the Hurricane had over the the Spitfire, the Me109, and especially the German bombers—a handy division of labor between the two that was a huge part of the British victory in the Battle of Britain. (The persistent "Hurri v Spit" bickering among Battle-of-Britain nerds annoys me. Both filled the roles they were best suited for, and an all-Hurri or all-Spit RAF would have been far less effective.)

Allen made similar comments about the Chain Home system, where design decisions were made for speed of deployment and supply chain reasons. Moreover, major scientific inventions typically come in their own time. You don't just go to the closet, open the box marked "Inventions," and pull something out. The fact that a practical radar system with coastal coverage and only a few corners cut was deployed—cheaply!—in about a half a decade is a miracle.

An example of his engineering blindness came about when he was discussing the decision to equip both platforms with 0.303 Browning machine guns instead of 0.5 Colts. He was once again mystified by the Air Ministry's decision to go with the Brownings and wrote as if it were a simple matter of one-to-one substitution. Nowhere did he consider that a one-for-one substitution in number of rounds, if it had even been possible, would have added at minimum another 180lb—the weight of another large adult male—to a fully loaded aircraft. Subbing by number of seconds of ammunition would have increased a loaded platform weight by 78lb. Maneuverability, speed, and rate of climb in early mark fighters would likely have been impacted, and there may well have been issues squeezing the ammo boxes into the slim wings of a Spitfire.

Now, it's been a while since graduate school for me, and my degree is in physics, not aerospace engineering. Hence, I'm sure that I'm missing many factors. However, I'm confident that all of these issues and many others were considered and factored into the Air Ministry's decision-making. It would have cost Allen a mere one evening's conversation with a retired aerospace engineer to illuminate all of this.

The only statements of Allen that I agreed with were those that had to do with low-level tactics. His chapter on squadron tactics was solid, as were his opinions on the "big wing" introduced by Douglas Bader, both regarding its thin merits and how it was used by Trafford Leigh-Mallory to prosecute a grudge match against Keith Park. Allen's perceptiveness of his fellow pilots even hit the mark when it came to Bader's motivations; I'm 100% in agreement with him that the "big wing" was espoused by Bader not for its actual merits but because Bader was climbing the walls in frustration at being stuck in 12 Group and not seeing near enough action to make him happy. If Bader had started out in Tangmere or Biggin Hill, he never would have come up with the idea, because he would have been up to his ass in Messerschmitts and happy as a hog in a mudhole.

What Allen was, was a good pilot and low-level tactician. And while it's common to slam high-level leadership for their ignorance of low/mid-level concerns, that goes both ways. Often a low/mid-level manager will be just as ignorant of the concerns floating around in the higher levels of leadership. This is the problem with spinning theories in isolation or only among others of your own ilk; had he had one half-day conversation apiece with a retired aerospace engineer, electrical engineer, and military project manager, he would have learned much to inform his opinion. It also speaks to why nearly all modern military pilots have degrees in physics or engineering.

However, even though I disagree with Allen's arguments in this book and failed to finish it after losing patience with his carping, I recommend it to any Battle of Britain nerd. show less

This book is one participant’s view on the Battle of Britain. From a viewpoint 25 years after the war the author has written his viewpoint about the Battle of Britain and how it could have been done better. Some of the points he makes are really interesting. However, I feel that a lot of the book is written with the hindsight that gives us a 20/20 view of the events. The book is still worth reading to gain a different perspective of this major battle.