Scramble, Too

By Stephen Mahoney

DUEL OF EAGLES by Peter Townsend. 480 pages. Simon & Schuster. $9.95.

He won the heart of the little Princess and then failed to win her hand. That is how the world remembers him: an unsuccessful suitor, elegant and somehow attenuated. Fifteen years later, exGroup Captain and Royal Equerry Peter Townsend finds a role more comfortable for a dashing fighter pilot as the author of a real-life adventure yarn.

Part of it is oft-rehashed history--that moment late in 1940 when the outmanned Royal Air Force took on Hitler's Luftwaffe and changed the course of World War II. But Townsend, himself a hero of the battle, approaches the duel of eagles not as history but as a personal, crotchety reminiscence of the participants.

The group captain's idiosyncrasy is a commitment to obsolete but attractive romance. "Our battle in the air," he writes, had "the character of a terribly dangerous sport." Glimpsing an enemy plane, he told himself gleefully before priming his guns: "Pretend you're Richthofen, the Red Knight." Playing Richthofen, Townsend and other British airmen allowed damaged German planes to escape: as they passed the enemy, they gallantly tipped their caps.

The author admires for his heroism one Werner Borner, radio operator aboard a crippled German Dornier 17 bomber. Borner's distinction: he tried to kill Townsend--and nearly succeeded. Flying a Hurricane. Townsend closed with the Dornier as the Germans, elated after a successful attack on shipping in the harbor at Lowestoft, were flying back across the North Sea derisively singing Goodbye, Johnny. Townsend wounded two of the four crew members. Talking with Townsend after the war, Borner, the only man left besides the pilot, recalled that "with a last effort I shot at the Hurricane, which was so close I could see the pilot." Townsend bailed out and was picked up by a trawler. He had, nonetheless, according to a peculiar chivalry, got the best of Werner Borner. "What fighter pilot," he writes, "can honestly deny that it is more romantic to be shot down than to shoot others down?"

Much of this strikes the contemporary reader as anachronistic and worse. Thirty years after the Battle of Britain, enemy pilots see each other as blips on radarscopes, and they do not tip their caps. Yet some things have not changed, certainly not for the better. The villains of Townsend's book are the villains of the most modern war saga: politicians.

About politicians, Townsend is both bitter and occasionally shrewd. He presents well-researched episodes from the 1920s and 1930s, when air force commanders in both England and Germany struggled to strengthen their young units against the opposition of shortsighted, budget-obsessed political bosses. Even Churchill, as early as 1919 when he was Secretary of War, is described as having a "tendency to wobble when attacked." Townsend's sole hero on the ground is "Stuffy" Dowding, commander in chief of Britain's Fighter Command.

Dowding won considerable enmity by demanding of the Air Ministry expensive bulletproof glass to protect his pilots. "If Chicago gangsters can have bulletproof glass in their cars," he snapped at Ministry officials, "I can see no reason why my pilots should not have the same." The glass was installed; Dowding was retired prematurely. The new windscreens saved lives at a time when the R.A.F. had no lives to spare, and among those lives was Townsend's.

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