Operations Block, Carver Barracks (Former RAF Debden), Elder Street, Essex

Description

952/0/10045
01-DEC-05

WIMBISH
CAVERSFIELD
Operations Block, Carver Barracks (former RAF Debden)

GV
II*

Sector operations block. 1938, built to designs of J.H. Binge of Air Ministry's Directorate of Works and Buildings (drawing no. 5000/137). Reinforced concrete with Flemish bond brickwork cladding; thick-section concrete subroof slab supported by 20 large-scale rolled steel joists, with sand and shingle in the 4ft 6in space between this and the thin-section concrete upper roof, which is covered in asphalt.
PLAN: Tall block , projecting section on N elevation, to N of wider and lower S section which projects to the E end. Plotting room occupies major space in taller block to N, other rooms including operations room, meteorological office, battery room, ventilating plant room, searchlight room, teleprinter room, traffic office and receiving room.
EXTERIOR: the surrounding 9ft high reinforced concrete traverse wall has a maximum thickness of 17ft to its angled earth bank. Angled entrances with shuttered concrete lining to W elevation and in NE angle next to E projection of S range, which has four timber casements with cast-iron grilles to S and one to E elevations. Cast-iron rainwater goods, and ladder stairs to roof on W elevation.
INTERIOR: remarkably intact, with original joinery including doors to message hatches, twin safes in Code Room, cast-iron furniture to timber doors, electrical face plates, and ducting and grilles to air filtration plant. Steel outer doors. Raised platform along one side of plotting room, providing a view of the centre of the room, where radio cross-bearings of Sector aircraft were translated into a map position and then passed to the operations room. Shuttered openings between operations room and wireless cabinets whose operators maintained contact with sector fighters and on demand switched the radio-telephone through to the controllers or his assistants.

HISTORICAL NOTE: The airfields associated with the Battle of Britain of 1940 - when Britain had become the first nation in history to retain its freedom and independence through air power - relate to historic sites and fabric stretching from those used by the RAF to those used by or built especially for the Luftwaffe, including the now-protected sites at Paris Le Bourget and Deelen in the Netherlands. Of all the sites which became involved in The Battle of Britain, none have greater resonance in the popular imagination than those of the sector airfields within these Groups which bore the brunt of the Luftwaffe onslaught and, in Churchill's words, 'on whose organisation and combination the whole fighting power of our Air Force at this moment depended'. It was 11 Group, commanded by Air Vice Marshall Keith Park from his underground headquarters at RAF Uxbridge, which occupied the front line in this battle, with its 'nerve centre' sector stations at Northolt, North Weald, Biggin Hill, Tangmere, Debden and Hornchurch taking some of the most sustained attacks of the battle, especially between 24 August and 6 September when these airfields and later aircraft factories became the Luftwaffe's prime targets. Debden, a 'Scheme C' fighter station which was opened in April 1937, is also noted for the largely intact preservation of its flying field and defensive perimeter, the most complete of the fighter landscapes completed before and associated with the Battle of Britain after Kenley (Surrey).
This is the most complete example of a sector operations block associated with the critical stage (in summer 1940) of the Battle of Britain to have survived from 11 Group, which then took the brunt of the Luftwaffe assault. In contrast to the hipped-roofed single-storey operations block of the 1920s expansion of the RAF (examples at Bicester, Northolt and Duxford - the last two associated with the Battle of Britain), the new designs of 1937 (of which this is an example) were protected against incendiaries and bomb blast with a surrounding concrete wall and earth bank. Sector controllers working from these buildings retained executive authority over the aircraft they despatched until they returned to base, the sector controlled from Debden covering the hotly-contested Thames Estuary approach to London. It is thus of great importance in relationship to the command and control system that then guaranteed the survival of the RAF in one of key events of the Second World War, in addition to being a remarkably intact example of a distinctive late 1930s design, with many internal fittings including the original air filtration system and the central plotting room. The precise workings of these operations rooms are explained in Ramsey (14-28).

The operational infrastructure which was being put in place by Sir Hugh Dowding - in command of Fighter Command during the Battle of Britain - from March 1936, which had its origins in his earlier position on the Air Council as Member for Research and Development. Although historians have drawn attention to the production of obsolete aircraft (notoriously exemplified by the Fairey Battle) in order to achieve crude parity with Luftwaffe figures, the early development and sophistication of German radar technology and the speed and manoevrability of the new generation of monoplane fighters designed by Camm, Mitchell and Messerschmitt, there is a broad consensus of opinion that it was the infrastructure put in place by Dowding that provided the key to the incisive and economic marshalling of fighter squadrons which guaranteed Fighter Command's survival in the Battle of Britain of 1940. The essence of this relationship of technology to command and control has become familiar to students of the Battle. It saw the system of Chain Home radar stations (the first five of which became operational in 1938, further to development work at Bawdsey) and Observor Corps posts linked by telephone and teleprinter to the Filter Room at Fighter Command Headquarters (Bentley Priory), where the plots were checked with those of adjacent stations before decisions concerning deployment and attack could be made. Operations rooms controlled the Groups into which Dowding had subdivided the country. Air Vice Marshall Keith Park commanded the deployment of squadrons within 11 Group, based at Uxbridge. Finally, within each Group, were those operations rooms on the principal sector airfields which controlled the fighter squadrons. In his detailed description of the 11 Group operations bunker at Uxbridge, Churchill (1949: 293-7) wrote: 'All the ascendancy of the Hurricanes and Spitfires would have been fruitless but for this system of underground control centres and telegraph cables, which had been devised and built before the war under Dowding's advice and impulse', wrote Churchill. It could be said, indeed, that 'Dowding controlled the battle from day to day, Park controlled it from hour to hour, and the 11 Group sector controllers from minute to minute (Wood and Dempster, 1969: 84-90). As a consequence of their historical importance, surviving examples of sector operations rooms within 11 Group (at Debden and Northolt) have been recommended for statutory protection, as well as the all-important Uxbridge bunker and two sector operations blocks on key stations in 12 and 13 Group to the north (Catterick and Duxford).

Keith Braybrooke, 'Debden', in W.G. Ramsey (ed), The Battle of Britain Then and Now, (5th edition, London, 1989), pp. 190-197; Churchill, W. The Second World War. Volume II: Their Finest Hour (London, 1949); Lake, J. and Schofield, J., 'Conservation and the Battle of Britain'. In The Burning Blue. A New History of the Battle of Britain, Addison, P. and Crang, J. (eds), 229-242 (London, 2000); Wood, D. and Dempster, D. The Narrow Margin (London, 1969).

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