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In 1920 he was sent out to end the career of the Mad Mullah of Somaliland, whose troop of fanatically religious bandits had bothered the British for 21 years. To get within striking distance of the Mullah, Bowhill and his flyers had to pack planes, fuel and equipment on a caravan of 2,000 camels, trek 150 miles across the desert. When Bowhill's planes first roared across his camp, the Mullah was so sure that Allah had sent chariots to take him to heaven that he put on his finest clothes. Learning his mistake when a bomb nearly killed him, the Mullah fled, died next year in Ethiopia.
Tiger-Moths and Submarines. In September 1939, Sir Frederick was chief of the Coastal Command for the R.A.F., which—on paper—was supposed to be equipped with far-ranging reconnaissance ships and bombers. Actually, it had almost none. Its job: to protect British shipping, to catch submarines, to spot German naval units.
Sir Frederick decided to attack submarines with pure bluff. Banking on the well-founded fear that submarine men have of planes in general, he sent his flyers out in almost anything he could buy, beg or borrow. His motley "Honeymoon Fleet" consisted mostly of light Tiger-Moth trainers, no more lethal than the tiny yellow Cubs that put-put around U.S. airports. But against German submarine commanders, grooved in routine, the Tiger-Moths were almost as effective as dive-bombers. Whenever the U-boats saw a speck in the sky they submerged and stole away.
Before the Germans caught on, the Coastal Command had proper planes of its own, although for a time at least, the British did not understand how to make full use of the good U.S. equipment which was sent to them. The Coastal Command's range of operations now covers 600,000 square miles of sea, as far west as Iceland, north and south from Narvik to Africa.
To admiring subordinates in the command (not all of them R.A.F. men, for the Marshal had a knack of wheedling able officers from the other services), "Ginger" Bowhill seemed to cover a good proportion of this area in person, to know exactly what was going on in all the rest. He worked in a hectic blast of radiograms, reports, phone calls, saved a second or two by having the telephones on his desk painted different colors to show where the lines ran—to the Air Ministry, the Admiralty, various flight headquarters.
He also developed a knack of interpreting German radio messages, of prophesying from plane and ship movements what the enemy would be up to next. One of the command's greatest coups was breaking up a German raid on a British cruiser squadron. Though he had predicted the attack to the minute, reports of it caught the Marshal in the bathtub and he directed the whole action clothed in a bath towel, dripping on the rug beside his home telephone. Top achievement of the command was tracking and trapping the Bismarck this spring, just before Marshal
Bowhill took over the Ferry job—although if the stories which reached the U.S. are true, the credit for that success properly belongs to an American pilot who persuaded the British to let him take out a Catalina on a far longer flight than the British thought feasible.