rising generation of RAF officers, the men who would lead the RAF into the war, also came from the same strata of society in which the generals and admirals were traditionally nurtured. They were, on the whole, courteous (though there were some notable exceptions) and valued ‘form’. They liked to hunt and shoot, fish and sail and their politics were conservative. Like their Army and Navy contemporaries who made it to the top, they could be vain, overbearing and unscrupulous in the pursuit of advancement and glory.
They differed from their peers in sharing a heightened sense of the possibilities of the new. It was this spirit that had led them into the air in the first place. All had been attracted by the excitement of aviation. They were risk-takers, hazarding not just their lives at a time when flying was a very dangerous game, but also their careers, for opting for the RFC was a gamble for anyone planning a long-term military future. And they were by and large an intelligent bunch: sharp, inquiring and well-educated, at a time when brain power was not regarded as a cardinal military virtue. Arthur Tedder read history at Cambridge and had just started in the Colonial Service when the Great War broke out. Trafford Leigh-Mallory was a Cambridge contemporary, planning a career as a barrister. Sholto Douglas, a professor’s son, studied Classics at Oxford. Cleverness was prized and the cleverest, it was generally agreed, was Charles Portal, Winchester and Christ Church, Oxford, and ‘the accepted star of the Air Force’ as Churchill called him when appointing him Chief of the Air Staff in October 1940 at the young age of forty-seven (his Army and Navy opposite numbers were fifty-eight and sixty-four respectively).41
Not least, they looked different from their Army counterparts. The most senior, the best-known soldiers – Alan Brooke, Bernard Montgomery, Harold Alexander – sported Edwardian-era moustaches proclaiming their membership of a military caste. Portal and Tedder were clean-shaven. Tedder, with his fresh face and jutting pipe, cut a very unmartial figure, more like a liberal university professor than a man of action. Portal’s hooked nose and hooded eyes did not look British at all, and he reminded Peter Townsend of ‘an Arab sheikh’.42
Despite his relative youth, Portal would show himself the most detached and composed of the wartime chiefs of staff. He was as cool and hard as marble. High intelligence did not equate with an excess of human sympathy. This thoroughly modern warrior was as ruthless as any traditional commander and did not flinch from accepting or inflicting casualties. A spirit of restless aggression would pervade the direction of the wartime RAF, stimulated by a cadre of senior officers, most of whom had passed through Trenchard’s kindergarten. The approach guaranteed a high casualty rate among those who flew. The question was whether the expenditure was matched by the results.
3
In March 1934, Stanley Baldwin, the dominant figure in the National Government, announced in Parliament that henceforth it was official policy that ‘in air strength and air power this country shall no longer be in a position inferior to any country within striking distance of its shores’.1 That meant Germany. The great transformation in the RAF’s fortunes had begun. It was now launched on a race to keep up with the Luftwaffe as German air power evolved from nothing to threaten domination of the skies over Europe.
Baldwin’s words marked an end to wishful thinking. The physical and economic catastrophe of the last war had made a new one unbearable to contemplate, for government and people alike. Since 1919 defence spending had been governed by the ‘Ten Year Rule’ founded on the supposition that the country would not be engaged in a major conflict in the decade to come. Hard-headed Tories like Baldwin had become enthusiasts for Utopian formulas for world peace, embodied in the international disarmament talks which opened, attended by every major world power, in Geneva in February 1932.
The Ten Year Rule was scrapped in 1932 after service chiefs warned that the armed forces would soon be incapable of defending the empire. The Geneva talks effectively collapsed when Hitler pulled Germany out of both the conference and the League of Nations in October 1933.
With the Baldwin speech disarmament was all but buried. So too were the niggardly defence budgets that had starved the services of funds during the 1920s. When the purse strings were loosened it was the Air Force that benefited most. Once the poor relation of the forces, the Air Force was suddenly the Treasury’s favourite son. In 1930 it received by far the smallest share of the military budget: £16.75 million compared with £55.75 million for the Navy and £40.15 million for the Army.2 By 1939 it was getting the largest: £105.70 million against the Navy’s £97.96 million and the Army’s £88.29 million.
The money was emphatic proof that the Air Force was now at the heart of Britain’s defence strategy. In the thirty years since the advent of heavier-than-air flight, air power had assumed the same vital significance as sea power in ensuring the defence of the nation.
Between 1934 and 1939 the government authorized a series of schemes to expand the RAF at a rate that would maintain numerical parity with the Luftwaffe in the hope that this would deter aggression. When it became clear that this was unrealistic the emphasis switched from quantity to quality. The aim became to shape a force that would be able to withstand an initial onslaught from the air, and in time strike back. Existing programmes were scrapped and new ones devised in a desperate effort to keep up with an ever-changing reality. Such was the pace of events that only one of the eight expansion plans – Scheme F – was completed.
The favoured status of the Air Force was the result of several intertwined developments. There was a general conviction, shared by amateur and expert alike, that air power would determine the outcome of future conflicts. It followed that a powerful Air Force was the best means of deterring potential enemies. It also offered the hope that, if war did come, it could be fought without the need to send British troops to the Continent, an awful prospect for a society in which the memory of the trenches was still raw. All these notions were promoted with arriviste confidence by air power lobbyists inside and outside the RAF.
Trenchard and the Air Staff did not support the more extreme doctrines circulating in international military and political circles, which held that aeroplanes could win wars on their own. They answered the question: ‘what is the RAF really for?’ with a theory of air power that has been described as ‘strategic interception’.3 This held that, until now, in wars between nations, one side had tried to beat the other by defeating its land and sea forces in battle. The coming of air power changed all that. Aeroplanes could reach out to undermine the enemy’s capacity and will to fight. They would do so by smashing up war factories, power supplies and transport systems. As the targets were in populated areas, the onslaught would have a devastating effect on civilian morale. Trenchard was fond of quoting a maxim that had no basis in observable fact that ‘the moral effect [of bombing] is to the material in the ratio of ten to one’.4
Sooner rather than later the pressure would become unbearable. Civilians would clamour for protection and soldiers would be withdrawn from the front to try and defend them. Public support to continue fighting would evaporate and the enemy’s leaders would be forced to sue for peace. The prospect of mass civilian deaths and spectacular violence raised obvious ethical questions. They were to some extent answered by the claim that air power would put an end to the long agony of defensive terrestrial warfare as seen in the trenches of the Western Front. New wars would be short and sharp but less bloody in the long run than the old ones.
All this had profound implications for the
