redundant. The Navy would have an important role undermining the enemy’s war economy by exercising its traditional function of imposing a maritime blockade and securing Britain’s supply lines. The Army would still have to defeat the enemy forces in the field – though these would be much weakened as a result of air action. If the Air Force claims were accepted, though, it would mean that in a time of crisis it would have a privileged call on resources and a dominant voice in war councils. It was a recipe for bad blood.
The supposedly scientific prognostications of the air professionals chimed with the instincts of the civilian amateurs. Politicians needed little persuasion about the menace posed by aerial warfare. Stanley Baldwin’s doom-laden speech in the House of Commons on 10 November 1932 revealed how deeply the message had penetrated. Baldwin had twice been Prime Minister and was now the leader of the Conservative Party which dominated the National Government led by Ramsay MacDonald. He had been foremost in pressing for an international convention to outlaw, or at least limit, the use of aircraft as weapons of war. Now, with the Geneva conference in its death throes, he had nothing to offer but despairing prophecies.
The speech is remembered for his warning that ‘the bomber will always get through’, a phrase that struck home immediately. It was only one of a number of utterances that must have curdled the blood of everyone reading the next morning’s papers.5 He had now abandoned the hope that agreements to curb air power could ever work. The stark conclusion was that ‘the only defence is in offence, which means that you have got to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves’.
One of the many striking things about the speech is the sense of dread that it sets out to create even though there was at that stage no European war in prospect. Hitler and the Nazis were new on the scene and were still presumed to be subject to the normal laws of diplomacy and power politics.
As the decade progressed the spectre raised by Baldwin would haunt the political landscape. The future arrived more rapidly than he imagined and the distant nightmare began to feel like imminent reality. Mass media stoked anxieties. The Alexander Korda film Things to Come, based on H. G. Wells’s novel, was released in 1936. It painted a picture of a London-like metropolis being bombed back into the Dark Ages by an unstoppable wave of enemy bombers. The movie was a critical and commercial success, the sixteenth most popular at the box office that year.
It was to the RAF that everyone looked for protection from these horrors and it was happy to offer reassurance. Adastral House had a plan for dealing with the mounting threat from Germany. Almost every senior officer who mattered was an adept of the cult of the bomber. For John Slessor the paramountcy of bombing was ‘an article of faith’.6 Slessor was thoughtful and articulate, a Trenchard protégé who had ghosted his writings and speeches and from 1937 was de facto head of the plans department that translated doctrine into practice. He and his colleagues envisaged a scenario in which deterrence broke down and the Luftwaffe launched a huge air assault on Britain to land a ‘knock-out blow’ and deliver a swift victory.
The RAF needed fighter aircraft that would ‘provide a reasonable chance of parrying a knock-out blow’. But the real protection would be provided by a ‘striking force’ of bombers mounting a massive counter-offensive. Slessor admitted later that ‘our belief in the bomber was intuitive’ and that until war broke out ‘we really did not know anything about air war on a major scale’.7 The excuse was that there was a lack of hard evidence to work on. The RAF had little recent practical experience – bombing villages in Waziristan taught no lessons. There seems to have been no systematic military analysis of air operations in the wars in China, Abyssinia and Spain.8
‘Jack’ Slessor (© Imperial War Museums, CH 9457)
The absence of data did nothing to undermine the Air Staff’s confidence in the doctrine. It rested unsteadily on several untested propositions. One was that airspace was so vast that British bombers would be able to proceed directly to the task of destroying the enemy’s war industry relatively unhindered. But what was true for British bombers would presumably be true of German ones. Surely, at some point, a battle would have to be fought to gain air supremacy in order to avoid an endless attritional cycle of attack and counter-attack?
Another was that bombing would have a devastating effect on enemy morale. Again if that was so – and some critics argued from the evidence of the Spanish Civil War, where the bombing of Barcelona by the Nationalists in March 1938 had galvanized Republican resistance, that if anything the opposite was the case – then British morale would be similarly affected. To the first the airmen had no answer. The second could only be dealt with by the assertion that innate racial superiority meant that, whereas Britons could ‘take it’, Germans couldn’t.
Despite these obvious flaws the views of the Air Staff were generally accepted in Downing Street, Whitehall and Westminster. They harmonized with the mood of the times and the priorities of politicians. Everyone was desperate to avoid a war, especially one that meant sending troops to fight again on the Continent. Building up the Army and Navy could only provoke the Germans. Building up the Air Force might deter them. Expansion was seen as a defensive measure, popular with government and public alike. The decision to go ahead with it was essentially a political not a strategic choice. Once taken, the Air Force hogged both the public limelight and the Treasury’s still limited largesse.
The Army and Navy boiled with exasperation at the favour bestowed on the new boys. It bubbles in the diaries of Henry Pownall, a sharp-eyed Army officer who watched the process from his seat on the secretariat of the Committee for Imperial Defence which brought together the professional service heads, cabinet ministers and senior officials. ‘The public cry is all for the Air Force [first], Navy a distinct second, and the Army a very bad third,’ he complained after a major report into how to repair the country’s run-down defences that paved the way for rearmament was unveiled in February 1934.9 ‘The RAF have got too much,’ he snapped a few months later as the details of how the budget would be carved emerged.10 The Army’s appeals for funds to build up a field force to send to France in time of war received a stony reception. ‘Everyone will shout loud enough for the Army to practise as an Army when war comes but in peace it is the Cinderella of the Services,’ wailed Pownall in 1938.11
It was not just about money. There was resentment at the tremendous strategic airs the Air Force had given itself. ‘A constant bone of contention in our discussions was the role to be played by the Air Force,’ wrote Major General Sir John Kennedy, the Army’s Deputy Director of Plans on the eve of the war. ‘Both the General Staff and the Naval Staff opposed the fanatical efforts of the Air Staff to press upon us their theory that the war would be decided by the action of air forces almost unaided by the other two services.’12
They were also aggrieved by the RAF’s extreme reluctance to divert resources to meet their particular needs. The Army and Navy ‘fought hard and unsuccessfully for the provision of adequate specialized air forces, properly trained and equipped for the support of naval and military operations’. The airmen’s attitude was combative and defensive. Kennedy claimed that a senior officer at the Air Ministry had told him that the Air Staff regarded such co-operation as a ‘prostitution of the Air Force’.
The fight for a share of air assets would go on far into the war. In the high-level meetings where defence priorities were decided the admirals and generals could only grind their teeth while the
