‘The soldiers and sailors could never persuade the cabinet or the defence committee to settle the dispute in a way we thought right, either before or during the war.’13
For all their perceived cockiness, the newcomers showed respect towards political authority and voiced their arguments softly. Edward Ellington, CAS for the crucial 1933–7 period, was regarded by his own senior officers as being too deferential in the company of politicians. His successor, Cyril Newall, was more forceful but got on well with Lord Swinton and Sir Kingsley Wood, the air ministers who presided over the expansion period.
The Air Marshals’ approach contrasted favourably with the high-handed ways of the soldiers and sailors. The Army brass barely bothered to disguise their contempt for Leslie Hore-Belisha, Secretary of State for War from 1937 to 1940. ‘An obscure, shallow-brained, charlatan political Jewboy’ was Pownall’s verdict.14 Their treatment of him is revealed in an episode recounted by Kennedy when he was taken on a tour of the front in northern France by Lord Gort, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, in November 1939.
It was a cold, wet windy morning. We motored through the rain to the western side of the British salient … on our way we crossed Vimy Ridge. Gort got us out of our cars … he made Hore-Belisha climb a very muddy bank and kept him shivering in the howling gale while he explained the battle fought there in the 1914–18 war. In spite of his discomfort Hore-Belisha kept up a good appearance of polite interest. By this time his patent leather boots must have been giving him hell.15
There were further stops at other windswept battlefields. They paused at a château to meet the French commander and were taken to an attic window for yet another tour d’horizon. Gort deliberately ‘opened a window and let in a piercing draught on Hore-Belisha; when we went out again into the rain he shouted jovially, “Isn’t it a grand day!”’16
This schoolboyish bullying was all the more extraordinary given that Gort owed his appointment to Hore-Belisha’s patronage. Nor would the War Minister be thanked for the great efforts he made in cabinet to obtain funds and equipment for the army Gort now commanded. Edmund Ironside, who Hore-Belisha appointed as Chief of the General Staff, was equally obnoxious towards his patron. Ironside, an outstanding linguist, gleefully recounted to Kennedy over lunch one day in his club how he had instructed his political master not to try and address French commanders in their own tongue: ‘I told him that his French was Le Touquet French – good enough for talking to Mademoiselle X on the plage but no good for military conversations.’17
The hostile and surely anti-Semitic attitudes of Gort and Ironside were in sharp contrast to the warm relations between the RAF and Sir Philip Sassoon, Under Secretary of State for Air between 1931 and 1937. Sir Philip was rich, Jewish and unmistakeably gay.18 He was famously generous and hospitable and every summer hosted the annual camp of the Auxiliaries of 601 (County of London) Squadron, of which he was honorary CO, at Port Lympne, his sumptuous country house on the Kent coast. In between flying, the young airmen lounged around the twin swimming pools in the grounds and there was a party every night. Sassoon’s death aged only fifty in June 1939 caused the Air Force real sorrow. At a meeting of the Air Council ten days afterwards much of the discussion was taken up with whether or not to cancel the RAF garden party held each year at Trent Park, another Sassoon mansion in Hertfordshire, as ‘the absence of Sir Philip would revive memories and cast a gloom over the proceedings’.19
Expansion piled enormous bulk on the organizational skeleton devised by Trenchard. In April 1934, on the eve of the great transformation, the RAF had 814 aeroplanes at home and abroad. When the war broke out it had 3,860.20 The Air Force’s new physique might look impressive but was there real muscle underneath? The speed of events in Europe had the Air Ministry perpetually scrambling to keep up. The Nazis’ obfuscations about the extent of their own expansion programme meant there were no solid metrics on which to base the pursuit of parity. The result was that much of the budget was squandered on unsatisfactory aircraft which were ordered mainly to create the illusion of strength – an attempt at ‘scaring Hitler by “window dressing”’, as senior officers privately admitted to each other.21
The political imperative for numerical parity with the Luftwaffe had taken little account of the quality of the aircraft. In a time of fast-changing technology the policy was shockingly wasteful. The Air Ministry ordered new types in the knowledge that they would be out of date before they reached the squadrons. The Fairey Battle light bomber was known to be a dud from the outset, underpowered and short-ranged, yet more than 2,000 were bought before a halt was called, leaving their crews tethered to a lethally useless machine when the fighting began.
The RAF could argue that it was not their fault. Building a modern air force was hampered by the underdeveloped state of the domestic air industry and the government’s laissez-faire economic policy. In Germany, the Nazis ensured that aircraft manufacturing was at the service of the state and the national airline Lufthansa was to a large extent the Luftwaffe in sheep’s clothing. A senior Rolls-Royce executive, Willoughby Lappin, visited the Heinkel works on the Baltic coast in April 1936 and on his return reported his findings to British intelligence. Workers started their shifts at 6.15 a.m. and finished at 5.15 p.m., with two fifteen-minute meal breaks. ‘The most significant thing,’ he noted, ‘is probably the fact that everyone young and old is disciplined and is thinking nationally, whether from fear or choice does not matter … the Government are solely responsible for the policy and working of all the aircraft factories and the directors thereof have no control except to provide the Air Ministry with what they require.’22
In Britain the state gave limited support to a range of smallish ‘family firm’ constructors, who had to pay the costs of developing new designs themselves and competed for orders when the Air Ministry issued specifications for a new type. Until late in the day, British governments avoided intervening, refusing to allow the international situation to interfere with the principle of ‘non-interference with the flow of normal trade’.23
The result was a piecemeal approach to design producing a plethora of types. Multiplicity meant a lack of mass-production capacity and, though this was remedied when the government paid big motor manufacturers like Austin and Rootes to build ‘shadow factories’ for airframes and engines, there was a reluctance to mobilize industry on a war footing until it became absolutely necessary. Ultimately the failures and shortcomings were a consequence of Britain’s political system – what happened when a free-market democracy tried to prepare for total war.
Each side used smoke and mirrors to try and persuade the other that there was no point in trying to outdo them in the air. They engaged in a pantomime of good fellowship which looks surreal at this distance in time. The fraternizing began at the instigation of the RAF when in the spring of 1936 the Air Minister Lord Swinton invited General Erhard Milch to Britain.
General Milch was the man who could claim most of the credit for building up the Luftwaffe in the space of a few years from a puny collection of ill-assorted aircraft into the most feared air force in Europe. The Germans reciprocated and a party of senior RAF officers toured Luftwaffe facilities and aircraft factories the following January.
On 17 October 1937, Milch was back again, together with his chief of staff, Lieutenant General Hans-Jürgen Stumpff and Major General Ernst Udet, an internationally famous air ace and head of the Luftwaffe’s technical division. Arriving at Croydon Airport Milch declared
