rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">24
The programme that followed gave the impression that Britain was welcoming a trusted ally rather than a potential enemy. The day after arriving, Milch was taken to Buckingham Palace for an audience with King George VI. The itinerary covered almost every aspect of RAF operations, including visits to Cranwell and Halton and tours of the new shadow factories. Everything was done to make the Germans feel at home. At a cocktail party at the Carlton Hotel in the West End of London attended by everyone who was anyone in the British aviation world, the RAF band struck up the ‘Badenweiler Marsch’, which was always played at Hitler’s public appearances, as well as ‘Old Comrades’ and ‘Our Flag Flutters Before Us’, a marching song of the Hitler Youth.25
On 19 October the Germans were given the run of the bomber station at Mildenhall in Suffolk. It was occupied by 99 and 149 Squadrons, both equipped with Handley Page Heyford biplane heavy bombers which lined up in facing ranks on the grass runway for the visitors to inspect. According to The Times, the German officers, who were dressed in Luftwaffe uniform, ‘sat in the cockpits, waggled the controls, trained movable guns in their turrets, had bomb trapdoors opened for their inspections [and] asked questions which were readily answered …’26 They were then treated to a mass flypast by an assortment of the bombers then in service: Vickers Wellesleys, Fairey Battles, Handley Page Harrows and Bristol Blenheims. Lunch was served in the officers’ mess. The table was decked out in the red, black and white Nazi colours.
The eagerness to please created moments of black farce. On 23 October Air Vice Marshal Victor Goddard, the RAF’s deputy director of intelligence, took the Germans to Hornchurch in Essex which was home to two fighter squadrons. They were equipped with Gladiator biplanes which were swift and elegant but antediluvian compared to the sleek Messerschmitts now arriving at Luftwaffe fighter units. They did have one piece of equipment that was bang up to date – the latest optical reflector sights. Pilots had been told by the station commander Group Captain ‘Bunty’ Frew that ‘if the Germans ask about the sight, keep mum’. So when General Milch peered into the cockpit of one of the Gladiators and inquired how the sight worked, the pilot, Bob Stanford Tuck of 65 Squadron, replied smartly: ‘I’m sorry, General, it’s so new, I’ve not yet found out.’27 Tuck was ‘quite appalled’ when ‘suddenly AVM Goddard interrupted and proceeded to give him the full details’. According to one version of the story, when Goddard had finished Tuck suggested: ‘Sir, perhaps General Milch might like to take one home with him as a souvenir?’
The visit was presented by government and press as a hopeful sign that Hitler could be curbed. Flight magazine, the aviation bible, claimed that ‘when the British mission visited German air force centres in January last, the members all felt that they knew, understood and respected their German hosts. It is permissible to hope and indeed to believe that the German party under the leadership of General Milch returned to Germany with the same feeling.’28
Others doubted that the Germans were fooled for a minute. Winston Churchill, the arch opponent of the government’s policy of non-provocation, did not believe that the performance would have the slightest deterrent effect. It was, he wrote to the powerful Cabinet Secretary Maurice Hankey, ‘a desperate effort … to present a sham’. The truth was that at the Mildenhall display Bomber Command had struggled to ‘put little more than a hundred bombers in the air – the great majority of which (as the Germans will readily see) can barely reach the coast of Germany with a bomb load’.29
Churchill’s assessment of the RAF’s power to intimidate was accurate enough. The Heyfords the Germans inspected had double-decker wings and fixed undercarriages and belonged to a bygone age. The machines in the flypast looked modern but were underwhelming in almost every department. The Battle was powered by a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine but carried only two single machine guns to defend itself and had a range of a sparse thousand miles. The Harrow, classified as a ‘heavy’, could manage a 1,250-mile round trip but was pathetically slow. The Wellesley ‘medium’ was capable of long distances but was also sluggish. The Blenheim, another medium, was the fastest of the lot, but was able to penetrate only to the fringes of German territory. These were the aircraft with which the RAF’s bomber squadrons were currently equipped.
Better performing aircraft were emerging from the pipeline – the Whitleys, Wellingtons and Hampdens with which the RAF would fight in the first years of the war. But long-range aeroplanes capable of carrying a substantial bomb load were still in development. It would be twenty months before the Stirling, the first of the four-engine ‘heavies’, made its maiden flight. The Halifax did not start flying operationally until March 1941, the Lancaster a year later. In the meantime, the RAF would have to make do with machines which were plainly inadequate for the very ambitious role that had been claimed for them.
The Milch visit was merely a reminder of what the Air Staff already knew: that the service was utterly unprepared for war. Bomber Command – which had been created in a major structural reorganization of the Air Force in 1936 – had nothing in its armoury that was likely to cause Hitler to hesitate. Fighter Command, set up at the same time, was in better shape. It would be some time, though, before it had the machines and the system of detection, command and control needed to deploy them efficiently enough to withstand a mass attack. As things stood in the autumn of 1937, the Air Force was incapable of either deterring, defending or retaliating.
Slessor and the planning staff had already laid out the situation in stark terms in a paper to Newall a few days after he took over as Chief of the Air Staff on 1 September 1937. It stated that they would be ‘failing in their duty were they not to express the considered opinion that the Metropolitan [i.e. home-based] Air Force in general and the Bomber Command in particular, are at present almost totally unfitted for war; that unless the production of new and up-to-date aircraft can be expedited, they will not be fit for war for at least two and a half years; and that even at the end of that time, there is not the slightest chance of their reaching equality with Germany in first line strength if the present German programmes are fulfilled’.30
The warning produced yet another scheme – J – but unlike its predecessors this was more than a mere exercise in upping the numbers. Quantity gave way to quality. The plan was based on what the Air Staff considered to be its minimum strategic requirements rather than on hoped-for deterrent effect, or some ill-defined numerical ‘parity’. The goal was to have 3,031 front-line aircraft at home and abroad available by April 1941, that is 800 more than in Scheme F – the last one to get government approval.
As always, most of the new aircraft would be bombers, which would outnumber fighters by a factor of two to one. Nothing that had happened since the start of expansion had shaken the Air Staff’s belief in the proposition that a big bomber force was the foundation for all air strategy. When submitting the new scheme for government approval, the Air Minister Lord Swinton made it clear ‘there is no question of altering the ratio of fighter and bomber squadrons in the sense of reducing bomber squadrons to make fighter squadrons’.31
Faith in the offensive had blinded the Air Force professionals to the meaning of technological, military and political developments, the significance of which was dawning on amateur, civilian minds. Britain’s defensive situation was improving fast. The domestic aircraft industry was at last producing fast, modern, low-wing monoplane fighters that could at least hold their own against the Luftwaffe. At the time Scheme J was proposed, 600 Hurricanes were on order from Hawker and the first small batch would start to arrive on squadrons at the beginning of 1938.32 An order had been made for 310 Spitfires from Supermarine, though delays and complications meant production
