The Battle of Britain was fought when the RAF was but twenty-two years old. A glance at its adolescence will perhaps explain how, despite the best efforts of admirals to dismember it and governments to run it on the cheap, it grew strong enough to triumph in 1940.
In the first few months after the Armistice the Coalition Government of Lloyd George, ‘the man who won the war’, swiftly dismantled one of the instruments of victory – the largest air force in the world. There had earlier been counsel to the contrary, for General Smuts’s great report of August 1917 had ended with these words:
We should not only secure air predominance, but secure it on a very large scale; and having secured it in this war we should make every effort and sacrifice to maintain it for the future. Air supremacy may in the long run be as important a factor in the defence of the Empire as sea supremacy.1
As soon as the guns fell silent, any thought of following Smuts’s advice vanished like smoke. In November 1918 the RAF had an operational strength of 188 squadrons (excluding seaborne units) backed by another 199 training squadrons. Eighteen months later it was down to twenty-five operational squadrons, mostly in India or the Middle East, and eleven training squadrons.2 The air defence of Great Britain, about which there had been such frenetic concern two years earlier, for a time rested on two half-squadrons.3
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There were, of course, good reasons for a rapid run-down, if not for wholesale slaughter. Complete demobilisation of the non-professional forces was expected, and demanded; economy was the order of the day; the nation, sickened with four years of slaughter, was in unmilitary mood; and the late enemy had been comprehensively disarmed and forbidden to maintain military aviation. All the same, the reduction was so drastic that in some matters its effects could never, in the later years of rearmament, be overcome in time for the next conflict.
Small though the thinned-down RAF was, its mere existence affronted the heads of the two older Services. From 1919 to 1923 the War Office and the Admiralty waged a relentless campaign to dismember the new Service in the hope of recovering for themselves what they regarded as lost component parts.4 All their efforts, however, failed in face of the resolute defence put up by Sir Hugh Trenchard, Chief of the Air Staff from 1919 to 1929.
There are many reasons why Trenchard, whom it has become fashionable to depict only as a rather dim-witted enthusiast for strategic bombing, should rank as one of the progenitors of victory in the Battle of Britain. The first and most important is that by beating off the repeated assaults of the other Services he preserved a separate air force. Independence, theoretically justified by the economy and flexibility of centralised air power, was in practice essential at the time not only for the development of strategic bombing, in which context it is usually considered, but also for the sustained study of, and wholehearted commitment to, the air defence of Britain. General Lord Ismay, Churchill’s closest military confidant, gave his heartfelt verdict on this in his Memoirs (1960): ‘One shudders to think what would have happened in the Second World War if the Admiralty and the War Office had had their way and the Air Arm had again become a mere auxiliary of the older Services.’5
Trenchard won these battles largely by accepting, and making a virtue of, the concept so dear to the politicians of the time – economy. Early in 1919 he undercut the imaginative but probably impractical proposals of Sir Frederick Sykes, then Chief of the Air Staff, for a permanent Imperial Air Force. Trenchard’s much more modest ideas attracted Churchill, at that time combining, ominously, the portfolios of War and Air. Having displaced Sykes, Trenchard outlined his proposals in a remarkable memorandum published in December 1919 as a White Paper, price one penny. Its principles were accepted, and Parliament gave approval for a peacetime independent air force of some 30,000 officers and men and thirty-three operational squadrons – of which only twenty-five existed.6 Small as this was, it was better than the complete extinction as a separate Service for which the naval and military leaders hankered.
Trenchard and Churchill then soon found an additional role for the RAF which actually saved money. In 1922 the new Service was entrusted with responsibility for the internal security of the British mandated territories first of Iraq and then of Palestine and Transjordan. Its occasional warning and punitive operations, conducted at much less cost in lives and cash than the previous military expeditions, were brilliantly successful. ‘Air control’, extended later to Aden, became a further justification for an independent air force.
Although official investigations and reports by A. J. Balfour and the formidable Sir Eric Geddes again came down in favour of a separate air force in 1921, it was another two years before Trenchard’s post-war creation became reasonably secure. What doubts still surrounded its existence after the fall of the Coalition may be seen from the words with which the new Conservative Prime Minister, Bonar Law, offered Sir Samuel Hoare the Secretaryship of State for Air in November 1922:
Will you take it? But before you answer I must tell you that the post may be abolished within a few weeks. Sykes tells me that the Independent Air Force and the Air Ministry cost much too much, and that there is everything to be said in peacetime for going back to the old plan of Navy and Army control. I agree with him. I shall therefore expect you, if you take the post, to remember that it may very soon cease to exist. There will be an immediate enquiry into the whole question by the Cabinet and the Committee of Imperial Defence…. I ought to add that the post will not be a Cabinet post.7
The reviewing body set up by Bonar Law was a sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence under Lord Salisbury. Within this, a sub-sub-committee under Lord Balfour conducted a separate investigation into the special question of the squadrons, both ship-borne and shore-based, which worked with the Navy.* The climate of opinion at the time these committees were appointed may be judged from the later account of Hoare, who was to prove an able lieutenant to Trenchard in all his struggles. Referring to his speech in connection with his first Air Estimates of March 1923, Hoare wrote:
I told the House that we had only sixteen first line machines equipped and ready for Home Defence, and that all the squadrons in India had been grounded for lack of spares. If I had not wished to avoid a quarrel with the Government of India, I would have amplified my Indian story by telling the House that the squadrons had received no new engines for seven years, and that they were buying bits and pieces in the bazaars for patching up their obsolete equipment. Members were mildly surprised by my statement rather than seriously shocked. They were bent on economy….8
By the time, however, that Salisbury and Balfour had begun their deliberations, the international climate had changed. Economy, as personified in the previous Government by Sir Eric Geddes, wielding a far sharper axe than any remotely contemplated in later days by Mrs Thatcher, had suddenly lost its charm when Britain fell out with France over reparations policy towards Germany. Could it be that the strongest air force in the world, the French, situated only a few miles across the water, might have to be reckoned as hostile? The prospect was unlikely, but disturbing. In its last days the Coalition Government had already, reviewing the defences of the country, approved the creation of further squadrons.9 Now, with the vastness of Britain’s imperial commitments also in mind, the Salisbury committee quickly recommended not only the retention of a separate air force, but also a further measure of expansion.10 At the same time Balfour’s sub-committee came down in favour of leaving the maritime squadrons, ship-borne and shore-based alike, within the RAF.” At the time, this was a vital victory; for had the Admiralty won its case, the War Office would have fought still harder, and the residual air force would have been too small to survive.*
These judgments infuriated the Admiralty, where Admiral Lord Beatty had already tried to sway the issue by a threat of resignation if the verdict went against him, and where the First Lord, L. S. Amery, with difficulty now prevented the whole Board of Admiralty from resigning. Little less aggrieved was the War Office, whose political head, Lord Derby, when informing the Prime Minister of his ‘grave apprehension’ about the ability of the RAF officers to run a separate Service, wrote thus: ‘After Trenchard, who is a first-class man, there is nobody … really the calibre of the young officers who are taken in now is very low, worse even than many of those who were taken in during the war, and we know what their standard was, and you cannot expect to make a good staff out of such men.’2 Such opinions, held at a time when the RAF’s senior officers included men like Sefton Brancker, Robert Brooke-Popham, Frederick Bowhill, John and Geoffrey Salmond, John Higgins and John Steel (and at a more junior level Christopher Courtney, Hugh Dowding, Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt, Wilfrid Freeman, Cyril Newall, Charles Portal, Arthur Harris, John Slessor and Arthur Tedder), did not facilitate the task of the new Service in establishing itself.*
One of the principles enunciated by the Salisbury Committee, and accepted by the Cabinet, was that Britain should maintain ‘a Home Defence Air Force of sufficient strength adequately to protect us against an attack by the strongest air force within striking distance of this country’.13 In practical terms its main recommendation, announced by Bonar Law’s successor Stanley Baldwin in the summer of 1923, was that the Home Defence Force should consist of fifty-two squadrons (including thirteen non-regular).14 This Force comprised bombers as well as fighters – in fact, roughly two bombers to every fighter, since in the prevailing conditions of the time counter-attack was considered the prime element in defence. The programme was to be completed ‘with as little delay as possible’, later defined as within five years. Thenceforth, until 1934, a fifty-two-squadron Home Defence Force was to be the prescribed – but always unattained – goal.**
At least, however, the principle had now been confirmed of a separate air force containing a strong home defence element – though part of this was soon scheduled to double as a strategic reserve for India. With a victorious conclusion to yet one more enquiry in 1925, Trenchard had now won his basic battle. But before he retired at the end of 1929 he also had to his credit other achievements without which his Service would never have been strong enough to withstand the strain in 1940.
Many of these stemmed from his original memorandum on the creation of the permanent air force in 1919, the basic principle of which was ‘first and foremost the making of a sound framework on which to build’. In this spirit he set up RAF institutions which provided admirable training for possible future commanders (the Staff College at Andover), for entrants to permanent commissions (the Cadet College at Cranwell) and for technicians (the Apprentices’ Schools at Halton and elsewhere). He also gave a prominent place to special establishments for research into aircraft, wireless, armaments and aerial photography. To build up a reserve on a minimum budget he limited permanent commissions to fifty per cent and introduced the revolutionary idea of short-service commissions – four years, followed by five on the reserve – and had no difficulty in finding suitable entrants. With the same object in mind he founded the Auxiliary Air Force (AAF) on the analogy of the Territorial Army and with its assistance, though perhaps aiming more at a corps d’élite; and this outstanding creation he followed with the first of the University Air Squadrons.* In the sphere of aircraft provision, he spread the tiny permitted orders among a variety of firms, to help keep them alive against the day when much larger orders might descend upon them. On the personnel side, he spotted much youthful talent – Portal, for instance – and saw that it was groomed for future command.
Above all, perhaps, by means such as the Hendon airshows, the long-distance record flights, the pioneer carrying of air mail (including all the official mail and the British Gazette during the General Strike), the opening up of new air routes to be subsequently exploited by Imperial Airways, and the winning of the Schneider Trophy races, Trenchard captured public attention and affection for his Service and built up for it a fund of popular goodwill. At the same time he instilled throughout its ranks a high regard for technical proficiency, a determination to keep abreast of the times (and if possible a bit ahead), and a buoyant morale compounded of high spirits, courage and aggressive intentions towards any enemy. All this gave the youthful RAF a strength not to be measured only in numbers and was to be of profound importance in 1940.
There was a further way in which the Trenchard period contributed to the outcome of the Battle. In the demobilisation of 1919 the air defences so painfully built up in response to the German raids had been utterly swept away. The observer posts ceased to exist, the guns were mostly dispersed, all the Home Defence squadrons except three were disbanded or sent overseas. When Parliament approved a modest expansion in 1922 and the much bigger fifty-two-squadron Home Defence scheme in 1923, Trenchard and his staff had to start on home air defence almost from scratch. Beginning by securing in 1922 – for the first time – recognition of the Air Ministry as the authority primarily responsible for the air defence of the country – ‘only the Air Force’, wrote Balfour, ‘can protect us from invasion by air’ – they went on, in full co-operation with the War Office, to provide a coherent and well-thought-out system.
Since France was then the only potential enemy, defensive measures were basically devised to meet an attack on southern England from across the Channel. Naturally much of what had existed in 1918 was revived, such as ops rooms with visual displays of hostile and friendly forces. Details of the system included the installation of acoustical mirrors – of very limited range and useless against low-flying aircraft – on the south coast, the recreation (after new experiments by Major-General Ashmore) of observer posts and observer group centres, and the establishment of a fighter zone beginning thirty-five miles inland. After some extension, this ran roughly across England from the Thames Estuary to the Bristol Channel. Directly in front of the fighter zone was the Outer Artillery Zone, with the function of breaking up and indicating enemy formations, and behind the fighter zone was the Inner Artillery Zone, mainly for the protection of London. Three fighter squadrons were located beyond the fighter zone, and there were also isolated batteries for the defence of the ports.16
Operational control of this whole system rested with an airman, but full co-ordination with the Army-manned guns and searchlights was effected by locating the GOC Ground Troops in headquarters adjoining those of the air commander. Direct telephone links – the laying of which by the Post Office was a vast task in itself-fed the observer tracks both to the air command and to the ten fighter sector stations, each with one or two squadrons. By 1926 all this was controlled from Fighting Area headquarters, one of the two subordinate operational formations – the other being for the bombers – which together made up a new overall command entitled the Air Defence of Great Britain (ADGB).
Put to the test of war at that time, the system would doubtless have given only poor protection, since the fighting area had to be so far back from the coast for lack of good early warning out to sea, and because the fighters of the day needed fifteen minutes or so to reach 14,000 feet – the height around which raiders were expected. Put to the test of war in 1940 against much faster bombers, it would, as it stood, have been utterly hopeless. Nevertheless, it provided much of the ground plan for the later greatly extended and improved system which defeated the Luftwaffe.
Many things which were to prove essential for Britain’s survival in 1940 could not, of course, be provided in the Trenchard era. Disregarding technical developments beyond the capacity of the time, the most important of these was a force large enough to sustain a big expansion quickly when the moment came. The fifty-two-squadron Home Defence scheme of 1923 should have been completed by 1928. But the application of the Cabinet’s Ten Years Rule – that defence estimates should be framed on the assumption that Britain would not be engaged in a major war within the next ten years – though sensible enough when it was introduced in 1919, was by assumption moved forward year by year in the 1920s and then formally from 1928 as international relations became more settled. The resolution of the reparations-Ruhr crisis, the Locarno treaties of 1925, the extended preparations for the great Disarmament Conference, capped by the onset of a world depression at the end of 1929, all provided reasons for the politicians to pare down or even defer defence measures already agreed.
So it came about that in 1924 the completion date for the fifty-two-squadron Home Defence scheme was moved forward from 1928 to 1930. Then in 1925 it was moved forward from 1930 to 1935–6. Then in 1929, under the second Labour Government, it was moved forward from 1935–6 to 193817 – by which time it had long been superseded. So Trenchard never got his fifty-two Home Defence squadrons. When he retired in 1929 he had brought the total up to thirty-eight, but with the world recession and with the Disarmament Conference due to meet in 1932 progress then became slower still. By 1933, ten years after the first approval of the scheme, and a year after the dropping of the Ten Years Rule on account of accumulated deficiencies and developments in the Far East, the total was still ten squadrons short of the original target figure. Moreover by that time, such had been the stranglehold of economy, many of the aircraft were not up to the best contemporary standards: some American, Italian and German airliners were faster than the most modern British bombers.
How tight the financial constraints were in the years up to 1934 may be seen from two examples drawn from Trenchard’s own creation of the Cadet College at Cranwell. The first is the simple fact that the College, opened in 1920, had to exist in wood and iron huts and a galvanised iron mess for thirteen years before it got proper buildings.18 The second concerns the Sword of Honour awarded annually to the outstanding cadet. The year it was instituted, the Treasury approved an expenditure of £10 for the purpose. The Air Ministry ordered a sword for this sum, but forgot to provide for the inscription – which brought the total up to nearly £12. To cover this, the Air Ministry felt obliged to seek Treasury approval for the expenditure of a further £2.’
Without the developments in Britain’s air defence before 1934, it would have been difficult to defeat the Luftwaffe in 1940. Without those from 1934 onwards, it would have been impossible.
The year 1934 is a landmark because, for the first time since 1923, the theme of expansion was heard alongside that of economy. The events of 1933 – the advent to power of Hitler, the Japanese notice of departure from the League of Nations, the German walk-out from the League and the Disarmament Conference – coupled with the realisation that Germany was not only producing exceptionally large numbers of civil aircraft but also building up a secret air force, spurred Britain’s leaders into action. The result for the RAF was Expansion Scheme A, approved in july 1934.20
Scheme A set up a new target of seventy-five Home Defence squadrons within five years instead of the old unachieved objective of fifty-two squadrons. It had scarcely got going when, in March 1935, Hitler officially acknowledged the existence of the Luftwaffe and went on to inform the astonished Sir John Simon and Anthony Eden that this was already as strong as Britain’s air force and would soon equal the Metropolitan and North African Air Forces of France. Within two months the RAF had a new target in its sights – Scheme C,21 intended to bring the Home Defence Force up to 112 squadrons by March 1937. According to Baldwin, this was designed to achieve ‘parity’ with Germany at that date – an objective which posterity has understandably viewed as over-modest.
Scheme C, like Scheme A, was basically intended to impress Hitler. Nearly all the additions were to the front line, the provision of reserves being deferred and therefore totally inadequate for serious fighting purposes within the next five years. It soon became apparent that something more must be done – especially when Italy invaded Abyssinia and Home Defence squadrons had to be sent out to Egypt and Aden. But a general election was looming in Britain, public opinion was still deeply suspicious of rearmament, and Baldwin dared not risk letting in a Labour government opposed to all the progress thus far made. Only when the election of November 1935 was safely over did a further expansion scheme – F, approved in February 1936 – become possible.22 Designed to produce by March 1939 a Home Defence Force of 107 squadrons (five fewer than in the previous scheme, but with fourteen aircraft instead of twelve in all the fighter squadrons), it was a well-rounded project and ran its full course. Among its features were provision for full aircraft reserves, medium instead of light bombers, and the ‘shadow factory’ scheme for the aircraft industry (providing factories for certain firms, mostly motor manufacturers, to make aircraft components or later complete aircraft, under the guidance of a specialist airframe or aero-engine firm).
Expansion and the hypothesis of Germany rather than France as the enemy soon created a need for reorganisation. What was delicately termed the ‘reorientation’ of the air defences began. The existing Fighting Area, running from the Thames Estuary thirty-five miles inland across to the Bristol Channel, had Duxford in Cambridgeshire as its most northerly station. It was France-facing and would obviously not serve against Germany. Any part of England, it now seemed, would soon be within range of German bombers flying either directly across the North Sea or overflying the Low Countries, or else operating from captured bases in Belgium. (No one remotely thought of captured bases in western France or Norway.)
The solution, produced by a joint Air Ministry-War Office committee, was a new continuous defended zone twenty-six miles wide, running from Portsmouth eastwards of London up to the Tees. The first six miles of this, the coastal strip, became the new Outer Artillery Zone and the next twenty miles the new Fighting Area. Further inland were the Inner Artillery Zone protecting London, and ground defences at various important points outside the Zones. By this extension the Midlands and most of the north-east were brought within the ADGB system. At the same time, as the purely defensive element began to face towards Germany, so did the offensive part. Most of the bombers had thus far been stationed on southern and central airfields, in Oxfordshire and thereabouts. Now they began to be based on new airfields built in East Anglia, and as they moved, so fighter squadrons could occupy the vacated stations.23
The full implementation of these changes, involving extension of the Observer Corps network to new regions, took some years.* The slowest progress was in ground defence. The recommended total of guns and searchlights was nothing like achieved by the time war broke out.
The growth of the Home Defence squadrons from an actual forty-two in 1934 to a projected 107 in 1939 was accompanied by all the problems of construction, recruitment, equipment and training inherent in the task of nearly trebling an air force within five years. It also brought with it problems of command. During 1935 the Air Ministry decided that the task of commanding the enlarged Home Defence Force – all the home-based bombers and fighters – would be too much for one man. In 1936 the ADGB Command which had existed for the past eleven years was accordingly broken up. In its place appeared a division of command by function: Bomber Command, Fighter Command, Coastal Command, Training Command and a Maintenance Group, later Maintenance Command. With two additions – Balloon Command in 1938 when the barrage was extended outside London, and Reserve Command in 1939 to handle the new Volunteer Reserve centres and the civil elementary flying schools – this formed the basic structure of RAF Command organisation at home at the outbreak of war.24
Since there was no longer an overall operational commander at home, the Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief at Fighter Command, as at Bomber Command, became directly responsible to the Chief of the Air Staff at the Air Ministry. In practice, the AOC-in-C would run his own Command without any day-to-day control from above, but within the context of any major policy decisions emanating from Whitehall. Co-operation with other Commands would be achieved by mutual agreement or Air Staff directive. In practice, it would depend heavily on goodwill.
Fighter Command headquarters opened on 14 July 1936 at Bentley Priory, a late eighteenth-century mansion in extensive grounds at Stanmore – once a village in Middlesex but by this time virtually an outer suburb of London. The house, where the dowager Queen Adelaide had resided in the 1840s, had later declined into an hotel and a girls’ boarding-school before falling into the hands of the Air Ministry in 1926. Since then it had been the headquarters of Inland Area, responsible for training in the ADGB organisation.
A few days before Fighter Command set up its headquarters, its main subordinate formation, No. 11 (Fighter) Group, whose task was the defence of south and south-east England, had opened in the old ADGB headquarters at Hillingdon House, Uxbridge. The other main subordinate formation, No. 12 (Fighter) Group, formed in accordance with the decision to extend the continuous belt of protection to the Midlands and beyond, opened the following April at Watnall in Nottinghamshire. To these two Groups, and to their counterparts farther north and west which came later, would be entrusted the detailed conduct of operations, acting under the higher strategic control of Fighter Command.
The man chosen as the head of Fighter Command, Air Marshal Sir Hugh Caswall Tremenheere Dowding CB, CMG, had no exceptional wealth of operational or command experience behind him. Not very happy as a schoolboy at Winchester, where his father had excelled, he had entered the Army Class to escape classical studies and then proceeded through the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. After a dozen years’ service as an artillery officer in the outposts of the Empire he had been admitted to the Staff College course at Camberley and had rounded off his final year by taking flying lessons at Brooklands at his own expense – unless he should qualify, in which case the War Office would meet the cost. He did qualify – in a total time, passenger, dual and solo, of one hour forty minutes. Having then attended the Central Flying School and got his ‘wings’, he found himself swept into the RFC at the outbreak of war in 1914. Service in France followed, with command first of squadrons and then a wing, specialising for the most part in the development and use of wireless communication for purposes of artillery observation from the air. In 1916 he was posted home on promotion to colonel and spent most of the next two years doing good work in training. At the end of the war he was aged thirty-five and a brigadier general.
Dowding received a permanent commission and was soon posted to command a Group at Kenley. There, among other duties, he organised the second and some subsequent RAF displays at Hendon – a most exacting and nerve-racking task. Later he was Chief of Staff at Headquarters Inland Area, Uxbridge, dealing with training and reserves, and then for two years Chief of Staff in Iraq. Other work included a spell as Director of Training at the Air Ministry, where he found himself working harmoniously with Trenchard and almost receiving an apology, presumably for the employment at home in 1917–18: ‘Dowding, I don’t often make mistakes about people, but I made one about you.’
All this led up to the experience which particularly qualified Dowding for his new post. In 1929 he commanded Fighting Area for some months. Then, in 1930, he was invited to join the Air Council, the governing hierarchy in the Air Ministry, as the Air Member for Supply and Research. In this position, and after January 1935 as Air Member for Research and Development – a new Department having been created for Supply and Organisation – Dowding had greater responsibility than any other person for fostering technical progress within the RAF.
Not all Dowding’s decisions between 1930 and 1936 turned out well. Within a few weeks of his first appointment, trusting to the experts, he cleared the airship R101 for her maiden flight to India. The disaster at Beauvais made him very wary in future of trusting experts without strong proofs of their correctness. Among the aircraft he sponsored which did not properly justify themselves were the Battle light bomber – it could be produced fairly quickly, and there was the call for quantity – and the two-seat Defiant fighter. He also sanctioned some aircraft of poor performance for the Fleet Air Arm – though in doing so he was only striving to satisfy the desire of the Naval Staff for aircraft which would meet a multitude of inherently conflicting requirements. Perhaps his worst mistake, which he was later bitterly to regret, was in connection with aircraft petrol tanks. Trying to develop tanks which would be crash-proof, he overlooked the much greater need, far easier to satisfy, to produce tanks which by means of a suitable coating would seal themselves when penetrated by bullets.
But if Dowding as the Service head of research made some errors, he also made some decisions of supreme importance which were to help win his Battle a few years later. Among these, two stand out. Perceiving the need for much faster fighters, he took a lead in plumping for metal monoplanes instead of wooden biplanes, and supported at every stage the development of the Hurricane and the Spitfire. Perceiving also the need for much earlier warning of the approach of hostile aircraft, he backed radar wholeheartedly from the moment of the first experiments (see pages 48–51).
It must have been above all with these two dawning achievements in mind that Dowding approached his task as he settled in at Bentley Priory in 1936. A realist, he knew that the revolution in air defence was only just beginning, and that he might have very little time to translate it into Hurricanes, Spitfires, radar stations and communications before the enemy was upon him. Whatever he might lack in material resources or personal glamour, however, this tall, pale-faced, serious-minded, kindly man of unmilitary bearing and distant manners, who had acquired long ago at the Army Staff College the lasting nickname ‘Stuffy’, would never lack the fearless determination, the devotion to duty and the integrity to see his tasks through to the best conclusion he could possibly reach. Fighter Command needed a fighter at its head, and in Stuffy Dowding it had one – a quiet fighter, but one of the greatest obstinacy and singleness of purpose. Because he had been born in Dumfriesshire, where his Wiltshire-bred father ran a preparatory school, he was sometimes referred to as ‘a dour Scot’. He was no Scot, but fortunately for his country he could certainly be dour.25
* The shore-based squadrons intended primarily for naval co-operation were entirely administered and controlled by the RAF. Operationally they normally worked in accordance with naval wishes, but they could be required to undertake other tasks. The ship-borne squadrons, known after 1924 as the Fleet Air Arm, were trained, manned and maintained by the RAF, but operationally were under complete naval control.
* By 1937, when the Fleet Air Arm went over to the Admiralty, the RAF was strong enough to survive the amputation.
* One of the present authors heard a good specimen of this kind of pronouncement as late as 1943 in a conversation with Brigadier General Sir James Edmonds, the official military historian of World War I. Edmonds informed him that the early officers of the RFC were largely ‘bad hats – fellows with debts from Ascot, and so on’.
** The Home Defence Force constituted by far the greater part, but not the entirety, of the Metropolitan Air Force, which also included some squadrons for naval and army co-operation.
* The AAF squadrons, at first equipped with bombers, were converted to fighters from 1934 onwards, and in 1940 made up nearly a quarter of Fighter Command’s first-line strength. The University Air Squadrons were sometimes criticised as a minor element of doubtful use. Their value quickly became apparent in September 1939 when the Oxford Squadron alone provided nearly 500 officers.15
* In 1929 the War Office had relinquished control over the observer system, and the observers had become a civilian corps under Air Ministry aegis.