By 1936 the crucial innovations in Britain’s air defence – radar and the eight-gun, monoplane fighter – augured well. Quality seemed assured, but what of quantity? An aggressive move by Germany, the Foreign Office thought, might now come within three years. Conversely, it might never come at all. In an uncertain situation, how much of the new defensive equipment should (or, for that matter, could) be provided, and by what date?
The decision to construct a chain of twenty radar stations – a very bold one, in view of the technical problems outstanding – was taken in the summer of 1937. They were to be ready by 1940 and were estimated to cost £1 million.1 This seemed a lot at the time, but could in fact be readily afforded. More difficult to finance would be another large increase in the number of squadrons, with their big demands for airfield space, station accommodation and trained manpower. Such an increase, moreover, would involve questions of priority. In any further expansion, should the emphasis be on the RAF overseas (to counter Italy and Japan) or on the RAF at home (to counter Germany)? And within the RAF at home, should the emphasis be on fighters or on bombers?
During 1937 and 1938 these problems were confronted, if not exactly solved. Alarmed at the information coming from Germany, in January 1937 the Air Ministry put forward a new scheme to equal Germany’s estimated first-line strength by the spring of 1939. Most of it was rejected by Neville Chamberlain and his ministers – he succeeded Baldwin as Prime Minister in May – on grounds of expense. Armed with fresh evidence, the Air Ministry tried again in October. Its proposals this time visualised, among other things, building up the RAF overseas and adding 440 bombers and 132 fighters to the already approved target strength of the Metropolitan Air Force, all at an additional cost of £270 million. But – the Air Ministry pointed out – this could be achieved by 1939 only if the Cabinet abandoned the principle on which Britain’s rearmament had so far been conducted: that there must be ‘no interference with the normal course of trade’.
Chamberlain and his ministers, however, had as yet no intention of forgoing peacetime practices. They had no wish to direct labour, forbid ‘strategic’ exports such as aircraft, pre-empt materials or introduce any of the government controls which could step up aircraft production. In Parliament Churchill, since 1934 intent on goading the Government and the Air Ministry into faster rearmament, was by now demanding exceptional measures such as the setting up of a Ministry of Supply. Most of the ministers, however, remained unmoved. They had steered the ship of state into calmer waters after the storms of 1931 and they were convinced that, if a war had finally to be fought, the best chance of winning it would be from a sound financial base – ‘the fourth arm of defence’. Huge peacetime expenditure on arms beyond the unprecedented total of £1,500 million for the years 1937–41 already agreed, direction of manufacture and labour – all this might cancel out their hard-won gains and plunge the country into a new financial crisis. Also, though this was less clearly enunciated, it would greatly annoy employers and unions and cause much trouble for the Government.
Though determined to maintain ‘business as usual’ the Cabinet hesitated to turn down the Air Ministry’s new proposals flat. It was Sir Thomas Inskip, Minister for Co-ordination of Defence – a post established in 1936 – who showed his colleagues a way out. The extra £270 million could, he pointed out, be cut to £110 million if all proposed increases overseas were omitted, and if the proposed increase in the home bomber force was substantially reduced. The proposed increase in the home fighter force could then stand.2
These amendments Inskip justified not only on financial grounds but on strategic. Even a British bombing force inferior to the Luftwaffe’s could, he argued, prove a useful deterrent. And as long as Britain had a strong fighter arm, she could defend her home base should attack come, build up resources under a wartime economy once hostilities started, and then in the fullness of time move over to the offensive.
This prescription scandalised the Air Staff, who had for so long regarded offence as the number one weapon in defence. As a strategy it was, in fact, just becoming tenable – because of the promise shown by radar and the new eight-gun fighters. Was Inskip’s strategic insight, then, keener than that of the Air Staff? Did it need, as some have averred, a lawyer-politician to call back to reality airmen lost in impractical visions of strategic bombing – to point out to them the importance of ‘defensive’ defence, and impose on them a decision which helped to win the Battle of Britain?
It may be doubted whether the answer to these questions should be ‘yes’. Had the Air Staff been blind to the demands of ‘defensive’ defence they would scarcely have shown such vigour in backing the Hurricane, the Spitfire and radar. In essence, Inskip was offering the Air Staff all the extra fighters they had requested for home defence, but not all the extra bombers. Fighters were much cheaper than bombers and required a single crew member instead of four or five; and his proposals, consonant with the continuation of ‘business as usual’, accordingly commended themselves to the majority of the Cabinet.
Did this decision, as has been claimed, make a substantial contribution towards the victory of 1940? If so, the feather in Inskip’s cap would indeed be a big one. But in fact, though many have lauded Inskip’s sense of priorities, no one has yet shown that the scaling down of the Air Ministry’s bomber proposals in 1937 produced more Hurricanes and Spitfires in 1940.
Certainly, however, the adoption of Inskip’s proposals became one more factor in committing Britain to a completely defensive posture at the start of the war. It helped to delay the beginning of any significant British bombing offensive, and to confirm in Hitler’s hands the strategic initiative – an initiative which was to result in the collapse of France and the installation of the Luftwaffe just across the English Channel.
During 1938 financial considerations at last fell into second place. In February the Chiefs of Staff, pointing out alarming deficiencies in planned production, advised that these could be remedied only by exceptional industrial measures.3 They had scarcely sounded their warning when, on 11 March, Hitler’s columns rolled into Austria to the frenzied applause of the home-bred Nazis. With Mussolini firmly in the German camp since the abortive Anglo-French efforts to restrain him over Abyssinia, nothing could now be done about Austria. But could Britain and France avert further moves towards a Greater German Reich? Very quickly Chamberlain asked the Chiefs of Staff to advise on the practicability of Allied military action if Hitler threatened Czechoslovakia.
The Chiefs of Staff did not mince their words. ‘No pressure’, they reported, ‘that we and our possible allies can bring to bear, either by sea, on land, or in the air could prevent Germany from invading and overrunning Bohemia.’4 They added that only by the defeat of Germany in a long war could Czechoslovakia be restored, and that for a long war the British land and air forces were as yet entirely unfitted. The Army was far too small, and the RAF could not operate in a major war for more than a few weeks. Many months would elapse after the outbreak of hostilities before the aircraft industry would become capable of replacing wastage in a major conflict.
Lacking comfort in this direction, Chamberlain went on to place his faith in his powers of negotiation and to give a new shade of meaning to the word ‘appeasement’. But, meanwhile, his Government no longer gambled on Hitler’s unwillingness or inability to commit aggression. On 22 March 1938 the Cabinet formally abandoned ‘no interference with the normal course of trade’ as the basis for rearmament,5 and during April, in virtually approving a new RAF expansion scheme, it gave the Air Ministry authority to accept as many aircraft as could be produced within the following two years up to a total of 12,000 – 4,500 more than previously authorised.6 For the RAF, this was at last a clear green light. Events had decisively overtaken ‘business as usual’. In two or three years, the resources would be there. But would they be there in time for the moment of truth?
After the rape of Austria, rearmament became almost respectable. On the Labour side, politicians who four years earlier had denounced the Government’s first modest proposals as immoral now began to inveigh against its failure to keep pace with Germany. Allied to constant harrying by Churchill this produced difficulties for Chamberlain, who responded in May 1938 by dropping the Secretary of State for Air, Lord Swinton. This was no help at all. As a peer, Swinton had been unable to defend his Ministry’s record in the Commons, but he had been an outstandingly able political chief, a minister whose drive and vision had been a potent force behind all the new developments, especially radar and the shadow factories.
Most of the shortcomings in the RAF to which Swinton’s critics pointed had, in fact, stemmed either from shortages in manufacture under ‘business as usual’ or else from the difficulty of training large numbers of men to the required skilled standard when the trainers themselves were so few. The business of trying to treble so technical a service as an air force within five years was an immensely difficult one. If the Luftwaffe seemed to be more successful than the RAF, that was partly because Germany’s Government was setting a hotter pace, but also because its own shortcomings, which were real enough, were not yet apparent to the outside world.
Meanwhile, the build-up continued of the defence organisation which was to withstand the Luftwaffe in 1940. Early in 1937 the Air Defence of Great Britain Committee, chaired by Dowding, had produced an ‘ideal’ air defence scheme to counter attacks from an estimated German bomber force of 1,700 aircraft by the spring of 1939. (The scheme was ‘ideal’ in the sense that current manufacturing, financial and recruiting limitations were not taken into account.) The scheme had been prefaced by three general principles: that ‘passive defence’ (air-raid precautions) was as important as active; that no system could give complete security; and that ‘it is the air offensive which, if successful, will contribute most to a successful outcome of the war’.7 (The last of these may surprise those who think of Dowding only as a ‘fighter’ enthusiast.)
Among the features of the scheme had been that the Aircraft Fighting Zone should be extended north from the Tees to beyond Newcastle; that it should be widened in the West Riding and the Midlands; and that new defences should be set up for the Forth-Clyde, Bristol and South Wales areas. With the advent of radar and the possibility of forward interception, the old Outer Artillery Zone had now been abolished and fighter activity would be carried to the coasts and beyond. For the new extensions and a general thickening up of the defences further radar stations and many more observer centres and posts would be required, together with twenty-four more fighter squadrons to add to the twenty-one then in place. The eleven existing fighter sectors would need to be supplemented by another four, and the resulting fifteen sectors would then contain three squadrons apiece. Communications must be provided to tie in all the new developments with the rest of the system.
With regard to ground defences the Committee recommended that the existing approved (but far from provided) number of searchlights and heavy anti-aircraft guns needed to be virtually doubled – the lights to a total of 4,700, the guns to a total of 1,264. Large numbers of light anti-aircraft guns, possibly amounting to some 1,200 barrels, would be required as a defence against low-flying aircraft at airfields and other key points. In addition, balloon barrages, already approved for London at 450 balloons, should be provided for the ports and other major centres.8
Though this scheme was accepted ‘in principle’ during 1937, action was at first sanctioned only for an ‘intermediate’ stage. In general this meant that the Air Ministry got on with forming more fighter squadrons and stations to the extent approved under its current expansion scheme, and the Air Ministry and the Home Office between them saw to the expansion of the Observer Corps. During 1937 the Home Office also initiated several Civil Defence measures, placing on local authorities the burden of providing shelters and attracting volunteers as air-raid wardens and auxiliary firemen. The War Office part of the scheme, however, hung fire. Without suitable models already in production, the provision of anti-aircraft guns lagged far behind required totals.
As the summer of 1938 wore on, it became clear that Hitler had indeed got Czechoslovakia in his sights. The annexation of the Sudetenland and other disputed areas, with their three million inhabitants of German origin, had become, as expected, Hitler’s next objective. Behind the shrieking propaganda about Czech ill-treatment of the German-speaking minority lay, obvious enough to some but not to all, Hitler’s desire to demolish an outpost of the French security system and open up the way to lebensraum in the East. In this growing crisis, Britain’s formal interest was that of a League of Nations member pledged to concert measures against aggression; but France had the direct commitment of a military ally.
The possibilities, however, of saving Czechoslovakia from being overrun were as negligible as the British Chiefs of Staff had indicated six months earlier. Only Soviet Russia, committed to protect Czechoslovakia if France moved to her aid first, might have brought effective help; but Russia had no common frontier with the threatened state. With her armies shaken by Stalin’s purges, and their transit dreaded by Czechoslovakia’s neighbours, Russia seemed of doubtful military value. In any case Chamberlain, intent on averting the horrors of war by helping to remove what many felt to be Germany’s legitimate grievances, was not interested in military combinations. Declining to guarantee armed support to France, he hoped to minimise Hitler’s demands and induce the Czechs to accept them. Terrified of honouring their treaty commitment, France’s ministers quickly and gratefully followed Chamberlain’s lead.
Few of mature age who lived in Britain during the crisis of September 1938 can have forgotten that appalling week when Chamberlain, having flown to Germany – daring stuff for an elderly prime minister; Baldwin had never been in an aeroplane – and agreed in principle but not in detail to Hitler’s claims, found himself on his second visit cheated and affronted when the German dictator suddenly insisted on instant occupation instead of investigation and orderly transfer. The agony of the days when it seemed that Britain and France, however reluctantly, might stand behind Czechoslovakia – ‘a far-off country of which we know nothing’, in Chamberlain’s immortal phrase; the sudden ghastly imminence of war confronting the deeply pacific British people; the mobilisation of the Royal Navy, part of the AAF, the Observer Corps and anti-aircraft units; the distribution of gas masks to the regions, the makeshift plans announced for evacuation of the big cities, the hasty digging of shelter trenches (soon to be waterlogged) in the London parks; and then the ecstasy in the House of Commons as another ‘invitation’ to Germany cleared the way for the Munich ‘Agreement’ – all these, together with Chamberlain’s waved scrap of paper and ‘peace with honour’ on his return, were to become engraved on the national memory.
Only those concerned with the Services, however, knew the true weakness of Britain’s land and air defences at that time. In the RAF, everything was still in the throes of an expansion which would produce impressive results in a year or so, but was meanwhile greatly restricting operational availability. In terms of Dowding’s ‘ideal’ scheme only twenty-nine of the forty-five fighter squadrons deemed necessary for March 1939 were formed and in place during the crisis of September 1938, and of these only five were as yet equipped with the new monoplane fighters – Hurricanes whose guns, being not yet heated, could not function properly above 15,000 feet.9 None of the new promised balloon barrages was yet in place, and of the heavy anti-aircraft guns approved only a third were available. Modern light anti-aircraft artillery was virtually non-existent. Good progress was being made with the radar chain, but only five of the planned CH stations, those guarding the Thames Estuary, together with three mobile outfits, were as yet reasonably complete. They were brought into operation during that memorable month and remained on watch until the war with Germany was won.
As for the other arms of defence whose importance Dowding had stressed, civil defence under a voluntary system as run by local authorities of varying degrees of competence and enthusiasm was a thing of shreds and patches; and the offensive arm, as represented by Bomber Command, was in a far worse state of preparedness and availability than Fighter Command. The general picture, as described to his Cabinet colleagues shortly afterwards by Swinton’s successor, Sir Kingsley Wood, was that, at the anticipated rate of loss, ‘We had less than one week’s wastage behind the squadrons.’10 Fighter Command’s front line of some 400 aircraft was, in fact, backed by only 160 aircraft in reserve.” Of the RAF’s reserve pilots, less than ten per cent were operationally fit. Fighter Command’s ops room, and those of its Groups, were not yet underground.
It was scarcely an inducement to go to war.
After Munich the Air Ministry conducted a grand inquest into the state of the RAF during the emergency. Apart from known shortages, the most common deficiencies were found to be in communications and administration. Landline communications were still far too centralised through London, but here action was already in train; during the next eighteen months the completion of the GPO’s new Ring Main system brought great improvements. During the same period lines from the radar stations, connected at first to Bawdsey and then to the filter room at Fighter Command headquarters, were also laid down to the Groups and the Fighter sector stations. In administration, it emerged that some of the hard-pressed staff at Group headquarters during the crisis had taken days to deal with matters needing action within minutes. A remedy was found by redeploying most of the staff of the supporting services – equipment, engineering and signals – from Command headquarters, where they had been largely concentrated, out to the Groups, which had to conduct the operations and needed more supporting staff to do so.12 Had this not been done, the system would inevitably have broken down under the pressures of 1940.
Munich also gave rise to yet one more expansion scheme (M) for the RAF. It was the last of the pre-war programmes, due for completion in 1942. It now recommended a total of eighty-five squadrons for Bomber Command, mainly of the new ‘heavies’ (four-engined Stirlings and Halifaxes, and twin-engined Manchesters) specified in 1936. The Cabinet in November 1938, with the Chancellor of the Exchequer still urging financial caution, sanctioned this part of the programme only in principle: actual orders for bombers were only to be such as to utilise existing manufacturing capacity and ‘avoid dismissals’. The fighter element of the new scheme, however, the Cabinet once more approved in full.13 Of the 3,700 additional fighters required, half were to be ordered immediately, and Fighter Command was now to be brought up – by April 1941 – to a strength of fifty squadrons, including four for a possible move abroad with the Field Force. This total of fifty squadrons at once became Dowding’s fixed requirement – an imperative for now, never mind 1941.
On 15 March 1939, having stirred the Slovaks into declaring their independence, Hitler completed the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. German columns poured into Bohemia, the Luftwaffe – two days late because of bad weather – roared menacingly above Prague, and the Munich Agreement was revealed for the sham it always was. In angry reaction, Chamberlain instantly reversed tracks and guaranteed the integrity of Poland, Hitler’s next potential victim. With the junior partner in the Rome-Berlin Axis invading Albania a week later, the British Government then hastily extended guarantees to two other possible victims of aggression – Greece and Romania. All this made it virtually certain for the first time that if trouble with Germany flared up again, Britain would be involved from the start.
The effect of this was only marginal on the RAF, which was already in the throes of all practicable expansion, but it was revolutionary on the British Army. Up to this point there had been no positive commitment to send an expeditionary force to fight alongside the French, and no steps had been taken to provide a Field Force of more than four divisions. Now, on 29 March 1939, the Cabinet agreed to double the Territorial and strengthen the Regular Army, to a total of thirty-two divisions.14 A month later, greatly daring, it announced a first feeble instalment of conscription. Extremely limited though this was, it was too much for the parliamentary opposition. A. J. P. Taylor records that Clement Attlee spoke of the ‘danger of giving generals all they want’, and that Aneurin Bevan exclaimed, ‘Hitler has won.’
Conscription helped the RAF, very late in the day, to make good some of the deficiencies in the ground trades. But the main immediate effect of the decision to build a large army for service overseas was to increase the problem of close home defence. An army of thirty-two divisions would need large supporting forces in the air; and even an army of five divisions, which is what was now promised to the French as a first step, must be able to call on considerable help from bombers, reconnaissance aircraft and fighters. Above all, from fighters – fighters to protect the reconnaissance aircraft, and possibly the bombers, and to restrict the enemy’s air assaults on the Army and its communications.
The number of fighter squadrons earmarked to accompany a BEF had long been four – which would come from Fighter Command. In May 1939, following the decision to create a much larger army, the Air Ministry agreed to put six more fighter squadrons on a mobile basis so that in case of need, and if the situation at home permitted, they too could be sent abroad.15 Such plans were anathema to Dowding. Though by no means blind to broad strategic requirements, he deplored commitments which might send any fighter squadrons at all to the continent until he was assured of his projected total of fifty. On 7 July 1939, in a letter to the Air Ministry, he made his position abundantly clear: ‘If this policy is implemented and ten Regular Squadrons are withdrawn from this country, the air defence of Great Britain will be gravely imperilled.”6 It was a warning which he was to sound incessantly in the months that lay ahead.
To add to Dowding’s anxieties, three further tasks were laid on Fighter Command before war broke out. One was the defence of Belfast, which was outside the continuous system and was now given separate radar cover, ground defences and a locally based fighter squadron. Another was the defence of Scapa Flow, which the Admiralty decided late in the day to use as a main fleet base. Far beyond the continuous system, this Orkneys anchorage was now to have the protection of separate radar cover and two fighter squadrons based near Wick, on the mainland.
The third task was the most onerous. During 1939 it was decided that not all British shipping could be diverted to west-coast ports, and that east-coast convoys must be sailed with air protection between the Forth and Southampton. In consequence, Fighter Command was required on the outbreak of war to institute regular patrols with four squadrons specially allocated to this task. Since four squadrons could not be spared from the general defensive system, they had to be specially formed on Blenheims withdrawn from bomber resources and converted to fighters.17
Though Dowding’s cares multiplied, the last year of peace saw great progress in his Command and in supporting structures. The AAF, earlier equipped in the main with obsolescent bombers, completed its conversion to modern fighters: by September 1939 it could show fourteen squadrons in the line – more than a third of the strength of Fighter Command. The balloon squadrons of the AAF, too, inaugurated in 1938, grew rapidly in number: in September 1939 Balloon Command, formed the previous year when it became necessary to create a second Balloon Group, deployed 624 out of its approved total of 1,450 balloons.18 In September 1938 only London, with about 150 balloons for which there were crews, would have had this form of protection. A year later, barrages, mostly small, were also available for a dozen of the major ports and industrial areas.
With aircraft production, and particularly fighter production, moving into higher gears, steps were also taken to enlarge facilities for maintenance and repair. To deal with repairs beyond the capacity of the squadrons and to obviate sending damaged aircraft back to the factories, a new upper formation, Maintenance Command, with two Groups and many subordinate units, was formed during 1938. And to man the new depots and fly the new aircraft there was now the intake of the RAF Volunteer Reserve, started in 1937, and gratifyingly swollen by a rush of recruits during the September 1938 crisis. By September 1939 some 5,000 pilots, trained or under training, were becoming available from this source alone. For Fighter Command, however, the number of fully trained VR pilots, most of them not too generously accorded the rank of sergeant, was around 200.
Other new formations were also promising well. The Civil Air Guard, founded belatedly in 1938 to encourage activity in flying clubs, was producing skilled pilots, women as well as men, who later as the Air Transport Auxiliary would perform invaluable service in ferrying aircraft from factory to maintenance depot or squadron. And the future held few limits – on the ground – for the air companies of the Auxiliary Territorial Service, detached in June 1939 to become the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF). Enrolled for only five trades in September 1939 they were quickly in demand for many more – not least to act as operators in the radar stations.
On the ground defence side there was more limited progress. Enough anti-aircraft forces became available to warrant the formation of Anti-Aircraft Command – with headquarters at Stanmore adjacent to Dowding’s, and placed, like Balloon Command, under Dowding’s higher operational control. All the same, the deficiencies in this arm of defence remained appalling. Though about two-thirds of the approved number of searchlights were available, the number of heavy anti-aircraft guns deployable was only 695 out of the newly approved total of 2,232, and about a third of these were obsolescent. Light anti-aircraft guns were even more scarce – 253 towards the approved strength of 1,860.19
Civil defence, however, so rudimentary in September 1938, was a year later in a vastly more efficient state. The 1938 crisis had produced thousands of volunteers, and by the outbreak of war over 1.5 million men and women were enrolled as air-raid wardens or as auxiliaries in the local fire and ambulance services. Hundreds of street shelters had been prepared by local authorities and nearly 1.5 million ‘Anderson’ shelters – steel contraptions to be dug into the garden and covered with earth, hard work to install but each capable of holding six persons – had been distributed free to the less well-off sections of the population in the more vulnerable areas.
As the crisis deepened through August 1939, with Hitler clamouring for Danzig and concluding his deal with Russia to divide Poland, British mobilisation unobtrusively began. On the civil defence side, the gas masks were distributed, the women and children from the threatened urban centres began their strange adventure of evacuation into the ‘reception areas’, and the blackout fastened its eerie grip on the life of citizen and serviceman alike. And in the hospitals thousands of beds were emptied of their occupants to make room for the 140,000 or so casualties expected from the initial German air-raids.
But the dreaded ‘knock-out blow’ from the air, the possible opening gambit by Germany which had haunted British politicians in 1937–8, was not to be launched. In fact, the British Chiefs of Staff, their advisers, had never thought an actual ‘knock-out’ possible – rather that a massive opening blow from the air could cause fearful damage and dislocation. But after Hitler in 1938 revealed his preoccupation with expansion to the East, the possibility that Germany might begin a European war with an all-out air assault on Britain, though still powerfully entertained by the civil population, was seen in military circles to be much less likely. In truth, it had not featured among the German plans: the Luftwaffe, though an independent service, had been built up and conditioned since the Spanish Civil War to work closely with the German Army. In a major strategic role, without concurrent operations by the German land forces, the Battle of Britain, together with the ensuing ‘night blitz’, was to be its first – and last – venture.
When the disillusioned Prime Minister broken-heartedly informed the nation on 3 September 1939 that his hopes had all collapsed and that the country was at war, Britain’s defences were in every way stronger than they had been a year before. Though still far short of their approved totals of equipment, Fighter Command and Anti-Aircraft Command were much more capable of taking on the enemy, and armament production was increasing fast. Above all, there had been heartening progress with the most vital elements in the defensive system – the radar chain, the eight-gun fighters and the system of fighter control.
In September 1938 radar cover had extended only from Dungeness to the Wash, with a mobile outpost for Scapa Flow. By September 1939, having meanwhile also improved greatly in performance, the main chain gave continuous cover from Southampton to beyond the Forth. In addition, by September 1939 many new fighter airfields had been built, the sector organisation had been completed and control from the ground had been perfected.
To achieve accuracy in control had been a problem, but during 1939 ‘Pipsqueak’ had provided the answer. One fighter in each section of three switched his R/T on to this device, which produced periodic signals picked up by D/F (direction-finding) ground stations. Cross-bearings from these fixed the fighters’ position, which could be continuously plotted. Armed with this information, and with knowledge of the enemy’s course derived from the radar and observer plots, a controller on the ground could give his pilots over the R/T a ‘vector’, or compass bearing, which would – it was hoped – bring them to within sight of the enemy. This ‘controlled interception’, as yet unknown to the Luftwaffe, was to be the basis of Fighter Command’s operations in the forthcoming Battle.
On top of these developments, by September 1939 a new fighter Group – No. 13 – had been opened with headquarters at Newcastle for the defence of the north, and a further fighter Group – No. 10 – had been projected for the defence of the south-west. Most striking of all, however, was the change in the composition of the fighter force itself. In September 1938 Fighter Command had mustered twenty-nine squadrons, of which only five had Hurricanes. All the rest had biplanes. In September 1939, after four squadrons had left for France, no more than thirty-five were available for home defence – but seventeen of these were on Hurricanes and twelve on Spitfires. The difference in fighting power was immense.
So the inevitable question arises – did Munich buy the time which, wisely used, made victory possible in the Battle of Britain two years later? It is tempting to draw the apparently obvious conclusion. But there is no certainty that in 1938, if France had intervened against a much less well-prepared Germany, she would have collapsed as ignominiously as she did in 1940. Had France not collapsed, Fighter Command would not have had to face, as it did in 1940, attacks by escorted bombers from bases close at hand. Instead, it would have been dealing with unescorted attacks from much more distant bases – a task not entirely impossible for the older biplane fighters.
Such speculations, however interesting, are only the ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ of history. What seems much more certain, to those who lived through that month of crisis and bitter controversy, is that had Britain gone to war in September 1938 it would have been in disregard of the convictions of a large part of the population. By September 1939 Hitler’s cumulative aggressions had convinced all but a tiny minority that he must somehow be stopped – that it was really the case, as the uninspiring Prime Minister put it in his broadcast, that Britain would be fighting against ‘evil things – brute force, bad faith, injustice, oppression and persecution’. Deeply though Chamberlain had offended many by the combination of ‘appeasement’ and an air of self-satisfaction, he finally took into war a united nation. Of that, the inestimable benefit was to be reaped in the summer of 1940, when the zeal and ardent toil of the many helped to make possible the brilliant achievements of the few.