‘We who are concerned with the air all live in one house’, recalled John Baird, the Air Board’s parliamentary secretary. That was the Hotel Cecil: ‘An architecturally deplorable, dreadful building’ on the Strand, popularly known as Bolo House, in memory of a notorious French swindler, Bolo Pasha, who was executed for his sins. According to the Air Ministry’s first historian, it was full of ‘Bolo Brigadiers, Strand Subalterns and Kingsway Captains’, doing nothing to help the war effort. There were exceptions: Henderson had an office there; so did Godfrey Paine, newly-appointed Fifth Sea Lord; and William Weir, Minister of Munitions.
Aviation had grown enormously since the outbreak of war and its management needed a separate building: an important practical step towards independence from the Admiralty and the War Office, both absorbed by worries over conducting war at sea and on land. By March 1918, the RFC had over 100 operational squadrons in Britain and France, with another seventeen in the Mediterranean and the Middle East; the RNAS had forty in Britain and France, plus five in the Mediterranean. Many other squadrons were either employed in training or in the process of forming.
By the end of the war, the RAF would have a strength of nearly 300,000 officers and men, about 14,000 of them pilots, and there were nearly 23,000 aeroplanes on charge. Aviation had become a significant factor in Britain’s armament, as it had in France and Germany.
Zeppelins were no longer a serious threat to England, but Gothas were. Within ten days of the raid on London on 7 July Lloyd George had called on Smuts and also offered the Ministry of Munitions position to Churchill. Christopher Addison, the current minister, had written to Lloyd George on 4 June about the need to ‘get Winston in quick as the more it is talked about the more opportunity there is for opposition to gather’. Addison asked for three weeks, ‘so as to pave the way for Winston if you wished him to follow me’. The Prime Minister gave him six, and then it could have been said, as it actually was in September 1939: ‘Winston is back.’
He might well have been brought back as Air Minister, if Lloyd George had accepted the advice of Smuts, given on 6 June. Munitions, he said, offered less scope for his ‘constructive ability and initiative, and with effective help from America our aerial effort might yet become of decisive importance not only in the anti-submarine campaign but also on the Western Front in the next twelve months’. Churchill would prefer Munitions, Smuts told Lloyd George, but would accept the Air ‘if real scope is given to him’, together with control of ‘the higher patronage’.
Lord Derby was distressed at the prospect of Churchill’s return to office. It was provoking ‘rather bitter political controversy’, he wrote on 8 June to Haig. Were he to be made chairman of the Air Board, Derby foresaw the ‘eventual downfall’ of the government. Next day, Lord Cowdray, currently president of the Air Board, had his say. Production of aircraft would increase if Churchill took over from him, he admitted to Lloyd George, but: ‘Winston will see that he, and he alone, gets all the credit from the very brilliant achievements of the air services which may have a very material effect on the duration and success of the war.’ A bewildering comment: meaning, presumably, that the efforts of this ‘dangerously ambitious man’ might shorten the war.
The wisest comment came from Churchill’s Aunt Cornelia: ‘My advice is to stick to Munitions, and don’t try to run the government.’ The Morning Post – to say nothing of all his former colleagues – knew what she meant. ‘That dangerous and uncertain quantity,’ the Post wrote on 3 August, ‘is back again in Whitehall. We do not know in the least what he may be up to, but from past experience we venture to suggest that it will be everything but his own business.’
The Times asserted that ‘the crying need for 1917 is for aeroplanes, as it had been for shells in 1915. The government must be compelled to realise that the aeroplane will be the ultimate and deciding factor of the war.’ Churchill agreed that Britain needed to strengthen her air forces and urged the War Cabinet, yet again, on 7 July to seize Borkum. Air bases there would threaten vital targets in Germany. All her dockyards and anchorages could be ‘brought under continuous bombing by night and day from quite short distances. Aerial observation would reveal each morning the exact disposition of the German fleet.’
Nothing was done about Borkum, but by 17 July Churchill was Minister of Munitions and ‘head of the greatest productive department of the empire’, with his headquarters in the Hotel Metropole in Northumberland Avenue, handy for Whitehall. He wrote to William Weir, Director-General of Aircraft Production, on the 30th. ‘We need an immediate conference with the Air Board, under the presidency of a member of the War Cabinet (Smuts, for choice), to frame a clear view of war policy in the air during the coming year.’
Churchill attended a War Cabinet meeting on 24 August where he said that he strongly favoured the creation of an Air Ministry and was confident that there were natural and intimate bonds linking the two services. The personnel, he thought, would consist of ‘men who would make it their lifelong profession’, plus others ‘who would be lent temporarily to the air service’, before returning in due course to the army or the navy. He reminded his colleagues that ‘our American allies are inclined to the view that victory would be achieved by the side which obtained complete command of the air’.
With such thoughts in mind, he proposed a great and increasing extension of aircraft manufacture, diverting skilled workmen and essential materials from shell production. For too long, he told the Munitions Council on 4 September, the air force had been ‘the drudge of the other services’. Now, however, there were ‘only two ways of winning the war, and they both begin with A. One is aeroplanes and the other is America. That is all that is left. Everything else is swept away.’ Prophetic words, in this war and the next.
Churchill’s ‘imagination and boldness’, in Lloyd George’s words, countered the Admiralty’s claim to ‘super-priority upon all supplies’. The development of aeroplanes, said Churchill, was now ‘clearly before us as a great expansive feature of the campaign of 1918’. Flight’s editor agreed: ‘The future and the safety of the British Empire lie as much in the air as on the sea.’
During October 1917 Churchill argued that ‘air predominance’ would make possible attacks on German communications and bases. It would ‘paralyse the enemy’s military action’ by compelling him to devote more resources to defence than to attack. ‘All attacks on communications and on bases should have their relation to the main battle’ because it is not ‘reasonable to speak of an air offensive as if it were going to finish the war by itself’.
Churchill was determined to replace men with machines as far as possible with ‘masses of guns, mountains of shells, and clouds of aeroplanes’. This last was a more complex task than any other war material supply because of rapid changes in aircraft design, high wastage of men and machines and the problems of linking airframe to engine supply.
His appointment was welcomed by Weir, now Controller of Aeronautical Supply. Both men were efficient, hard-working managers, determined to get value for money from suppliers and workmen who thought – but not for long – that they could be bamboozled as easily as officials in the War Office and the Admiralty. The ministry prioritised labour and materials for tanks, transport and agricultural machinery as well as aviation. They reduced the number of aircraft types and engines already in service without impeding the development of better types and engines and hugely expanded the work force, including women. By the end of 1917 Churchill presided over the largest aviation industry in the world.
It was, however, an industry often at odds with the Air Board, heavily dependent on French engines (some of them poorly built), suffering fiascos by producing insufficiently tested British engines, plagued by a shortage of skilled workers and numerous strikes. By January 1918 Trenchard was complaining that the situation was ‘hopeless’, like a ‘comic opera’ and ‘we deserve to lose the war’.
Weir had often allowed ‘enthusiasm to outrun discretion’ in accepting airframes and engines and in promising large-scale production, but Henderson, Robert Brooke-Popham and Sefton Brancker, under Cowdray’s presidency of the Air Board, share the responsibility. Henderson, for example, said at a board meeting on 16 October 1917: ‘When the French had adopted any machine or engine on a large scale they had been proved to be wrong.’ This absurd comment, wrote John Morrow, was made ‘while English engines self-destructed all around him’.
Lloyd George welcomed the creation of an independent Air Ministry, wrote Morrow, as a means of ‘vaulting the “snail’s pace”’ of operations on the Western Front and bringing the prospect of victory closer. But nearly all the military and civilian officials consulted by Smuts opposed unifying the air services. Henderson was the chief exception, apart from Lloyd George, and his opinion weighed heavily with Smuts.
Henderson is today virtually unknown while Trenchard is frequently regarded as the father of the RAF. He certainly had the loudest voice, earning him a widely-used nickname ‘Boom’. Lord Beaverbrook, who kept a beady eye on everyone who mattered in and around Whitehall, disagreed: ‘Trenchard was a father who tried to strangle the infant at birth though he got the credit for the grown man.’
‘The Germans never shared the Trenchardian notion that fighting aircraft could only be effective in an offensive role’, wrote Malcolm Cooper. ‘The concentration of German fighters in large formations over their own territory was not, as the RFC command assumed, the reaction of an enemy being gradually beaten down, but rather that of a numerically-inferior opponent organising his forces to fight at best advantage in support of an army that was itself on the defensive.’ That point – understood by every able commander since organised warfare began – was ignored by Trenchard. He and his advisers persuaded themselves that heavy British casualties somehow proved that German losses were heavier.
Sefton Brancker, Director of Air Organisation at the War Office, offered this astounding comment to Trenchard in September 1916: ‘I rather enjoy hearing of our heavy casualties as I am perfectly certain in my own mind that the Germans lose at least half as much again as we do.’ Brancker, safely ensconced in Whitehall, would continue to ‘enjoy’ the loss of British airmen for the rest of the war and Trenchard shared his pleasure.
As head of the RFC in France, Trenchard was Haig’s man. Haig wrote in his diary for 28 August 1917 that Trenchard was ‘much disturbed’ by the prospect of an Air Ministry, ‘just at a time when the Flying Corps was beginning to feel that it had become an important part of the army’. He had somehow earned pilot’s wings in 1912 in thirteen days with a total flying time of sixty-four minutes, but he had a strong personality, considerable bureaucratic skills and the shrewdness to cultivate influential persons – military, civilian, royal – before and during the war. He also paid the closest attention to the press. His emphasis on constant offensive appealed strongly to many Victorians, Churchill among them, who regarded it as gallant and honourable.
If Trenchard had had his way, there would have been no RAF in 1918. Years later, he wrote: ‘I thought that if anything were done at the time to weaken the Western Front, the war would be lost and there would be no air service, united or divided.’ Henderson, he admitted, ‘had twice the insight and understanding that I had. He was prepared to run risks rather than lose a chance which he saw might never come again. He did so with no thought of self-interest, and it is doubtful whether the RAF or Britain realises its debt to him, which is at least as great as its debt to Smuts.’ Trenchard’s ‘insight and understanding’ were severely limited. He was aware that many of his aircraft were inadequate and most of his air crews poorly trained, but persuaded himself that their efforts were destroying large numbers of German aircraft and undermining German morale, which, of course, they were not.
The word ‘morale’ resonated constantly in the minds of Trenchard and his admirers. It reflected and highlighted the qualities valued by upper-middle-class Victorian and Edwardian society: courage; initiative; resourcefulness; tenacity and will-power, as opposed to acquiring practical skills as a result of intensive training and thinking seriously about effective tactics. Jack Slessor, a Trenchard admirer, disdained the morale of ‘foreigners’ if faced – as in the Great War – by British bombing: ‘Your toothpick worker,’ he wrote (apparently under the impression that foreigners made a great many of those items), ‘will go to ground again even if he has not already left the area, which is more likely.’ Thus wrote a man who rose to the highest rank in the RAF and is regarded as one of its foremost thinkers.
Under Trenchard, aerial strength was never grouped into areas most seriously threatened at a particular time, but spread thinly across the whole Western Front. The RFC, encouraged to concentrate on aerial combat, failed to focus its attention on protecting those aircraft who were making a more positive contribution to winning the war: attempting to locate enemy artillery batteries; taking photographs of troop movements and offering close support to ground forces.
On 24 August 1917, Smuts reported to the War Cabinet and was invited to draft appropriate legislation for the creation of an Air Ministry and at once asked for the full-time assistance of Henderson, who gave up his position as head of the RFC. Eric Geddes, First Lord of the Admiralty, refused to accept that the proposed Air Ministry should include the RNAS, even though he knew nothing about aviation (or indeed war at sea). Haig’s concern did not extend beyond the Western Front, but fortunately the Germans came to the rescue of Smuts and Henderson by launching a night offensive.
Shortly after 11 pm on 3 September 1917 a number of Gothas bombed a drill hall at Chatham naval barracks, killing or injuring more than 200 naval ratings. The raid was totally unexpected and the defences, ground and air, offered no effective resistance. On the following night, the Gothas came again, five of them following the Thames to London, where ‘thousands of lights’, as one German pilot recalled, guided them. They were untroubled by ground or air defences, and although only ninety Londoners were killed or injured, as loud an outcry followed as when day bombers struck at Folkestone and London earlier in the year.
The Manchester Guardian demanded ‘overwhelming supremacy in the air to redeem our shores from outrage’ and denounced the attacks as the worst event ‘since the Normans conquered England’: a ludicrous exaggeration from a newspaper with a reputation for usually sensible reporting.
Ashmore decided to set up a balloon barrage around London. An apron of long dangling streamers was to be held aloft by three to five balloons joined together by heavy steel cables. Anchored at three points, the apron could be raised as high as 10,000 feet. More impressive in theory than in practice, very few were actually erected and none served any useful purpose. A better idea proved to be the use of night fighters helped by searchlights and given a broad search zone free of ground fire. Sound locators, like massive ear trumpets, were also tried. ‘Such were the beginnings,’ wrote Raymond Fredette, ‘of an early-warning system against German bombers. In the next war Britain would have something better.’
Fortunately for Britain, the Gothas – even improved models – were always too few, too under-powered and too lightly-loaded to mount persistent and heavy attacks on London. During August they were, in any case, directed to attack the Channel ports, where men and supplies for Haig’s Flanders offensive were building up.
Beginning on 24 September 1917, the Germans used Gothas and also their first four-engined ‘Giants’ against targets in England. About twice the size of Gothas, they were technically far ahead of their time, carrying a heavy bomb load, several machine guns for defence and were robust enough to withstand punishment. In twenty-eight sorties, none were destroyed by ground or air defences. Although their bombing caused few casualties or damage, it made thousands of Londoners take refuge in underground railway stations while others fled into the country. Nightshift work was seriously disrupted and when daylight came transport services were overloaded as men and women tried to pick up their usual routines.
Anti-aircraft guns had blindly fired numerous shells, making a tremendous noise that was believed to be encouraging, but they hit no enemy aircraft. Night fighters did no better, for all their determination. As in the daylight raids, low cloud, rain, strong headwinds, navigational errors, light bomb loads and the near-impossibility of hitting any designated target saved London from serious damage. Heavy landings on return flights caused more losses than combat.
Lloyd George called an emergency meeting of the War Cabinet and, naturally, set up another committee: this one under Smuts, included Churchill and Ashmore. French gloomily predicted that London’s artillery defences would ‘cease to exist’ in a few months because gun barrels would be worn out. Churchill reported that he was arranging to have barrels relined at the rate of twenty a month, but the Cabinet decided that the entire production of 3-inch guns, planned to equip merchant ships in October, should instead be assigned to London.
As Minister of Munitions, Churchill was concerned about factory production. He asked for a report on current output at Woolwich Arsenal. It was well down on what it should be, but the authorities were more concerned about press coverage of the raids, claiming that it generated panic. Among those panicking was Lord Cowdray: ‘When London is half levelled,’ he wailed, ‘someone will have to be lynched, presumably the Cabinet, since no-one else has any clear responsibility.’
Lloyd George ordered newspaper editors to restrict their coverage and not publish photographs, pointing out that since the war began traffic accidents had killed or injured many more Londoners than air raids. Owners of bombed-out buildings were required to conceal the damage and shelters were provided under some public buildings.
What Londoners did not know was that of ninety-two Gothas sent out in October, only fifty-five crossed the Channel and fewer than twenty reached London. Five sorties by Giants achieved little. The Germans lost thirteen bombers and others were destroyed at their Belgian bases when the British launched their own attacks. On the last night of October, twenty-two Gothas dropped a great many small incendiary bombs, but most failed to ignite and as usual cloudy weather compounded navigational errors. About thirty persons were killed or injured: seven of these casualties (one fatal) were caused by shrapnel from British gun fire. Night fighters achieved nothing, but several of the Gothas were destroyed while attempting to land on fog-shrouded aerodromes.
Churchill thought it ‘improbable’ that terrorising aerial attacks could compel ‘the government of a great nation to surrender’. Most people would welcome a good system of dugouts or shelters and firm control by the authorities. They would soon realise that the casualties and destruction caused by bombers were less grave than they feared. In Britain, he said, ‘we have seen the combative spirit of the people roused, and not quelled, by the German air raids’.
Effective air defence in England needed a ground-to-air radio telephone network. Although work was in progress, this had not been achieved by the end of 1917. Ashmore, however, improved other aspects of ground defence. For example, he had searchlights grouped and placed those working with night fighters under the control of air squadron commanders. He also did his best to see that observer posts were capably manned and provided with a direct telephone link to his headquarters.
More of everything was needed – guns, fighters, searchlights – because there was a high risk of massive German raids in 1918, especially after the winter was over, and some Londoners panicked on any night when aircraft were heard or guns fired. Late in January 1918, on a rare clear evening, the Germans caused more than 200 casualties, a quarter of them fatal. Overall, though, the raids by Zeppelins, Gothas and Giants did not, from a German point of view, justify their immense expense and the heavy losses suffered by carefully-trained crews.
Churchill backed Ashmore and helped to provide ‘adequate’ protection against air raids, especially at factories and ports, well aware of the danger of panic and consequent loss of production. ‘Nothing that we have learned of the German population to endure suffering justifies us in assuming that they could be cowed into submission or, indeed, that they would not be rendered more desperately resolved by them.’ It is a great pity that Churchill’s reflections on the limited impact of aerial bombing were not accepted as a ‘general doctrine’ when the RAF came into existence. Too many officers preferred to believe what Trenchard and his acolytes claimed: that German defences against British bombers could not match those of Britain and that German resilience under aerial attack could not match that of Britons.
‘There is good reason to believe,’ said Churchill in October 1917, ‘that if the war lasts until 1919 aeroplane warfare by bombing and counter-bombing and the general struggle for mastery in the air by heavier-than-air machines will require the whole of our available resources and energies.’ Godfrey Paine, Fifth Sea Lord, objected. He needed aluminium to complete the building of rigid airships and most of the skilled labour required would be supplied by women. He wrote:
‘The Admiralty War Staff have repeatedly pointed out that they consider one effective rigid airship to be equal to six light cruisers, and judging by the use made of these aircraft by the Germans, this is fully borne out. As submarines grow in size and radius of action, so their operations will continue to extend to greater distances from the coast and far out into the Atlantic, where these rigid airships should be of the utmost value for convoy work and submarine scouting, etc.’
At the Battle of Jutland and on several other occasions the lack of such airships had deplorable results.
A massive German offensive began on the Western Front on 21 March 1918 and some three weeks later, on 15 April, Haig sent out a signal which alarmed many who received it: ‘With our backs to the wall, each one of us must fight to the end.’ That was a period when German air raids on England, timed to coincide with the offensive on land, might have had serious consequences. But there were no air raids in March or April, partly because the bomber force had been gravely weakened by its earlier efforts and partly because its strength was devoted to support of the ground forces. In the middle of May, however, four major raids were aimed at targets in England: on the night of the 19th, about 250 Londoners were killed or injured and over 1,000 homes and business premises were destroyed or damaged. But anti-aircraft guns and night fighters shot down or drove away most of the bombers in what proved to be the last attack of the war.
The German aerial offensive against England killed more than 400 people and seriously injured ten times as many. Among these casualties were thirty-eight killed and about 200 injured either by British anti-aircraft fire or in air-raid shelter stampedes. Grievous losses, but light by Great War standards. They were, moreover, unprecedented and no-one knew – before the Armistice – how much greater they might grow. The damage caused was estimated at nearly £3,000,000. Despite claims made at the time, the diversion of guns and aircraft to home defence was never a serious drain on the Western Front, although memories of the raids were kept green by many Britons in the years between the wars.
As soon as trench lines became established on the Western Front, artillery became an essential weapon and airmen became an important ally for gunners, providing them with thousands of photographs and in 1917, as John Terraine wrote, the RFC enjoyed its ‘finest hour’ by carrying out ‘a meticulous aerial survey of the whole British front, which the Royal Engineers translated into the first really reliable map’. Gunners were then able to identify and attack particular targets.
This ground-air co-operation lasted until the Armistice ‘and it is one of history’s extraordinary circumstances that it took until 1942 for the penny to drop in the next war’: thanks, above all, to Tedder and Coningham (officers whom we shall meet anon). Attempts were also made to destroy railways and rolling stock behind enemy lines, to give support to land forces advancing (or retreating) and to drop small arms ammunition and food supplies.
Meanwhile, in response to growing public demands, Haig and Trenchard had been ordered in 1917 to prepare a bomber force to hit German cities. Both were unwilling. Every aeroplane available, they objected, was needed for the proposed Flanders offensive and in any case Trenchard had few that could reach targets in Germany. Since May 1916, the navy had had a base at Luxeuil in eastern France from which raids could have been made on German war industries.
Trenchard opposed this initiative and was backed by Henderson, but plans to revive it came early in 1917 from Weir, representing the Ministry of Munitions on the Air Board. Trenchard, still loyally backing Haig’s Flanders offensive, resisted. He had no suitable machines, but C. G. Grey (editor of Aeroplane) pointed out that nothing was being done to build such machines: ‘The Germans,’ he wrote, ‘have developed a special branch of warfare which we have neglected in a manner which can only be described as idiotic.’
As early as December 1914, Handley Page had begun work on his heavy bomber, ‘a bloody paralyser’, as Sueter demanded. But without Churchill’s drive the project faltered and the RNAS did not receive its first twin-engined Handley Page 0/400 (an improved version of his 0/100) until November 1916.
Its performance surpassed that of the Gotha, but in September 1917 only eighteen were serving the naval squadrons in Dunkirk. The RFC did not build any until the Cabinet ordered reprisal raids and Trenchard chose to dismiss it as ‘a useless type’. Despite his opposition, these bombers, and some other single-engined types of little value as bombers, were formed into 41 Wing at Ochey (in north-eastern France, near Nancy) under the command of Cyril Newall, a lifelong Trenchardist who rose to the RAF’s highest rank.
On 17 October, his bombers carried out the RFC’s first long-range attack on a German target in daylight and a week later the navy’s Handley Pages made their first night raid, both on a factory near Saarbrücken. In May 1918 Newall admitted that ‘the material effect’ of bombing had been slight, but claimed that ‘the moral effect had been considerable’. That claim, untested but fervently asserted, would become an article of faith with Trenchardists.
Weir organised an ‘Independent Air Force’ (independent, he meant, of the Anglo-French armies on the Western Front), intended to focus on bombing targets in Germany. The IAF came into existence on 5 June with Trenchard in command and Newall as his deputy, with five squadrons at Ochey.
In August Churchill wrote to Louis Loucheur, French Minister of Munitions, about plans for long-distance bombing. This was the time, he said, to attack targets in Germany, launching a combined offensive in darkness as well as daylight. We needed only more reliable Liberty engines for our bombers. He told Lloyd George in September that Haig placed a high value on the work of aircraft. In Britain, however, as in Germany, the threat of aerial attack aroused public outcries and obliged the authorities to divert guns and aircraft to home defence, even though the casualties and destruction caused by air raids were very light.
Trenchard knew this, but asserted in his final despatch (December 1918) that ‘the moral effect of bombing stands undoubtedly to the material effect in a proportion of twenty to one’: an assertion later regarded as an established fact by many airmen. German anti-aircraft crews showed themselves to be formidable opponents, but many British theorists overlooked that fact after 1918. During the Great War, flak brought down nearly 1,600 British and French aircraft over the Western Front: 260 of them in the last four weeks of fighting. As soon as the Armistice was signed, Trenchard returned the IAF to Haig’s command. Salmond, who succeeded Trenchard, was annoyed by his eagerness ‘to pass on an unwanted baby and clear out with all speed’.
Meanwhile, early in October 1917, Cowdray told Admiral Mark Kerr, in ‘strictest confidence’, that there was to be no Air Ministry. Kerr, the first flag officer to qualify as an air pilot, prepared a memorandum later described by himself as ‘The Bombshell’. The Germans, he believed, were building a large force of heavy bombers that would be capable of destroying factories everywhere in London and south-eastern England. To counter this danger, wrote Kerr, ‘the Air must have a Ministry with executive power, and also priority of output for a while’, even though he recognised the need for aircraft to combat submarines and fight enemy aircraft on the Western and other fronts. The government, already moving in that direction, introduced an Air Force Bill to Parliament early in November.
Reginald Barnes (with whom Churchill went to Cuba in 1895 and was now a brigadier-general on the Western Front) strongly favoured improving the air force: ‘real supremacy in the air,’ he told his old friend on 1 November 1917, would be ‘the difference between winning and losing this war.’ Bombing, although still in its infancy, ‘is going to make it impossible for the weaker side in the air to fight’. Barnes and his men had just endured continuous bombing in darkness without being able to do anything about it and he wanted Churchill ‘to open people’s eyes at home to this’. Churchill replied on the 15th: your letter ‘confirms my views I have long held’.
William Joynson-Hicks (a Conservative MP) ‘thankfully welcomed’ the Bill to create an air force. He had urged the creation of an independent striking force ever since 1912 and early in the war asked for ‘continuous raids of some 400-500 aeroplanes dropping bombs on the Rhine bridges and the giant Krupp factory at Essen... Many of us who have been called fanatics have felt that there is a chance of the war being decided in the air.’ The air force now to be created should not be merely a wartime measure, but survive into peacetime. The Bill easily passed both Houses and the royal assent needed to make it law was given on 29 November 1917.
Cowdray expected to become the first Air Minister. Lloyd George, however, invited Lord Northcliffe, a newspaper magnate, to take on the task. He rejected the offer on 16 November in a letter to The Times (which he owned) complaining about ‘men in various positions of authority who deserved punishment, but were being retained and even elevated’.
Cowdray resigned on the same day, in a letter also published in The Times. He had been deeply offended to read in that newspaper the first intimation that Lloyd George wished to appoint a new Air Minister. Lloyd George replied at once: he had wished ‘to secure at the head of the Board the services of one who was personally acquainted with the organisation of the air service in America, and who was therefore in a better position to co-ordinate the energies of the two countries’. He asked Cowdray to stay on until the Air Force Bill became law, but he refused.
Cowdray wrote to Churchill on 28 November. Although he was sorry to leave the Air Board, he had ‘every kind regard and thankfulness for your devotion to the needs of the air services’. Lloyd George immediately appointed Lord Rothermere, another newspaper magnate, as president of the Air Board and then, on 3 January 1918, made him first Secretary of State for the Air Force. Trenchard was appointed chief of the Air Staff (CAS) on the 18th, despite being opposed to the idea of a separate air force.
Churchill told Rothermere on 26 January that he hoped to produce about 2,000 aircraft that month and 3,000 by June as well as 4,000 engines: ‘we ought to go on building up the size and scale of our air forces’ during the next eighteen months. He was aware, he said, of research requiring new types of aircraft and asked Rothermere to make provisions for these. In March, Churchill asked the War Cabinet to consider a new offensive strategy for 1919 based on aircraft and tanks: ‘A strategy proceeding by design through crisis to decision, not mere waste and slaughter sagging slowly downwards into general collapse.’ He wanted to double Britain’s air strength. Victory could be achieved, he thought, if the air force could drop not five but 500 tons of bombs each night on German cities and manufacturing establishments.
Churchill’s main work in the summer of 1918 was building weapons of all kinds for use in 1919, the first year in which he thought victory would be possible. He was living permanently in the Hotel Metropole where he demonstrated, as throughout his public life, an exceptional capacity for sheer hard work, day after day; and for ensuring that everyone over whom he had authority also worked harder than they thought possible. The hotel, he said, ‘enables me to work to the last moment before dinner, to get papers when I come back after, and to begin with shorthand assistance as early as I choose in the morning’.
As late as 15 September he still had in mind campaigns in 1919, as he told Clementine: he intended to arm perhaps fifteen American divisions, nearly 500,000 men, and was buying 2,000 or 3,000 aircraft from the United States ‘for the bombing of Germany’ by British pilots. He hoped to drop mustard gas ‘on the Huns to the extent of nearly 1,000-tons by the end of this month’.
A month later, however, Clementine urged her husband to come home. ‘Even if the fighting is not over yet, your share of it must be’, she wrote on 18 October. She wanted him to be praised as ‘a reconstructive genius’, and not only as ‘a mustard gas fiend, a tank juggernaut and a flying terror’. ‘Could not your munitions workers be set to build lovely garden cities, pull down slums and make furniture for their new homes?’ The answer, then and later, was always, ‘No’.
The RNAS, neglected since Churchill’s departure from the Admiralty, welcomed independence, but ‘nearly all the experienced and far-sighted naval airmen turned over to the Royal Air Force’, wrote Stephen Roskill. ‘The loss of that band of pioneers was perhaps the greatest single cause of the trials and tribulations which later afflicted the Fleet Air Arm, and which endured right into World War II.’ Trenchard did not believe the new service could survive even in wartime and had found it impossible to work with Rothermere, resigning on 19 March.
Rothermere was happy to see him go, as he later wrote to Bonar Law (Chancellor of the Exchequer): Trenchard had a ‘dull unimaginative mind’, he believed he knew everything about aviation and would ‘within twelve months have brought death and damnation to the air force’. In particular, Trenchard insisted on ordering large numbers of obsolete aeroplanes.
Smuts agreed that Trenchard should go and so Lloyd George appointed Major General Frederick Sykes in his place on 12 April. Henderson, passed over again, also resigned and Rothermere, unable to stand criticism in those newspapers he did not own, and already depressed by the recent death of a second son, left office on 25 April. Trenchard would happily have accepted Haig’s offer to command an infantry brigade, but Lloyd George, responding to a vehement rumpus in the press, instructed Weir to find him another job in aviation.
‘Never has there been an arm,’ Churchill declared, ‘to which more encouraging prospects were open than the British flying service at present.’ Within a year, he predicted, it would be the most powerful in the world. Therefore, he urged, no major offensive should be launched on the Western Front until the Allies had aerial superiority. When this appeared to have been achieved by August 1918, he wrote: ‘This is the moment to attack the enemy [with an aerial bombing offensive] to carry the war into his own country.’ Then smash his morale and to ‘harry his hungry and dispirited cities without pause or stay’ on the eve of winter. ‘While the new heavy French machines ... will strike by night at all the nearer objectives, the British [will bomb] not only by night but in broad daylight far into Germany.’
During 1918, Britain’s air strength had increased rapidly as her factories produced nearly 56,000 air frames and engines. At the time of the Armistice, more than 300 aircraft were appearing every day and thousands more were on order; 100 large factories were at work and half of all orders placed by Churchill’s ministry were for aviation materials.
After the war, the British had an opportunity to discover what bombing of German cities, factories and communications had actually achieved. They could not deny that only minor damage had been caused, but many years later, an American historian, George Williams, concluded that the Air Ministry was more interested in ‘advocacy than accuracy’. Tami Biddle agreed: Trenchard used his authority ‘to protect his own record and his own version of the war effort’. Natural enough, but he ‘closed off deeper and more searching analyses of what bombing had or had not accomplished in the war’. Trenchard, as Malcolm Smith wrote, was ‘a master of the wholly unfounded statistic’.
On 28 January 1919, Weir spoke warmly of the work done by Churchill’s ministry for the RAF. It had been part of ‘the greatest example of state organisation ever carried through in any country’. And so Churchill ended the war as he had begun it: in charge of a formidable weapon, well able to defend Britain and attack her enemies.