‘Don’t put Churchill in the War Office’, wrote Leo Amery to Lloyd George on 27 December 1918. Amery had been at Harrow with Churchill and believed he knew him well. A Conservative MP since 1911, he was about to leave the War Cabinet, where he had been an assistant secretary and move to the Colonial Office as a parliamentary under-secretary. The army, he told Lloyd George, was ‘terrified’ at the prospect of Churchill in the War Office: what he needs is scope for ‘adventure and advertisement’ and would do well in the Air Ministry.
Lloyd George ignored Amery’s plea and asked Churchill if he wanted the War Office or the Admiralty. ‘My heart is in the Admiralty’, he replied on the 29th. Perhaps it would be best, he continued, to link the Air with the Admiralty: ‘though aeroplanes will never be a substitute for armies, they will be a substitute for many classes of warship. The technical development of the air falls naturally into the same sphere as the mechanical development of the navy; and this becomes increasingly true the larger the aeroplane grows.’ Early in January, however, the Prime Minister decided not to link air and sea power. It was a decision with permanent consequences. Instead, Churchill was offered land and air power (the War Office and the Air Ministry).
In Aftermath, the last volume of his Great War memoirs, Churchill wrote about his ‘Armistice Dream’ whereby the League of Nations would preserve world peace by controlling ‘war from the air’ because the aeroplane threatened ‘the safety and even the life of whole cities and populations’. If a major war came again, he foresaw the ‘wholesale, unlimited, and perhaps, once launched, an uncontrollable’ process of destruction.
Lloyd George’s decision to appoint Churchill minister for two departments was unpopular with many men in public life, who had long resented (and/or envied) his elevation at such a young age to so many offices and his exceptional success as a journalist and orator. His able management of the Ministry of Munitions was not held to outweigh the disasters suffered by the Royal Navy, especially at Gallipoli: disasters for which he was believed to be primarily responsible.
Aviation enthusiasts feared that the newly-created Air Ministry would disappear because the War Office and the Admiralty were keen to divide its assets between them. At that time, Trenchard opposed independence and Henderson refused a commission in the RAF. He found a non-military role in Geneva as Director-General of the League of Red Cross Societies. Trenchard and Henderson have subsequently been lauded as fathers of the RAF, but without Churchill the infant would have died. There was, however, force in the argument that not even Churchill could successfully manage two major offices.
The Times asked: ‘Can any single man cover the huge span of both these departments of the army and the air? We gravely doubt it.’ Flight agreed: the notion that any one man could fill both posts at the same time ‘is simply an absurdity’, but reminded readers that it was Churchill, at a time when few of his colleagues believed in a future for aviation, who had the foresight to create a naval air service. ‘Had it not been for him and Commodore Sueter the probability is that the war would have found the navy minus aircraft altogether.’
As early as January 1919 Churchill said: ‘The air force is the arm which stands alone and midway between the land and sea services, where they clash it rules.’ In February he underlined that point: ‘There is no question of subordinating the Royal Air Force’ to the other services or allowing them to divide its assets. However, he took surprisingly little interest in the development of civil aviation. McCormack wrote that his ‘malign influence on civil air policy would linger until the Second World War’. It is certainly the case that Britain, then a state with world-wide interests, failed to develop efficient long-distance aircraft, civilian or military, between the wars. Germany’s Junkers Ju 52 first flew in 1932 and the American Douglas DC-3 in 1935: the RAF had nothing comparable.
The fate of the RAF rested with Churchill. By March 1920, it had been reduced to twenty-five squadrons and about 28,000 officers and men, but he had said in February 1919 that its integrity, unity and independence ‘will be sedulously and carefully maintained’. Weir did not wish to continue as Air Minister and advised Churchill to appoint Trenchard, who would devote the rest of his life to fostering the interests of that service. Churchill agreed that should there be another war, the bomber would by then have become a decisive weapon and could only be wielded by an independent air force.
In February 1919, Churchill intended to appoint Trenchard as First Air Lord, but that splendid style of naming – borrowed from the Royal Navy – was soon dropped and he became merely chief of the Air Staff. Likewise, Sykes would not be Second Air Lord, but Controller-General of Civil Aviation, while Edward Ellington became Director-General of Aircraft Production (later Supply and Research), rather than Third Air Lord. Robert Groves, alas, was never to be Fourth Sea Lord even briefly: instead, he would serve as Trenchard’s deputy and Director of Air Operations. Churchill intended ‘to make this post of much wider scope and importance than at present’. Groves would be appointed to command RAF units in the Middle East later that year and his death in an aircraft accident near Cairo in 1920 made it easier for Trenchard to reign over the new service.
To ensure the ‘distinct and independent character’ of the RAF Churchill wisely ordered that ranks, titles and uniforms be ‘deliberately differentiated’ from those of the older services. Perhaps it is just as well that such suggestions as ‘Ensign’, ‘Reeve’, ‘Banneret’ and ‘Ardian’ went the way of the various ‘Air Lords’. Instead, a range for officers from ‘pilot officer’ to ‘marshal of the Royal Air Force’ took root. The non-commissioned ranks got their own hierarchy: corporal, sergeant and warrant officer survived from army days, but with the addition of ‘AC2’ and ‘AC1’ (aircraftman 2nd and 1st Class, leading aircraftman (LAC) and later senior aircraftman (SAC). There was also ‘flight sergeant’, senior to sergeant. These new ranks had a significant impact on the team spirit and self-respect of both officers and men from that time on.
Churchill refused to appoint a Secretary of State for Air because, he told his friend F. E. Smith (Lord Birkenhead and Lord Chancellor) in March 1919, the service is too small to justify that status, although one day it may take the prime place in our defensive organisation. Meanwhile, Churchill wanted ‘a thoroughly efficient RAF which will last year after year in good condition and be a credit to the country’. Squadron identities were to be preserved; technical development (the service’s ‘life blood’) was to be encouraged and also general education for recruits.
Churchill found work for the RAF that was not merely important but cheaper than anything the other services could offer. The RAF was ‘one element’ in a modern defence force: ‘modern’ in 1920s language meant ‘cheap’. He rejected the proposal of Sykes (then CAS) for a large, expensive air service in these days of ‘economy and disarmament’. Trenchard therefore replaced Sykes and submitted a much more modest proposal, and even that was trimmed by Churchill. No major war was in prospect for at least ten years, therefore, ‘we have to aim at quality and progress rather than quantity and immediate war power’. But he reminded Lloyd George on 1 May 1919 that even a small RAF would be expensive. ‘All the arts and sciences are involved. Only the most skilful mechanics and highest paid craftsmen are of any use: only the best materials will serve.’
Churchill presented Trenchard’s memorandum on the permanent organisation of the RAF to Parliament in December 1919. Trenchard – well aware that money was tight – concentrated on building a sound framework, one which could, at need, be expanded. Small elements would work with the army and the navy respectively, while the main portion ‘will grow larger and larger and become more and more the predominating factor in all types of warfare’.
Churchill presented the estimates for the coming year to Parliament in March 1921. Two years ago, he said, he was faced with clearing away ‘the gigantic debris and enormous mass of material’ left over from the war and thought it would take five years ‘to make an efficient, self-respecting, well-disciplined, economically-organised air force’. In fact, progress had been more rapid than he hoped, thanks to ‘continuity of administration’ and hard work by all ranks.
‘No more complicated service has ever been brought into existence in this world... Almost every known science and art practiced among men is involved in aeronautical research.’ Only the ablest men can learn to be efficient pilots and also to master ‘aerial war-gunnery, bombing, torpedoing, photography, wireless telegraphy, spotting for artillery, observing, and other functions of that kind’. It follows therefore that the RAF needs many schools or training centres where every aspect of military aviation is going to be taught and studied. The system is still far from complete, but eventually the RAF will ‘become a great technical university for the nation, with the glamour and traditions of a gallant service super-added’.
There were now twenty-eight fully-formed service squadrons, Churchill continued, twenty-one of them overseas: six in Egypt and Palestine; five in Mesopotamia; eight in India; one on the Rhine and one at Malta. The ‘equivalent’ of three more are in Ireland, three were working with the navy and one was employed in England: ‘giving refresher courses to pilots’. Four more were to begin forming in April, and ‘we propose this year to begin the formation on a very small scale of a Territorial Air Force’ of six squadrons, stationed near large cities, ‘with a small nucleus of regular air mechanics’, backed by volunteers.
‘I am very anxious to illustrate how foolish and wasteful it would be,’ said Churchill, ‘if we were to take advice which is pressed upon us from more than one quarter at present. Now that the war to end war is over, we need only civil, not military, aircraft. But we still need to defend Britain and her empire.’ Properly handled, the RAF ‘will become a substitute to a very important extent both for soldiers and ships’.
However, the Committee of Imperial Defence learned in November 1921 that the RAF had only three squadrons in Britain, whereas France had as many as forty-seven. Churchill had left the Air Ministry in April of that year and The Times wrote that: ‘He leaves the body of the British flying service well nigh at that last gasp when a military funeral would be all that was left for it.’ Due to his ‘incredibly inadequate rule... the soul had all but departed’.
According to John Ferris, the Air Ministry under Churchill had overcome its ‘gravest political problems’ and ‘despite his usual cavalier disregard for consistency, he provided an admirable blueprint for reform’, recognising that after a long and costly war the most the RAF could hope for was secure foundation.
Several MPs objected to his control of both the Air Ministry and the Colonial Office. He tried to answer those who suggested that he had too many fish to fry, by remarking that fish were not the problem: he simply had too little batter (too little money). More seriously, they were concerned that little was being done to foster civil aviation. Money was tight in those post-war years and civil aviation did indeed suffer even more than the RAF. Flight was sharply critical of Churchill in these days. He remained very much ‘the fighting man’, wrote Spooner, and the sooner he handed over the Air Ministry to a civilian the better. Spooner believed, with good reason, that during the years 1919-1921 Churchill had hoped to add a third office, the Royal Navy, and become Britain’s first Minister of Defence. But that was very much a step too far, in years when admirals and generals had no thought of unification and were determined to divide air power between themselves, ending the RAF’s independence. Had it not been for Churchill, they would have had their way and nothing said or done by Trenchard would have thwarted them.
Sueter (now Rear-Admiral Sir Murray) ‘was exceedingly caustic’, recorded Spooner on 11 August 1921, ‘regarding alleged shortcomings of air force units operating with the navy’. Churchill, said Sueter, was turning the RAF ‘into an air military force, which is being developed exactly like a guards regiment, but that is of very little use to the navy’. In some recent combined manoeuvres, the airmen were so incompetent that they located a submarine in Dorchester, Dorset: about twelve miles from the nearest deep water. ‘That,’ said the gallant admiral, with some justification, ‘is not what is wanted in the navy.’ Clearly, commented Spooner: ‘There is a screw loose somewhere.’
In November 1922, Arthur Balfour replaced Lloyd George as Prime Minister and proposed to liquidate the RAF. Churchill was at that time out of office – indeed, out of Parliament – but an inquiry by the Committee of Imperial Defence recommended that it survive. Defence spending, as always in peacetime, was unpopular with many voters and as late as 1932 Maurice Hankey (Secretary of the Cabinet and of the CID) wrote: ‘It would be worth a lot to get rid of submarines and aircraft, which I have advocated for a long time.’ As for Churchill his understanding of what aircraft might do did not advance. For example, he still believed in the late 1930s that ‘even a single well-armed vessel will hold its own against aircraft’ and that the RAF’s concentration on forward-firing guns for fighters was ill-advised and that turret-armed fighters would prevail in aerial combat.
‘The first duty of the Royal Air Force’, as Churchill and Trenchard agreed, ‘is to garrison the British Empire’, as cheaply as possible. Churchill was ahead of most military men (or politicians) in urging the development of troop-carrying aircraft, but those built were few and poorly designed. He had in mind the possibilities of what would become ‘aerial policing’ since as early as March 1914, when the so-called ‘Mad Mullah’ (Mohammed Abdullah Hassan) massacred members of the Somaliland Camel Corps. During unrest in Egypt in 1919 and again in 1921 aircraft were used to bomb and strafe ‘rebels’. Egypt was a vital base for British control of the Middle East and as a staging-post on long flights to India and the Far East. Aircraft gave valuable service in Mesopotamia, the north-west frontier of India and Aden, where ‘policing’ (keeping the peace, protecting farmers and herders from raiders) was more emphasised than ‘control’.
Palestine posed greater problems for Britain in the late 1930s than could be solved with the resources available. Ships and troops were also employed in preserving imperial rule, but aircraft were highly mobile and usually invulnerable to opponents who were ‘uncivilised’, ‘primitive’ and lightly-armed. Loudspeakers were a useful weapon for airmen to overawe the restless and warn them of the consequences of ‘rebellion’. As the Governor-General of the Sudan put it: airmen were ‘swift agents of government’. Churchill’s support for aerial policing was confirmed in 1920 when the RAF successfully subdued the Mullah of Somaliland at a cost of only £30,000 instead of a projected cost of £7,000,000 needed to finance a military expedition. It was the first time, he reported to Parliament in February 1920, that airmen had enjoyed ‘the general direction’ of soldiers and seamen.
Irish rebels, however, could not be subdued in the same fashion. They could perhaps be dispersed, wrote Churchill on 1 July 1920, ‘by machine-gun fire or bombs, using, of course, no more force than is necessary to scatter and stampede them’: a foolish remark for a man who was supposed to understand what aircraft and weapons could do. On 24 September, he told Trenchard that his forces in Ireland were too weak and should be strengthened, to protect armoured cars and scatter rebel gatherings. The situation was worse by April 1922 when Churchill urged that aerodromes be set up in the north and around Dublin, so that ‘hostile concentrations might be dealt with from the air or retaliatory measures taken in case of aggressive attack upon the British forces’.
For Mesopotamia (now known as Iraq), Churchill suggested ‘a series of defended areas in which air bases could be securely established’. Strong aerial forces could operate from these and ‘enforce control, now here, now there... long lines of communication that eat up troops and money’ would not be needed. Trenchard, encouraged by Churchill, supported ‘air control’ of Britain’s imperial territories, because it gave his infant RAF an important role to play and also because it did indeed prove to be much cheaper than ground forces and cost many fewer British casualties. In Iraq, for example, five RAF squadrons were successfully substituted in 1921 for thirty-three imperial battalions, reducing the annual cost of the garrison to £2,000,000, a tenth of the army cost.
Churchill had emphasised to Trenchard that the aim was not to defend Iraq from invasion, but to maintain ‘internal security’. Aircraft would be able to bomb or machine gun from the air, as well as transport soldiers at need, and supply them. From a central position in Baghdad, ‘any point’ could be quickly reached and ‘reinforced or relieved’. Air control would permit ‘substantial economies’ and could be extended over all imperial trade routes and even to Ireland.
Henry Wilson (head of the army) was bitterly opposed to an independent air force and refused to be impressed by Churchill’s advocacy of aerial policing. By July 1921, writing to Henry Rawlinson (C-in-C India), he had thought of a satisfying insult: ‘I do not believe in Winston’s ardent hopes of being able to govern Mesopotamia with hot air, aeroplanes and Arabs.’
Later in March 1921 Churchill, now Colonial Secretary, told Laming Worthington-Evans (his successor as Secretary of State for War) that the War Office was refusing to allow an air squadron to be moved from India to Mesopotamia. This squadron was needed there and Churchill asked Worthington-Evans ‘to give directions which will bring to an end what is an extraordinary interference with the affairs of another department’. Churchill’s advocacy of aerial policing was crucial in protecting the RAF’s independence. Churchill was also concerned about resistance to Trenchard’s desire to establish three aerodromes in Trans-Jordan.
Aeroplanes would mark out a ‘desert route’ to Mesopotamia, he told his Cabinet colleagues in April 1921, which ‘would have a very salutary effect upon the Arabs’ and significantly shorten the journey time between the two. Wilson approved. Writing to Walter Congreve (commanding ground forces in Egypt and Palestine) he said Churchill intended to use aeroplanes to drop bombs along the chosen route: falling onto a white surface they would throw up the black sub-soil, thus forming a chain of black dots. Wilson urged Congreve to help make it easier for aircraft to fly between Egypt and Mesopotamia. The advantages were obvious, but Churchill had a struggle to overcome the ‘obdurate’ resistance of Austen Chamberlain, Chancellor of the Exchequer.
In March 1922, Churchill ‘scored a great victory’, in Spooner’s opinion, for his account in Parliament of the RAF’s work in Iraq. As Seely observed, ‘for the first time in history we see the young air force taking charge of a big country, with the older services ancillary to it’. Although Seely had disagreed with Churchill over his holding of two ministries, he supported him wholeheartedly now that he was Colonial Secretary and welcomed his ‘most interesting experiment’ in Iraq: four ‘little rebellions’ in the past year had all been settled with few casualties on either side.
Churchill was already certain, in March 1922, that if war ‘on a great scale suddenly broke out again’, air power would play a vital part. To keep ‘this new arm, with its measureless possibilities, in perpetual thraldom to the army or the navy’ would be a major mistake. An independent air force will, moreover, take over many duties hitherto carried out by the Royal Navy, such as long-range reconnaissance, anti-submarine operations, attacks upon troop transports, and do so more effectively and cheaply.
Rawlinson wrote to Trenchard in April: ‘I know that you and Winston are pressing to replace British troops in India with aeroplane squadrons. At the moment, he refused to agree, but if your air policy succeeded in Iraq, he would reconsider.’ As for Beatty (First Lord of the Admiralty) he assured Hankey in August that there was ‘not the smallest chance of Mr Churchill being able to bring about an arrangement between the two services’ with regard to the RAF’s continued independence. This was the same Beatty who had supported Churchill’s efforts in the last year of the war to combine air and sea power against the U-boat threat.
The RAF formally took control of Iraq on 1 October 1922 with John Salmond in command of a formidable force: more than 1,000 officers and men (plus eight female nurses) had left Southampton aboard the Braemar Castle on 14 September. It was the first time the RAF had chartered a ship exclusively for its own drafts. The total strength in Iraq would amount to about 3,000 persons when they arrived, including four armoured car companies, signals personnel, an armoured train and a water transport section. Eight squadrons (one of Sopwith Snipes, one of Bristol fighters, four of De Havilland 9as and two of Vickers troop-carriers, one of Vernons and the other Victorias) were to be stationed at three bases – Hinaidi, Mosul and Shiva – and all eight were equipped with twelve aircraft and reserves.
Some six months later, on 14 March 1923, Samuel Hoare (now Secretary of State for Air) reported to Parliament that the problem they were trying to solve in Iraq was ‘control without occupation’ and if they succeeded the experiment would be extended throughout the Middle East. In India, the senior RAF officer now had direct access to the viceroy and his headquarters lay close to those of the army.
At the Dardanelles, the air units sent there had shown that on ‘active service soldiers, sailors and airmen could all work harmoniously together’. In David Omissi’s opinion, air power preserved Britain’s influence for a generation: without such a cheap alternative to military occupation, ‘it is likely that the British presence would have been curbed or ended’ and Turkey might well have absorbed large parts of an Arab kingdom.
Air control was well established by 1933 when Flight Lieutenant Edgar Kingston-McCloughry described it in a prize-winning essay.
‘Mountain, desert, marsh and swamp offer no obstruction to aircraft which, ignoring such barriers, can penetrate to the source of trouble... Against this arm uncivilised people are almost helpless, for they have practically no means of retaliation, and our bases and important centres are easily defended by land forces.’
Action against rebels made their ‘existence wretched and intolerable’. Far fewer native casualties were suffered than in the days of army control, and the cost to Britain, in lives and money, was far less. ‘Air control,’ he concluded, ‘resembles the quick, clean incisive sweep of a surgeon’s knife which cuts out a cancerous growth.’ Incidental casualties – to women, children or innocent bystanders – were unavoidable prices to pay for preserving order. The Air Ministry did its best to conceal ‘regrettable accidents’, but no airmen in those years could seriously claim that aircraft were capable of ‘precision’ bombing or ground strafing. Worse still, was the practice of dropping delayed-action bombs, intended to kill those who believed the raid was over.
Although Churchill left the War Office in February 1921, he remained Secretary of State for Air and the Colonies until April, when to the great delight of Stanley Spooner, the Air Ministry got its own Secretary of State – Frederick Guest – although he was at a loss to understand the appointment of a former soldier with no aviation experience and currently a politician who has had ‘a quiet parliamentary life’. On the other hand, Guest was Churchill’s complaisant cousin and remained in office until October 1922. Seely would have been a better choice, ‘welcomed by the friends of aviation’, in Spooner’s opinion, ‘having regard for his fearlessly expressed views upon the vital importance of seeing that the British Empire is supreme in the air’.
Churchill was ‘extremely shocked’ in July 1921 to learn that the RAF had fired on women and children at Nasiriyah. It was ‘a disgraceful act’, he told Trenchard, who blamed political officers for demanding that ‘a special example should be made of an exceptionally unruly tribe’. On 30 May Trenchard had been told by Group Captain Amyas Borton that eight aircraft had fired upon tribesmen enjoying a picnic, chasing them into a lake where they made easy targets. Trenchard was rightly concerned that if the news got out, ‘there would be a charge of “frightfulness” against the force’.
A week later, on 7 June, Churchill told Percy Cox, High Commissioner in Iraq, that aircraft must be used ‘with the greatest circumspection’, and never to support ‘purely administrative measures, such as collection of revenues’. He assured Cox on 8 July that he believed in ‘the legitimate use of air power’, reiterating his hopes for ‘order and happiness in Mesopotamia ... a state with an Arab ruler protected by contingents of British, Indian and native troops and Imperial Air Forces’.
No action was taken against Borton, however, who reported cheerfully to Trenchard on 23 August that a bombing raid had killed eight men and fifty-seven livestock. ‘I am most pleasantly surprised at these results, as I had anticipated a purely moral effect’, wrote Borton. A year later, in June 1922, he told Trenchard that a rebel village had been entirely destroyed by ground troops after a raid in which a hundred bombs were dropped: the village had been ‘a hot bed of malcontents’. Trenchard did not complain. He was by no means alone among RAF officers who had no qualms about severely punishing ‘restless natives’ in any territories ruled by Britain. They were not as ‘extremely shocked’ as was Churchill at such incidents.
‘I am a great believer in air power,’ said Churchill in 1922, ‘and will help it forward in every way’ thus resisting a return of aviation controlled by the older services. Any country which neglected air power would in the event of war find itself ‘fatally situated’ and therefore aviation must be developed as an ‘independent conception’, essential to bolster Britain’s defence against ‘the most deadly attack, one from the air, if ever such a danger arose again’.
Churchill told Austen Chamberlain in March 1922 that he had discussed the RAF with Billy Mitchell, head of the American flying service, who had travelled all round Europe, studying air organisations, and regarded the RAF as a model for every nation. He told Churchill about the chaos prevailing in the United States over waste and duplication caused by the army and the navy running their own separate services.
This ‘dramatic and bizarre’ crisis erupted early in September 1922, when Mustafa Kemal – also known as ‘Atatürk’ – hero of Gallipoli in 1915 and now head of a popular rising against both the moribund sultanate and foreign occupation of Turkish territory, advanced to the Dardanelles Straits, having destroyed a large force of Greek invaders in Asia Minor.
Atatürk threatened a small British garrison in Chanak (Çanakkale), a town of strategic significance on the Asian coast opposite Kilid Bahr. Lloyd George, Curzon (Foreign Secretary) and Churchill were all determined to resist him. ‘If the Turks take the Gallipoli peninsula and Constantinople,’ asserted Churchill with his usual exaggeration at a Cabinet meeting on 7 September, ‘we shall have lost the whole fruits of our victory [in the Great War] and another Balkan war would be inevitable.’
Ordered on 29 September to deliver an ultimatum requiring Atatürk to withdraw from Chanak, Charles Harington (commanding Allied forces in Turkey) wisely refused. Atatürk, also cleverly, did not attack British garrisons there or elsewhere. On 11 October an agreement obliged Lloyd George to accept a demand for a drastic revision of the humiliating Treaty of Sèvres (August 1920) and Atatürk agreed to tolerate a British presence in a ‘neutral zone’, enclosing all the coasts of the Sea of Marmara from Gallipoli to Constantinople. In July 1923, after nine months of negotiation in Lausanne, Turkey was freed from foreign occupation and shortly afterwards a republic was proclaimed, with Atatürk as first president.
A powerful fleet had been sent by the British government to the region and Trenchard sent four squadrons, one of them commanded by Arthur Tedder, later to become a great Allied commander and the only one known to have been rescued from a watery grave (in May 1918) by a Japanese destroyer; a distinction of which, in his whimsical way, he was inordinately proud. The danger of a major war over Chanak ended, in fact, on the day after Tedder arrived in Constantinople. Yet all British forces remained in the region throughout the months of diplomatic negotiations.
This tedious standby did certainly help Tedder’s emergence as a likely senior officer, but he later reflected that an opportunity had been missed at Constantinople to accustom all three services to the idea of working together. Serious casualties would have been suffered if fighting had begun, as a consequence of their failure to do so. Here lie the roots of Tedder’s particular strength as a commander in the Second World War: his constant concern to combine the efforts of all services. As for Churchill, he lost his hitherto safe Dundee seat in October 1922 and was out of Parliament for the next two years.
Churchill was now moving away from the Liberal Party back into the Conservative fold after twenty years and was re-elected to Parliament, calling himself a ‘Constitutionalist’, as member for Epping, Essex, in October 1924. He was one of the biggest boulders in a Conservative landslide in that year’s General Election and was promptly appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer, to his surprise and delight, by Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. It was a high position for which he was unqualified. He nevertheless retained it for five years and sensibly passed swiftly over them in his memoirs. He severely cut expenditure on the armed services, thereby setting up a situation against which he would rail so eloquently in the 1930s.
Those services (with the exception of the RAF’s Fighter Command) were poorly equipped and manned in September 1939 and without American supplies and support would have suffered even heavier losses in the early years of the war. During 1933, when Churchill began to give serious attention to German re-armament and British weakness, the RAF had numerically fallen to sixth place in the world: ‘the Royal Navy had a smaller complement of men than at any time for forty years; the condition of the British Army was the most hapless of all.’
As always, wrote Robert Blake, Churchill pressed ‘with enthusiastic extremism the case for whatever department he headed’, while he headed it. Peter Gretton agreed: he became ‘absorbed in his task, whatever it was, and fitted himself with mental blinkers,’ which allowed him to disregard other points of view and other issues. ‘Rigorous economy’ became his watchwords.
Throughout the years from 1911 to 1922, he had been an aviation enthusiast, but during the years from 1922 to 1933, other interests absorbed him. As far as his relations with airmen are concerned, these are his real ‘wilderness years’. In David MacGregor’s opinion, Churchill was a ‘cheapskate’ as Chancellor, a man who ‘strenuously opposed Admiralty plans for warship construction, naval aviation development, and a Singapore naval base’.
Consequently, thanks in part to Churchill’s conduct for five years in a powerful office, Britain’s ability to face the dictators from 1933 onwards was seriously weakened. On the other hand, as Christopher Bell argued, Churchill did back the creation of a base in Singapore, against both Treasury advice and the Labour Party. Bell fairly observed ‘the propensity of historians to place Churchill at the centre of events and, consequently, to treat him as the only member of the decision-making process who mattered’ and concluded that ‘the most serious damage to the armed services was inflicted, as Churchill himself argued, after he left office’.
In 1925 he returned Britain to the ‘gold standard’, as in the days of his youth, which meant, in practice, low wages, massive unemployment and poor returns for exports. Britain was not ‘a land fit for heroes’ and resounding speeches could not make it so. The services were a prime target for cuts in expenditure (essential, so he was advised). Despite Trenchard’s protests, he ruled that for economic reasons RAF expansion, due to be completed in 1931, must be delayed until 1940, thus ensuring ‘very considerable economies’.
Relations with France were good, he thought; Germany posed no threat; Italy and the Soviet Union needed watching, China and Japan did not matter. He told Samuel Hoare (Secretary of State for Air) on 20 September 1925:
‘You would be surprised to hear all the quarters in which misgivings are felt upon the subject [of an independent RAF]. My own view is strictly in favour of a separate air force on the merits, subject only to the query: “can we afford it?” As you know, I am animated by the most friendly feeling to you and to Trenchard and am most earnestly desirous of maintaining that close co-operation of which you speak.’
In October 1925, Churchill assured Trenchard that ‘I have not at all altered my views as to the desirability of a separate air force, so far as efficiency and leadership in the air are concerned’. But the cost ‘is another matter, and I am not convinced that large savings would not result from the less satisfactory solution of division’. Churchill admitted to Trenchard that he was being bitterly reproached by the navy and under cruel pressure and cuts must be made because: ‘Everything now turns on finance.’
In the event, the RAF survived, but its budget was cut by thirty per cent. Churchill said that he regretted this cut. In December 1926 he told Francis Bridgeman (First Lord of the Admiralty) that ‘the much-abused air force put up with a devil of a lot, if you look at the dwellings they live in and compare them with the fine permanent barracks of the navy and army, particularly the navy’. A year later, in December 1927, he complained to Baldwin that he was ‘repulsed by every department, except the Air Ministry’, when seeking to reduce expenditure.
Churchill wrote to Richard Hopkins (a senior Treasury official) in December 1927 about Trenchard’s idea ‘that with flying boats he could take over most of the naval duties now performed in the Persian Gulf by small cruisers’. Churchill wanted Hopkins to look into the costs and discuss with Trenchard what could be done. On 16 January 1928 he asked Bridgeman to reduce the Admiralty’s estimated expenditure for the coming year. It was essential, said Churchill, that Bridgeman consult the Air Ministry regarding a great expenditure proposed on an untested new anti-aircraft weapon: was it likely to be justified by the probable results against aircraft attack? Later that month, on the 29th, he wrote to Baldwin. ‘There is a widespread feeling – in my opinion well founded – that the Admiralty give less value for money than either of the other two services.’
In his first month as Chancellor – November 1924 – Churchill asked the Committee of Imperial Defence to consider extending the Ten-Year Rule (a rule that he had initiated in 1919, supposing that Britain would not be engaged in a major war during the next decade). This was done informally until December 1928 when the government accepted his wish to extend it from a date that began anew each day. Throughout the years from 1919 to 1932 it remained in force. The rule helped the Chancellor to control service expenditure and thereby played a part in encouraging the policy of appeasement against which that same Chancellor would later protest, especially when he realised that neither Baldwin nor Chamberlain would give him another office.
The RAF fared better than the other services between the wars and Churchill argued that reducing its budget should not in any way hamper the development of ideas; it would merely ‘check mass production until the situation demanded it’ and so avoid expenditure on armaments that might be obsolete when required. In spite of his deep interest in military history, he was as naive as most other politicians in supposing that fully-equipped and trained fighting men could be conjured into existence at little more than a moment’s notice. Consequently, he never admitted that the Ten-Year Rule endangered Britain or the empire.
According to Ernle Chatfield (Third Sea Lord, 1925-1928; later First Sea Lord and later still Minister for Co-ordination of Defence) the rule made realistic military planning impossible. In memoirs written early in the war he denounced the ‘crushing, soul-destroying influence’ of the rule. The decision to extend it in 1928 was particularly distressing. ‘Gagged and bound hand and foot’, the service departments ‘were handed over to the Treasury Gestapo. Never has there been such a successful attempt to hamstring the security of an empire.’ Hankey agreed with Chatfield.
In 1948, after The Gathering Storm (Churchill’s version of events in the 1930s) was published, Hankey wrote to The Times, claiming: ‘Several service people and ex-ministers have begged me to write on the subject.’ The ‘whole official world’ knew that Churchill was responsible for the rule and the higher ranks in the services ‘have never forgiven him’. British rearmament after 1933, wrote Hankey, had been severely constrained by the ‘dangerous and demoralising’ impact of the rule, which had badly damaged both the fighting services and the arms industry and Churchill could not ‘escape some responsibility for our misfortunes’. The rule seriously undermined Britain’s aircraft industry, in Barnett’s opinion: it was ‘one of Churchill’s least happy contributions to English [sic] history’.
Between 1924 and 1932, wrote Tami Biddle, ‘RAF procurement expenditure increased rather than declined, and in the mid-1920s the Air Ministry spent a higher proportion of its total budget on research and development than the Admiralty or the War Office’, and by 1940 Britain was ‘the largest aircraft producer in the world’. On the other hand, RAF officers did too little thinking – as opposed to making assertions – about the practicalities of their obsession with offence. They made plenty of noise, but were found wanting when the war began in 1939 and it was not until 1942 that deeds began to match that noise. Fortunately for Britain and all those who feared a total and permanent German victory in 1940, some officers had been quietly thinking and acting, so that an effective defence, at least in daylight, was available in that crucial year.
Amery wrote to Baldwin on 11 March 1929 about the danger of entrusting Churchill after the election (due on 30 May) ‘with his long-cherished dream of co-ordinating the fighting services’. That danger never arose because the Conservatives were defeated and Churchill was furious at finding himself once again out of office. More than a decade would pass before he returned to ruling circles. One of his last acts as Chancellor was to resist the Admiralty’s demand for a larger Fleet Air Arm. The days when he fostered naval aviation were over, but most influential naval officers were content with such aircraft as gradually found their way into service.
These were the years when the United States and Japan overtook the British seaborne empire in number and quality of both aircraft and aircraft carriers. During the Great War, the RNAS had learned to use land-based aircraft effectively for protection of ports and convoys, but after that war, the RAF lost this expertise. The Imperial Japanese Navy benefitted ‘because its air force was trained by British officers who used the RNAS as a model. Between the wars, alone in the world, Japan developed land-based maritime strike forces’ and these were used to good effect in 1941 and 1942.
In December 1931, Churchill was nearly killed on 5th Avenue in New York. He looked the wrong way before stepping off into the path of a car travelling at more than 30 mph. Although he was in great pain, he remained conscious and when a policeman pressed him for details of the accident, he correctly insisted that it was entirely his own fault. Had he died, there would still have been British politicians and military leaders to speak out against German and Italian aggression, but they would probably have been no more concerned than he was about danger from Japan. There would still have been a spectacular expansion of the RAF, but the army would still have been untrained and poorly-equipped for operations anywhere. As for the Royal Navy, it too would have been hard-pressed.
With Churchill long gone, who was there to stand up to the formidable Chamberlain and his numerous supporters? Not Anthony Eden. He had his chance in 1938-1939, but lacked the guts to seize it. As late as April 1939, a public opinion poll gave him thirty-eight per cent support as the next Prime Minister if Chamberlain resigned and only seven per cent each to Halifax and Churchill. On the outbreak of war, Chamberlain excluded him from the centre of events by offering him the Dominions Office, a backwater post without membership of the War Cabinet, and he accepted it. It is possible, of course, that Eden might have developed a more assertive character in the absence of Churchill, but it seems more likely that he would have proven to be as ‘realistic’ a Prime Minister as Chamberlain.
Lloyd George, a known admirer of Hitler, might well have made more of a stir in Churchill’s absence. He would not have been averse to playing the part of Hitler’s puppet. In Churchill’s absence, Halifax would have urged Chamberlain to hang on in 1940, bearing in mind that there would have been no invasion of Norway without Churchill demanding it. Neither Attlee (the Labour Party leader) nor Sinclair (Liberal leader) had Churchill’s assets: A small but devoted group of supporters; galvanic energy; an unrivalled power of oratory when words really mattered; a simple British patriotism; a real sense of destiny that he was the chosen man to save the nation; above all, an extraordinary optimism and confidence against all the odds.
Under Chamberlain and following Hitler’s victories in Western Europe, Britain would have negotiated an armistice with Hitler: an armistice acceptable, if not popular, with many Britons whose memories of the Great War were still vivid, enhanced by years of lurid, if not lucid, writing on the impact of aerial bombardment and even more memorable newsreels of the destruction caused in China, Spain, Poland and Western Europe. Axis control of the Mediterranean and the Middle East would have permitted an undistracted campaign against the Soviet Union that might well have been victorious. The United States would eventually have prevailed against Japan, if she chose to attack Pearl Harbor, but the war in the east would surely have been longer and more bloody.
It is certain that the United States would have taken no part in the war across the Atlantic: how could she, without bases in the British Isles? Had Churchill died in December 1931, some other Briton might have emerged during the 1930s to oppose appeasers and pacifists alike, to inspire and bully his fellow-citizens into ‘their finest hour’. But it is hard to think who that might have been. Although he made many mistakes during the crucial decade, 1934 to 1945, Churchill towered head, shoulders and torso over everyone else in British public life, and never quite fell out with his essential American and Soviet allies.