Between the wars, the idea of air power, as much as any demonstrated capability dominated the minds of airmen and politicians, particularly in Britain and the United States, and won their support for strategic bombing as a potentially war-winning force. A swift ‘knockout blow’ from the air would prevent a repeat of the trench warfare so vividly remembered. Devoted airmen were sure that the bomber would dominate any future war. Defence would no longer prevail over offence and air power would matter more than either land or sea power.
No one doubts that essential building blocks in Britain’s air power appeared during Trenchard’s years in office: flying schools to set and maintain standards; research and development facilities to encourage improvements; cadet colleges to train air crews; staff colleges to develop leaders and apprentice schemes to train mechanics. Despite Churchill’s constant complaints, Britain had a well-capitalised, competitive, and research-intensive aviation industry between the wars. Churchill, however, revelled in numbers and never understood why many soldiers, sailors or airmen were not to be found in constant, direct contact with the enemy. The Air Ministry resisted, as well as it could, demands to build great numbers of machines that were either inadequate or would soon become obsolete.
In fact, the doctrine of ‘quality over quantity’ was often breached in response to pressure from the aviation industry and from politicians, while the threat of a sudden German assault was always in many minds. These were years of rapid change in airframes, engines and equipment and designers (like air commanders) had to learn from experience which types could perform adequately in wartime; with airfields, hangars and ground crews being built or trained as rapidly as possible in the late 1930s. There were, inevitably, serious misjudgements – especially in regard to transports and carrier-borne aircraft – but overall British air power outmatched that of its enemies.
The crucial step that airmen failed to take in the inter-war period, wrote Williamson Murray, was to learn from history. They failed even though by 1918 aircraft were already being used in every role that they would play in the Second World War: reconnaissance and direction of artillery fire; close support for soldiers advancing or retreating; bombing behind the battle lines; convoy escort and strategic bombing. In particular, it had been painfully learned during the Great War that most operations could only be carried out successfully if and when fighters had won aerial superiority.
Tragically, Trenchard and his acolytes chose to believe that the bomber (not even escorted by fighters) would prevail, if there were enough of them and their crews were sufficiently resolute. It was also believed that no other people could match the British for courage, either when pressing home their attacks or withstanding those made in retaliation. Many Americans were equally adamant, as one instructor at the Air Corps Tactical School asserted in the early 1930s: ‘A well-planned and well-conducted bombardment, once launched, cannot be stopped.’ By 1935, it was also asserted that ‘escorting fighters will neither be provided nor requested unless experience proves that bombardment is unable to penetrate such resistance alone’.
Only after suffering intolerable losses over Schweinfurt in October 1943 did Ira Eaker – then commanding the US bomber force – urge that drop-tanks and long-range escort fighters be provided. As for the RAF, Arthur Harris was also obliged to recognise, after suffering equally unacceptable losses, that his bombers needed the support of night fighters.
‘The only explanation,’ that Murray could find was that, ‘pre-war assumptions remained so strong that the real conditions of aerial warfare made relatively little impression.’ The RAF took little interest in drop-tanks until 1943 and despite prodding from Hugh Dowding, head of Fighter Command, Sholto Douglas (assistant CAS) ruled in March 1940 that a long-range fighter must be inferior in performance to a short-range fighter. More than a year later, in June 1941, Portal (by then CAS) agreed and so informed Churchill, who replied that his apparently authoritative ruling closed ‘many doors’. It was unlike Churchill to accept so meekly what were merely untested assertions.
Many British airmen, politicians and journalists were convinced that the new German air force was being created not to support the army in land campaigns, but to bomb targets in Britain. The RAF therefore needed a bomber force to retaliate, if not deter, but it failed to consider the practical needs of a strategic bombing policy. In too many RAF minds it was not thought essential that bombs hit a particular target because the mere act of dropping them would have the desired effect of winning the war by undermining enemy morale.
What thought, for example, was given to the optimum size of a bomber? Where should it be armoured and what type and number of defensive weapons would it need? What was the ideal size of a bomb and what tests were undertaken to ensure that it actually exploded when dropped? What was done to develop accurate bomb sights? Was navigation seriously studied even over friendly territory, let alone that of a possible enemy? Would escort fighters be needed? Would bombing at night be possible? Would bad weather be a major problem? Was there an adequate air intelligence organisation set up to gather and assess information about how best to defend vulnerable industries and ports in Britain, how best to overcome enemy defences, on the ground and in the air? Not least – in the 1930s – how could military targets be hit without also hitting civilians working there or living nearby?
Lazy and even dishonest assumptions were as widespread in all three services as they were in Whitehall and Westminster. When, for example, the Air Staff set up ‘air exercises’ in the 1930s, umpires ensured that offensive bombers always overcame defensive fighters. One serious experiment was attempted in 1937: thirty obsolete aircraft were placed within a large circle. For one week – at high and low levels, in daylight and in good weather, untroubled by flak or defensive fighters – bombers attacked these sitting ducks. They destroyed two, damaged eleven beyond repair, left six damaged but reparable and missed the other eleven entirely. The experiment was not repeated.
As for navigation, during a night exercise in 1937, two-thirds of a Bomber Command force was unable to find the fully-illuminated city of Birmingham and during the next two years nearly 500 bomber crews had to make forced-landings, having lost their way while flying within the British isles.
Slessor admitted in his memoirs that belief in the bomber was ‘a matter of faith’ between the wars, but faith is more fitting for a possible life after death than for preserving safety before then. Faith may move mountains, but it does not eliminate enemy air defences and yet Trenchardists virtually ignored these. Slessor also confessed that in the 1930s he too had subscribed to a spirit of traditional amateurism: an attitude that served well enough in dealing with unrest among poorly-armed and untrained ‘natives’, but would be swept aside by professional Germans, and later (to general surprise) by equally-professional Japanese opponents.
The RAF’s Staff College discouraged independent thought in the 1920s and 1930s, serving as a disseminating station for approved doctrine, seasoned by essays on riding, hunting and how to cope with the bazaars of Baghdad. When war came in 1939, the bomber was quickly found to be wholly inadequate; so too were its crews, except in courage and determination. Without air supremacy, which only fighters could provide, enemy productive centres and communications could not be destroyed. In any case, as an Admiralty memorandum in 1932 declared, aerial bombing was ‘revolting and un-English’, whereas bombardment by land or sea, including blockade, were not.
Two years into a war in which Bomber Command was suffering heavily and achieving little, Slessor (then commanding a bomber group) was still preaching to Trenchard’s text. By attacking widely different parts of Germany on successive nights, he told his crews: ‘You spread the moral effect not only of the actual attacks but of the air-raid warnings in all districts over which you pass. You know Lord Trenchard’s slogan: “Keep the Germans out of bed, keep the sirens blowing” and there is the devil of a lot in it.’
Precisely what, Slessor was unable to say. Another assumption was that Britons would prove more stout-hearted than Germans, if they were attacked from the air. Too many officers seemed unaware of the fact that an effective defence against bombers was not only possible, but had in fact been devised in Britain. They also assumed that the Germans could not conceive their own system of defence.
Consequently, numerous brave young men in Bomber Command found – as they died, were injured or captured – that their weapon and their training were alike inadequate. During the war, about half of all the men who flew with Bomber Command were killed. Their German opponents were not cowering sleepless, but fighting back effectively. All British bombers until 1942 were twin-engined machines poorly armed and armoured, able to carry only a light load from Britain to Germany. No truly heavy bomber, with four engines, large enough to carry a seriously destructive or fire-raising load was even nearly ready for service.
Bomber pilots had learned to fly mainly in daylight in good weather. Crews were not initially trained in such essential tasks as navigation, wireless operation and the use of guns. As for fighter pilots, they were very skilled at close-formation flying and crowd-pleasing aerobatics at air shows until 1938; moves that were entirely useless in wartime. Thereafter, they began to learn how best to use their excellent weapons as part of an ever-improving system of defence, at least in daylight.
The Air Staff observed the overseas wars of the 1930s in China and Spain, but drew no lessons from them. Civilians did. Whenever they went to a cinema, they saw newsreel clips of bombs falling, clouds of smoke rising, shattered buildings, women and children in distress. No-one in authority told them, as the years passed, that Japanese bombing was not overwhelming China or that the casualties from bombing in the Spanish Civil War were not decisive. They supposed, not unreasonably, that such destruction was definitive.
As for Spain, in September 1937, Wing Commander Victor Goddard (chairman of a Joint Intelligence Sub-Committee on Spain) reported that lowflying attacks had a severe impact on semi-organised and semi-disciplined ground forces, but he was sure that such attacks would not alarm British troops, if war came, because they had the discipline and fire power needed to resist effectively. Goddard clearly knew nothing about the actual state of the British Army in the late 1930s. He was able to visit Spain in February 1938, where he learned only what he already knew.
In September 1937, Air Ministry officials decided that British bombers were so fast and well-armed that they would not need fighter escorts. Close support of ground forces would be ‘uneconomical’ and, indeed, an improper use of air power. It would be years before the RAF recognised a need for aircraft designed for low-flying attack in support of British ground forces advancing or retreating. A few officers – among them Tedder, Coningham and (eventually) Slessor – understood the need for close co-operation with ground forces and their day would come, but only after unescorted bombers had suffered heavy losses in daylight raids.
Until Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Churchill was out of office and unlikely to return. For all the noise he made about the need to rearm, he did not cast a single vote against the government on foreign or defence policy before the Munich Crisis; he denounced Gandhi in even stronger language than he applied to Hitler; he refused to condemn the atrocities committed by either Franco or Mussolini; and did not believe Japan posed a serious threat to British power in the Far East.
He had always devoted much of his enormous energy to writing and supervising the efforts of those paid to gather information for him. Out of all this emerged ‘his story’ of the Great War, a very long biography of his ancestor, the first Duke of Marlborough and plans for an even longer history of the English-speaking peoples. He also found time for frequent holidays far from Westminster. Late in 1937, he was still advocating the return to Germany of colonies confiscated after the Great War and when Eden resigned as Foreign Secretary in February 1938, Churchill was fourth quickest of 400 Conservative MPs to sign a round robin confirming their confidence in Chamberlain.
The navy used to be the ‘sure shield’ of Britain, Churchill declared. We cannot say that now because this ‘cursed, hellish invention and development of war from the air’ has weakened that shield. As early as March 1934 he said: ‘I dread the day when the means of threatening the heart of the British Empire should pass into the hands of the present rulers of Germany.’ True enough, but as Edward Ellington (a former head of the RAF) wrote after the war: ‘When we resumed expansion in 1934, we had a much smaller basis on which to build than we should have had had Winston been as enthusiastic for expansion when Chancellor as he was when a critic.’
For the rest of the 1930s – when he gave his attention to airmen and air power – Churchill preached to the same text. ‘With our great metropolis here, the greatest target in the world, a kind of tremendous, fat, valuable cow tied up to attract the beasts of prey, we are in a position in which no other country is at the present moment.’ As usual, his purple prose was regarded with amusement, even contempt, by some fellow-politicians, but Rothermere (owner of the Daily Mail) was even more concerned than Churchill. My information, he told him as early as August 1934, is that the Germans will soon have a force approaching 20,000 aeroplanes, turning them out like sewing machines or motor cars.
Churchill, advised by his friend, Desmond Morton (head of the Industrial Intelligence Centre, 1930-1939, and close to him throughout the war) replied that that figure ‘can have no reality’, although the danger was serious enough to justify greater action. At this time, Churchill said that ‘a bomb dropped on civilians is a good bomb wasted’, and John Steel, head of Wessex Bombing Area agreed. In carrying out exercises, only military objectives were targeted, but presumably the civilians who worked in such places were fair game.
If another war came, Churchill said in November 1934, three or four million Britons would be driven out into the open country, confronting the government of the day with unprecedented problems in feeding and keeping order. By November 1937, the Luftwaffe would be nearly double the size of the RAF and Britain’s air defences were no longer adequate to secure peace, safety and freedom. In no more than ten days, he said, London would suffer up to 40,000 casualties, even more, if incendiaries were used. Birmingham, Sheffield and other great manufacturing towns, as well as dockyards, oil storage depots other vital targets were just as vulnerable.
Few men, even politicians, have ‘cried wolf!’ as often and as eloquently as Churchill. Did he believe the figures he bandied about so freely? He certainly relished the money and publicity they earned him, from those who read what he wrote, listened to what he said and supposed that such a famous man must be well informed. He had no evidence that the Luftwaffe was poised to make any attack on Britain in the 1930s. Never at any time could it have caused such casualties as he claimed to fear and he took far too long to grasp the fact that good work was being done, from 1935 onwards, to prepare effective defences against aerial attack.
During the Great War, as First Lord of the Admiralty and later as Minister of Munitions, Churchill could, with some justification, think of airmen as ‘his’: he was in close touch with them, but despite the flow of information he received in the 1930s from some concerned airmen, this was no longer so.
In September 1938, Hastings Ismay (Secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence) asserted that ‘Germany’s air defence was already perfect’, which was by no means true, and that Britain’s was ‘singularly weak’, which was incorrect also. Slessor would recall in his memoirs ‘the shocking state of unpreparedness in the air’ in September: like Churchill, he took no account of what was being done by officers and civilians under Dowding’s direction at Fighter Command. He knew nothing about it. The RAF’s ability to defend was improving rapidly, although its ability to offend remained feeble.
‘It would be a great mistake,’ Churchill asserted in August 1938, ‘to imagine that the slaughter of the civilian population following upon air raids would prevent the British Empire from developing its full war power.’ He repeated that opinion in September, with attacks on civilians in mind: ‘So far from producing panic and a wish to surrender, they have aroused a spirit of furious and unyielding resistance among all classes. They have united whole communities otherwise sundered, in a common hatred of such base and barbarous methods.’
At that time, there had been no attacks on British civilians. However, Churchill was sure that if war came between states with equal air strength, the state which seeks the slaughter of the civil population is unlikely to succeed. He had changed his mind by the end of 1940, when British bombers were beginning their attempt to carry the war across the Channel.
Germany, he asserted, in September 1938, could already put into action simultaneously more than 1,500 aeroplanes and her industry is so organised that it can certainly produce, at full blast, 1,000 every month and increase that number as the months pass. As for casualties, Churchill’s estimates grew wilder every time he had an audience or dictated a piece for the newspapers. On this occasion, he said 5,000 persons would be killed and 150,000 injured in a single all-out raid on London.
In his postwar memoirs he admitted to painting the picture even darker than it was. He actually painted it so black that his gross exaggerations, expressed so often and so vividly, helped to induce diplomatic paralysis. Chamberlain’s government, full of men who loathed the very idea of another war, came to believe that only by yielding to all Hitler’s demands could safety, at least for Britain, be ensured. In this loathing, most Britons – Conservative, Labour or Liberal – were at one.
Without a bomber force strong enough to deter Hitler, Chamberlain and the chiefs of staff were determined not to challenge him during the Czech crisis of September 1938. Only with the advent of radar and modern fighters in 1939 was Dowding able to feel a growing confidence in Britain’s prospects of withstanding the Luftwaffe. As for destroying that air force and the state that had created it, that would surely call for a combination of all arms – land, sea and air – yet Churchill rejected peacetime conscription and had little interest in a strengthened British Army. When he spoke of a ‘Grand Alliance’, a slogan taken from his Marlborough biography, he meant the Royal Navy and the French army, supported by aircraft. We are in grave danger, he asserted, more dangerous than at the height of the U-boat campaign.
Mercifully, from a British point of view, some senior RAF officers guided by Dowding – listening to civilian engineers, aircraft manufacturers and scientists – developed and produced modern fighters in the late 1930s that would match German fighters and prove markedly superior to German bombers. These bombers, like their British equivalents, were twin-engined, poorly armed for defence and carried too light a load to cause irreparable destruction of aerodromes, military depots, factories or ports. Numerous houses were wrecked, but many of their inhabitants survived. It took many raids for Churchill, other politicians and senior service officers to understand that the real bomber was far less deadly than the imagined bomber.
Of equal importance to the modern fighters was the development in Britain, by those same officers and civilians, of a system of control and reporting based on that devised during the Great War. In providing fighters with adequate early warning, it would be greatly helped – when serious attacks began – by information gathered in two chains of radar stations, one to detect high-flying raiders and the other to spot those approaching at low levels. Britain would be effectively defended against bombers in daylight in 1940, when it mattered most, and later (during 1941) in darkness as well.
Tragically, some influential voices in the Air Ministry hewed stubbornly to the Trenchardist line that only offence mattered. Aircraft production favoured bombers over fighters by a ratio of seven to three between 1936 and 1939. The RAF, wrote Alan Stephens, ‘was extremely lucky that it had a number of dedicated and highly-perceptive people who insisted on developing the air defence system’. That system depended upon airfield construction. These airfields, both major bases and temporary landing strips, were designed and managed by a special Air Ministry unit although the actual work, including repairs and extensions, was carried out by Royal Engineer, RAF personnel and civilian contractors in Britain and overseas.
It became a very large business: in 1939, for example, the RAF had over 150 airfields, covering nearly 90,000 acres in Britain. By 1944, there were close to 500 RAF airfields and more than 130 assigned to Americans, covering more than 330,000 acres, and all needing ample storage space for fuel and weapons.
The Works Directorate of the Air Ministry employed nearly one-third of Britain’s construction manpower. This was indeed, wrote Sebastian Cox, ‘one of the great unsung achievements of the Second World War’. Some bright sparks in Whitehall understood an ancient truth – valid until the first nuclear explosion – that us humans will find an answer to every weapon and that weapon needs a great deal of back-up.
Malcolm Smith wrote: ‘It is indeed a real measure of the failure of integration in the administration of British defence, the lack of cohesion between defence services, Treasury and Foreign Office that the RAF went to war and won its most famous victory with a policy that made nonsense of everything the Air Staff had been teaching for the last twenty years.’ However it provided the essential airfields.
Churchill had begun to recognise in the mid-1930s the possibility of using science to help frame a defence. Although absolute immunity from air attack was impossible, Britain could guard herself against a mortal blow and perhaps even deter an attacker. Whoever had aerial superiority would enjoy a decisive advantage and Germany, he believed, was rapidly approaching that eminence. Aerial bombing, he declared, was ‘the shame of the twentieth century’. Unlike rifles, machine guns, artillery fire and naval bombardment – not to mention swords, bows and arrows – he supposed bombing to be an exceptional means of terrorising a civilian population ‘by the slaughter of non-combatants’. Given his life-long interest in military history, he could hardly have been unaware that ‘non-combatants’ always suffer in wartime.
If only some new method of assisting the defence could be devised, he mused, the whole of our affairs would be greatly simplified. By July 1939 he thought that if the aerial threat could be restricted or prevented, then the decision in wartime would remain as in the past with armies and navies. The matter was urgent, he added, because Germany might try to reduce Britain with a rapid ‘violent aerial mass attack’, employing ‘psychological shock tactics’. This would be even more dangerous if Britain were not allied to France because Germany might then ‘commence hostilities with the air arm alone’.
Churchill began to learn about radio and radar defences to assist British fighters against raiders approaching the coast. However they could give no help once raiders had crossed the coast and were flying over land. He saw no value in a growing Observer Corps that was training to monitor the progress of bombers over inland targets and advocated a curtain of mines, dropped by parachute, to intercept them. This impractical notion was foisted upon him by his scientific adviser, Frederick Lindemann, an Oxford physicist.
A ‘poisonously unpleasant’ man, he was shrewd enough to conceal this aspect of his character from Churchill. He had made his name during the Great War, working at Farnborough, where he learned to fly and bravely demonstrated what pilots should do to get out of a spin. Churchill, who was himself ignorant of all technical matters, greatly over-valued Lindemann’s gift for explaining complex matters in simple words. He never realised that Lindemann was often mistaken. For instance, he assured Churchill in June 1939 that systematic day raiding of Britain was no longer possible, that night raiders could not reach military objectives, that aircraft were no threat to convoys and that the U-boat danger had been mastered. He was wrong on all these points. Nevertheless, as soon as Churchill became Prime Minister he found his favourite scientific adviser a sinecure in his government and had him elevated to the peerage as Viscount Cherwell.
Henry Tizard was a scientist of far superior merit. His ‘greatest achievement,’ wrote Solly Zuckerman, ‘was the encouragement he gave to the development of the chain of radar stations which assured the RAF’s victory in the Battle of Britain.’ Chamberlain’s decision to sack Lord Swinton (ablest of all Secretaries of State for Air) was a severe blow to Tizard, the RAF and to Britain.
In July 1940, however, Tedder, by now Director General for Research in the Air Ministry, supported Tizard’s appointment as head of a vital mission to the United States. He was, thought Tedder, ‘by far the best leader’, a man ‘who combines the wide scientific knowledge needed with the understanding of current operational requirements, and who has also an international standing as a scientist’. Churchill was persuaded. Tizard and his colleagues took with them to Canada and the United States a collection of information about anti-aircraft guns, gyroscopic gunsights, armour plates, jet propulsion, chemical weapons, self-sealing petrol tanks and especially the cavity magnetron, which delivered 10-cm radar into the hands of American industry. This collection gave a new dimension to the special relationship between Churchill and Roosevelt; it was, said one American scientist: ‘The most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores.’
Many elements in Britain’s air defence were the same in both wars – anti-aircraft guns, searchlights, balloons and aircraft – all eventually working together, aided by early warning from a network of coastal observers connected to control centres by wireless and telephone networks. Operations rooms, strikingly similar in layout and function, were used in both wars to co-ordinate the defenders’ efforts and faced exactly the same problems.
Here are some examples. When will an attack be launched? Where will it come from? Which targets will it attempt to hit? How can the range and accuracy of guns and searchlights be improved? At what height should balloons be flown? Where should these ‘static defences’ be situated? How can aircraft get quickly enough into position to attack the enemy and with what weapons should they be armed?
It was soon learned in both wars that different aircraft, crews and methods of control were needed to deal with day and night raiders. It was also learned that the sight and sound of defences in action were necessary for civilian morale, however useless they might be from a military point of view. Airmen and politicians alike were obliged to swallow their exasperation and accept that people under attack needed to be cheered up and given hope.
One lesson the Air Ministry was reluctant to learn was the value of hard runways. As late as 1938, recalled Harold Balfour (later Under-Secretary of State for Air in Churchill’s government), ‘the Air Staff declared there was no need to plan for hard runways’. Nor did they; shortly before war actually began, in September 1939, there was not a single aerodrome in Fighter Command with all-weather runways, as opposed to fields liable to be either muddy or dusty.
Churchill’s sources regarding German air strength in the 1930s ‘lacked authenticity,’ wrote David MacIsaac, ‘he juggled with hypothetical figures’ and depended, as always, on a fluent pen and tongue. In fact, wrote Seaman, Churchill was ‘taken in by Hitler’s vauntings’; the Luftwaffe was not designed for strategic bombing against cities but for tactical support of armies in the field. Churchill’s eloquent rants had grievous consequences when the war actually came: there was no immediate onslaught on Britain, for which 250,000 hospital beds had been assigned in London alone. Although he certainly painted a vivid picture of the German menace, Britain’s intelligence services failed lamentably to modify that picture with a realistic assessment of the Luftwaffe's equipment and Hitler’s likely intentions.
Senior officers in the Air Ministry seconded poorly-based fears. In another war, they calculated – for no good statistical reason – that bombing casualties would be fifty per ton. As it happened, the raids that actually struck at London in 1940-1941 caused, on average, three or four casualties per ton. Responding to widespread alarm at the prospect of massive casualties, in July 1936 Churchill urged a three-fold increase in RAF strength. He emphasised that it must also be made more professional – offering more permanent commissions – and laying a greater emphasis on training. However there was much disorganisation, with many squadrons only partly complete and the quality of servicing was low.
As a defence force, the RAF was neglible and its capacity for offence ‘puerile’. In November 1936 he said ‘Germany has specialised in long-distance bombing aeroplanes’, which would have been news to most Luftwaffe officers then or later. A few weeks later, in January 1937, he again claimed that Germany already had an immense preponderance in heavy bombers. In fact, as British intelligence services should have known, German aircraft production, until 1937, was concentrated on training aircraft (more than half of the total) and less than one-fifth were bombers or fighters.
Despite his assertion that air power would be a major factor in another war, Churchill declared in January 1938: ‘The air menace against properly-armed and protected ships of war will not be of a decisive character.’ He agreed with most senior naval officers that aircraft could not destroy capital ships. He also underestimated the impact of air power on land forces: ‘The whole course of the war in Spain,’ he announced with his usual certainty, even about a subject he had not studied, ‘has seemed to show the limitations rather than the strength of the air weapon... so far as the fighting troops are concerned, aircraft are an additional complication rather than a decisive weapon.’
Churchill wrongly assumed in March 1938 that the RAF’s focus on the forward-firing, fixed gun fighter was mistaken and a turret-armed fighter was essential. He had been assured by Lindemann that modern fighters met and flew past one another ‘too quickly for human action’ and pursuing from behind is open to deadly retort: how easy it would be, he thought, for our airmen to throw out aerial mines. Enemies following in the wake would therefore incur needless and possibly fatal risk. ‘The only sure method is to swim along side by side and let him have it.’
In other words, Churchill knew nothing about the real problems airmen would face in modern combat and relied on whatever Lindemann told him, and he knew nothing either. Churchill recommended that Britain build, as quickly as possible and in the largest numbers feasible, ‘fast, heavily-armed aeroplanes designed with turrets for fighting on the beam on parallel courses’. The matter was urgent because the Germans must know that ‘we have banked upon the forward-shooting plunging “Spit-fire”’. For a man who had once shown an exceptional grasp of what aircraft might achieve in wartime, such opinions reveal that he was no longer up with the play. Fortunately, he was not Prime Minister in the critical years, 1935-1939, when effective fighters were designed and brought into service.