By March 1939, Churchill had learned something of Fighter Command’s work under Dowding’s leadership. German bombing would fail, he now believed, because ‘ninety-nine out of every 100 square miles of this island would be practically immune and safe from air attack’. He was, of course, entirely mistaken and neither Dowding nor any responsible person under his command would have made such a rash claim.
Churchill was on sounder ground when he said we have: ‘the best machines’ and our air defences were ‘better armed’ and ‘constantly manned... Science has been brought powerfully to our aid against air attack.’ By 1940 Britain will feel ‘a great measure of confidence’ because the progress of the German war machine ‘will be more than overmatched by a year’s improvement in the British Air Force.’ This happened to be true, by a narrow margin helped by the Luftwaffe’s misuse of its superior strength. Churchill’s contribution to that ‘improvement’ was to help generate a sense of urgency in both the government and the service ministries.
During 1939 he published articles alleging that ‘Bombs Don’t Scare Us Now’ and ‘Air Bombardment is no Road to World Domination’. He also claimed, ‘there is nothing in this problem of air attack which the British nation cannot confront’. At the same time, he warned that Hitler and Goering (head of the Luftwaffe) would not easily lay down ‘the blackmailing squeeze of air terror’, which argued for ‘early action’ by Britain and France. A German invasion, he said in August 1939, would require ‘crossing the sea in relays for many hours’, and would not be ‘child’s play’ for the Germans. ‘As daylight raiding will soon become too expensive, we have chiefly to deal with random night-bombing of the built-up areas.’
From 1934 onwards, Churchill received a stream of information from civil servants, politicians and serving RAF officers about the state of Britain’s defences, should there be another war with Germany. He did not solicit this information, which he used without disclosing his sources. Rothermere wrote to him on 30 April 1935 about his conversation with Norman Macmillan: ‘As you know, he is one of the greatest test pilots this country has produced’ and had assured Rothermere that German air power was already very great. Although he offered no evidence to support this claim.
A year later, in April 1936, Morton wrote to Churchill about information he had received from Wing Commander Peter Warburton, who claimed that the Air Ministry was ‘too complacent’ in its calculations and in May Lord Londonderry (Secretary of State for Air) wrote to him about his recent visit to Germany where Group Captain Francis Don (Air Attaché at the embassy in Berlin) gave him information about German air strength which came as ‘a complete surprise’. According to Londonderry, there was a complete lack of knowledge in England about what was happening in Germany.
Actually, sufficient information about the growth of German air power was available to the Air Ministry, if it had been looking for it. One very important source was offered by two junior officers in October 1936. They were Squadron Leader Herbert Rowley (who had accompanied Arthur Coningham on the first east-west crossing of Africa in 1925 and was then serving at the Aeroplane and Armament Experimental Establishment, Martlesham Heath, near Ipswich in Suffolk) and Flight Lieutenant Dick Atcherley (a famous test, and stunt, pilot at the Royal Aircraft Establishment in Farnborough, Hampshire, where he developed a system of air-to-air refuelling which had been demonstrated at that year’s Hendon Air Display).
Rowley and Atcherley took some leave, borrowed a Percival Gull three-seater monoplane from Robert Blackburn, chairman of Blackburn Aircraft, and flew from Martlesham Heath via Lympne in Kent and Amsterdam to Tempelhof aerodrome in Berlin. Just like that. German customs officials asked them no questions and they were charged only a nominal sum to house their aeroplane. They had timed their visit perfectly, for the German propaganda machine was geared to respectability in 1936 and so they got a friendly welcome. They were not deceived, however, for they shared Churchill’s concern about the revival of German military strength, especially in the air.
Throughout the 1930s, the Air Staff consistently assumed a massive aerial assault would occur, if war broke out, but did little to examine this assumption. For example, what weight of bombs could any twin-engined aircraft (no four-engined bombers were yet in production) carry to a British target from bases in Germany, allowing for the weight of its crew, fuel, defensive weapons, ammunition and armour? The location and approximate size of all major German aircraft factories was known, probable production rates could be deduced and the scale of the threat realistically assessed.
Rowley and Atcherley had lunch in Berlin on 7 October with Colonel Friedrich Hanesse, of the air intelligence service, and frankly admitted that they were out to see as much as they could. Hanesse was ‘most amused’ and invited them to fly over to Rangsdorf (a civilian aerodrome, just south of Berlin) the next day and examine whatever interested them. They strolled into Tempelhof at 7.30 am on 8 October, wheeled their Gull out of its hangar, filled it with petrol, signed a receipt, and took off. No-one asked them who they were or where they were going. They flew all round Berlin – on their own, unchallenged – observing several large training bases and a new staff college.
On returning to Tempelhof, the Englishmen had lunch with a famous pilot, Ernst Udet, who had met Atcherley when both were performing at air shows in the United States. Rowley was privately astonished that Udet – great pilot, fine cartoonist and boon companion – should be in charge of Luftwaffe research and development. He was right to wonder, for during the next five years, until his suicide in November 1941, Udet grossly mismanaged his job. He told Rowley that he had recently condemned the Heinkel He 118 dive-bomber, preferring the Junkers Ju 87, which became the notorious ‘Stuka’. This was good news for Britain in 1940 because the Heinkel was a superior design, faster and more agile. Fighter Command would have found it much more difficult to destroy than the Stuka. Udet also killed the Heinkel 112 fighter, later re-modelled into a potentially superb fighter, the 100, which was never put into production.
The Englishmen spent a day at Damm fighter station, home to one of the squadrons of the Luftwaffe’s elite Richthofen group. They were shown everything: aircraft; cockpit equipment; re-fuelling methods and accommodation. This latter particularly impressed Rowley:
‘The German Air Staff evidently realise that the skilled and intelligent airman deserves something better than the old-style barracks. The kitchen was well-run and clean and we sampled the dinner which was excellent. In the dining-room, each airman has his own chair instead of a bench. The sleeping quarters were equally well thought out, with airmen four to a room, having their own wardrobes and plenty of space. Each block has its own sitting-room with wireless and generally the airmen are very much more comfortable than in our own squadrons.’
Next day, Rowley and Atcherley returned to Tempelhof, where they were encouraged to crawl all over the civil version of Heinkel He 111 and Junkers Ju 86 bombers and agreed that they were at least as efficient as their British equivalents. They were flown to Rostock, Heinkel’s factory, where they examined a brand-new Heinkel 111B-l bomber and doubted if there was ‘an airframe in England among all our latest bombers which looks better’. They noticed also that its armament consisted of three hand-held machine guns (very difficult to aim accurately) and calculated its likely speed, range and bomb load.
The Englishmen were then taken to Dessau, about seventy miles southwest of Berlin, to see an enormous Junkers factory. An American visitor assured them that ‘the whole American aviation industry could be lost inside the Junkers organisation’. They left Dessau in rather a haze, stunned by its size and efficiency. They regretted that Wilfrid Freeman (head of Research and Development in the Air Ministry) had not also taken the opportunity to visit Germany.
Rowley and Atcherley spent ten days in Germany and Rowley’s forty-four-page report, full of important information gathered by observant airmen who understood how air forces work, should have been a godsend to the Air Staff, but it was left unread. This negligence confirms the low opinion formed of the Air Ministry in the 1930s by Churchill, an opinion amply supported by subsequent historians. As one of them – I. B. Holley, Jr – wrote: ‘One is left aghast at the extent to which unchallenged assumptions permeated RAF official thinking, given that the very survival of the nation almost certainly hinged on the soundness of its air power.’ Rowley had taken the precaution of sending a summary of his report to Wing Commander Charles Torr Anderson – whom we shall meet presently – and he forwarded it to Churchill, arranging for him to meet Rowley.
In Rowley’s opinion, the Germans understood that ‘the power of an air force rests entirely on its striking force; that is the bombing aeroplane’. Army and navy co-operation, transports and even fighters were of far less importance. Here is the authentic Trenchard voice, but wiser Luftwaffe officers recognised the value of transport aircraft and paid close attention to the problems of using fighters and bombers in close support of ground forces. Dowding and Keith Park (his chief assistant) were also alert to the need for defensive fighters, but it would take years of effort by Tedder, Coningham and a handful of other officers to snap the RAF out of its Trenchardist fixation with strategic bombing and the war would be over before the RAF had its own fleet of modern transport aircraft. The Germans, Rowley believed, had grasped ‘one simple and commonsense fact which has so far escaped our Air Staff’: the need to concentrate on the mass production of a few proven weapons.
He had a point. ‘By October 1936,’ wrote Sebastian Ritchie, ‘no fewer than fifty-five different experimental designs were in progress and six more were under consideration.’ On the other hand, unless a net is cast widely, especially at a time of technical revolution, such big fish as the Avro Lancaster four-engined strategic bomber and the de Havilland Mosquito twin-engined all-purpose aircraft might not be caught. In later years, the Luftwaffe would suffer from a multitude of types, few of which were put into quantity production. Rowley would have been delighted to know that British manufacturers would soon leave Germany far behind.
In 1940 and 1941, the RAF received over 35,000 aircraft, the Luftwaffe just 22,000. In 1936, however, the RAF did not have ‘a single aeroplane in service,’ wrote Rowley, ‘which has the slightest chance of reaching Germany, dropping bombs, and getting home again.’ He was right to rate the Vickers Wellington highly, and right to regard the Armstrong Whitworth Whitley and the Handley Page Hampden as little more than ‘death traps’. But he greatly over-rated the value of the Bristol Blenheim, brought into service in November 1936, as a bomber. For its day, it had value as a fast short-range reconnaissance aircraft, but it was never more than a marginally useful bomber and then only if escorted by fighters.
There would be further exchanges between RAF and Luftwaffe officers during 1937, but no more casual get-togethers over a drink or three, no more unsupervised flights over the Nazi capital, and certainly no more solos in a German bomber, such as Atcherley enjoyed. The ‘Four-Year Plan’, to be implemented under Goering, was announced in Germany on 18 October 1936, just three days after the departure of the English visitors. That plan would end what Richard Overy called ‘the period of compromise’ and lead inexorably to the world’s most destructive war.
As a member of the Air Defence Research Sub-committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence since July 1935, Churchill had taken a close interest in every item of RAF equipment and the flow of detailed information to him from serving officers increased. Among them was Group Captain Lachlan MacLean, second in command of 3 (Bomber) Group, who sent him a long report in January 1937 on many RAF deficiencies, including inadequacies in aircraft, armament, pilot training, navigation and ground maintenance. ‘In brief, if we have a war forced on us in the next three, possibly five years, we shall be powerless to retaliate, at any rate in the air. A fact which ought to provide food for thought.’
In October 1937 MacLean wrote to Anderson about a forthcoming visit to Britain by the German air minister, Erhard Milch. He would be accompanied by Hans-Jürgen Stumpff (chief of the Luftwaffe General Staff) and by Ernst Udet. ‘How we have been let in for this visitation at the present moment,’ wrote MacLean, ‘is beyond imagination.’ Anderson forwarded this letter to Churchill, together with a copy of comments by Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt (head of Bomber Command) on this visit: the RAF, he said, will ‘have to comb the country in order to produce sufficient aircraft to get up any sort of show’, and few of them – as the Germans would readily deduce – could reach even the German coast with a bomb load. Milch and his colleagues would be allowed to inspect on the ground one example of each modern aeroplane, none of them fully operational. ‘This is a fair commentary,’ wrote MacLean, ‘on the state of equipment and the state of training!’
Churchill learned that fifty to sixty modern Gloster Gladiator fighters had been sent to China while RAF squadrons had to make do with older machines; that old anti-aircraft guns were being sold overseas before newer models were in production; and that fewer than twenty-odd anti-aircraft guns were all the defence available for Malta.
Roy Fedden, chief engineer of the Bristol Aeroplane Company, visited Germany twice in 1937 and wrote to Anderson in October: ‘I am absolutely shattered at the tremendous progress of aircraft and engine production in Germany, not from the technical aspect so much as in quantity and organisation.’ He sent a full report of what he had seen to the Air Ministry, where it was shelved, unread, just as Rowley’s report had been a year earlier. Once again it was Anderson who ensured that it reached Churchill.
All this information was sent by Churchill to Maurice Hankey (Cabinet Secretary) in a private letter, not naming his informants and hoping to win his support. ‘I remember how you played an essential part in saving the country over the convoy system,’ he told him, ‘and how when young officers came to you and told you the truth, against service rules, you saw that the seed did not fall on stony ground.’ Hankey’s eight-page reply, sent on 19 October 1937, reveals how deeply the spirit of Pangloss infused British governments during the 1930s: all is well, or if not, will be shortly. Critics may harm their careers, he wrote, and ‘their reputations before posterity’. Also, ‘there is almost invariably a perfectly sound explanation forthcoming’ for any problems and so on. ‘As a nation,’ he told Churchill, ‘we need “jollying” along rather than frightening.’ Churchill curtly rejected this rebuke which, long as it is, was silent on the substance of the criticisms offered.
MacLean, commanding a bomber group at the time of Munich, told Churchill in December 1938 that he was leaving the service. He could no longer stand ‘the methods of suppression and coercion’ used to silence criticism and ‘quench initiative or originality, should it in any degree run counter to orthodoxy’. Churchill forwarded this letter to Kingsley Wood (Secretary of State for Air), asking him to look into the affair because MacLean is ‘one of the ablest men I have met in the air force’. McLean did resign, but was recalled in August 1939, promoted to air commodore and commanded a bomber group in the Middle East, 1940-2, before leaving to form an operational training group in Canada in 1943.
Anderson was perhaps the most important of those RAF officers who communicated regularly with Churchill late in the 1930s and visited Chartwell several times. By then, it was known in the Air Ministry that he was ‘a frequent purveyor of information’ to Churchill, but no disciplinary action was taken against him.
Most of Anderson’s information concerned the lack of modern aircraft, failure to recruit men who were, or could become, skilled mechanics, wireless operators, etc., the need for more long-service officers, poor equipment (shortage of machine guns, bombs that failed to explode), inadequate training and sub-standard accommodation for officers and airmen. One point on which Anderson was most insistent was the shortage of skilled navigators: this lack would hit the RAF hard when war came. He also cited letters from Tedder (commanding in Singapore) about weaknesses there in training, organisation and the conduct of combined exercises.
In June 1937 Anderson had written to Churchill, confirming a report in The Times that the RAF’s total strength was 124 squadrons, but Anderson believed that 100 of those squadrons were only equipped with obsolete aircraft and that some of the squadrons currently being formed had only training-type aircraft. In August 1937, he wrote again, referring to Churchill’s comment on the ‘power of personal example and inspiration’ shown by the 1st Duke of Marlborough. ‘It is just that influence which is so disastrously absent from the air force at this moment’, but he named no names.
Anderson had been seriously wounded as a soldier during the Great War, but recovered and transferred to the RFC. He was granted a permanent RAF commission in 1919 and had a successful career, rising to the rank of group captain in 1940. He was personal assistant and air adviser to Beaverbrook, 1940-1942, ‘where he helped to establish the Lancaster bomber on a proper production basis’. He was invalided out of the RAF in 1942. In April 1975 Martin Gilbert interviewed him. He recalled Churchill saying: ‘I know what is troubling you. It is loyalty to the service and loyalty to the state. You must realise that loyalty to the state must come before loyalty to the service.’
Churchill was also greatly helped by Ralph Wigram, a senior member of the Foreign Office, who told him on 19 December 1935 that ‘it is idle’ to get into arguments about aircraft with the Air Ministry. The real test ‘is the capacity to manufacture machines and to train pilots in emergency’, and in these regards we are behind Germany. Churchill was greatly impressed by Wigram, who died suddenly on New Year’s Eve, 1937, aged only forty. ‘He was a charming and fearless man,’ he recalled, ‘and his convictions, based upon profound knowledge and study, dominated his being... Like other officials of high rank, he spoke to me with complete confidence.’
It was not only RAF officers and civil servants who confided in Churchill. Major Gilbert Myers, formerly a gunnery instructor in the RFC and currently an employee of General Aircraft at Hanworth aerodrome, Feltham, told him in November 1936 that of a contract placed by the Air Ministry for eighty-nine Hawker Fury fighters only twenty-three had actually been delivered in more than twelve months.
Without the information provided by these men, Martin Gilbert (Churchill’s official biographer) thought it would have been nearly impossible for him ‘to have aroused public opinion’ in opposition to the government’s ceaseless determination to avoid or stifle public debate. This information helped to prepare him for high office when war came in September 1939. But did his exaggerations help to inhibit effective responses to Hitler’s aggression?
In September 1937, Churchill wrote to Lord Linlithgow (Viceroy of India) about how ‘everyone is united in dealing with our deficiencies as fast as possible without interfering with the ordinary life of the country. This is a serious limitation.’ The RAF, wrote Churchill, was ‘but a fraction of the German, and I do not think we shall catch up. On the contrary, it would seem that 1938 will see Germany relatively stronger’ in the air and more powerful on the ground than the French army.
In February 1938 Hankey wrote to Cyril Newall, recently appointed CAS, telling him about ‘conversations’ the government was to have with Italy and Germany. The prospects of doing a deal were strong, as long as we do not give ‘parliamentary critics’ any grounds for supposing that we are ‘weakening’ in foreign affairs.
Churchill alleged in March 1938 that the RAF lacked ‘essential armament and equipment’, meaning that many aircraft had ‘no war value’ and British production was only one-third of Germany’s. He called for a debate, but Sir Horace Wilson advised Chamberlain on 10 March to refuse, which he did, ‘flatly and firmly’. On 13 March, Anderson revealed to Churchill the ‘rather misleading language’ in the latest White Paper and Air Estimates: ‘Both read well until one digs beneath the fine language.’ For example, many ‘pilots’ were only partly trained; there were not eleven fully-functioning flying training schools; and Cranwell had not been extended to full capacity.
Thus encouraged, Churchill persisted in his campaign to strengthen and modernise the RAF. With adequate fighter defences, air raid shelters and vigorous reprisal bombing, he said in May 1938, the damage done by enemy bombers could be kept to ‘manageable proportions’. In June he criticised ‘the almost total absence of defence’ for cities and ‘vulnerable points’ and declared that there were hardly any modern anti-aircraft weapons, whereas Germany had thousands. But the best defence against ‘air murder, for such I must judge the bombing of civilian populations’, was ‘an air force so numerous and excellent that it will beat the enemy’s air force in fair fight’.
The RAF’s fighters must attack bombers so that if one in three were destroyed raiding would cease; it must also bomb enemy airfields, military depots, railway junctions and the like.
‘I do not believe in reprisals upon the enemy civilian population. On the contrary, the more they try to kill our women and children, the more we should devote ourselves to killing their fighting men and smashing up the technical apparatus upon which the life of their armies depend. This is the best way of defending London, and of defending the helpless masses from the bestialities of modern war.’
Like John Steel, former head of Wessex Bombing Area, he did not say how civilian casualties could be avoided. Both Treasury and Cabinet saw in air power a means of saving money on expensive land campaigns. They would have been happier still if they had known, as Richard Overy has written, that Germany’s aircraft industry was ‘appallingly inefficient in the first years of the war’. No surprise there, given what we now know of Goering and Udet as air force commanders.
On a different air problem, Churchill had emphasised in May 1936 that ‘the integrity of operational command’ over the sea ‘is vital’. He therefore supported the Admiralty’s demand for control of its own aircraft. The Fleet Air Arm, he said, ‘is now vital’ to the safety of warships at sea and necessary for every form of action. From 1918 to 1937, the FAA was part of the RAF, which trained its pilots and ground crews. The RAF was responsible for the design and production of its aircraft, but from 1930 onwards Dowding (then responsible in the Air Ministry for research and development) had assured the Admiralty – which paid for them – that it was getting exactly what it asked for.
Admiral Sir Caspar John later admitted: ‘The Admiralty was not competent to say what it wanted and the Air Ministry was not competent to advise.’ Neither service gave serious thought to the quality and number of naval aircraft produced and took little notice of what other nations, the United States and Japan in particular, were designing for use at sea.
In May 1936 Churchill advocated handing the FAA over to the navy, but nothing was done. In April 1937 he repeated his plea: ‘All functions which require aircraft of any description... to be carried regularly in warships or in aircraft carriers naturally fall in the naval sphere.’ It was the duty of the FAA to protect the fleet, reconnoitre for it and protect merchant shipping, if necessary. Consequently, the Admiralty should operate it.
It was different for army/air co-operation, which were both land-based. Two months later, in July 1937, Chamberlain decided to return the FAA to Admiralty control, but he rejected its bid for control of shore-based aircraft. These remained with the recently-formed Coastal Command, a decision which Churchill thought wise. So too did Edward Ellington (then CAS). Trenchard – although long retired – objected vehemently, but was then powerless.
Looking back in 1976, Stephen Roskill thought the Air Staff had been ‘unjustifiably rigid in their indivisibility of air power argument’ and the government ought to have settled the argument no later than 1935. Herbert Richmond, a retired admiral and life-long opponent of independent air power, complained publicly as late as November 1942 that the Air Ministry had supplied the FAA with ineffective types before the war. Hugh Dowding responded promptly: ‘The Admiralty got precisely the types which they specified and demanded. They insisted on a plurality of roles for each type, and such hybrids as the torpedo-spotter-reconnaissance aircraft were foredoomed to inefficiency before pencil was laid to drawing board.’ Most admirals, he concluded, ‘were obsessed by the idea of fleet action and the role of naval aircraft was completely subordinated to this conception’.
Neither the FAA nor the Royal Navy nor Coastal Command were equipped or trained in joint operations to hunt or destroy U-boats in 1939. Thanks to the RAF’s obsession with the bomber (which proved a totally inadequate weapon when put to the test until 1942), the RAF’s contribution to the Battle of France, though gallant and determined, was of little value. It would be unable to cope effectively with U-boats until 1942. Fighter Command, under Dowding, successfully resisted Luftwaffe attack, but only when Tedder took command in the Middle East did the three services learn to co-operate with each other, and mercifully were never challenged there by more than a fraction of German power.
Some people hoped, others feared, that after a General Election in November 1935, Baldwin would bring Churchill into the Cabinet. However, his victory was so complete that he had no need to employ a man whom he feared politically, although admiring his skill as a writer, speaker and painter. As Beaverbrook told Churchill, in his usual cheerful way, ‘you’re finished now’.
In February 1936, Philip Cunliffe-Lister, later Lord Swinton, the new Secretary of State for Air, expressed concern that the RAF was falling behind Germany and his proposal for rapid expansion was accepted by the Cabinet. Later that month, Hankey told Warren Fisher (head of the Treasury): we must not bring in Churchill who would ‘upset the psychology of the whole machine’. He meant, presumably, that Churchill was not ‘one of us’ in backing Chamberlain.
To general surprise, Thomas Inskip, a lawyer, was appointed Minister of the Crown for the Co-ordination of Defence in March 1936. This cumbersome title was carefully chosen to pacify officers in all three services who feared that a Ministry of Defence would end their cherished independence. ‘The chief qualification of the new minister for this new post,’ wrote Geoffrey Smith (now editor of Flight), ‘seems to be that he is completely without knowledge or experience of any of the three fighting services and therefore must of necessity be impartial in dealing with the problems of co-ordinating their needs and their contributions to the common object of defence.’
Morton told Churchill on 24 April 1936 that the appointment of Inskip was ‘made in the hope that the international situation would so right itself that there would be no need for any hurry to re-arm, or perhaps even to rearm at all’. He then made a point that weighed heavily with Churchill. The government, Morton wrote, were persisting in making Britain’s weapons expensive ‘works of art’, rather than cheap and mass-produced as in Germany. Those unfortunate airmen who crewed Whitleys, Hampdens, Battles, Blenheims and Defiants would not have agreed that their aircraft were ‘works of art’ and they would soon learn that their German equivalents were superior. Like Churchill, Morton believed whatever suited him to believe.
Churchill seemed to some the man best qualified for Inskip’s position, but his appointment ‘might have been taken as a bellicose gesture’, to be avoided at all costs. Baldwin admired his ‘imagination, eloquence, industry, ability’, but distrusted his judgement. Even so, Churchill offered Inskip sound advice on 3 June 1936. Your job, he said, will be to co-ordinate strategy, settle inter-service quarrels, ensure that goods ordered are actually delivered and create a structure for war industry and its organisation. ‘It was my experience’ during the Great War, Churchill concluded, ‘that while people oppose all precautions in time of peace, the very same people turn round within a fortnight of war and are furious about every shortcoming. I hope it may not be yours.’
Among Churchill’s keenest advocates was James Garvin, editor of the Observer. He wrote to him in October 1936 to say that as long ago as 1 June 1935 he had asked Baldwin in writing ‘to make you Minister of Air and Goering’s opposite number. He refused and the whole of his third premiership has been a calamity.’
Inskip faced ceaseless manoeuvres by all three service heads to exact funds from the Treasury at each other’s expense. In January 1937 Churchill questioned the government’s decision ‘not to interfere with normal trade’ while carrying out its re-armament policy. Yet part of this normal trade, he told Inskip, was to supply machine tools for military equipment to Germany. It should be stopped at once. On 26 March he suggested that Inskip draw up a list of everything an air squadron should have, from pilots to spare parts, and drop in on a randomly-chosen squadron without warning and see for himself whether in fact it had everything it was supposed to have. This was a practice which Churchill followed throughout his own career, untroubled about ruffling feathers, civilian or military.
In December 1937 Inskip produced a memorandum (drafted for him by Hankey) in which he argued that the RAF’s role was not to deliver a knockout blow, but to resist it. This is ‘one of the most important and influential statements on the RAF in the 1930s’ because of the emphasis it gave to the need for more fighters: ‘home defence is our primary object.’
German aircraft, thought Inskip, would more easily be destroyed over Britain by fighters than by bombers attacking their bases in Germany. He also asked what attention was being given to aircraft replacement and maintenance in the event of war. Britain’s available resources, he argued, ‘should be directed to an increase in war potential rather than to a further increase in our first-line strength’. That meant more ‘shadow factories’ (built by private firms prepared to embark on military projects). Fighters were cheaper to build than bombers and that is an important reason why his arguments prevailed.
Inskip failed, however, to recommend ‘the compulsory drafting of labour and material from civil industry to those related to defence in order to accelerate the rearmament programme’. He won over the Cabinet, despite strenuous objections from the Air Ministry, which had not, at that time, a clear idea ‘as to what was operationally possible’ with the resources on hand: Trenchard and his successors had not done the homework necessary to give substance to years of easy generalisations. On 1 October 1938 fighter strength had been just over 400 aircraft, only seventy of which were Hurricanes; the rest were ‘obsolete’ or ‘obsolescent’ biplanes. Reserves were very low; factory output was quite unable to replace losses; there were too few airfields and operations rooms were as yet ill-equipped.
The unwelcome fact of weakness in the air would be driven home by Ludlow-Hewitt, appointed head of Bomber Command in September 1937. He reported to the Air Staff in November that his command was: ‘entirely unprepared for war, unable to operate except in fair weather, and extremely vulnerable both in the air and on the ground.’ The situation had not improved six months later in March 1938 when Anderson sent Churchill a copy of Bomber Command’s training report for 1937. ‘I cannot but regard the present low level of operational efficiency generally prevailing throughout the Command with concern and anxiety’, wrote Ludlow-Hewitt. He felt it wise, however, to end on an optimistic note: once we are fully equipped with modern aircraft, he assured his Air Staff readers, all will be well.
Churchill wrote to Clementine in January 1938 to tell her, with glee as well as concern, that Chamberlain (now Prime Minister) had informed some French politicians visiting London that Britain was making 350 aircraft per month. He was misinformed: the true figure, which Churchill got from Morton, was only half that. Consequently, there is ‘a certain reproaching’ going on between Chamberlain and the Air Ministry.
‘What happened was that poor Neville believed the lie that the Air Ministry circulated for public purposes and did not know the true figures. This gives you some idea of the looseness with which we are governed in these vital matters... It ought to make Neville think. He does not know the truth: and perhaps he does not want to.’
Hugh Dowding learned on 4 February 1937 that he had been passed over for the RAF’s highest office, chief of the Air Staff, which would fall vacant in September when Ellington retired. He would then be fifty-five, and it may well be argued that the service needed young blood at the top: it was in the throes of a technical revolution and certain to be a major weapon (for defence or offence) should there be another war. The argument was given added force by those who observed Ellington in office. By no means ‘young blood’ (he turned sixty in 1937), he was widely regarded by senior officers in all three services and by those civil servants and politicians obliged to work with him as a liability.
‘Uncle Ted’ was apparently kindly and fair-minded, but he had seen active service only as a soldier, had never flown in combat, rarely in peacetime and seemed lost in the Whitehall jungle. Three of the RAF’s most eminent officers– Trenchard, John Salmond and Freeman, all tigers at home there – openly despised him and a fourth, Slessor, would tell the head of the Air Historical Branch in 1975 that Ellington had been ‘a disaster’.
The nod went to Cyril Newall: by no means youthful either, for he was less than four years younger than Dowding. A far abler officer was Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt: shrewd, experienced and widely-respected. Trenchard, Salmond and Freeman soon became as hotly opposed to ‘poor old Cyril’ as they had been to ‘Uncle Ted’. One must note, however, that sweeping condemnation – except of each other – came easily to that particular trio.
Newall learned nothing from the Luftwaffe’s effective conduct of operations during the Spanish Civil War. He even asserted that its adroit support of ground forces was a gross misuse of air power. The Luftwaffe used that war to gain priceless combat experience, but Newall resisted demands for similar support of British and French soldiers when Germans invaded Western Europe. When they occupied the Channel coast and prepared to attack targets in southern England, he still believed it necessary to employ bombers against what he called strategic targets (factories, oil tanks, railway junctions) far behind the front lines.
Not surprisingly, strenuous efforts were made from May 1940 onwards to get rid of Newall. A memorandum composed by an Australian-born officer, Wing Commander Edgar Kingston-McCloughry (a member of the Air Ministry’s Directorate of War Organisation) and circulated anonymously, castigated him as ‘a weak link in the nation’s defence’; a man of ‘inadequate mental ability, limited practical experience, weakness of character and personality, and lack of judgement and foresight’. Everyone who mattered read it and no-one leapt to his defence, although Slessor praised him in his postwar memoirs. Noble Frankland thought McCloughry ‘a man of great ability, deep insights and ideas which were much in advance of his time’, while admitting that he had ‘a passion for intrigue or, as he would have put it, constructive criticism’. McCloughry remains one of very few RAF officers to have made a significant mark as an author, with four valuable studies of aviation history to his credit.
‘Except possibly for Margaret Thatcher,’ wrote Ernest May, ‘no peacetime British Prime Minister has been so strong-willed, almost tyrannical’, as Neville Chamberlain. He won for himself an influence over the media that ‘if not quite on a par with that of Goebbels in Germany, exceeded that of any contemporary head of government in any other democratic nation’. Warren Fisher, his closest adviser, was Permanent Secretary of the Treasury and head of the Civil Service from 1919 to 1939. In his view, Britain’s strategic priorities should firstly be the RAF (including civil defence), secondly the army, with naval precautions for Far Eastern defence a distant third.
From 1933, wrote Peden: ‘Fisher had devoted himself to persuading his political masters to re-arm, and, down to 1938, his influence in this direction was more important than that of much more publicised advocates of rearmament, even Churchill.’ Chamberlain, Fisher and the chiefs of staff all understood that the empire, although impressive in extent, offered little immediate support in opposing German aggression, although it might be a vital source of manpower and raw materials if Britain was not quickly conquered.
No British politician could match Chamberlain in the smooth conduct of business, but he detested criticism, expected admiration and as David Margesson (Chief Whip of the Conservative Party) wrote, he ‘engendered personal dislike among his opponents to an extent almost unbelievable’. Chamberlain died in November 1940 and Churchill spoke eloquently in Parliament about his merits. On 22 June 1941, however, he revealed his true opinion to Jock Colville: ‘The narrowest, most ignorant, most ungenerous of men.’
Chamberlain asked the chiefs of staff in March 1938, when Hitler united Germany and Austria, to report on the ‘military implications’ of going to war in defence of Czechoslovakia. The consequences, they replied, ‘could well lead to an ultimate defeat’. The chiefs were ‘most alarmed’, wrote Peter Kemp, about Britain’s weakness in the air: ‘intensive propaganda in the years between the wars had raised an unholy fear of the bomber and its power of destruction.’
Edmund Ironside, head of the British Army, had already written late in 1937 that the Cabinet, ‘are terrified now of a war being finished in a few weeks by the annihilation of Great Britain. They can see no other kind of danger than air attack and discount all other dangers.’ At the height of the Munich Crisis, a year later, he wrote: ‘We cannot expose ourselves now to a German attack. We simply commit suicide if we do... What a mess we are in.’
‘Like Chatham,’ wrote Chamberlain to his sister Ida on 12 March 1939, ‘I know that I can save this country and I do not believe that anyone else can.’ Three days later, the Germans occupied Prague and the rest of Czechoslovakia. From then on, Chamberlain began to realise that his triumph at Munich had been hollow, but he made a desperate situation far worse at the end of March by offering a guarantee that Britain could not possibly fulfill: to defend Poland if she were attacked by Germany. France immediately supported Britain. Romania and Greece were also guaranteed.
Admiral Chatfield (formerly First Sea Lord who succeeded Inskip as Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence in January 1939) told the Cabinet that these guarantees were merely words and all three chiefs of staff agreed, but none of them dared to contradict the Prime Minister, not even privately. By July, however, Churchill’s day was coming. Reginald Barnes wrote to his ‘dear old pal’ on the 4th. ‘Now, our rather slow movers in command, having gone rather more than the whole hog, and burnt their last remaining boat, seem to be realising at last that you might be of some help to them... I pray I shall see you in the Cabinet soon.’
In 1939 the army had only two divisions of fully-trained troops in Britain because government policies had concentrated on bombers and fighters for the RAF since 1934 and there was no tactical air arm trained and equipped to support ground forces. A weak Coastal Command remained part of the RAF even after the FAA was reluctantly returned to Admiralty control in 1937.
The Air Ministry remained responsible for the design and construction of naval aircraft and the Admiralty did not press hard enough to modernise or strengthen its air arm. Britain lacked the military strength in 1939 even to deter a far more rational enemy than Hitler. Chamberlain and his chiefs of staff recognised the severe limits imposed on Britain’s actions: ‘Far-flung interests and obligations to be defended against the threefold threat of Germany, Italy and Japan; the practical difficulties in responding to each specific initiative by the dictators; the slow pace of re-armament imposed by our fragile economic recovery; and the hindrance of anti-war opinion in the country.’