Polling day for a General Election in Britain, held while war still raged in the east, was 5 July. It was the first for a decade – Hitler’s onslaught prevented the one due in 1940 – so nobody under thirty had ever voted before. Results were not to be declared until the 26th in order to allow the votes of nearly 3,000,000 men and women serving in the armed forces abroad to be collected and counted. A Conservative victory, with Churchill remaining Prime Minister, was widely expected, even by members of the Labour Party. He had addressed enthusiastic crowds in many places and told Colville that he had no doubts about the result. ‘I said that I would agree, if it were a presidential election.’ Although Tedder was keen to succeed Portal as head of the RAF, he had good reason to believe that Churchill would insist on another officer.
During the evening of 26 July, Tedder learned, to his delighted surprise, that the people of Britain had overwhelmingly rejected the Conservative Party, though not Churchill personally. The notorious trio of Churchill’s close cronies – Beaverbrook, Bracken and Cherwell – were also out of public life.
Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party, would become Prime Minister. Unlike Churchill, he used words sparingly, his temper was reliable, he lived a normal life, did not make unreasonable demands on others and did not regard himself either as a war lord or a master of all other skills. He was, in short, a man for Tedder, who was promoted to five-star rank as a marshal of the RAF in September. Among many congratulations was a most welcome letter from Spaatz, soon to succeed Arnold as head of the American Army Air Forces. ‘I know that never will I have a post similar in happiness,’ he wrote on the 18th, ‘to that which I had under you and Ike in North Africa, England and Europe.’ Tedder replied at once, looking ahead as always: ‘Yes, it was a good team, and I hope it has done something even more permanent than winning the war.’
Tedder succeeded Portal as CAS on 1 January 1946: or ‘Chief Aunt Sally’, as he extended the initials in an address to the Cambridge University Air Squadron in May 1949. One friend, Air Chief Marshal Sir Ronald Ivelaw-Chapman, wrote of him locked in the ‘whirligig of Whitehall’, head of the RAF in ‘the House of Shame’, as Air Commodore Frederick Rainsford described the Air Ministry. Tedder was also elevated to the peerage as a baron, although not as a viscount. Unlike all his successors, however, he was not appointed for a fixed term. He would remain CAS until he chose to retire.
‘I am glad to see you where you are,’ wrote Harris, late of Bomber Command on 2 January 1946. He was to lunch with Churchill on the 4th and intended to have ‘a final row with the old boy’ over the award of nothing more than the defence medal to members of Bomber Command, a scandal for which Churchill – anxious about his postwar reputation – was responsible. The ex-Prime Minister was acutely sensitive to criticism, once Hitler was safely dead, that perhaps Allied bombing had been too destructive.
In another letter to Tedder, on 6 January, Harris expressed his displeasure that Montgomery and Alexander had been made viscounts, ‘and you, as their superior, a baron. Shades of Reims and the attempt to oust you.’ Harris left England for Cape Town and published Bomber Offensive in 1947, an account that Tedder thought full of ‘bitter and unbalanced comments’ he told Trenchard on 20 January 1947. ‘I know there is good stuff in it, and it ought to have been a great book, worthy of a great commander and a great command. Unfortunately, it is not.’
From June 1946 Tedder was chairman of the chiefs of staff committee. Brooke had been anxious to retire once Hitler’s Germany had been destroyed and perversely selected Alexander as his successor, an officer whom he knew to be inadequate for so demanding a role. Churchill persuaded Brooke to stay on for another year and sent Alexander to Canada as governor-general. Brooke did not support his vice-chief, Sir Archibald Nye, who ‘knew how to handle the chiefs and Whitehall with a lightness of touch that Montgomery did not possess’ and so cleared a path to the top for his protégé. Portal and Andrew Cunningham did not oppose Montgomery’s proposed appointment, which took effect in June 1946.
From that month, Tedder took up his position and was thus brought into regular contact with the War Office and the Admiralty. Tedder, smirked Montgomery, was as bad as Eisenhower: holding conferences ‘to collect ideas. I held them to give orders.’ Montgomery’s dictatorial approach, as even Nigel Hamilton admitted, was ‘often based on inadequate advice or hasty judgement, and would be a distinct liability, casting an unfortunate shadow’ over his postwar career. Harmony would not be restored until November 1948 when Attlee found Montgomery a job outside England.
There were actually many points of agreement between Montgomery and Tedder. They concurred, for example, that all modern military operations were in fact combined army/air operations. Montgomery did not claim that the army commander should direct all air forces working over land. On the contrary, he thought air power must be under centralised air control, within the framework of an agreed army/air plan. They agreed on many issues: the shortage of regular recruits for the armed forces; the lack of adequate, modern fighting equipment for them; the adverse effects of reliance on National Service men; the poor pay and living conditions of officers and men and the inept performance of A. V. Alexander as Minister of Defence.
Where Montgomery disagreed with Tedder, his case was usually strong. In February 1948, for instance, while Montgomery accepted that Britain’s main weapon in a war with the Soviet Union would be air power, he argued that British troops should be sent immediately to the Continent for three practical reasons. Firstly, to hold positions on the Rhine until American support arrived. Secondly, to establish and protect air bases from which the Allies could mount counter-attacks. And thirdly, to prevent enemy forces from launching bomber or rocket attacks on British targets from bases close to the Channel coast.
Tedder believed, with Admiral John Cunningham (a cousin of the wartime Cunninghams), that British forces would be swiftly swept aside and that effective counter-attack could only come from secure bases in the Middle East. Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin agreed with Montgomery, Prime Minister Attlee with Tedder, but even today no-one can say who was ‘right’. The issues were grave and it was entirely proper that the soldier and the airman should offer their political masters stark alternatives rather than fudged compromises. Attlee and Bevin were experienced politicians, used to dealing with colleagues who detested each other.
The notorious rift between the chiefs in the period June 1946 to November 1948 had little effect on either the major policies of the British government or the wider world in which those policies were framed. Had the chiefs been blood brothers, Britain’s dire financial situation throughout those years would not have improved one iota. The chiefs had no impact, for example, on the McMahon Act of August 1946 to prevent Anglo-American collaboration in atomic research or the Truman Doctrine to contain Soviet aggression or the Marshall Plan to assist west European economic recovery or worsening relations with the Soviet Union that led to the Berlin Airlift.
The arrival of Admiral Sir Bruce Fraser in September 1948 and Slim as his fellow chiefs of staff in November greatly pleased Tedder, but did nothing to hurry along the union of western powers resulting in the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in April 1949. The chiefs were mere observers of the Soviet Union’s test of its first nuclear device in August 1949 and the proclamation of a People’s Republic in China in October. Their four main concerns were the defence of Britain and Western Europe, the defence of sea links with the rest of the world, the retention of a firm hold on the Middle East, to safeguard oil supplies and provide essential bases for offensive action in the event of Soviet aggression, and to retain control of Singapore and the Malay peninsula.
Above all these concerns was the atomic bomb. A possibility of extinguishing life on earth now existed, at the moment in the hands of a friendly power, but another power, growing less so by the day, was seeking to build its own bomb, at great expense but with the help of successful espionage. Britain’s safety, as well as her global influence, seemed at risk, but the American government was no longer prepared to share its knowledge or permit further joint research with British scientists, partly because of that espionage.
Tedder therefore supported Attlee’s decision in January 1947 to develop nuclear weapons and planning began, under his direction, for a British jet-bomber force capable of carrying them. He thought the American stance would change as relations with the Soviet Union worsened. The thoughts of Washington and Whitehall would then turn to the restoration of long-range bomber bases in eastern England. Spaatz was thinking along the same lines, so too were his able younger colleagues, Hoyt S. Vandenberg and Lauris Norstad. A problem anticipated is one more easily solved, so the former wartime allies put their heads together during the summer of 1946.
During June and July, Tedder and Spaatz made a secret agreement of long-lasting significance. Almost from the day of their return from Moscow in May 1945, they had shared concerns about the strength of Soviet forces, Western Europe’s vulnerability and the speed of demobilisation in both Britain and the United States. What was to be done?
The RAF’s latest bomber, the Avro Lincoln, was an ‘unenterprising’ design, with an ‘unremarkable’ performance, utterly incapable of reaching important targets in the Soviet Union from eastern England. The superior Boeing B-29 Superfortress had the range, but could not operate from runways in that region unless they were lengthened and strengthened. Tedder began this work at Marham and Sculthorpe in Norfolk and at Lakenheath in Suffolk that would turn Britain into an unsinkable aircraft carrier for American bombers.
The first official visit, lasting a week, began on 9 June 1947 when nine B-29s arrived at Marham from Frankfurt; a total of 150 men were aboard, many of them wartime veterans, and Tedder arranged for a host of journalists and cameramen to be present. In return, he sent sixteen Lincolns of the famous 617 (Dambusters) Squadron to the United States to help celebrate the first Air Force Day, 1 August 1947.
American air commanders knew that the B-29 was nearing the end of its life as a carrier of atomic bombs and that even an improved version, the B-50, would not last long. Crew training, especially in accurate navigation at night, needed to be improved and secure, fully-equipped bases were needed in the Middle East as well as in Britain if Soviet aggression was to be deterred or answered. During 1947, Tedder learned that even Spaatz and his most senior colleagues found it extremely difficult to extract information from the Atomic Energy Commission, formed in January and holding the absurd belief that its work was ‘a sacred trust’, taking precedence even over the ‘military requirements’ of the United States.
On 17 and 18 July 1948, sixty B-29s landed at three specially-prepared airfields in East Anglia. It was the first time that the United States had stationed combat aircraft in another sovereign state in peacetime. None of them were modified to carry atomic bombs, all of which remained in the United States. Soon the B-29s were rotating through England on ninety-day tours and a major depot for repair and maintenance work was opened for these and for transport aircraft at Burtonwood, east of Liverpool.
Vandenberg, who had succeeded Spaatz in July 1948, was concerned about ‘the exposed position’ of his bombers and asked Tedder if American soldiers could be sent to England, with their own anti-aircraft guns, and engineers to improve the airfields. Tedder agreed wholeheartedly and began negotiations that concluded in March 1949 with the purchase of 194 B-29s to replace the Lincolns.
Friendly relations only reached so far and Britain was excluded from American thinking regarding the possible use of atomic weapons, nor was Tedder able to obtain, for the RAF, the superior B-50 or get the B-29s leased or loaned. He realised, more clearly than most other Britons in public life, that the postwar relations of the United States and Britain were those of master and man, as they had been since 1941. He supposed, however, that if war threatened between the West and the Soviet Union the best available American bombers and fighters would then be sent to England and the Middle East. Although the deal provoked adverse comment from the British aircraft industry and in the House of Commons, it went ahead. The first of eight squadrons of ‘Washingtons’, as the British named these B-29s, was formed in June 1950 and they survived until March 1954.
Tedder strongly influenced the conception and creation of the RAF’s jet-bomber force, though why he – or anyone else in authority – supposed that Britain could afford or need three different types is impossible to say. He would be long out of office before such bombers became operational, but they supposedly gave his successors a stronger hand to play in dealing with the Americans. The Vickers Valiant appeared in May 1951, followed by the Avro Vulcan and the Handley Page Victor in August and December 1952. They only reached squadron service between 1955 and 1958: the years of maximum danger, Tedder thought, of war with the Soviet Union.
At the end of the European war in May 1945, the victorious allies had divided Germany into four ‘Zones of Occupation’, but Berlin – although deep inside the Soviet zone – was also quartered into four ‘Sectors of Occupation’. The Soviet Union insisted that American, British or French access to Berlin was a privilege, not a right; that supplies of food, fuel, medicines, clothing and manufactures for the three western sectors must all come from the western zones; and that free movement of people or goods between the western and eastern divisions of Germany or Berlin could not be permitted.
The Western Allies gradually became aware that only economic revival, in which Germany must play a leading part (despite French reluctance to help an old enemy), would permit the creation of armed forces strong enough, in Western Europe, to resist the danger of invasion by a new enemy, the Soviet Union. They therefore decided in March 1948 to link their zones into a common economic unit and introduce a new currency: clear indications that they intended to strengthen their capacity to resist the Soviet Union.
Vehement Soviet protests culminated in the closure, on 23 June, of western access to Berlin. General Lucius D. Clay, the American military governor, proposed to fight a land convoy into the city. This proposal appalled Ernest Bevin, Tedder and his fellow chiefs in Whitehall. Clay was persuaded that the British and Americans should use their unquestioned right of aerial access to fly supplies into Berlin.
No-one supposed that a city of more than 2,000,000 people could be supplied indefinitely by air: Berlin’s distance from the west, too few aircraft, too few landing grounds, uncertain weather, smoke from industries and private homes were all severe handicaps. But the airlift was a triumph, under the inspired guidance of an American airman, General William H. Tunner, who created a ‘steady rhythm’, as he later wrote, of loading, flying and unloading, ‘constant as the jungle drums’. He had a British airman, Air Vice-Marshal John Merer, as his deputy and they worked together until Stalin accepted defeat in May 1949, but flights continued for another four months to build up stocks for the coming winter.
Gail S. (‘Hal’) Halverson had the idea of dropping tons of ‘candy’ (sweets and chocolate) by miniature parachute for the children who stood all day in the rubble at the end of the runway. They deserved any candy they got. As Ann Tusa said, the food delivered was nasty: dehydrated potatoes; vegetables; dried soups, all of them barely edible. Near the end of the airlift, some Berliners ‘tasted cheese for the first time since 1945’, yet they accepted what they got and few responded to Soviet blandishments, nor did Stalin allow radio jamming, static balloons or aerial ‘incidents’ to impede the airlift. He expected ‘General Winter’ to wreck the airlift in spite of all that Allied courage, ingenuity and determination could do, but for once the winter of 1948-1949 was mild.
The British share of all the cargo delivered was less than one quarter, but that share included nearly half the food and most of the liquid fuel. The airlift demanded the most precise flying by thousands of American and British airmen, day and night, imposing a fearful strain on everyone involved, on the ground or in the air. Mick Ensor’s experience may stand as an example. He was a New Zealander serving with the RAF who flew exactly 200 airlift missions, eighty-six of them wholly or partly in darkness, between Wunstorf and Gatow. ‘In the beginning,’ he later reflected, ‘God created Heaven and Earth. Then he created the Berlin Airlift to cure keen pilots of their sinful desire to fly aeroplanes.’
That airlift was the ‘finest hour’ of Anglo-American air power in peacetime and greatly helped Tedder’s constant efforts to keep alive a partnership born in wartime. The airlift’s amazing success confirmed what many British and American officers had always preached: that the particular strength of air forces lay in their capacity for rapid response in maximum strength at an identified key point. By the time Stalin gave up, the United States, Canada, Britain, Iceland, Denmark, Portugal and Italy were allied; a West German republic was about to emerge and several British airfields were being actively readied for American bombers that were nuclear-capable.
On 22 May 1948, some Egyptian Spitfires attacked an airfield at Ramat David, where RAF forces were covering a British withdrawal from Haifa. Several RAF Spitfires and three DC-3s were destroyed or damaged, before the Egyptians could be shot down or driven away. The Jews were currently forming their own air force and they too attacked and destroyed RAF aircraft – perhaps in error – while defending the newly-formed state of Israel against their Arab enemies.
Tedder backed the decision of his local commanders not to escalate these tragic incidents into outright war. ‘It is ironic,’ wrote Bruce Williamson, ‘that during the Israeli War of Independence, the RAF was attacked by both protagonists... the almost inevitable result of getting in the middle of someone else’s war.’
Tedder retired on 31 December 1949 and next day began his duties as a governor of the BBC. Only ten weeks later, on 14 March 1950, he reluctantly agreed to a request from Prime Minister Attlee to accept a year’s appointment as head of a joint-services mission in Washington and Britain’s first representative on NATO’s ‘Standing Group’, a newly-formed executive committee. Attlee’s decision to re-activate Tedder was justified by the response of Omar Bradley, head of the US Army and chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. ‘I consider Marshal Tedder one of the United Kingdom’s most outstanding men’, he assured Louis Johnson, Secretary of Defense, on 17 March. ‘I am glad we are going to have him with us.’ Lauris Norstad, head of US Air Forces in Europe, agreed. Tedder, he wrote:
‘has a very strong position with Americans, both in and out of the military establishment and he has, of course, the esteem and affection of his wartime associates. The remarkable thing is that he is not considered a foreigner when in this country. We regard him as one of the family.’
Then, to everyone’s surprise in Whitehall and Washington, came an outbreak of war. Not in central Europe or the Middle East, as many half-expected, but in Korea. By June 1950, a communist state existed in the north and an officially democratic republic in the south. When North Korean forces invaded South Korea on the 25th, it was widely supposed to be a Moscow-inspired attempt to draw Anglo-American forces to the Far East while the Soviet Union ‘destabilised’ the politically-shaky states of Western Europe: in particular, France, Italy and Greece, where there were large and well-disciplined communist parties.
Although President Truman and his advisers recognised this danger, they believed they must act in support of South Korea. Britain was anxious to help, but always had an eye on her interests in Malaya, Hong Kong and the new People’s Republic of China as well as the Nationalist state in Taiwan. Tedder was immediately involved in top-level discussions and later, on Attlee’s instructions, would support Truman and Bradley in opposing the attempt by a famous general, Douglas MacArthur, commanding US forces in the Far East, to escalate the conflict. Throughout the rest of his year in Washington, Tedder served as an important link between American and British services, but he was determined to escape, resisting pressure to stay on, and did so at the end of April 1951. He was then nearly sixty-one and had then worn uniform for more than thirty-five years. It was, he thought, enough.
Slessor succeeded Tedder as CAS on 1 January 1950 and throughout his three years in that office was deeply concerned with the development of a British atomic bomb, long-range aircraft to deliver it at need, the development of air-to-air and ground-to-air missiles, new fighters and an improved radar reporting system. He was faced with constant pressure in Germany, the Middle East, Korea and Malaya in partnership with NATO and American forces. Churchill returned to power in October 1951 and ruled that Britain’s defence policy must be revised.
He adopted the result, a ‘Global Strategy Paper’, largely written by Slessor. It became ‘perhaps the best-known, the most often discussed, and also the most highly-regarded defence document of the post-war period’. Its basic themes were the need to win the Cold War, to complement American nuclear strength and to cut British commitments overseas. Even so, whatever Churchill or Slessor had in mind, the so-called ‘special relationship’ remained that of master and man, for American power was so much greater than that of Britain. ‘American imperialism,’ Slessor complained in September 1952, ‘has become far more intolerant and selfish than British imperialism at its ripest.’
Slessor ended his career on 1 January 1953, and was not awarded a peerage, even by a Conservative government. Churchill, he wrote, ‘was not the easiest of men to work under and he did not particularly care for me’. His last careful, heart-felt letter to Churchill, urging him to keep Britain strong in the air and not utterly dependent on the United States, was written on his last day in office. It was not even acknowledged, yet in his memoirs – published in May 1956 – this archest of grovellers described Churchill, in his usual extravagant language when discussing important persons, as ‘by a long chalk the greatest Englishman that ever lived’.
In 1957 Tedder referred to the fuss currently being made over the publication of an edition of Brooke’s wartime diaries. Brooke was by then Lord Alanbrooke and the edition (by Arthur Bryant) was in fact inadequate as subsequent scholars have revealed. Bad as it was, the edition was vehemently criticised by civil servants and politicians who regarded as ‘indecent exposure’ arguments over the conduct of strategy and operations. Mistakes, it was argued, should be deeply buried, far from the prying eyes of historians and those citizens who wish to know what went on while they were enduring a global war. This secrecy would, of course, ensure that those mistakes would re-surface if or when another war loomed.
The idea of making his own ‘indecent exposure’ was taking shape in Tedder’s mind, and correspondence with Liddell Hart encouraged him. Glowing reviews of an official British account of the Normandy campaign (by Major L. F. Ellis) ‘staggered’ Liddell Hart, as he told Tedder in December 1962, because it slavishly followed Montgomery’s opinions and actions. Tedder was not surprised. ‘I wonder if it has struck you,’ he wrote to Liddell Hart in March, ‘that there is a remarkable likeness between Monty and Winston in their respective attitudes towards history?’ In other words, each of them determined, so far as lay within his own power, to make sure that ‘his story’ should record his own version of events rather than ‘history’. Tedder thought the facts about Churchill’s conduct would eventually become known, but Montgomery – operating at a much lower level of importance – had the record of his actions so ‘skillfully adjusted at the time that I see little, if any, prospect of the truth being disentangled from the story’. Not only ‘adjusted’: it is now known that when Montgomery was head of the British Army he ‘removed’ many documents from the War Office and destroyed some.
In March 1963, Liddell Hart sent Tedder some copies of a paper he had written in 1942 entitled ‘Points Supplementary to an Estimate of Winston Churchill’. In 1938, Churchill had declared that aircraft would not be a danger to ‘properly-equipped modern war fleets, whether at sea or lying in harbour... This, added to the undoubted obsolescence of the submarine as a decisive war weapon, should give a feeling of confidence and security, as far as the seas and oceans are concerned, to the western democracies.’ Churchill also declared in 1938: ‘Those who know France well, or have long worked with French statesmen and generals, realise the immense latent strength of France’; the French army is ‘the most perfectly-trained and faithful mobile force in Europe’.
As many historians have written, especially in the years since detailed information about Churchill’s entire career became available, he was often carried away by his fluent pen and delight in resounding words. His strategic grasp did not extend beyond offensive action regardless of tedious concerns about supply and reinforcement. Everyone agrees, however, about his endless energy, powerful personality and exceptional capacity for leadership, especially in the blackest days of the war. Above all, Churchill saw in Hitler a man who must be destroyed, a man more deadly than any natural disaster that had hitherto struck this planet.
Tedder was helped in writing his memoirs by many former colleagues and by David Dilks, a young scholar who later became an eminent historian. Zuckerman provided detailed information, particularly on the transportation plan. On this subject, Tedder ran into trouble with ‘someone in the Cabinet Office’, who tried to insist – as is instinctive in British officialdom – that a bland summary of conclusions should take the place of a detailed account of who said what to whom. That was one battle won by Tedder, with the help of Dilks and the Air Historical Branch.
Tedder’s book, entitled With Prejudice, was published by Cassell in September 1966 and widely reviewed. An anonymous reviewer in the Economist made the point that Tedder scorned most politicians and yet he was himself ‘one of the war’s must successful politicians’, in that he so often survived even Churchill’s wrath. Across the Atlantic, Alfred Goldberg noted that Tedder had never been dazzled by Churchill and lacked the ‘intensely egocentric’ focus that so grievously marred the writings of Montgomery and Brooke. Only Slim, among British commanders, had qualities comparable to Tedder’s: ‘He, too, was successful in leading Allied forces... and in triumphing over terribly ambiguous command arrangements.’ One exceptional achievement, thought Goldberg, was to insist on the bombing of French and Belgian railway networks before D-Day against the political (not military) objections of Churchill. ‘Great credit should also be granted to Roosevelt for his unflinching trust in the responsible military commanders at that critical moment.’