Churchill

The history of technological innovation is filled with examples of new technologies whose full implications or best uses were only slowly recognized. Thomas Watson of IBM famously said there would be little market for home desktop computers. Even as recently as 2010, many technology seers thought there would be limited public appetite for tablet computers like the iPad.

Churchill was always far ahead of his contemporaries in anticipating how new technologies would be used, and what effect they would have on social life and warfare. For example, when advancements in submarine design in the first decade of the twentieth century spurred more construction (especially by Germany), most naval experts thought submarines would be used exclusively for coastal and harbor defense of the homeland and to break the close blockades that were the specialty of the Royal Navy. Churchill was nearly alone in recognizing that torpedo-equipped German submarines would become a potent offensive weapon, ranging far into the open sea, interdicting vital shipping, and posing a threat to the British surface fleet. Churchill warned of this possibility as early as 1912, but the naval establishment dismissed his unorthodox prediction.

The story of air power—with whose development Churchill was closely involved—is similar. Indeed he deserves to be considered the first political prophet of air power. Not only was he the first parliamentarian or cabinet minister to fly a plane, he became the first head of government to own a pilot’s license.

The motorcar never replaced horses in the affections of the polo-playing former cavalry officer. Yet curiously, as a young man, Churchill became fascinated with the possibilities of flight that opened up in 1903 with the Wright brothers’ feat at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

On February 25, 1909, Churchill, as president of the Board of Trade, told the cabinet, “aviation would be most important in the future” and recommended “we should place ourselves in communication with Mr. [Orville] Wright and avail ourselves of his knowledge.”

A year later, when the Daily Mail asked for funds to back the first transatlantic flight, Churchill provided a check for ten thousand pounds. This made possible the flight of two English aviators from Newfoundland to Ireland in 1910, many years before Lindbergh’s more celebrated solo flight.

By contrast, that same year General Foch of France voiced the opinion that prevailed throughout the military when he derided the use of airplanes in battle: “It’s just a sport—the aeroplane—it is a zero in war.”

As First Lord of the Admiralty, on November 10, 1913, Churchill chose air power as his subject for a speech at the prestigious Lord Mayor’s Banquet at the Guildhall in London:

I have come here tonight to tell you that it is not only in naval aeroplanes that we must have superiority. I would venture to submit to this great company assembled that the enduring safety of this country will not be maintained by force of arms unless over the whole sphere of aerial development we are able to make ourselves the first nation.... [C]ommand and perfection will be indispensable elements not only in naval strength but in national security.

A half year later, as tensions between Britain and Imperial Germany heightened, Churchill was already taking steps to make a flying service an integral part of the Royal Navy, while the War Office was drawing up contingency plans for dispatching men on horseback to France.

At a dinner at the Savoy Hotel, Churchill told his audience: “This new art and science of flying is surely one in which Great Britain ought to be able to show itself, I do not say supreme in numbers, but supreme in quality.... One cannot doubt that the development of the flying art... must in the future exercise a potent influence... on the military destinies of states.”

Churchill practiced what he preached. Two years before, in the Admiralty, he had founded the Royal Navy Air Service—a forerunner of the Royal Flying Corps, and later the Royal Air Force. (The United States Air Force, by contrast, originated in World War II with the Army Air Corps.)

Because of Churchill’s endeavors, Britain became the first nation to arm a plane with a machine gun and the first to launch an airborne torpedo. Churchill even ordered a test version of a helicopter. It was Churchill who gave to the English language the word “seaplane” and coined the word “flight” to designate the deployment of four aircraft in the skies. Another phrase born of his fertile pen was “the fog of war,” through which only planes could pierce from their sky view above.

His responsibility in command, as well as his curiosity, impelled him to become a pilot himself. His first trip in a seaplane was in 1912. At that time the danger of death accompanied any flight, but of course, the risk only added to the thrill of adventure for Churchill. The next week he demanded his first lesson as a pilot. The following day his instructor was killed while piloting the same machine.

A month later, Churchill piloted a new type of seaplane off Southampton and landed safely. Yet the same plane crashed a week later. Members of Parliament then communicated to the prime minister the folly of a cabinet minister jeopardizing his life by his flying ventures. “I regret,” answered Asquith, “that valuable lives should be exposed to needless risks, but I have no reason to suppose that I have any such persuasive influence on the Right Honourable Member.”

Neither did his terrified wife. Churchill wrote from Eastchurch Naval Flying Center after going up three times. “Darling—We have had a very jolly day in the air.” She wired her alarm ending, “I hope my telegram hasn’t vexed you, but please be kind and don’t fly any more just now.”

Her plea was disregarded. In 1913, he was going up about ten times a day. The naval pilots were as fearful as his wife. Thirty-two was regarded as the top age of a pilot, and Churchill was then thirty-eight.

After Clementine’s frantic urging, Churchill’s closest friend, F. E. Smith, wrote, “Why do you do such a foolish thing as fly repeatedly? Surely it’s unfair to your family, your career, and your friends.”

One airman Churchill ordered to go up with him as co-pilot arrived a bit late for their afternoon flight. “Where have you been?” growled Churchill. “Making a will,” replied the man cheerfully.

If Churchill had robust faith in the future offensive use of the airplane, he had little faith in the dirigible. The Germans were building a fleet of Zeppelins, but Churchill resisted pleas to mount a counterforce in Britain. “I rate the Zeppelin much lower as a weapon of war than anyone else,” he responded. “I believe that this enormous bladder of combustible and explosive gas would prove easily destructible.”

When World War I broke out, Churchill ordered his seaplanes to bomb the Zeppelin air sheds at Cologne and Friedrichshaven. The dirigibles were useful for observing British defenses and deployment of troops, and he made sure that a lot of them would never take to the skies. At the same time, his seaplanes bombed to smithereens the U-boat bases at Zeebrugge. The War Office, which had doubted the efficacy of air power, commended the bombing as “sound and justified.”

Churchill, in 1917, was appointed by the new prime minister, David Lloyd George, to the new position of secretary of state for munitions and supplies, as well as secretary of state for the new Ministry of Air—the first such department in the world. Shortly afterward, in a speech in Bedford, a center of the manufacturing engine industry, Churchill identified his chief goal—producing “masses of guns, mountains of shells, and clouds of planes.”

He immediately made contact with Bernard Baruch, the chairman of U.S. War Industries, and inked a hundred-million-pound contract for American arms. Churchill’s new department numbered twelve thousand civil servants and fifty groups or sub-departments, which he quickly reduced to ten.

Churchill’s position at the head of the new air force department enabled him to do what no other war minister has ever done, before or since. Almost every weekday, Churchill would fly in his biplane from London to look over the battlefields in France in order to pinpoint exactly where weaponry and supplies were needed. He would return to Parliament the same evening to report his findings to the House of Commons. Today, almost a decade short of the hundredth anniversary of World War I, only a few executives pilot themselves daily to their office. Yet Churchill was commuting daily from his ministry in London to the western front in France and back to the House of Commons that night.

It should be mentioned that, in 1918, he ceased his daily flying after his third plane crash. The word from his wife reportedly was “either the aeroplane or Clementine.” Churchill later mused, “The air is an extremely dangerous mistress. Once under its spell, most lovers are faithful to the end, which is not always old age.”

Before taking office in the spring of 1917, with the war in a stalemate, Churchill proclaimed in a speech in Dundee, “Complete unquestionable supremacy in the air would give an overwhelming advantage.” It was a prediction that found its vindication in World War II.