With the memory of the 1999 Balkan air campaign fresh in the mind, it is fair to conclude that airpower alone forced President Milosevic of Serbia to withdraw his forces from Kosovo to let in the NATO-led troops. On the other hand it may be argued that it was the threat of a land invasion that tipped the scales in NATO’s favour. Whichever view is taken, it cannot be denied that NATO aircraft inflicted unacceptable damage to Serbian military, industrial, communications and transport targets. Moreover, in spite of the Serbs having a sizeable air force, little or no attempt was made to defend the country against NATO bombardment. Can it therefore now be claimed that, with the sophistication of modern strike-aircraft armed with laser-guided weapons, the employment of airpower alone can result in a belligerent nation suing for peace without even putting up a fight? This question is very relevant to this history since the the Air Staff’s argument in the early 1920s in fighting for the survival of the RAF as an independent service was based upon the doctrine of the offensive use of airpower independent of the other two services. Chapter 10 critically examines the RAF’s bombing doctrine, or lack of it, in the inter-war years.
In 1918, the year the Great War ended, the Independent Bomber Force (IBF) of the Royal Air Force was formed. It was to operate independently of the battlefield, unlike the many Allied squadrons operating in direct support of the land and naval forces, i.e. the strategic rather than the tactical use of airpower. The IBF was tasked with attacking industrial targets and so weaken the enemy’s will and ability to continue with the war. The Germans for their part had employed Zeppelin airships and Gotha bombers to attack targets in England. Strategic bombing became a possibility when bomber aircraft and airships had the range and bomb-carrying capacity to take the war to the enemy’s homeland. As the war ended there was already speculation that the employment of airpower alone had the potential to bring victory. It was said that the bomber would always get through, and that the effect on the morale of the civil population at the prospect of air bombardment could itself be decisive. Among exponents of the offensive use of airpower were Major-General Hugh Trenchard, later appointed to the post of Chief of the Air Staff, of the RAF, the American Colonel Billy Mitchell and the Italian Douhet. Trenchard was quite clear about the importance of maintaining a strong offensive bomber force. Even after his retirement from the RAF in 1930, he continued to press the case for bombers, seeing little need for fighters if the war was taken to the enemy. In retrospect, claims made for the effectiveness of the bombers were perhaps premature. Strategic bombing in the Great War was in its infancy. Some of the units of heavy bombers, such as the HP V/1500, were only working up as the war ended, and Berlin was not bombed. The claims made for the effectiveness of bombing were based more on its perceived potential to bring an enemy to sue for peace than experience gained in war. For all the talk of heavy bombing, small two-man biplane bombers, almost indistinguishable from the fighters, continued in service until the mid-1930s.
In the event, the formulation of air policy in 1919 and the years that followed was not so straightforward. In general terms air policy is determined by a mix of factors. Firstly, there is the foreign policy stance of a nation, i.e. does it stand alone, is it neutral like Switzerland or Sweden, or is it a partner in a military alliance when friendly countries may be expected to provide military support in the event of an attack by a country or countries outside the alliance? Countries in an alliance may also be able to reduce the burden of defence expenditure through collaborative efforts in weapon design, development and procurement, contingency planning and joint exercises. Secondly, there is the willingness of governments, and indirectly electorates, to spend money on defence rather than on hospitals and schools. Thirdly, there is the industrial capacity of a nation to produce aircraft and weapons at home. The alternative is to import, but countries then run the risk that foreign sources of supply might dry up in the event of war. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, is the need to maintain national security. By this is not meant the use of aircraft against the civilian populations, which is internal security, but defence against attack by a belligerent nation. This can extend to the oceans, since the protection of maritime trade can be vital to a country such as Britain.
The First World War, or the Great War, as it was then known, ended on 11 November 1918. In order to understand how British air policy was formulated on cessation of hostilities, and how it developed in succeeding years, one has to consider the situation faced by the British government of the day and the British people. To begin with there were the memories of the slaughter of millions of men in the bloody trench warfare in Flanders and beyond, which created war weariness. This had to be the war to end all wars, and Britain was to be ‘a land fit for heroes’. Then there was the League of Nations, which would be a world forum to which nations could appeal if a dispute looked likely to lead to conflict, and naturally hopes were pinned on the League to avert war. Finally there was the ‘Ten-Year Rule’. This was national defence policy framed in the belief that Britain would not be involved in a major conflict for at least ten years. For all these reasons defence expenditure would be low on a list of priorities for public expenditure.
In these circumstances there was no need for 184 operational squadrons backed by training units at home and abroad, and a period of rapid disbandment followed, so that the number of operational squadrons was reduced, by March 1921, to a mere twenty-eight fully formed squadrons; and of these, twenty-one were abroad and three in Ireland. The RAF also gave up 149 airfields, 122 landing grounds and 2,240 hirings (land and buildings). Of the four remaining squadrons three were with the Royal Navy. This left one RAF squadron in England, giving refresher training to pilots. To make matters worse, the Admirals and Generals saw little reason for the maintenance of a separate air force, and argued for the return of squadrons to their respective services whence they had come on 1 April 1918, the day the RAF was officially formed from units of the Royal Naval Air Service and the Royal Flying Corps. It was argued that the expense of maintaining an Air Ministry alone was unacceptable in the prevailing financial climate.
On 11 January 1919 Hugh Trenchard was reappointed to the post of Chief of the Air Staff (CAS) in succession to Major-General Sykes. Trenchard had resigned as the RAF’s first CAS following differences with Lord Rothermere over policy. For his part Sykes sought to secure the future of the RAF as an independent force by advocating an imperial service involving the Dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the Union of South Africa and India. At that time neither the Westminster Parliament nor the Dominions were ready for such a grandiose plan of expansion. Trenchard, on the other hand, it was said, ‘was prepared to make do with a little and would not have to be carried’. This made him much more appealing to a cost-conscious government. And so it fell to Trenchard to fight the battle for survival. He was fortunate in having the sympathetic ear of Winston Churchill, who was Secretary of State for War and the Air. Churchill had no intention of returning the RAF to the Royal Navy or the Army, and, instead, asked Trenchard to put in writing his own ideas for the new service. This was to be the Trenchard Memorandum, which laid down the foundations of the independent air force. Its publication was followed by the granting of new RAF rank titles, which served to emphasize a separate identity. Once the Memorandum was accepted, the RAF moved forward, even though attempts by the Royal Navy and Army to reclaim what they regarded as their air components continued for some years to come. It was not until 1937 that the Royal Navy took complete control of the Fleet Air Arm, but by that time the RAF was firmly established as the third armed service. Another factor that helped to sustain the RAF in the face of inter-service rivalry and government cut-backs was air control. At the Cairo Conference in March 1921 it was accepted that the RAF should replace the Army as the primary force in maintaining order in the Middle East. Trenchard had shown that it was possible for a few aircraft, with a minimum of air-transportable land forces, to suppress revolts by dissident tribesmen when the ‘Mad Mullah’ was defeated in the protectorate of British Somaliland in 1920. Formerly large Army garrisons had been necessary to maintain order. Aircraft were much quicker in nipping incipient trouble in the bud. By the time Army troops arrived on the scene it was more likely that the trouble would have escalated, resulting in heavier casualties on both sides. As a consequence air control was much more economical in money and lives than in those operations where only land forces were used. This was bound to be attractive to a government seeking economies. Air control, then, gave the RAF an operational raison d’être, and was used in Mesopotamia (Iraq) and India, followed later by Transjordan and Palestine.
The next development in air policy was for the Conservative government to recognize the need for the RAF to contribute to national security. By now the nation realized that the Royal Navy could no longer guarantee that the territory of the British Isles would not be violated by an enemy. It was agreed that the RAF could expand to fifty-two squadrons, seventeen fighter and thirty-five bomber, but that in the prevailing economic climate this would not happen immediately. It would be phased in over a minimum of five years. Add to this the Ten-Year Rule, the hope that the League of Nations would prove effective in preventing conflict on a large scale and the declared pacifism of a number of MPs, and it may be understood that the Westminster Parliament would not wish to be seen sending signals to the rest of the world that it was rearming Britain. Strange then that the preponderence of squadrons from the fifty-two would be bomber, but this was the very essence of Air Staff thinking at the time, i.e. offensive defence. The number of squadrons needed to defend Britain would be that necessary to defeat an aerial assault by any power within striking distance of its shores. It may seem bizarre to have seen France as a potential aggressor in the early 1920s, but this was not the intention. It was that France had, at that time, the largest air force in Europe. This was to be the yardstick. Therefore, by the end of 1923, British air policy provided for the continued existence of the RAF as a separate service, air control in India and the Middle East and the gradual expansion in an unspecified number of years to fifty-two squadrons for national defence, plus a continuation of the Ten-Year Rule.
It would seem strange today if civil aviation comprising commercial airlines came under the control of a ministry of defence. But this was the situation after the Great War. Even the Air Estimates, the money voted annually by Parliament for expenditure on the RAF, contained an element for civil aviation. This might seem all the more perplexing since the government’s attitude was that the airlines should ‘sink or swim’, so to speak, in the market place. The explanation for public expenditure on civil aviation lies in the overlap between the development of military and civil flying, and the great reliance that the struggling firms in the aircraft and aero-engine manufacturing industry placed on aircraft orders. The aircraft industry badly needed contracts for both civil and military types to survive, and there was little to choose between the design of both. Indeed, a civil airliner could always be adapted for military use. Therefore the larger the civil air fleet, the larger the nation’s war potential. Both civil and military aircraft prototypes went to the RAF’s experimental establishment at Martlesham Heath in Suffolk for airworthiness tests and evaluation, if land-planes, and to the Marine Experimental Establishment, Felixstowe, if they were flying-boats or floatplanes. If found satisfactory by the RAF test pilots, they could then enter service or receive modifications. To have required the nascent aircraft industry to set up its own parallel organization would have been too costly. As it was, the French were prepared to subsidize their airlines, and for a while in 1921 only foreign aircraft touched down at Croydon. In the end the British government relented and granted a modest subsidy of £60,000 to help the airlines. And because the costs of civil aircraft development were met in part from public funds, the airline and aircraft industries were given time to get on their feet, if one will forgive the malapropism. Indeed, at a time when the RAF was unable to place orders for new military aircraft, Trenchard sensibly awarded contracts for prototypes so that firms manufacturing aircraft could at least keep their core staff of designers and builders in employment until better days came along. Each year’s specifications for military aircraft were sent out to aircraft manufacturers numbered sequentially throughout the year, e.g. Specification 16/22 called for a long-distance coastal-defence biplane. Finally, it should be remembered that most of the pilots of both civil aircraft and airships were ex-service pilots who flew in their retired ranks, thus emphasizing the parallel development of military and civil flying.
The development of airships was very prominent during the inter-war years. Owing to their low speed and poor manoeuvrability relative to aircraft, however, airships were not considered a serious rival in combat, although they were admirably suited to reconnaissance, particularly maritime reconnaissance. Where the airship could score over the aircraft of the day was in long-distance flying, and the idea of linking the far-flung Dominions of Canada and Australia with the Mother country was appealing. Indeed, the necessary airship sheds and mooring masts for berthing airships were built in such places as India in preparation for Imperial air routes. But the inter-war years are best, if sadly remembered, for the catastrophes befalling airships, although British enthusiasts like Commander Burney remained undaunted. It was not until the tragic loss of the R101 at Beauvais in northern France on a flight to India in 1930 that the policy was virtually to abandon further airship development. Only a small staff was kept on at Cardington in Bedfordshire for work on balloons, and the latter were to feature as part of aerial defence during the Second World War. Until the loss of the R101, governments had been equivocal in giving support to airship development. On the one hand there was the feeling that since airships were to be used commercially then the private sector should bear the cost of development, but on the other hand the government had a part to play to give British airships a fighting chance in the developing international airline market. After all, the Germans were successfully using airships on long-haul civil flights. The result was that two large airships were built in the late 1920s. One, the so-called ‘capitalist’ airship, was a private venture titled R100, and the other, the so-called ‘socialist’ airship, was state funded and titled the R101. As has been said, the loss of the R101 spelled the end of serious airship development in Britain, but in Germany too the end was not far off. The tragic loss of the German airship Hindenburg at Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1937 sealed the fate of lighter-than-air machines for all practical purposes.
In the early 1930s successive British governments saw the need to strengthen the RAF in an uncertain world, at the same time wishing to be seen to play their full part in general disarmament. The League of Nations had been successful in averting conflict involving smaller countries, but was unable to prevent a determined major power from acting aggressively. First it was Japanese expansionism in the Far East, when, in 1932, Manchuria became Manchukuo. This was followed by the Nazis coming to power in Germany to create the Third Reich in 1933, and lastly there was the Italian aggression against Abyssinia in 1935. When the League sought to admonish Mussolini it only threw the latter into the arms of the German dictator, Adolf Hitler, so creating the Rome – Berlin Axis. Since neither leader ran a democracy they could spend money on armaments pretty well at will. As the Disarmament Talks at Geneva got bogged down in endless bickering over the details of disarmament, they eventually ran into the sands. Hitler could conveniently see no reason why the the major powers should not come down to the arms limits imposed upon his country at Versailles in 1919. Of course Hitler would be happy not to see arms limitations adopted that might limit his own freedom to act. When he withdrew Germany from membership of the League of Nations, the time had come for Britain to look to its defences. No longer would she look at France’s air capability, but at that of the Third Reich.
So began the policy of rearmament and expansion. More squadrons with up-to-date aircraft and new airfields were going to be needed. Now it was not the funds made available by the Treasury that was to be the constraint, but the ability of the RAF and the aircraft industry to cope with the demands made upon them. Trenchard had built ‘his cottage’. He had built an air force that placed quality before quantity, and his successors were initially loath to water down a highly professional force through too fast an expansion. Fortunately the opening of reserve and auxiliary squadrons from 1925 onwards, and the introduction of short-service commissions in 1923 meant that there was a pool of reserve and ex-service pilots in civilian jobs who could be called on to serve. For the aircraft industry the answer lay in the contracting-out of work to ‘shadow’ factories. Motor car firms were involved in building engines and airframes to designs and specifications put out by the aircraft industry.
As the inevitability of a second world war became clear for all to see, the fear grew that Britain was dropping behind Germany in the production of military aircraft and the forming of air units, and so criticism fell on His Majesty’s Government that not enough was being done. Winston Churchill, then on the back-benches of the House of Commons, and thus out of government, was loudest in voicing his discontent. The British Prime Minister in 1938, Mr Neville Chamberlain, did not succeed in persuading Hitler to abandon his territorial ambitions. Having already absorbed Austria into the Third Reich and brought about the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, Hitler had eyes on Poland, and there was added fear that Britain would not be ready if war came in 1938. If not successful in bringing ‘peace in our time’, which Chamberlain had declared on his return from the Munich Conference, having signed away Czechoslovakian independence, he did at least give the RAF and the aircraft industry a breathing space, so that when war did come in 1939, there was an effective radar-based fighter control system in place, and Spitfires and Hurricanes were coming off the production lines to provide defence. But except for the Battle light bombers sent to France with the Advanced Air-Striking Force in September 1939, the heavy bombers needed to carry the war to the enemy were still to come.
This book goes into detail to explain how air policy was applied in the years between 1919 and 1929 by dealing with all the major events in this context. It tells of the famous and the not-so-famous, the successes and the failures and the advances made in aircraft and air weapon design over the first ten years in this volume, Volume I, and between 1930 and 1939 in Volume II.