4

THE AIR COUNCIL

1930–1933

On September 1, 1930, “Stuffy” Dowding returned to the Air Ministry, joining the Air Council as air member for supply and research (AMSR), once again succeeding his former chief, Air Marshal Higgins. By historical coincidence, it was nine years to the day before the German invasion of Poland began the European war that escalated into the Second World War. The Air Council was the RAF equivalent of the Royal Navy’s legendary Board of the Admiralty, and the similar, though less well known, Army Council. Its members included two politicians, the secretary and the under secretary of state for air; a senior civil servant, the permanent under secretary of state for air; and four or more active-duty RAF officers styled “air members,” including the chief and the deputy chief of Air Staff, the AMSR, and the air member for personnel (AMP).1 Subject to the authority of the Cabinet and Parliament, the Air Council was the RAF’s policy-making body.²

As AMSR for nearly four and a half years, Dowding was the air officer responsible, under the CAS and the secretary of state for air, for the whole of the matériel side of the RAF establishment: the equipment element in the organization, training, and equipping of the service. Dowding spent his first two and a half years working in this capacity under the leadership of Jack Salmond, Trenchard having finally relinquished his appointment as chief of Air Staff after a tenure of just under eleven years, to be succeeded by his longtime heir presumptive. For the most part highly regarded as an operational commander, and personally popular—contemporaries and historians alike have stressed his good looks and “charm”—Salmond did have his critics,3 who considered him an intellectual lightweight with an overinflated reputation and a proclivity for backstairs intrigue. Nevertheless, after Trenchard’s departure he was the best-known senior air officer, overshadowing contemporaries such as Dowding.⁴

In the 1930s, the stable acquisitions process bequeathed by Trenchard to the RAF was first unsettled, and then swept away by powerful, external forces. Dowding and his Air Council colleagues confronted unprecedented problems. Worrisome changes in the international environment, combined with near-revolutionary changes in technology, drastically altered the RAF’s organizational and senior leadership challenges. Internationally, the hopeful “spirit of Locarno” dissolved into bitter wrangling at the preparatory sessions for the International Conference on the Limitation of Armaments, to be convened at Geneva, Switzerland. The failure of the Geneva Disarmament Conference, revealing the impossibility of reconciling Germany’s demands for what it called “equality of rights” with France’s conception of its national security requirements, marked an early turning point on the path to another European war. Simultaneously, the global economy collapsed into the Great Depression, drying up financial resources at the very moment when rapid innovation in electrical and aeronautical engineering promised huge performance returns on investment in technology.

Dowding’s debut in his new role was inauspicious. Just one month after he joined the Air Council, British aviation suffered a major disaster with the crash of the airship R-101 (a technologically innovative version of the zeppelin concept) on its inaugural passenger flight. Fatalities included Director-General of Civil Aviation Sir Sefton Brancker, and the incumbent secretary of state for air, Lord Thomson of Cardington. Like the in-flight explosions of the German airship Hindenburg and the US space shuttle Challenger in later decades, the R-101 disaster was both a policy and a public-relations nightmare for the government concerned, not only calling into question the safety of a major aeronautical program, but also the basic competence of the responsible government agencies. Dowding himself shared official responsibility: he had signed the new airship’s certificate of airworthiness just two days before the fatal flight. Making things worse, if possible, when the news broke upon a shocked Cabinet, the CAS was out of touch in his remote country cottage.5

Dowding never tried to dodge his share of blame, stating with typical bluntness, “I was wrong not to insist on much more extensive trials and tests,” and explaining with painful candor that he had been “in my new saddle for only a few weeks” when called upon either to endorse or halt a project in which the Air Ministry, the Government, and the British public had invested great hopes. He himself laid no claim to the specialized expertise required to evaluate the technical controversies surrounding the airship’s design, although characteristically, he participated personally in R-101’s final, sixteen-hour test flight. Over the course of what was by this point a thirty-year military career, Dowding had developed an ingrained wariness of official wisdom in the areas of strategy and organization. Reflecting that, “I was not sufficiently self-confident to set my personal opinion against that of the technical experts,” the R-101 disaster added a new dimension to his chronic skepticism.⁶

Almost incredibly, a week after systemic failure claimed the lives of, among others, not only one of Britain’s most famous aviation experts, but in addition, the Cabinet member at the head of his own ministry, the chief of Air Staff pressed Dowding to authorize a flight to the Middle East by R-101’s sister ship (albeit of a different design) the R-100. That Salmond would make such a request in the midst of national shock over the crash, just two days after the memorial service for the dead, and well before the technical investigations and the official inquiry could even begin, forcefully illustrates the strength of the political and economic interests behind the airship program. The terms in which the CAS conveyed his request, “I am personally anxious the R-100 should do the trip,” speak volumes about the RAF’s “Trenchardist” leadership culture, Salmond’s character, and the integrity that led Dowding to say “no.”

It seems likely that Dowding’s intransigence regarding the airship program in the aftermath of the R-101 disaster helped consolidate a reputation among his peers for negativity and lack of team spirit, and it is certainly possible that it permanently affected his relationship with Salmond, especially if—consciously or unconsciously—the CAS took Dowding’s stance as reflecting poorly on his own integrity. (It should be noted that, in later years, he specifically disclaimed having been subjected to “pressure” to authorize the fatal flight of R-101.) The AMSR’s internal dissent broke into the open, and created public controversy, with his testimony before the official inquiry. Newspapers reported that, “Vice Marshal [sic] Dowding alone of all today’s witnesses did not think the ship was in shape for her first long voyage.” Dowding’s testimony before the inquiry is evidence that “pernickety primness” had been forged by the fires that consumed R-101 into a steely resolve to speak the truth as he knew it, “though the heavens fall.”7

Not only did he make no effort to evade or mitigate his own responsibility in the disaster, he drew attention to facts that brought into question his own knowledge and judgment. For example, Dowding testified that the airship captain did not follow his direction to complete previously postponed full-power tests immediately after liftoff. Other testimony noted that there was no written order for a further test, and experts opined that the captain had exercised good judgment in not improvising a stress test at the outset of a long-endurance flight. Overall, the general impression given by the inquiry report is that the handoff of responsibility as AMSR from Air Marshal Higgins to his successor was unfortunately timed, and that the Air Ministry Research Department allowed the R-101 program managers to cut corners in testing, in order to inaugurate passenger service on time. The inquiry panel specifically concluded that this happened, in significant part, because the program managers, in their turn, were overconfident.⁸

More broadly, the R-101 disaster and its disturbing sequel highlight the wickedly complex interaction of bureaucratic, political, economic, technological, and strategic challenges facing Dowding and his Air Council colleagues. Dowding’s most important share of the broader challenges facing the service was adapting the RAF to the ongoing revolution in aircraft design, which saw monoplanes supplanting biplanes, and metal replacing wood and fabric in construction. Adaptation involved a gradual, but ultimately decisive break with the service’s Trenchard-era standards and practices regarding the acquisition of technology. As early as 1924, specialists on the Air Staff warned that aircraft acquisition, and indeed the entire British aircraft industry, were being hamstrung by the Air Ministry’s uneconomical proliferation of excessively restrictive technical requirements. Trenchard and his deputies blocked major acquisition reforms during the 1920s, but on Dowding’s watch the Air Ministry began to publish general specifications that embodied statements of “ideal” performance characteristics tied to operational requirements in place of highly detailed design requirements.9

During Dowding’s tenure as AMSR “the whole attitude of the service” toward the acquisition of technology changed, although change came neither easily nor quickly to the Trenchard-ist Air Ministry. When in 1933 Dowding sought “to cut development times by half,” by consolidating operational requirements for new aircraft and informally circulating them to industry before formally soliciting bids, it took the Air Council until 1935 to give the idea final approval. As AMSR, he had to tread carefully around the opinions and preferences of successive chiefs of Air Staff and their inner circles of advisers. Not only colleagues such as the deputy chief of Air Staff (DCAS) but also relatively junior officers holding key portfolios, such as flying operations and director of operations and intelligence, were empowered to critique AMSR plans, policies, and decisions, and promote their own ideas, in practice circumscribing Dowding’s nominal mandate. Getting results would depended at least as much on his patience and negotiating skills, as on formal, positional authority.¹⁰

Sometimes Dowding himself utilized delaying tactics. On taking over as AMSR, he inherited a bureaucratic stalemate regarding the specification for a follow-on to the Bristol Bulldog, one of the RAF’s standard, biplane fighters. Desire for substantially increased speed and a better field of vision for the pilot pointed toward adopting a monoplane design; fears that industry was not ready to produce a reliable, military monoplane, combined with the increasing uncertainty of future funding from the Treasury, suggested that taking what one could get immediately was the better part of wisdom. Dowding, however, was in no hurry to push development of yet another generation of biplanes. Accepting the risk of waiting, he teamed up with his sometime rival Newall, then deputy chief of Air Staff, to buy time for monoplane development to mature. Together, they persuaded the CAS to postpone the decision regarding a Bulldog replacement.

Part of the problem was conflicting priorities. As air member for supply as well as research, it was Dowding’s responsibility to balance a host of industrial-production factors against desirable technical innovation. Attempts to exploit the acquisition process to promote technical innovation sometimes clashed with efforts to nourish struggling aircraft manufacturers with procurement contracts. Since the end of the Great War, the Air Ministry had doled out contracts among the few potentially viable aircraft-manufacturing firms at least as much to, in effect, subsidize the industrial base of British airpower, as to meet current aircraft requirements. The AMSR also had to reckon with the political power as well as the market position of Britain’s aircraft manufacturers, notably exerted through an industry trade association known as SBAC (Society of British Aircraft Constructors). SBAC could, and did, take its members’ complaints to the Cabinet when Air Staff endeavors to improve acquisition processes encroached upon what the businessmen considered their due.11

After nearly a year of patient bureaucratic maneuvering, Dowding secured approval of a specification that was open to “low wing” monoplanes as well as biplanes, and to both air-cooled and liquid-cooled engines. From this historic Specification F.7/30,¹² issued in September of 1931, flowed the development stream that eventually resulted in the RAF’s acquisition of high-speed monoplane fighters, as well as the intimately related development of new types of high-performance aircraft engines, such as the Rolls Royce engine that would evolve into the world-famous Merlin. In a practice he would continue as air officer commanding-in-chief of a combatant command, as AMSR Dowding allowed considerable independence to his principal subordinates, such as the director of technical development (DTD). While the Air Staff struggled to reconcile operational requirements and rapidly evolving technological potentialities, the DTD was working closely with Hawker Aircraft and Supermarine Aviation on advanced designs following on from the initial responses to Specification F.7/30.13

The foregoing does not mean that the RAF’s—or Dowding’s—path to acquiring the high-performance fighters of 1940 was straight, clear, or short. Throughout the early 1930s the Air Staff and the Air Defence of Great Britain (ADGB) command were deeply embroiled in a debate over the intertwined issues of fighter-aircraft characteristics and fighter tactics. Many of the RAF’s most senior and influential leaders, including successive AOC-in-Cs of ADGB—Sir Edward Ellington, Sir Geoffrey Salmond, and Sir Robert Brooke-Popham—were convinced that the only feasible approach to defensive counter-air operations was to use the concentrated fire power of fighters in mass formations to “break up” incoming bomber formations. Discounting single-seat aircraft because of their inability to fight in formation, they called for two-seat fighters featuring movable machine guns. Essentially, these veterans envisaged fighters of the future as faster versions of World War One vintage aircraft such as the Bristol F2.¹⁴

Compared to many of his colleagues, Dowding was much more impressed by the tactical potential of the single-seat, monoplane fighter with fixed, forward-firing guns. Indeed, the Air Staff actually opposed the multi-gun fighter, predicting poor aerodynamic performance. The AMSR was unbeguiled by visions of fighters cruising in mass formations and using enemy bomber formations for target practice, probably because he relied on the results of practical experiments, rather than “vision,” to inform his thinking regarding future requirements. Dowding’s “air firing trials” produced statistical evidence that a single-seat fighter with multiple, forward-firing fixed guns was actually more likely to score fatal hits on enemy aircraft than the gunner in a two-seater firing a movable, twin machine gun. Promotion to the rank of air marshal (three-star or lieutenant general equivalent) in January 1933, should have fortified Dowding’s ability to drive home his conclusions, but the hand of fate intervened to give the RAF a new chief of Air Staff with a contrary agenda regarding fighter development.¹⁵

The New Year’s 1933 personnel moves saw Jack Salmond, after just three years in office, hand over as CAS to his brother Geoffrey. Unfortunately, within days the latter was diagnosed with terminal cancer. To succeed him, the secretary of state for air, Lord Londonderry, eventually selected Ellington, apparently by virtue of seniority. Jack’s retirement at the early age of fifty-two, together with Geoffrey’s untimely death, not only cost the RAF the services of two of the most experienced, and arguably the two most successful, operational-level combat commanders in its short history, but also catapulted to its head an officer with no experience of wartime operational command, and almost no personal experience as a flyer. Ellington was perhaps the RAF’s most accomplished senior staff officer and administrator, but some insiders worried that “Uncle Ted,” as he was known in the service (whether affectionately, or dismissively, or both) lacked the force of character necessary in the top job.16

A particular problem for Dowding was that the new CAS, having served not only as ADGB commander, but also as director of aircraft production and research in 1919–20, clung tenaciously to his well-developed, albeit obsolete, ideas regarding air-to-air combat and fighter aircraft. Uncle Ted immediately reversed the development priority for a single-seat fighter with fixed, forward-firing guns, and funded his own pet project: a two-man fighter with dual controls and fore-and-aft gunnery positions. The CAS’s design concept, which fully justified his self-conscious comment that, “I do not expect that the first attempt will produce a very satisfactory machine,” was never built. Instead, the Air Staff eventually persuaded him to abandon his wildly impractical idea of a push-me–pull-you fighter with crewmen at opposite ends of the fuselage alternating as pilot and gunner, in favor of the only slightly more plausible concept of a “turret fighter” whose pilot would concentrate on flying in formation while a crewman aimed the guns.¹⁷

The ultimate outcome of the obsession with aerial combat between mass formations of bombers and fighters was to be the Boulton-Paul Defiant, which featured no fixed, forward armament and a gunner literally trapped in a four-gun turret behind the pilot. The turret could traverse forward to fire over the pilot’s head, but its guns could not be depressed to fire either directly ahead, or forward and downward. The tactical concept was that formations of Defiants would cruise along beneath enemy bomber formations, picking them off from below. Unsurprisingly, in actual combat the turret fighter concept failed catastrophically. Not only did the weight of the turret preclude the speed and agility necessary to bring its weapons to bear on high-performance enemy aircraft; its four machine guns were in any case hopelessly outclassed by the firepower of its rivals. The brutal attrition suffered by the Defiants in 1940 fully validated Dowding’s prediction that this aeronautical monstrosity would be helpless against single-seat fighters.

The AMSR, along with some of the sharper minds on the Air Staff, also understood that the coming generation of fast, multiengine, monoplane bombers, each self-defended by multiple machine guns as well as armor plating, would make difficult targets even for heavily armed, high-performance fighters. They perceived that the key to future fighter effectiveness would be somehow to combine maximum speed, rate of climb, and agility with maximum firepower. With the monoplanes coming off the drawing boards promising vastly increased speeds, Dowding and his colleagues sought a corresponding increase in firepower, by either multiplying the longstanding, standard fighter armament of twin machine guns, or by substituting 20 mm cannon for the machine guns. Dowding recognized that the “cannon fighter” would provide optimal firepower, but problems with the reliability, size, and weight of available cannon (including the weight of the ammunition) pushed him toward choosing eight fixed, forward-firing machine guns as an interim solution.18

By the fall of 1934 two firms, Hawker and Supermarine, had each produced designs Dowding was willing to purchase in prototype. In a remarkable instance of serendipity, the need to meet the eight-gun specification by accommodating four in each wing inspired Supermarine’s Reginald Mitchell to give his design its famous elliptical wings, vastly improving the aerodynamic performance of the Spitfire. Colin Sinnott, having exhaustively and persuasively analyzed the acquisition of the Spitfire and Hawker Hurricane prototypes, concludes tartly that Dowding, “did not consult the Air Staff” before placing the orders. It was thus Dowding’s initiative, based on the work of his subordinates in the AMSR Directorate of Technical Development, which produced this famous and critically important leap forward in RAF fighter performance. The telling contrast between this historic achievement, and the record of British bomber development in the decade of the 1930s, underscores the failure of Dowding and his colleagues to achieve a similar, timely advance in bomber development.19

Shortly after becoming AMSR, Dowding presented a specification for a high-speed aircraft carrying double the bomb load of the RAF’s current, standard day bomber. So-called day bombers traded heavy bomb and fuel loads for speed and/or defensive armament; night bombers sacrificed speed for bomb load and range, flying under cover of darkness to improve their chances of evading interception. Carrying heavy loads of both bombs and fuel, as well as defensive armament, ammunition, and multiple crewmen, meant big aircraft. Just as Dowding’s “high speed development work” had led eventually to the Hurricane and Spitfire, approval of the specification for a high-performance, multi-role bomber as early as 1930 might well have set in motion timely development of long-range, “heavy” bomber types that could have been operationally effective in the conditions of 1939–41. In this case, however, facing objections from Air Staff Flying Operations (F.O.1) “that the proposed aircraft was unduly large,” Dowding backed down.

Although RAF leaders recognized the advantages of bombers capable of both day and night operations, F.O.1 favored giving priority in bomber development to speed, to help neutralize the threat of interception. Increasing operational range did not seem particularly urgent; for imperial defense and colonial control missions the Air Staff still preferred compact aircraft easily transported by ship. Such views were not quite so myopic as they may seem in light of later events. Neither imperial Japan nor fascist Italy was on the march; Germany was still effectively disarmed under a parliamentary regime committed to peaceful revision of the Versailles Treaty. Conditioned by memories of the Dreadnought-building naval race a generation earlier, which many believed had contributed to the outbreak of war, British foreign policy emphasized nipping in the bud a potential race to build bigger, better bombers. While disarmament negotiations were underway at Geneva, therefore, the British government suspended bomber procurement, and imposed a weight limit on new designs.

In addition to the potential political backlash against proposals to develop heavy bombers, technical and financial factors reinforced the reluctance of Dowding and his colleagues to press the issue. The Air Staff consistently overestimated the physical and psychological effects of bombing; and consequently, it tended to discount the significance of heavier bomb loads, much as they discounted the importance of increasing bombers’ operational radius.20 As Dowding himself correctly anticipated, moreover, British aircraft manufacturers resisted investing the vast amounts of capital required, not only to solve the complex design problems posed by next-generation, multiengine, long-range heavy bombers (and transports) but also to expand and retool the aviation industrial base in order to produce such behemoths. Despite the burgeoning potentialities of the ongoing revolution in aeronautical technology, therefore, all these varied considerations seemed to validate the RAF’s go-slow approach to bomber development.

In the circumstances, the Air Staff naturally, if unimaginatively, thought in terms of replacing aging aircraft with somewhat faster, but otherwise generally similar, types.²¹ Three of the five aircraft operational in Bomber Command at the beginning of the Second World War, the Handley-Page Hampden, the Vickers Wellington, and the Fairey Battle, developed out of initial specifications issued during this period. The Hampden was a relatively capable bomber for its day, with a top speed of 265 mph and a 4,000-pound maximum bomb load, although its small, cramped fuselage—a result of the Government’s arbitrary weight limit—limited its operational usefulness. The slower Wellington (top speed 235 mph) could carry a slightly more robust 4,500 pounds of bombs, and its larger airframe proved highly adaptable; successive, upgraded models operated effectively as “medium” bombers throughout the war. Neither aircraft, however, possessed the combination of range and bomb load needed for strategic bombing operations against Germany.²²

The most ill fated of the RAF’s prewar bomber acquisitions was the 1932-vintage Battle. The specification that led Fairey Aircraft to tender this design was for a high-performance, monoplane bomber. Dowding pinned his hopes for “high performance” on the development of a new engine, the Griffon, which unfortunately was not produced in time to be married to Fairey’s airframe.²³ Thus, like so many aircraft developed during the aeronautical transformation of the thirties (including its fighter equivalent the Defiant) the Battle proved obsolescent upon delivery for service. Even when equipped with the versatile Merlin engine, the Battle possessed neither sufficient range and bomb load for strategic bombing on the one hand, nor the speed and maneuverability for tactical attack roles, on the other. In May of 1940, eight squadrons of Battles attained an awful immortality in RAF history, losing thirty-five of sixty-three aircraft in an inexpressibly brave, utterly futile effort to prevent German panzer divisions from crossing the Meuse River.

The constraints that nearly stultified British bomber development slowly began to lift as the Geneva Disarmament Conference staggered toward eventual collapse, and Britain’s vulnerability to air attack erupted into a hotly debated domestic political issue. Airpower actually seemed to be elbowing aside sea power as the central pillar of national security. Conservative Party leader Stanley Baldwin summed up the national anxiety in November 1932, with a remark in the House of Commons that, quoted or misquoted, and often misattributed, has reverberated through the history of airpower: “No power on earth can protect the man in the street from being bombed . . . the bomber will always get through.” Winston Churchill, officially a Conservative although excluded from the coalition National Government formed in 1931, chided his nominal Leader for a speech that “led to no practical conclusion,” but Baldwin in fact had accurately summarized the informed public’s understanding of the situation.24

Educated public opinion in Britain linked two political assumptions together with one military assumption to form a widely shared chain of strategic reasoning: (1) failure to reach international agreement on arms limitation would result in an arms race; (2) an arms race would lead to another great war; and (3) in the next great war, Britain would be exposed to devastating air attack. Within the mental framework created by these assumptions, British leaders struggled to cope with the erosion of the post–World War international order. Then, in January 1933, what a well-placed army officer on the staff of the Committee of Imperial Defence described as the “ultra-nationalistic, saber-rattling Nazi government” came to power in Germany. The increasingly apparent failure of international “conference diplomacy” to achieve positive results, combined with the unnerving apparition of Adolf Hitler as German chancellor, impelled British leaders to reassess defense force structure requirements comprehensively for the first time since the early 1920s.25

To develop a new planning basis, the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) spun off a Defence Requirements Committee (DRC) composed of representatives from the Army, Navy, Air Force, Foreign Office, and Treasury, charged with identifying “the worst deficiencies” in Britain’s defense posture, and proposing remedies. Working through the winter of 1933–34, the DRC readily agreed that, notwithstanding the clear and present threat posed by Japanese expansionism to British economic interests and imperial security, “Germany must be regarded as the ultimate danger.” Despite this already daunting global threat environment, however, the DRC report suggested only modest modernization and infrastructure improvements for the Navy; preparations for an updated version of the small British Expeditionary Force of the pre-1914 era (approximately equivalent to two army corps); and completion of the RAF’s fifty-two-squadron Home Defence Air Force, whose development had been on hold since 1931, along with ten additional squadrons for imperial defense, and a further ten squadrons for expansion of the Naval Air Arm.²⁶

The bland prose and moderate terms of the DRC report concealed contentious and possibly irreconcilable differences regarding the capacity of all three services to carry out their prescribed roles and missions. Concerning the RAF, two issues stood out. First, the DRC simply deferred the whole question of fighters for the defense of England’s industrial midlands, the north of England, and Scotland—areas that would be within range of “modern” bombers operating from bases in northwestern Germany, to say nothing of the worst-case scenario of German bases in the Low Countries. A second, related problem was that a new BEF, implicitly intended to once again help defend the Low Countries and northwestern France, would need an air component. The DRC report assumed this would be supplied out of the resources of the Home Defence Air Force. Amid the open skepticism of his fellow chiefs of staff and the dismay of his Air Ministry colleagues, Ellington endorsed this assumption.

Ellington’s gaffe provoked consternation because the air officers still envisioned the Home Defence Air Force as primarily a strategic bombing force with a deterrence/second-strike role, not to be frittered away in tactical support of ground forces. Accordingly, they insisted that the RAF could not supply an air component for a new BEF out of the Home Defence Air Force’s projected fifty-two squadrons. Literally at the last minute, when the DRC was meeting to approve its report, Ellington had to concede, humiliatingly, that his colleagues were demanding that he redo his sums. The issue of the RAF’s proper size and composition thus became entangled with the prospect of once again dispatching a BEF to defend from German attack the same ground liberated at the cost of nearly a million British dead less than a generation earlier. The failure to persuasively articulate the RAF’s position created a fateful political vacuum at the center of the defense policy-making process.27

As air member for supply and research, Dowding was, second to Ellington, on the hottest of Air Council’s hot seats during this crucial period, for it was during this period that Dowding’s “supply” portfolio came to encompass some of the most strategically critical and politically charged issues in British national defense policy. By the end of 1933 the longest-tenured member of the Air Council, as one of the handful of senior air officers best placed to shape the destiny of the RAF at a defining moment in its institutional history, Dowding must bear a full share of the Air Council’s collective responsibility for the collective leadership failures in the period that Churchill later memorably described as the “years for the locusts to eat.”²⁸

Air Council nomenclature varied somewhat across the decades. This outline is somewhat simplified, in the interests of brevity and clarity. In January 1935, the Air Ministry redesignated Dowding’s post “air member for research and development,” or AMRD, retaining him in place for another fourteen months.

Maurice Dean, The Royal Air Force and Two World Wars (London: Cassell, 1979), 82–83.

E.g., historians Vincent Orange and David Omissi.

Henry Probert, High Commanders of the Royal Air Force (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1954), 103, 108; John Laffin, Swifter Than Eagles (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1964), 197; Vincent Orange, Churchill and His Airmen (London: Grub Street, 2013), 140–41.

Laffin, Swifter Than Eagles, 212–13.

Basil Collier, Leader of the Few (London: Jarrolds, 1957), 135–40, 147; Richard Hough and Denis Richards, Battle of Britain (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1990), 29; Vincent Orange, Dowding of Fighter Command: Victor of the Battle of Britain (London: Grub Street, 2008), 62.

Report of the R. 101 Inquiry presented by the Secretary of State for Air to Parliament by Command of His Majesty, March 1931. Digital copy available at http://lordkingsnorton.cranfield.ac.uk/archive. Also, see New York Times, November 7, 1930.

Report of the R. 101 Inquiry.

Sebastian Ritchie, Industry and Air Power (London: Frank Cass, 1997), 22–33; cf., Colin Sinnott, The RAF and Aircraft Design, 1923–39 (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 18–19, 23–43, 76–84; and John James, The Paladins: A Social History of the RAF Up to the Outbreak of World War II (London: MacDonald, 1990), 114–15.

James, The Paladins, 117; Orange, Dowding, 11.

See, for example, Sinnott, The RAF and Aircraft Design, 83, 139, 149–51. Cf., Ritchie, Industry and Air Power, 7, 16–17, 23; and Harald Penrose, British Aviation: Ominous Skies, 1935–1939 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1980), 26.

For the historiographical controversy surrounding this specification, see Sinnott, The RAF and Aircraft Design, 81, 86–87, 94.

Collier, Leader of the Few, 141; Len Deighton, Fighter (New York: Knopf, 1978), 60–61, 64–67, 73–77; Sinnott, The RAF and Aircraft Design, 78–87, 94–102. Cf., Ritchie, Industry and Air Power, 16–17.

Sinnott, The RAF and Aircraft Design, 108; 118–19; James, The Paladins, 116–17.

Sinnott, The RAF and Aircraft Design, 61, 123.

John Terraine, The Right of the Line: The Royal Air Force in the European War 1939–1945 (Ware, Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1997), 15–17, 44–45; cf., James, The Paladins, 164, for the view that Ellington was “more subtle than they [the politicians] could imagine.” Also, Anthony Furse, Wilfrid Freeman (Staplehurst, Kent, UK: Spellmount Ltd., 2000), 95; Dean, The Royal Air Force and Two World Wars, 87–88; Brian Bond, ed., Chief of Staff: The Diaries of Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Pownall, vol. 1, 1933–1940 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1973), 16 (May 19, 1933).

Sinnott, The RAF and Aircraft Design, 119–20, 123–24, 128–29.

Terraine, The Right of the Line, 16–20; James, The Paladins, 116–17; cf. Robert Wright, The Man Who Won the Battle of Britain (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 53–54. Also, Hough and Richards, The Battle of Britain, 37.

Sinnott, The RAF and Aircraft Design, 32. See also, Collier, Leader of the Few, 141–42, 148–50; Hough and Richards, The Battle of Britain, 56; Michael Korda, With Wings Like Eagles (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 34–39, 111.

Sinnott, The RAF and Aircraft Design, 12, 137.

Ibid., 60, 138–44. See also, Keith Hayward, The British Aircraft Industry (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1989), 15; Peter Lewis, The British Bomber Since 1914: Sixty Years of Design and Development (London: Putnam, 1974), 195; James, The Paladins, 114–15.

Sinnott, The RAF and Aircraft Design, 141. Also, Terraine, The Right of the Line, 17–20, 28–29, 78–79; Neville Jones, Beginnings of Strategic Air Power: A History of the British Bomber Force 1923–1939 (London: Frank Cass, 1987), 70; W. J. Reader, Architect of Air Power: The Life of the first Viscount Weir of Eastwood, 1877–1959 (London: Collins, 1968), 207–18. Arthur “Bomber” Harris attributed the Hampden’s shortcomings to what he regarded as the institutional incompetence of Handley-Page: see Orange, Dowding, 88.

Sinnott, The RAF and Aircraft Design, 142–44.

Keith Middlemas and John Barnes, Baldwin: A Biography (London: The Macmillan Company, 1970), 735–36; Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: The Prophet of Truth, 1922–1939 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977), 449–52.

Middlemas and Barnes, Baldwin, 722–36; G. C. Peden, British Rearmament and the Treasury (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1979), 107–8.

N. H. Gibbs, Grand Strategy, vol. 1, Rearmament Policy, in History of the Second World War, United Kingdom Military Series, ed. Sir James R. M. Butler (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1976), 96–97.

Sinnott, The RAF and Aircraft Design, 96, 134–35, 142, 145; cf., Lewis, The British Bomber, 194. Also, Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: The Prophet of Truth, 455.

Peden, British Rearmament and the Treasury, 109; Gaines Post, Jr., Dilemmas of Appeasement: British Deterrence and Defense (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 31–35; Furse, Wilfrid Freeman, 60, 77. See also, Defence Requirements Committee, 28 February 34, quoted in T. C. G. James, The Growth of Fighter Command, ed. Sebastian Cox (London: Frank Cass, 2002), 8–9; Gibbs, Grand Strategy, 565; Penrose, Ominous Skies, 12; 23; James, The Paladins, 156, 160–66.