The core philosophical question of the period – and the unresolved dilemma that was to be faced in 1940 by Hugh Dowding, and by his vociferous, furious opponents – was this: what was the RAF for? If the realm was to be defended from the air, how best was this to be achieved? Giulio Douhet, a pioneering French pilot whose writings came to be studied eagerly within the RAF, had this to say: ‘The command of the air will be achieved when the enemy’s planes are reduced to a number incapable of developing any aerial action of real importance to the war as a whole.’7
In other words: strike first and take the fight to them. Attack not only the airfields and aerodromes, but also the plane-making factories, and their fuel suppliers, and the roads and the rails used by the suppliers. Yet an alternative in emphasis had been outlined by Frederick Sykes in 1918: ‘Strategic interception has not been frequent in history, owing to the great skill demanded of the leader, combined with the great mobility and efficiency of the troops under his command. It is the ideal strategy for the new Arm – the Air Force.’8
Another theory arose: that of the ‘knock-out blow’. If only the elusive blow could be landed, hostilities could be ended almost immediately. From the air, such a blow could come in the form of massive bombardment, as foreseen in all those Edwardian science-fiction dystopias. As J.M. Spaight wrote: ‘The nations may fear to unleash the monsters they have bred. That would be the greatest, the most welcome contribution that an air-power could make to the next war – that the next war never in fact comes.’9
Hugh Trenchard might not have been the most academic of men, but the subject of bombing – and the concomitant ethical issues – was frequently in his thoughts throughout the early 1920s; for as the technology of flying evolved, so too did its destructive potential. ‘There can be no question that a bombing squadron is a more powerful offensive weapon than the fighting squadrons,’ he said in 1924. ‘It strikes either at the nation or at the air forces on the ground whereas the fighter can only strike at the air force. Therefore, it may be stated as principle that the bombing squadrons should be as numerous as possible and the fighters as few as popular opinion and the necessity of defending vital objectives will permit.’10
What about the prospective bombardment of civilian populations, though? What was the RAF doctrine on this subject? There was never any suggestion that innocent civilians – women, children, the elderly – would be targeted. Likewise, hospitals and schools were to be avoided at every possible cost. But Trenchard had been looking with some interest at the changing industrial landscape and the potential it offered. He was vehemently fascinated by the rise of workers’ movements; the growing strength of the unions in the mines and in the steel foundries.
‘[He] singled out several industries as being particularly important: iron and coal mines … chemical production facilities, explosives factories, armament industries, aero-engine manufacturers, submarine and ship-building works, gun foundries and engine repair shops,’ wrote Philip Meilinger.11 But it wasn’t just physical damage Trenchard was interested in; it was psychological sabotage. By making targets of such establishments, he could undermine the morale of the workers; if the destruction became sufficiently intense, then they could be made to rise up against their employers, and against the state, by simply refusing to carry on. In the war to come, both the Germans and the British would seek to probe these nerves to the limit.
Despite the screw being turned on the new Air Force’s budgets, it was also quickly understood within the Air Ministry and Whitehall that there is always a war somewhere. And the British empire needed policing and patrolling – or to put it another way, controlling. Hugh Trenchard was very quick to see that the RAF could become indispensable in such a role.
‘Trenchard … suggested to Churchill that the RAF be given the opportunity to subdue a festering uprising in Somali-land,’ wrote Philip Meilinger. ‘Churchill agreed.’ And thus a new empire of the air was assembled; valuable experience for those who would find themselves in positions of responsibility come 1939. Throughout the 1920s, steadily increasing numbers of RAF planes were deployed to India, Afghanistan and Iraq, and even more sent to Egypt, Transjordan and Palestine. As a last resort, rebels would be bombed ‘to compel compliance’.12
Back in Britain, the gentleman amateur approach to training was made much more formal and professional. A dedicated RAF college was established at Cranwell in Lincolnshire; in essence, it was the pilot’s equivalent of Sandhurst (indeed, a few years later, in 1933, it gained its own grand purpose-built headquarters, designed by architect James West and inspired by the Royal Hospital in Chelsea).
As the 1920s wore on, Trenchard himself was fast becoming not so much a leader as an unlikely idol to many existing and aspiring pilots. His nickname was ‘Boom’ – a reference to his loud and intimidating voice when angered. The most prominent of his admirers – who joined the RAF under the assumed name of ‘Shaw’ after his First World War exploits in Arabia – was T.E. Lawrence. Lawrence later wrote: ‘The word Trenchard spells out confidence in the RAF … We think of him as immense.’13
Thanks to enthusiastic collusion between Air Minister Winston Churchill and Hugh Trenchard, the policing of the Middle East from the air was expanded. And it was at this point, in the early 1920s, when the philosophy of the RAF bifurcated most visibly. Out in the Middle East, the bomber held dominion. T.E. Lawrence, who had lived and fought among the Bedouins in the First World War, aiding their attacks on the Ottoman forces, somehow found a way of conflating his Arab romanticism with his adoration for the work of the RAF. It was a semi-mystical business: when a village was targeted for ‘recalcitrance’ and then bombed to pieces and burned to ashes, any Iraqi who witnessed such horrors, Lawrence reasoned, would not see it as Western eyes saw it. The bombing would be understood in terms of destiny. ‘It is not punishment, but a misfortune striking from heaven.’14
Less metaphysical was the view of Hugh Trenchard, expressed to Parliament. ‘The natives of a lot of these tribes love fighting for fighting’s sake,’ he said. ‘They have no objection to being killed.’
He shared his private thoughts on these knotty matters with a colleague whom he had not previously warmed to: Hugh Dowding, who in the late 1920s was sent out to Palestine. It was a serious gesture of confidence. After the war, Dowding was head of 1 Group at Kenley. He rose to the rank of air commodore, moved to Inland Area headquarters at Uxbridge (just a few miles away from the Fighter Command HQ-to-be at Bentley). Then in 1924, he was sent out to Baghdad, in a period during which the RAF were seeking to quell uncountable numbers of different sects and tribes in a landscape that was often far from hospitable to their advanced technology; a land of rough mountains and vast marshes, as well as sand plains. Dowding acquitted himself well and in May 1926 came back to Britain to join the Air Ministry as Director of Training.
In 1929, he was given possibly the trickiest job of them all; a posting to Palestine requiring nimble, fleet judgements. Any mistakes could well result in a conflagration that might sweep across an already fissile Middle East. The country, at that stage, was a British protectorate; the Balfour Declaration of 1917 had promised a home for the Jewish people – and although the fulfilment of that promise was some way off, tensions in the region were high, especially in the vortex that followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. For Dowding, this was quite a cauldron to be thrown into; instructive and educational, an invaluable experience.
Dowding seemed bemused by this new world. ‘The Arab legion is a curious force run entirely on Oriental lines,’ he wrote to Trenchard. ‘It is cheap, and has a great deal of rough effectiveness; but I imagine if certain of its methods appeared in “The Spectator”, there would be something of a sensation.’ Dowding’s nickname among colleagues, quite early on, was ‘Stuffy’; yet he did have a bone-dry sense of humour.15
The peace of those interwar years grew yet more uneasy. In the early 1930s, the Great Depression and its aftershocks rippled across every continent; and as economic hards
hips began to grate ever more painfully on the ordinary people, fissures were opened in the body politic in many countries. It was understood at Cabinet level as the decade dawned that Britain would have to construct an ever more advanced air fleet; yet there were also those who saw this new air age as the harbinger of Armageddon. Both sides were to be proved right.
Chapter Three
The Seduction of Flight
In 1932, when German voters made the Nazi party the largest political force in the Reichstag, practically every British schoolboy – and a great many pilots to be – were reading the first adventures of a new hero created by Captain W.E. Johns (not a captain at all in reality – but he was a very experienced former pilot). That year saw publication of The Camels Are Coming, a collection of short stories featuring the young James Bigglesworth, known more familiarly as ‘Biggles’. In his first – surprisingly dark – adventures, Biggles was a Great War ace in the Royal Flying Corps, somewhere between 1917 and 1918.
Biggles’s world (friends Algy and Ginger soon popped up) was one of continual hazard and ‘red mists’, of love betrayed and dead friends avenged, as he went flying off in search of treacherous Germans. At the beginning, there was more consumption of whisky and cigarettes than one would expect (these refreshments were swiftly replaced in later stories with milk). There was also a sense of mortality; in the early books, Biggles felt fear keenly. This did not stop him killing many enemy pilots. He also lied about his age in order to get into the Corps. Biggles was seventeen as his exploits began.
Johns was writing with terrific authority; he had flown with the RFC during the First World War and appeared to have had nine lives. Propellers had flown off his aircraft, while he had got lost in mists, and had been forced to ditch into the sea – all this while over home territory. He also got caught up in terrifying dogfights in 1918, one of which brought him down in enemy territory and resulted in him being made a prisoner of war. But the Biggles adventures – as they went on, Johns brought them up to the present day and indeed had his hero take on the Nazis – were infused with the lyricism of flight itself. Above all, James Bigglesworth loved to fly.
Nor was Biggles the only literary pilot competing for attention. The astoundingly prolific children’s author Percy F. Westerman – who had spent a little time in the Royal Flying Corps in 1918 as a navigation expert – soon added to his wide range of adventure stories with entries such as Winning His Wings (1919), Unconquered Wings (1924), The Riddle of the Air (1926) and Standish of the Air Police (1935). These were aimed at boys who would never have the opportunity to travel abroad unless they were seeking their fortune in a far corner of the empire. But boys were allowed to daydream, and authors such as these were able to tell them that flying was every bit as extraordinary and marvellous as they could imagine.
Daydreams were not solely the province of the young. These daring literary heroics were matched in real life by spectacular RAF displays in the 1930s, vast pageants at Hendon in north London, several of which were organised by Wing Commander Keith Park. These events were frequently attended by royalty, as well as thousands of eager members of the public. Here were elaborate acrobatics, close formation flying, gimmicks such as giant catapults and floodlit displays of night flying: ‘The Sky Is Their Stage’; ‘The Thrill of the Year’. The spirit of such events goes on now at the annual Farnborough Air Shows. Back in the interwar years, long before technology smoothed the flight paths of all pilots, here were real daredevils, diving and swooping, making impossible turns. There were pyrotechnics; fighters would ‘attack’ other planes which would come down amid simulated flames. There would be simulated bomber raids (it is difficult to imagine modern audiences finding this an acceptable means of escapism); even, a little later, action involving barrage balloons. It is possible, in the febrile 1930s, that these mad air shows provided some subliminal reassurance.
Among the early air show daredevils was a young pilot, inducted into the air force in 1929, called Douglas Bader. Though he was later made hugely famous in biography and film, over-familiarity takes nothing away from the story of Bader’s genuinely breathtaking achievements – a man who had agonisingly lost both legs in a plane crash in 1931, who painfully learned to walk again on primitive artificial limbs, was then retired from the RAF, but came back and went on to fight brilliantly in the Battle of Britain.
Even away from the thrills of the 1920s and 1930s air show spectaculars, the young pilots – who themselves worshipped at the altar of the First World War ‘aces’ – perfected terrifying new tricks: one pilot impressed by ‘climbing out of his rear cockpit in mid air and crawling forward to tie a handkerchief about the joystick in the empty front cockpit, then getting back into the rear cockpit … Bader did it too, finding it diverting to be straddled across the fuselage like a bareback rider, holding on with the heels while the hands were tying the handkerchief.’ Then, at the Hendon Pageants, Bader and his team would make the crowds (and the journalist from The Times) swoon with ‘the cleanest trick flying’ performed before ‘hundreds of thousands crowding hillsides’.1
The annual Hendon shows were no empty spectacle; they were tableaux of potential, presented not only for domestic audiences but for continental eyes too, and for observers yet further afield. They featured an element of sabre-waving that would not suit modern tastes. In the earlier shows, in the 1920s, highly specific set-pieces depicted ‘Arabs’ (RAF men sporting Bedouin costumes) attempting theatrical uprisings, only to see the pride of the RAF swoop down on their ‘native villages’ (props which were destroyed amid convincing flames and fireworks). Britain’s might, in the form of her Empire, now extended to the heavens; and rival powers out in the East, for instance, such as Japan, would be implicitly invited to take note of the courage, the ingenuity and the mechanical know-how.
Among those looking on, fascinated, in the early days was Germany’s Erhard Milch, later to become a senior Luftwaffe commander. Before he joined the Reich Aviation Ministry in 1933, Milch had pursued a successful career in civil aviation. The Hendon visit beguiled him and he later wrote warmly of his conversation with someone from the Bristol Aeroplane Company. They discussed fuel injections: ‘My English then was very bad,’ wrote Milch, ‘but he explained everything so kindly that I understood. We had nothing of the kind in Germany at that time.’2 That was not quite true.
But the very nature of the new warfare caused anguish outside of the RAF, and particularly in some Cabinet circles: it was felt that the destructive possibilities of bombing would grow so enormous that it would paradoxically become a weapon that could never be used. Some politicians worried: what if this horrific weapon was unleashed upon Britain by its enemies? In the industrial areas of the Midlands and north, there was mass unemployment, with squalor and poverty on a scale that seemed closer to the nineteenth century than the neon glow of the 1930s. Nor had the preceding years been much easier for working men and their families; an economy shrunk to the bone, the apparent indifference and hostility of many politicians and the ruling class, and other factors – the acute sense of ingratitude for all the terrible sacrifices of the First World War – helped the trade union movement enormously. Those same politicians in the 1930s looked at the seething resentment of the workers and calculated how much enemy bombing it would take before they rose up and overthrew the established state.
Elsewhere, the newspapers were in the time-honoured business of stoking anxiety. Then, as now, fear sells. A report from the Evening News in January 1935 ran:
If war came tomorrow, London would be an inferno of exploding bombs, of gases drifting in poisonous clouds through the streets, of flames leaping from building to building. Squadron upon squadron of enemy aeroplanes – hundred after hundred filling the sky – would rain down death upon the city. There would be no escape from the destroying horror – except flight from the doomed capital of Empire.
The urgency was not misplaced. Under its commander-in-chief Hermann Goering, appointed by Hitler in 1934, the Luftwaffe, as
the German air force was now known, flew out from behind black clouds of secrecy. Though expressly forbidden by the terms of the Versailles Treaty, research and rearmament had been proceeding in the clearings of distant, obscure forests: pilots trained, planes perfected, weaponry honed. Goering – who had brought the concept of the concentration camp to Germany after it had been pioneered by his own father in southern Africa some thirty years beforehand – was a swaggering showman. In the interwar years, having joined the Nazi party, Goering had become a bloated morphine addict, the dependency starting after he was injured at a Nazi rally. The pale blue uniform that he was later to devise for himself, added to his undisguised lust for the vulgar trappings of high society, speak of a serious imbalance at the core of the man. But Hitler’s trust in him meant that his growing Luftwaffe was taken very seriously.
In Whitehall, meanwhile, fevered calculations were being made. Officials tried in the early 1930s to project what Germany might soon be capable of. It was reckoned that they could drop anything from 300 to 900 tons of explosives every day. London was the presumed target; many believed that the Germans would soon have the capability to turn the capital into an inferno miles wide. Even the more optimistic voices held an undercurrent of dread. A Home Office report declared:
Even if unlimited money and resources were available, it would be impossible to prevent heavy casualties and great destruction of property. All that can be done is to take whatever steps financial and other considerations allow on the one hand to inflict as much damage as possible on the attackers, on the other hand to minimise the effects of air attack upon the morale of the people and the working of essential services.
The Secret Life of Fighter Command Page 4