The second half of the 1930s saw the RAF transformed from a small, professional élite into a mass force with the potential to fight a major war. The question of how it would go about doing that was not finally resolved until the end of 1938, when the great strategic conundrum of bombers or fighters, offence or defence, was settled, at least for the first stage of the coming war. In December that year the balance shifted decisively in favour of fighters and ‘close defence’. The change was initiated not by the air force itself but by the government. Despite radar and the advent of the Hurricane and Spitfire, the Air Ministry pressed for parity with the German bomber force. But the government decided this was no longer possible within the time available. The goal had always been unrealistic. Britain was a democracy, reacting wearily to the threat of a war it had no wish to fight. Rearmament had been late and grudgingly paid for, with the aircraft factories still operating at peacetime levels of production. Germany was a dictatorship, heading at full speed and with no concern for cost towards a conflict of its own making. Britain was not going to catch up before the war was launched. It was the minister in charge of defence coordination, Sir Thomas Inskip, who forced the air force to accept the change in strategic thinking. In a memo to Swinton of 7 December he stated the new thinking crisply:
I cannot take the view that our Air Force must necessarily correspond in numbers and types of aircraft with the German Air Force. I cannot, therefore, persuade myself that the dictum of the Chief of the Air Staff that we must give the enemy as much as he gives us is a sound principle. I do not think it is the proper measure of our strength. The German Air Force…must be designed to deliver a knock-out blow within a few weeks of the outbreak of war. The role of our Air Force is not an early knock-out blow – no one has suggested that we can accomplish that – but to prevent the Germans from knocking us out.26
The inference was clear. For the time being at least the emphasis would be on defence and making any German attack on Britain too painful to sustain. Despite the strenuous opposition of the Air Ministry and RAF senior staff, the Cabinet backed Inskip’s view. The next years would belong to the fighters, and those who flew them.
3 ‘Free of Boundaries, Free of Gravity, Free of Ties’
The great RAF expansion gave thousands of young men the chance to realize an ambition that had seemed remote and probably unattainable when they first conceived it. That flying was possible was still a relatively novel idea. For most people in the world the thought that they would ever actually do so themselves was fantastical. The banality of aviation has hardened our imaginations to the fascination it excited in the years between the wars. Once, in Uganda in the 1980s, I was at a remote airstrip when a relief plane took some adolescent boys for a joyride. It was the first time they had been in an aeroplane. When they landed their friends ran out to examine them, as if they expected them to have been physically transformed by the experience.
So it was, or nearly so, in the inter-war years. ‘Ever been up?’ people would ask each other at the air displays that attracted hundreds of thousands in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. Those who could say ‘yes’ were admired for their daring, their worldliness, their modernity. The men and women who flew the beautiful treacherous machines were exalted and exotic. In the eyes of many, their courage and skill put them at the apex of human evolution.
Aviators were as popular as film stars. Record-breaking feats of speed, distance and endurance filled the papers. Men were the most avid readers of these stories, young men and boys. Almost every pilot who fought in Fighter Command in 1940 fell for flying early. Their interest flared with the intensity of a great romance. For some, the first magical taste came with a ten-minute flip in the rear cockpit of one of the rickety machines of the flying circuses that hopped around the country, setting up on racecourses or dropping in at resort towns. The most famous was led by Alan Cobham, a breezy entrepreneur who was knighted for pioneering flights across Asia. Billy Drake was sixteen years old, on holiday from his boarding school in Switzerland, when the circus arrived to put on a display close by his father’s golf club near Stroud. It was half a crown to go up. Drake was already intoxicated with aviation, but his parents tried to dissuade him, partly because flying seemed a dead end for a middle-class boy, but also because they feared for his safety. The brief hop over the Gloucestershire fields was enough to set the course of his early life. ‘When I got down,’ he remembered many years later, ‘I knew that this was it.’1
Pete Brothers watched aeroplanes in the skies around his home in Lancashire, where his family owned a firm supplying chemicals to the food and pharmaceutical industries. In his spare time he made model aeroplanes. His family were wary of his enthusiasm. In 1936, on his sixteenth birthday, he was given flying lessons at the Lancashire Aero Club in the hope that the draughty, dangerous reality of flying would cool his ardour. ‘My father said, “You’ll get bored with it, settle down and come into the family business.” But I didn’t. I went off and joined the air force.’ He took his father flying and he, too, became ‘flat-out keen’.2
Sometimes, unwittingly, parents planted the germ themselves. Dennis David was seven years old and on holiday in Margate when, ‘as a special treat, my mother and I went up in an Avro 504 of the Cornwall Aviation Company. Though I was surprised by the din, this…sowed a seed inside me.’3
Just the sight of an aeroplane could be enough to ignite the passion. James Sanders got up at five one morning, in July 1933, at the villa in Genoa where his wealthy archaeologist father had moved the family, to watch a formation of twenty-four Savoia Marchetti seaplanes, led by Italo Balbo, the head of the Italian air force, heading west on a propaganda visit to the United States, and felt two certainties. ‘There was going to be a war, there was no question about it, and I was going to be in the air force.’4
Throughout the inter-war years, all around the country, many a flat, boring pasture was transformed into an airfield and became an enchanted domain for the surrounding schoolboys. On summer evenings Roland Beamont would cycle from his prep school in Chichester to the RAF station at Tangmere, climb on to his bicycle to see over the hedge and watch 11 Squadron and 43 Squadron taking off and landing in their Hawker Furies. From the age of seven, when he had been taken up by a barnstorming pilot, he had been entranced with flying. Watching the silver-painted biplanes, the sleekest and fastest in the air force, he decided he ‘wanted more than anything else to be on fighters’.5 Twelve years later he was in the middle of the Battle of Britain, flying Hurricanes from the same aerodrome.
First encounters with aeroplanes and airmen sometimes had the quality of a dream. Bob Doe, a shy schoolboy, was walking home after classes to his parents’ cottage in rural Surrey when ‘an RAF biplane fighter…force-landed in a field close to the road. I was able to walk around it, touch it and feel what was to me [the] beginning of the mystery of aviation.’6 Thousands of miles away on the other side of the world, near the town of Westport in the Southern Alps of New Zealand, a small, restless boy called Alan Deere had experienced the same revelation. While playing near his father’s farm he heard the note of an engine in the sky, looked up and saw a tiny silver machine. He had heard of aeroplanes but never seen one. ‘The fact that one was now overhead seemed unbelievable. Where did it come from? Who was the pilot? Where was it going to