The money was emphatic proof that the Air Force was now at the heart of Britain’s defence strategy. In the thirty years since the advent of heavier-than-air flight, air power had assumed the same vital significance as sea power in ensuring the defence of the nation.
Between 1934 and 1939 the government authorized a series of schemes to expand the RAF at a rate that would maintain numerical parity with the Luftwaffe in the hope that this would deter aggression. When it became clear that this was unrealistic the emphasis switched from quantity to quality. The aim became to shape a force that would be able to withstand an initial onslaught from the air, and in time strike back. Existing programmes were scrapped and new ones devised in a desperate effort to keep up with an ever-changing reality. Such was the pace of events that only one of the eight expansion plans – Scheme F – was completed.
The favoured status of the Air Force was the result of several intertwined developments. There was a general conviction, shared by amateur and expert alike, that air power would determine the outcome of future conflicts. It followed that a powerful Air Force was the best means of deterring potential enemies. It also offered the hope that, if war did come, it could be fought without the need to send British troops to the Continent, an awful prospect for a society in which the memory of the trenches was still raw. All these notions were promoted with arriviste confidence by air power lobbyists inside and outside the RAF.
Trenchard and the Air Staff did not support the more extreme doctrines circulating in international military and political circles, which held that aeroplanes could win wars on their own. They answered the question: ‘what is the RAF really for?’ with a theory of air power that has been described as ‘strategic interception’.3 This held that, until now, in wars between nations, one side had tried to beat the other by defeating its land and sea forces in battle. The coming of air power changed all that. Aeroplanes could reach out to undermine the enemy’s capacity and will to fight. They would do so by smashing up war factories, power supplies and transport systems. As the targets were in populated areas, the onslaught would have a devastating effect on civilian morale. Trenchard was fond of quoting a maxim that had no basis in observable fact that ‘the moral effect [of bombing] is to the material in the ratio of ten to one’.4
Sooner rather than later the pressure would become unbearable. Civilians would clamour for protection and soldiers would be withdrawn from the front to try and defend them. Public support to continue fighting would evaporate and the enemy’s leaders would be forced to sue for peace. The prospect of mass civilian deaths and spectacular violence raised obvious ethical questions. They were to some extent answered by the claim that air power would put an end to the long agony of defensive terrestrial warfare as seen in the trenches of the Western Front. New wars would be short and sharp but less bloody in the long run than the old ones.
All this had profound implications for the futures of the Army and Navy. Trenchard was careful not to claim that the new reality would make the old services redundant. The Navy would have an important role undermining the enemy’s war economy by exercising its traditional function of imposing a maritime blockade and securing Britain’s supply lines. The Army would still have to defeat the enemy forces in the field – though these would be much weakened as a result of air action. If the Air Force claims were accepted, though, it would mean that in a time of crisis it would have a privileged call on resources and a dominant voice in war councils. It was a recipe for bad blood.
The supposedly scientific prognostications of the air professionals chimed with the instincts of the civilian amateurs. Politicians needed little persuasion about the menace posed by aerial warfare. Stanley Baldwin’s doom-laden speech in the House of Commons on 10 November 1932 revealed how deeply the message had penetrated. Baldwin had twice been Prime Minister and was now the leader of the Conservative Party which dominated the National Government led by Ramsay MacDonald. He had been foremost in pressing for an international convention to outlaw, or at least limit, the use of aircraft as weapons of war. Now, with the Geneva conference in its death throes, he had nothing to offer but despairing prophecies.
The speech is remembered for his warning that ‘the bomber will always get through’, a phrase that struck home immediately. It was only one of a number of utterances that must have curdled the blood of everyone reading the next morning’s papers.5 He had now abandoned the hope that agreements to curb air power could ever work. The stark conclusion was that ‘the only defence is in offence, which means that you have got to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves’.
One of the many striking things about the speech is the sense of dread that it sets out to create even though there was at that stage no European war in prospect. Hitler and the Nazis were new on the scene and were still presumed to be subject to the normal laws of diplomacy and power politics.
As the decade progressed the spectre raised by Baldwin would haunt the political landscape. The future arrived more rapidly than he imagined and the distant nightmare began to feel like imminent reality. Mass media stoked anxieties. The Alexander Korda film Things to Come, based on H. G. Wells’s novel, was released in 1936. It painted a picture of a London-like metropolis being bombed back into the Dark Ages by an unstoppable wave of enemy bombers. The movie was a critical and commercial success, the sixteenth most popular at the box office that year.
It was to the RAF that everyone looked for protection from these horrors and it was happy to offer reassurance. Adastral House had a plan for dealing with the mounting threat from Germany. Almost every senior officer who mattered was an adept of the cult of the bomber. For John Slessor the paramountcy of bombing was ‘an article of faith’.6 Slessor was thoughtful and articulate, a Trenchard protégé who had ghosted his writings and speeches and from 1937 was de facto head of the plans department that translated doctrine into practice. He and his colleagues envisaged a scenario in which deterrence broke down and the Luftwaffe launched a huge air assault on Britain to land a ‘knock-out blow’ and deliver a swift victory.
The RAF needed fighter aircraft that would ‘provide a reasonable chance of parrying a knock-out blow’. But the real protection would be provided by a ‘striking force’ of bombers mounting a massive counter-offensive. Slessor admitted later that ‘our belief in the bomber was intuitive’ and that until war broke out ‘we really did not know anything about air war on a major scale’.7 The excuse was that there was a lack of hard evidence to work on. The RAF had little recent practical experience – bombing villages in Waziristan taught no lessons. There seems to have been no systematic military analysis of air operations in the wars in China, Abyssinia and Spain.8
‘Jack’ Slessor (© Imperial War Museums, CH 9457)
The absence of data did nothing to undermine the Air Staff’s confidence in the doctrine. It rested unsteadily on several untested propositions. One was that airspace was so vast that British bombers would be able to proceed directly to the task of destroying the enemy’s war industry relatively unhindered. But what was true for British bombers would presumably be true of German ones. Surely, at some point, a battle would have to be fought to gain air supremacy in order to avoid an endless attritional cycle of attack and counter-attack?
Another was that bombing would have a devastating effect on enemy morale. Again if that was so – and