Slessor and the planning staff had already laid out the situation in stark terms in a paper to Newall a few days after he took over as Chief of the Air Staff on 1 September 1937. It stated that they would be ‘failing in their duty were they not to express the considered opinion that the Metropolitan [i.e. home-based] Air Force in general and the Bomber Command in particular, are at present almost totally unfitted for war; that unless the production of new and up-to-date aircraft can be expedited, they will not be fit for war for at least two and a half years; and that even at the end of that time, there is not the slightest chance of their reaching equality with Germany in first line strength if the present German programmes are fulfilled’.30
The warning produced yet another scheme – J – but unlike its predecessors this was more than a mere exercise in upping the numbers. Quantity gave way to quality. The plan was based on what the Air Staff considered to be its minimum strategic requirements rather than on hoped-for deterrent effect, or some ill-defined numerical ‘parity’. The goal was to have 3,031 front-line aircraft at home and abroad available by April 1941, that is 800 more than in Scheme F – the last one to get government approval.
As always, most of the new aircraft would be bombers, which would outnumber fighters by a factor of two to one. Nothing that had happened since the start of expansion had shaken the Air Staff’s belief in the proposition that a big bomber force was the foundation for all air strategy. When submitting the new scheme for government approval, the Air Minister Lord Swinton made it clear ‘there is no question of altering the ratio of fighter and bomber squadrons in the sense of reducing bomber squadrons to make fighter squadrons’.31
Faith in the offensive had blinded the Air Force professionals to the meaning of technological, military and political developments, the significance of which was dawning on amateur, civilian minds. Britain’s defensive situation was improving fast. The domestic aircraft industry was at last producing fast, modern, low-wing monoplane fighters that could at least hold their own against the Luftwaffe. At the time Scheme J was proposed, 600 Hurricanes were on order from Hawker and the first small batch would start to arrive on squadrons at the beginning of 1938.32 An order had been made for 310 Spitfires from Supermarine, though delays and complications meant production was stalled. Radar infrastructure was expanding rapidly. The first five stations in the Chain Home radar network covering the approaches to London became operational in 1938.
The Air Staff could take the credit for having identified and backed two world-beating fighters and for moving fast to exploit Radio Direction Finding. What they failed to grasp fully was the damage these developments had done to the premises on which their theory of air power rested. The combination of radar, the sophisticated command and control system that it made possible and fast, well-armed fighters seemed to provide a plausible shield against an attempted ‘knock-out blow’.
The implications were spelled out by one senior officer who saw clearly the new reality. Hugh Dowding was appointed commander-in-chief of Fighter Command when it was created in July 1936, having been passed over for CAS in favour of Newall despite being his senior. He was regarded by his peers as humourless, earnest and aloof and well suited to his nickname, ‘Stuffy’. Before his appointment he had been in charge of research and development at the Air Ministry and it was largely on his initiative that the Hurricane and Spitfire were ordered. He had no scientific training but was open to new ideas and soon grasped the significance of RDF. It was he who devised the finely tuned system of collating raw radar reports and sightings from ground observers, filtering them through control centres and translating the refined information into orders to the fighter squadrons.
Dowding’s views ran head-on into the prevailing orthodoxy. He rejected the notion that counter-attack by bomber was the best form of defence in favour of a simpler idea. ‘The best defence of this country is Fear of the Fighter,’ he wrote. ‘If we are strong in fighters we should probably never be attacked in force. If we are moderately strong we shall probably be attacked and the attacks will gradually be brought to a standstill … if we are weak in fighter strength, the attacks will not be brought to a standstill and the productive capacity of the country will be virtually destroyed.’33 The overwhelming duty of the Air Force, he argued, was to secure the safety of the home base. Dowding’s views were heresy to the bomber cult. It took courage to maintain his beliefs in contradiction to the overwhelming official wisdom but he did so tenaciously, in the words of the official historians choosing ‘neither to understand other arguments, nor to compromise, nor even to accept with good grace the decisions that went against him’.34
On his own, Dowding was unable to deflect the Air Staff from the fixed notion that inspired all their strategic thinking. It needed an outsider to do that. The first major challenge to the primacy of the bomber arrived from an unexpected quarter. Sir Thomas Inskip came from a line of stolid West Country solicitors and parsons and was known, if at all, for his parliamentary objections to a new version of the Book of Common Prayer. The announcement early in 1936 that he was to be moved from his post as Attorney General to the newly created position of Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence was greeted with derision and incomprehension. The role had been created by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, in an attempt to harmonize the rearmament effort. It was a vitally important job and big names were bandied about to fill it, among them Winston Churchill’s. Baldwin eventually decided Inskip was a safer bet, a decision that was approved by the Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain who noted in his diary that while he would ‘excite no enthusiasm’ he would ‘involve us in no fresh perplexities’.35 Inskip would confound the low expectations set for him.
When Scheme J arrived on his desk he coolly reassessed the a priori assumption contained within it that it was essential for Britain to possess a bomber strike force to match that of the Luftwaffe. To the quiet, God-fearing lawyer, it seemed that for the time being at least the emphasis should be on defence rather than offence and priority given to fighters. Admittedly, if war came that would mean that Britain would suffer more damage than it could inflict, but ‘the result would not at once be critical’.36 He believed that Germany did not have the resources to sustain a prolonged war and would therefore have to ‘knock us out in a comparatively short time’. The best course was to concentrate on warding off the initial assaults while preserving military and economic strength for a long-drawn-out fight which Britain would win through its superior staying power. He was prepared to propose an increase of only £100 million on top of the existing allocation for the previous expansion scheme. If the money was to be used effectively, the Air Ministry should spend it on relatively cheap fighters rather than expensive bombers.
The airmen fought back vigorously against this impertinent rejection of the professional wisdom that suffused their thoughts and actions. Swinton reiterated the mantra that ‘counter attack still remains the chief deterrent and defence’ and warned that ‘we must not exaggerate the possibilities’ arising from radar and other developments. He also mounted a political defence, suggesting strongly that the change of direction would play badly with the public, making it seem as if the government was abandoning its public promises to keep up with the Germans in the air.
He had misread the changing mood. It was the here and now that mattered currently, not theories for the future. When the whole question of defence expenditure was considered in cabinet on 22 December 1937, it was Inskip’s view that ‘parity with Germany was more important in fighter aircraft resisting aggression, than in the offensive role of bombers’ that prevailed.37
The Air Ministry was now compelled to work with him to draw up a new scheme – K