As the conflict approached, the people of Britain absorbed the idea that the Air Force would play the dominant role in the coming struggle, as the guarantors of their survival and the agents of eventual victory. On 1 October 1938, the first issue of the weekly news magazine Picture Post appeared. It was lively, outspoken, thoroughly modern in outlook and almost immediately won a big circulation and considerable political influence. The second issue carried a long article entitled simply ‘The RAF’, part of a series intended to shed light on ‘our great national institutions’.9 It was written by Nigel Tangye, a young journalist-about-town who was also a pilot and officer in the RAF reserve. Tangye had good connections with the Air Ministry and it would have been surprising if he had not checked with them before making the momentous claim that ‘the RAF holds today a position of importance higher than the Army or Royal Navy’. The duties of the Air Force of protecting the national territory, preserving vital sea trade routes, defending the empire and lending aid to allies amounted to ‘everything which for hundreds of years has been the function of the Royal Navy’.
Publicity frequently stressed its ‘democratic’ nature, compared to the other services. ‘Officers and men in the Royal Air Force share a common spirit which is unknown either in the Army or the Navy,’ wrote Tangye. ‘So much of the Navy’s time is spent in scrubbing decks, so much of the Army’s in massed drilling. But the Air Force Machines have to fly every day, and the crews of each are bent on keeping them in tip-top condition.’
It was never presented as a classless organization. That would have been too much to claim in a society which, though lines were blurring, was still strictly defined by birth, money, education, accent and manners. It did, however, seem something like a meritocracy in which the near-revolutionary notion that competence was more important than background had taken hold.
The Air Force needed a large cadre of expert tradesmen to keep it flying. They came, largely, from the lower-middle and upper-working classes, and the educational gap between other ranks and officers was consequently narrower than in the Army and Navy. The need for aircrew opened the door to the officers’ mess to young men who would never have passed muster in the 1920s and 1930s.
The literary types sent in the early years of the war by the Air Ministry on fact-finding tours of bases to gather propaganda material were struck by the varied origins of the officers they encountered. The Oxford don Lord David Cecil noted after a visit to a bomber station in 1941 how ‘compared with the Army or Navy the men of the RAF seem very diverse … very varied … drawing its members from every sort of rank and profession’.10 Sitting down to dinner in the mess he found on one side of him ‘a boy fresh from a public school; on the other side a bank clerk; opposite, a New Zealander, next to him a garage worker, next to him a law student’.
The service was too young, he concluded, to have ‘evolved a traditional type’ to which all must conform: ‘Their upper lips are not too stiff. On the whole their manners tend to be expansive. There is often a touch of jaunty flamboyance in the way they walk and speak and wear their uniforms, with an elegant identification bracelet glinting on the wrist.’
Air Force style was in bright contrast to the dowdiness of the other services. As a boy watching the build-up to D-Day around his home in the West Country the military historian John Keegan was disappointed that the British soldiers he saw ‘wore khaki from top to toe … so ill-cut, shapeless and hairy that I could find almost nothing in its wearers to admire’.11 When the Americans arrived he and his school friends were amazed at ‘how different they looked from our own jumble-sale champions, beautifully clothed in smooth khaki …’ They were even more impressed by the ‘number, size and elegance of the vehicles in which they paraded about the countryside in stately convoy’, so unlike the ‘sad collection of underpowered makeshifts, whose dun paint flaked from their tin pot bodywork’ that the Army had to make do with.
No one had to feel sorry for the RAF. The aircrew could equal their Yank counterparts in swank and dash and even the earthbound ‘erk’ had the edge over his ‘brown job’ and matelot comrades. Their uniform may have been of serge but they wore a collar and tie to go to work and their hair, curling from under their distinctive two-button side caps at a length that would have given a sergeant-major apoplexy, was as like as not gleaming with Brylcreem.
It was no longer the case that all the nice girls loved a sailor. In October 1939 ‘Just An Airman’ wrote to Picture Post complaining that after joining the Air Force his girlfriend had dumped him and since then he had found that ‘no decent girl seems to look at an airman’. He went on: ‘I am five feet 10 inches tall, good at sports and reasonably good looking. Once I had girlfriends. Now the only place I seem welcome is at the public house.’12
His self-pitying and possibly self-serving missive produced an avalanche of positive responses, a selection of which was printed over a double-page spread. ‘I, as a young lady of nineteen, was very surprised to read your correspondent’s letter,’ wrote Joyce Dickinson of London Road, Rainham, Gillingham, Kent.13 ‘Many young ladies, including myself, admire members of the Royal Air Force and feel especially proud when we read of their daring and brave exploits on the Western Front and over Germany. He may rest assured that although one girl has turned him down, many of us would like the opportunity to make his acquaintance.’
From Wallasey in Cheshire ‘An Admirer’ declared: ‘I think many readers will agree with me when I say that the RAF is the finest of the three services. I am not saying anything against the Navy or the Army … but I prefer the Air Force.’
It was little wonder that when conscription began more men exercised their right of choice in favour of the Air Force over the other services. The RAF seemed immune to the criticism that the Army in particular sometimes attracted. The war in the air got off to just as bad a start as it did on land and sea. Bomber Command’s early record was one of continuous failure and heavy, pointless losses, and the pattern was maintained by all branches of the service in the campaigns in Norway and France. Government propaganda and a co-operative media skated over this truth.
Then, in the summer of 1940, in full view of the population, Fighter Command won the Battle of Britain, supercharging national morale and gilding the Air Force with an aura of success that never tarnished. ‘The RAF are the darlings of the nation!’ wrote John Thornley, a twenty-nine-year-old salesman from Preston, Lancashire, in his diary in July 1940.14 ‘What magnificent chaps the RAF pilots must be,’ he declared a month later as the Battle approached its climax.
By the end of the summer its reputation seemed unassailable. Britain’s city-dwellers proved remarkably willing to overlook Fighter Command’s inability to protect them from the nightly Blitzes that devastated their homes in the winter of 1940–41, preferring to blame politicians for the lack of counter-measures. Major flaws in the Air Staff’s thinking and preparations such as its blind faith in strategic bombing and the initial failures to co-operate effectively with the Army and Navy were never really exposed to public view. The RAF’s numerous critics in the upper echelons of the other services complained that it appeared subject to different rules from the ones they had to obey. Often it seemed a law unto itself, holding, in the opinion of the soldier-historian Bernard Fergusson, ‘an unwritten charter direct from the war Cabinet’ that allowed it to direct bombing policy and decide on what types of aircraft were needed without having to consult with soldier and sailor colleagues.15
In two previous books, Fighter Boys (2003) and Bomber Boys (2008) I told the story of the RAF in the Battle of Britain and the Strategic Offensive against Germany, conveying events, emotions and attitudes as much as possible from the perspectives of the participants. In this final work in the trilogy, I hope to