This was quite a claim to advance on the basis of a few air raids. By making it, Smuts set a pattern for extravagant extrapolations, unsupported by serious data, of what air power might do that persisted through the years ahead and which profoundly shaped the development and condition of the Royal Air Force as it prepared for the next big war.
His prophecy was followed by an equally momentous proposal. He recommended that henceforth the RFC and its maritime equivalent, the Royal Naval Air Service, should no longer be tied strictly to the tactical needs of the Army and Navy and the two should be amalgamated in a single Air Force under the political control of a new Air Ministry. The Smuts plan was adopted and implemented with a speed that was remarkable even in wartime. The Royal Air Force came into being on 1 April 1918, the first – and for some years the only – independent air service in the world.
The original set-up was makeshift. The Air Ministry was initially sited in the Cecil Hotel, a second-class establishment in the Strand, before moving to a Portland stone block at No. 1 Kingsway, named Adastral House after the wonderful motto the RAF had inherited from the RFC – Per Ardua ad Astra. But the first great leap had been made and the airmen had their chance at reaching for the stars.
In less than four years the status of airmen had soared. Initially the lackeys of the traditional services they were now their nominal equals. The grant of independence had come out of nowhere. No one serving in the air had asked for it. Indeed, there were some in the RFC, including initially Trenchard himself, who were sceptical of the value of a third service, though it did not take him long to change his mind.
The airmen had been handed independence on a plate. They soon learned they would have to fight to keep it. The Army and Navy saw the measure as a temporary aberration. Once the flap was over and the war won, they set about trying to kill off the upstart and claw back control of their air assets.
The fight for survival that ensued had a profound effect on the fundamental character and outlook of the RAF. From birth it was forced to develop theories and practices that justified its existence and techniques for fending off a predatory Army and Navy, both operating from positions of massive institutional strength.
The Navy was particularly persistent. The Admiralty had a solid claim that as the Fleet was central to Britain’s defences, anything connected to it should come under its control. The creation of the Fleet Air Arm in 1924 still left naval aviation in the hands of the RAF and it was not until May 1939 that the Admiralty won it back. The Army felt that it had not been properly compensated for the loss of the RFC and senior officers complained constantly that the RAF showed no interest in providing for its legitimate needs. The belief that the Air Force was primarily out for itself ran deep in the traditional services. It was true that the RAF fought its corner hard in the early years of its existence, but self-interest was essential for self-preservation.
Mutual suspicion and misunderstanding, breaking occasionally into open bureaucratic warfare, placed a heavy strain on relations between the services that would last into the early years of the next war, hampering Britain’s ability to fight it.
The RAF had to tread carefully in the post-war atmosphere of military cost-cutting that slashed budgets to the bone, a general loathing of war and a deep reluctance to contemplate the dreadful thought that Britain might one day have to fight another one. The newcomers were last in the queue for resources. Even getting kitted out in the new blue uniforms was a struggle. The Royal Army Clothing Department which dealt initially with supply, appeared unwilling to accept the change. ‘Without presuming to criticize the decision of the Air Council, I venture to submit to you the following considerations,’ wrote its director, General Sir Benjamin Johnson, in July 1918.5 He went on to urge them to make sure they were happy with their choice as ‘nothing could be worse for the prestige of the Air Service than the adoption of a colour which it might be found faded, went shabby or showed dirt and dust marks easily’. Eight years after the birth, the Treasury were still complaining that they had not been consulted about the clothing costs (which admittedly came to about £1.5 million).6
In the face of this resentment and a government which begrudged every shilling of military expenditure, the RAF needed outstanding leadership to keep it on its feet. It was provided by Hugh Trenchard who, as Chief of the Air Staff, was the professional head of the RAF for eleven of the first twelve years of its life. ‘Boom’ Trenchard dominates the story of the early days, simultaneously forbidding and benign, the patriarchal figure of the foundation myth. He claimed to dislike being referred to as the ‘Father of the RAF’ but had no difficulty accepting all the other accolades that would be heaped upon him over the years. Trenchard was a failure until he was forty. He was born in 1873, the son of a soldier turned failed West Country solicitor and a mother whose father had been a naval officer. He was supposed to join the Navy but flunked the entrance exam to Dartmouth then twice failed to pass muster for the Army academy at Woolwich. He finally scraped into the Royal Scots Fusiliers and spent the next nineteen years in India and Africa.
His career was going nowhere when in 1912, inspired by a letter from a brother officer describing ecstatically his experiences with the newly formed Royal Flying Corps at their aviation school on Salisbury Plain, he decided to try it for himself. He was immediately entranced – not with flying for he was too big and clumsy to be a good pilot – but with the opportunities it offered, for the military and for himself. Qualities the Army overlooked were appreciated in the RFC and promotions came rapidly. Three years later he was officer commanding in France.
Trenchard inspired something close to adulation among the generation of officers who led the RAF into the war and his thinking pervaded their outlook. Even after he was long gone from office, his protégé Arthur Tedder, who, as deputy to the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was one of the busiest men in the world, still found time during the 1944 invasion to write to the old man asking for his advice.
He was seen to possess a quality that was not obvious in any other military figure of the time. ‘There are some rare people in whose presence one instinctively and immediately feels: here is a really great man,’ declared ‘Jack’ Slessor who first met him when a young RFC officer in France.7 ‘I felt it [then] … and I have felt the same about him ever since. It is difficult to define that quality of real greatness. Self-confidence without a trace of arrogance, a contemptuous yet not intolerant disregard for anything mean or petty; the capacity to shuffle aside non-essentials and put an unerring finger on the real core of a problem or the true quality of a man, a sort of instinct for the really important point; a selfless devotion to the cause of what he believed to be true or right.’
Those who served with him felt they had been gilded by the association. ‘I’m one of the Boom boys,’ boasted Air Marshal Sir Hugh Walmsley in later life. ‘He put the fear of God into me but by God I loved him.’8 He even managed to be a hero to his valet. The humorous, intelligent Maurice Baring, who as his adjutant saw him at very close quarters in the First World War, thought him ‘one of the few big men of the world’.9
Trenchard had many failings. He could be bombastic, dogmatic and often got things badly wrong. He shamelessly interfered in Air Force matters long after leaving office, with the result that ‘all his successors up to the end of the war had to cope with his promptings and criticisms’.10 And despite his military disdain for civilian manoeuvrings, he could intrigue as enthusiastically as any grubby politician if he thought the cause was worth it.
In many ways, though, his reputation is deserved. He was a formidable operator in the corridors of Whitehall, forceful with officials but knowing when to bend, and showed a subtle understanding of political realities, tending to tell his masters what they wanted to hear. His methods intensified friction with the other services,