Air Force Blue: The RAF in World War Two – Spearhead of Victory. Patrick Bishop
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Halton boys who had spent two years living twenty to a hut, Cranwell, where each cadet got a room of his own and had the services of a batman, must have seemed like luxury. The Brats, though, were unlikely to have been overawed by their surroundings or their classmates. They were already well versed in service ways and armoured with the confidence that came from hard-earned success. Two Halton boys won the Sword of Honour in the inter-war period, Patrick Coote in 1930 and John Badger in 1933. Both were killed in the war before they could achieve their full potential but, on the whole, apprentices who made it to Cranwell were destined for the top. The first Halton entrant, Walter Dawson, ended up an air chief marshal. Among the rest who passed through in the years between the wars were an air marshal, eleven air vice marshals, twenty air commodores and thirty group captains. Of the relatively small number who failed to make it beyond the rank of Flight Lieutenant, all but a handful attended at the end of the period and lost their lives in the war while still junior officers.38
The elite cadres that emerged from the college and training schools were far too small to satisfy even the limited manpower demands of the RAF in its shrunken post-war existence. Aviation was a young man’s game and the active life of a pilot was relatively short. If everyone who flew an aeroplane had a permanent commission, the service would soon fill up with underemployed and expensive officers whose flying days were over.
Several solutions emerged. One scheme was to create a new class of airman pilots, drawn from the ranks. The preference was for men with ‘a high standard of education and efficiency’, showing the qualities of ‘pluck, reliability, alertness, steadiness, keenness and energy’. Rather than lose their technical skills they would not receive commissions but were classed as sergeant pilots. They were expected to serve for five years then go back to their old trades.39 In 1939, about a quarter of the pilots in RAF squadrons were NCOs, giving a core of toughness and skill to every unit. They had won their wings the hard way and would be regarded with slightly nervous respect by the younger newcomers who flooded in later.
Most of the flying personnel needs were supplied by the invention of the Short Service Commission (SSC). In 1924 the Air Ministry advertised for 400 young officers for flying duties. They were to be British-born and of pure European descent who would serve up to six years and then move onto the Reserve of Air Force Officers (RAFO). According to the official RAF account in the interwar years these men ‘formed the bulk of officers … the Air Force was essentially a short service force and its flyers were birds of passage’.40
In 1925 Trenchard backed a scheme suggested by some RFC veterans who studied engineering at Cambridge after the war to start a university air squadron. The idea spread to Oxford, then London, then elsewhere. He also got government backing for an Auxiliary Air Force of weekend fliers, the RAF’s equivalent of the Army’s territorial units. The pilots were amateurs who flew in their own time in aeroplanes supplied and maintained by the RAF and the squadrons would have a marked local character. The Auxiliary Air Force provided a home for men from affluent homes to meet up in a patriotic cause and enjoy each other’s company. The atmosphere was clubby and exclusive and in some units the whiff of snobbery was strong.
These structures were bold and imaginative departures from contemporary military norms. The RAF’s top officers, and those rising behind them, hardly seemed like radicals. They almost all came from conventional military backgrounds and on paper differed little from their Army and Navy counterparts. Trenchard was succeeded as CAS in 1930 by John Salmond, the son of a major general who, after Wellington and Sandhurst, had fought in the Boer War before taking up flying and transferring to the RFC. On 1 April 1933 he handed over to his brother Geoffrey who lasted only twenty-seven days in the job before dying. His replacement was Edward Ellington, a former gunner.
The rising generation of RAF officers, the men who would lead the RAF into the war, also came from the same strata of society in which the generals and admirals were traditionally nurtured. They were, on the whole, courteous (though there were some notable exceptions) and valued ‘form’. They liked to hunt and shoot, fish and sail and their politics were conservative. Like their Army and Navy contemporaries who made it to the top, they could be vain, overbearing and unscrupulous in the pursuit of advancement and glory.
They differed from their peers in sharing a heightened sense of the possibilities of the new. It was this spirit that had led them into the air in the first place. All had been attracted by the excitement of aviation. They were risk-takers, hazarding not just their lives at a time when flying was a very dangerous game, but also their careers, for opting for the RFC was a gamble for anyone planning a long-term military future. And they were by and large an intelligent bunch: sharp, inquiring and well-educated, at a time when brain power was not regarded as a cardinal military virtue. Arthur Tedder read history at Cambridge and had just started in the Colonial Service when the Great War broke out. Trafford Leigh-Mallory was a Cambridge contemporary, planning a career as a barrister. Sholto Douglas, a professor’s son, studied Classics at Oxford. Cleverness was prized and the cleverest, it was generally agreed, was Charles Portal, Winchester and Christ Church, Oxford, and ‘the accepted star of the Air Force’ as Churchill called him when appointing him Chief of the Air Staff in October 1940 at the young age of forty-seven (his Army and Navy opposite numbers were fifty-eight and sixty-four respectively).41
Not least, they looked different from their Army counterparts. The most senior, the best-known soldiers – Alan Brooke, Bernard Montgomery, Harold Alexander – sported Edwardian-era moustaches proclaiming their membership of a military caste. Portal and Tedder were clean-shaven. Tedder, with his fresh face and jutting pipe, cut a very unmartial figure, more like a liberal university professor than a man of action. Portal’s hooked nose and hooded eyes did not look British at all, and he reminded Peter Townsend of ‘an Arab sheikh’.42
Despite his relative youth, Portal would show himself the most detached and composed of the wartime chiefs of staff. He was as cool and hard as marble. High intelligence did not equate with an excess of human sympathy. This thoroughly modern warrior was as ruthless as any traditional commander and did not flinch from accepting or inflicting casualties. A spirit of restless aggression would pervade the direction of the wartime RAF, stimulated by a cadre of senior officers, most of whom had passed through Trenchard’s kindergarten. The approach guaranteed a high casualty rate among those who flew. The question was whether the expenditure was matched by the results.
3
In March 1934, Stanley Baldwin, the dominant figure in the National Government, announced in Parliament that henceforth it was official policy that ‘in air strength and air power this country shall no longer be in a position inferior to any country within striking distance of its shores’.1 That meant Germany. The great transformation in the RAF’s fortunes had begun. It was now launched on a race to keep up with the Luftwaffe as German air power evolved from nothing to threaten domination of the skies over Europe.
Baldwin’s words marked an end to wishful thinking. The physical and economic catastrophe of the last war had made a new one unbearable to contemplate, for government and people alike. Since 1919 defence spending had been governed by the ‘Ten Year Rule’ founded on the supposition that the country would not be engaged in a major conflict in the decade to come. Hard-headed Tories like Baldwin had become enthusiasts for Utopian formulas for world peace, embodied in the international disarmament talks which opened, attended by every major world power, in Geneva in February 1932.
The Ten Year Rule was scrapped in 1932 after service chiefs warned that the armed forces would soon be incapable of defending the empire. The Geneva talks effectively collapsed when Hitler pulled Germany out of both the conference and the League of Nations in October 1933.
With the Baldwin