Air Force Blue: The RAF in World War Two – Spearhead of Victory. Patrick Bishop
Читать онлайн книгу.
in March 1938 had galvanized Republican resistance, that if anything the opposite was the case – then British morale would be similarly affected. To the first the airmen had no answer. The second could only be dealt with by the assertion that innate racial superiority meant that, whereas Britons could ‘take it’, Germans couldn’t.
Despite these obvious flaws the views of the Air Staff were generally accepted in Downing Street, Whitehall and Westminster. They harmonized with the mood of the times and the priorities of politicians. Everyone was desperate to avoid a war, especially one that meant sending troops to fight again on the Continent. Building up the Army and Navy could only provoke the Germans. Building up the Air Force might deter them. Expansion was seen as a defensive measure, popular with government and public alike. The decision to go ahead with it was essentially a political not a strategic choice. Once taken, the Air Force hogged both the public limelight and the Treasury’s still limited largesse.
The Army and Navy boiled with exasperation at the favour bestowed on the new boys. It bubbles in the diaries of Henry Pownall, a sharp-eyed Army officer who watched the process from his seat on the secretariat of the Committee for Imperial Defence which brought together the professional service heads, cabinet ministers and senior officials. ‘The public cry is all for the Air Force [first], Navy a distinct second, and the Army a very bad third,’ he complained after a major report into how to repair the country’s run-down defences that paved the way for rearmament was unveiled in February 1934.9 ‘The RAF have got too much,’ he snapped a few months later as the details of how the budget would be carved emerged.10 The Army’s appeals for funds to build up a field force to send to France in time of war received a stony reception. ‘Everyone will shout loud enough for the Army to practise as an Army when war comes but in peace it is the Cinderella of the Services,’ wailed Pownall in 1938.11
It was not just about money. There was resentment at the tremendous strategic airs the Air Force had given itself. ‘A constant bone of contention in our discussions was the role to be played by the Air Force,’ wrote Major General Sir John Kennedy, the Army’s Deputy Director of Plans on the eve of the war. ‘Both the General Staff and the Naval Staff opposed the fanatical efforts of the Air Staff to press upon us their theory that the war would be decided by the action of air forces almost unaided by the other two services.’12
They were also aggrieved by the RAF’s extreme reluctance to divert resources to meet their particular needs. The Army and Navy ‘fought hard and unsuccessfully for the provision of adequate specialized air forces, properly trained and equipped for the support of naval and military operations’. The airmen’s attitude was combative and defensive. Kennedy claimed that a senior officer at the Air Ministry had told him that the Air Staff regarded such co-operation as a ‘prostitution of the Air Force’.
The fight for a share of air assets would go on far into the war. In the high-level meetings where defence priorities were decided the admirals and generals could only grind their teeth while the RAF got their way. ‘The politicians were much attracted by the Air Force doctrine,’ recalled Kennedy. ‘The soldiers and sailors could never persuade the cabinet or the defence committee to settle the dispute in a way we thought right, either before or during the war.’13
For all their perceived cockiness, the newcomers showed respect towards political authority and voiced their arguments softly. Edward Ellington, CAS for the crucial 1933–7 period, was regarded by his own senior officers as being too deferential in the company of politicians. His successor, Cyril Newall, was more forceful but got on well with Lord Swinton and Sir Kingsley Wood, the air ministers who presided over the expansion period.
The Air Marshals’ approach contrasted favourably with the high-handed ways of the soldiers and sailors. The Army brass barely bothered to disguise their contempt for Leslie Hore-Belisha, Secretary of State for War from 1937 to 1940. ‘An obscure, shallow-brained, charlatan political Jewboy’ was Pownall’s verdict.14 Their treatment of him is revealed in an episode recounted by Kennedy when he was taken on a tour of the front in northern France by Lord Gort, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, in November 1939.
It was a cold, wet windy morning. We motored through the rain to the western side of the British salient … on our way we crossed Vimy Ridge. Gort got us out of our cars … he made Hore-Belisha climb a very muddy bank and kept him shivering in the howling gale while he explained the battle fought there in the 1914–18 war. In spite of his discomfort Hore-Belisha kept up a good appearance of polite interest. By this time his patent leather boots must have been giving him hell.15
There were further stops at other windswept battlefields. They paused at a château to meet the French commander and were taken to an attic window for yet another tour d’horizon. Gort deliberately ‘opened a window and let in a piercing draught on Hore-Belisha; when we went out again into the rain he shouted jovially, “Isn’t it a grand day!”’16
This schoolboyish bullying was all the more extraordinary given that Gort owed his appointment to Hore-Belisha’s patronage. Nor would the War Minister be thanked for the great efforts he made in cabinet to obtain funds and equipment for the army Gort now commanded. Edmund Ironside, who Hore-Belisha appointed as Chief of the General Staff, was equally obnoxious towards his patron. Ironside, an outstanding linguist, gleefully recounted to Kennedy over lunch one day in his club how he had instructed his political master not to try and address French commanders in their own tongue: ‘I told him that his French was Le Touquet French – good enough for talking to Mademoiselle X on the plage but no good for military conversations.’17
The hostile and surely anti-Semitic attitudes of Gort and Ironside were in sharp contrast to the warm relations between the RAF and Sir Philip Sassoon, Under Secretary of State for Air between 1931 and 1937. Sir Philip was rich, Jewish and unmistakeably gay.18 He was famously generous and hospitable and every summer hosted the annual camp of the Auxiliaries of 601 (County of London) Squadron, of which he was honorary CO, at Port Lympne, his sumptuous country house on the Kent coast. In between flying, the young airmen lounged around the twin swimming pools in the grounds and there was a party every night. Sassoon’s death aged only fifty in June 1939 caused the Air Force real sorrow. At a meeting of the Air Council ten days afterwards much of the discussion was taken up with whether or not to cancel the RAF garden party held each year at Trent Park, another Sassoon mansion in Hertfordshire, as ‘the absence of Sir Philip would revive memories and cast a gloom over the proceedings’.19
Expansion piled enormous bulk on the organizational skeleton devised by Trenchard. In April 1934, on the eve of the great transformation, the RAF had 814 aeroplanes at home and abroad. When the war broke out it had 3,860.20 The Air Force’s new physique might look impressive but was there real muscle underneath? The speed of events in Europe had the Air Ministry perpetually scrambling to keep up. The Nazis’ obfuscations about the extent of their own expansion programme meant there were no solid metrics on which to base the pursuit of parity. The result was that much of the budget was squandered on unsatisfactory aircraft which were ordered mainly to create the illusion of strength – an attempt at ‘scaring Hitler by “window dressing”’, as senior officers privately admitted to each other.21
The political imperative for numerical parity with the Luftwaffe had taken little account of the quality of the aircraft. In a time of fast-changing technology the policy was shockingly wasteful. The Air Ministry ordered new types in the knowledge that they would be out of date before they reached the squadrons. The Fairey Battle light bomber was known to be a dud from the outset, underpowered and short-ranged, yet more than