Air Force Blue: The RAF in World War Two – Spearhead of Victory. Patrick Bishop
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The RAF could argue that it was not their fault. Building a modern air force was hampered by the underdeveloped state of the domestic air industry and the government’s laissez-faire economic policy. In Germany, the Nazis ensured that aircraft manufacturing was at the service of the state and the national airline Lufthansa was to a large extent the Luftwaffe in sheep’s clothing. A senior Rolls-Royce executive, Willoughby Lappin, visited the Heinkel works on the Baltic coast in April 1936 and on his return reported his findings to British intelligence. Workers started their shifts at 6.15 a.m. and finished at 5.15 p.m., with two fifteen-minute meal breaks. ‘The most significant thing,’ he noted, ‘is probably the fact that everyone young and old is disciplined and is thinking nationally, whether from fear or choice does not matter … the Government are solely responsible for the policy and working of all the aircraft factories and the directors thereof have no control except to provide the Air Ministry with what they require.’22
In Britain the state gave limited support to a range of smallish ‘family firm’ constructors, who had to pay the costs of developing new designs themselves and competed for orders when the Air Ministry issued specifications for a new type. Until late in the day, British governments avoided intervening, refusing to allow the international situation to interfere with the principle of ‘non-interference with the flow of normal trade’.23
The result was a piecemeal approach to design producing a plethora of types. Multiplicity meant a lack of mass-production capacity and, though this was remedied when the government paid big motor manufacturers like Austin and Rootes to build ‘shadow factories’ for airframes and engines, there was a reluctance to mobilize industry on a war footing until it became absolutely necessary. Ultimately the failures and shortcomings were a consequence of Britain’s political system – what happened when a free-market democracy tried to prepare for total war.
Each side used smoke and mirrors to try and persuade the other that there was no point in trying to outdo them in the air. They engaged in a pantomime of good fellowship which looks surreal at this distance in time. The fraternizing began at the instigation of the RAF when in the spring of 1936 the Air Minister Lord Swinton invited General Erhard Milch to Britain.
General Milch was the man who could claim most of the credit for building up the Luftwaffe in the space of a few years from a puny collection of ill-assorted aircraft into the most feared air force in Europe. The Germans reciprocated and a party of senior RAF officers toured Luftwaffe facilities and aircraft factories the following January.
On 17 October 1937, Milch was back again, together with his chief of staff, Lieutenant General Hans-Jürgen Stumpff and Major General Ernst Udet, an internationally famous air ace and head of the Luftwaffe’s technical division. Arriving at Croydon Airport Milch declared he had come to ‘destroy mischievous rumours and create an atmosphere of comradeship and friendliness’.24
The programme that followed gave the impression that Britain was welcoming a trusted ally rather than a potential enemy. The day after arriving, Milch was taken to Buckingham Palace for an audience with King George VI. The itinerary covered almost every aspect of RAF operations, including visits to Cranwell and Halton and tours of the new shadow factories. Everything was done to make the Germans feel at home. At a cocktail party at the Carlton Hotel in the West End of London attended by everyone who was anyone in the British aviation world, the RAF band struck up the ‘Badenweiler Marsch’, which was always played at Hitler’s public appearances, as well as ‘Old Comrades’ and ‘Our Flag Flutters Before Us’, a marching song of the Hitler Youth.25
On 19 October the Germans were given the run of the bomber station at Mildenhall in Suffolk. It was occupied by 99 and 149 Squadrons, both equipped with Handley Page Heyford biplane heavy bombers which lined up in facing ranks on the grass runway for the visitors to inspect. According to The Times, the German officers, who were dressed in Luftwaffe uniform, ‘sat in the cockpits, waggled the controls, trained movable guns in their turrets, had bomb trapdoors opened for their inspections [and] asked questions which were readily answered …’26 They were then treated to a mass flypast by an assortment of the bombers then in service: Vickers Wellesleys, Fairey Battles, Handley Page Harrows and Bristol Blenheims. Lunch was served in the officers’ mess. The table was decked out in the red, black and white Nazi colours.
The eagerness to please created moments of black farce. On 23 October Air Vice Marshal Victor Goddard, the RAF’s deputy director of intelligence, took the Germans to Hornchurch in Essex which was home to two fighter squadrons. They were equipped with Gladiator biplanes which were swift and elegant but antediluvian compared to the sleek Messerschmitts now arriving at Luftwaffe fighter units. They did have one piece of equipment that was bang up to date – the latest optical reflector sights. Pilots had been told by the station commander Group Captain ‘Bunty’ Frew that ‘if the Germans ask about the sight, keep mum’. So when General Milch peered into the cockpit of one of the Gladiators and inquired how the sight worked, the pilot, Bob Stanford Tuck of 65 Squadron, replied smartly: ‘I’m sorry, General, it’s so new, I’ve not yet found out.’27 Tuck was ‘quite appalled’ when ‘suddenly AVM Goddard interrupted and proceeded to give him the full details’. According to one version of the story, when Goddard had finished Tuck suggested: ‘Sir, perhaps General Milch might like to take one home with him as a souvenir?’
The visit was presented by government and press as a hopeful sign that Hitler could be curbed. Flight magazine, the aviation bible, claimed that ‘when the British mission visited German air force centres in January last, the members all felt that they knew, understood and respected their German hosts. It is permissible to hope and indeed to believe that the German party under the leadership of General Milch returned to Germany with the same feeling.’28
Others doubted that the Germans were fooled for a minute. Winston Churchill, the arch opponent of the government’s policy of non-provocation, did not believe that the performance would have the slightest deterrent effect. It was, he wrote to the powerful Cabinet Secretary Maurice Hankey, ‘a desperate effort … to present a sham’. The truth was that at the Mildenhall display Bomber Command had struggled to ‘put little more than a hundred bombers in the air – the great majority of which (as the Germans will readily see) can barely reach the coast of Germany with a bomb load’.29
Churchill’s assessment of the RAF’s power to intimidate was accurate enough. The Heyfords the Germans inspected had double-decker wings and fixed undercarriages and belonged to a bygone age. The machines in the flypast looked modern but were underwhelming in almost every department. The Battle was powered by a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine but carried only two single machine guns to defend itself and had a range of a sparse thousand miles. The Harrow, classified as a ‘heavy’, could manage a 1,250-mile round trip but was pathetically slow. The Wellesley ‘medium’ was capable of long distances but was also sluggish. The Blenheim, another medium, was the fastest of the lot, but was able to penetrate only to the fringes of German territory. These were the aircraft with which the RAF’s bomber squadrons were currently equipped.
Better performing aircraft were emerging from the pipeline – the Whitleys, Wellingtons and Hampdens with which the RAF would fight in the first years of the war. But long-range aeroplanes capable of carrying a substantial bomb load were still in development. It would be twenty months before the Stirling, the first of the four-engine ‘heavies’, made its maiden flight. The Halifax did not start flying operationally until March 1941, the Lancaster a year later. In the meantime, the RAF would have to make do with machines which were plainly inadequate for the very ambitious role that had been claimed for them.
The Milch visit was merely a reminder of what the Air Staff already knew: that the service was utterly unprepared for war. Bomber Command – which had been created in a major structural reorganization of the Air Force in 1936