Air Force Blue: The RAF in World War Two – Spearhead of Victory. Patrick Bishop
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the Empire Air Days put on at RAF stations around the country from 1934 to 1939 emphasized the excitement of flying rather than the realities of aerial warfare with spectacular demonstrations of stunt and formation flying. Sometimes they included mock imperial policing operations in which aircraft dropped flour bombs on villages inhabited by rebellious ‘Whatnot’ tribesmen or on fake wooden battleships. The main purpose, though, was to impress and entertain.
In official publications the RAF naturally emphasized its defensive and deterrent role. The bomber force was designed for a counter-offensive not to launch aggressive war. This was a British version of air power framed by national characteristics of restraint and reserve, with rearmament presented, reasonably enough, as a reluctant necessity. A pre-war recruiting poster showed a young family picnicking on the cliffs on a sun-drenched summer day. Father and son are looking upwards at a flight of twin-engine bombers heading out to sea while mother and daughter prepare tea. The copy reads ‘Air Defence is Home Defence’.23
When it came to attracting the specialist ground tradesmen needed to service the expanded squadrons, the RAF used a different approach, which ignored the prospect of war and made no appeal to duty and patriotism. The competition for skilled men was fierce, and there were plenty of well-paid jobs available in war industry factories. Advertising campaigns played up the prospect of travel and adventure and the attractions of outdoor life over a dreary works in the Midlands. A poster that appeared in 1939 showed a smart, confident figure in side cap and overalls, probing efficiently at an aero engine above the exhortation: ‘Come on, skilled fitters! Your experience will earn you the finest job ever: and with it – security, good prospects and a grand outdoor life.’24
The inducements on offer were strong even in supposedly prosperous parts of the country. Len Hayden was brought up in Henham-on-the-Hill in Essex, one of nine children who lived in a three-bedroom house without running water. He left school at fourteen and did a series of menial jobs in local haulage and engineering companies which offered little pay and no security but where he picked up a knowledge of mechanics. One winter morning early in 1939 he arrived at work after pushing his bike for eight miles through thick snow only to be sent home for turning up late.25
It was then that he made up his mind to respond to a newspaper advert seeking air mechanics for the RAF. He decided against telling his parents. His father Billy had been a reasonably prosperous coal merchant and dairy farmer before the previous war. He volunteered for the Army in 1916 and served in the trenches where he was poisoned by mustard gas. His health, and his prosperity, never returned. ‘Time after time he would return home [from hospital treatment] and try and rebuild his business, each time only to succumb to bouts of pneumonia and pleurisy caused by his wartime service,’ Hayden remembered.26 He scraped a living as a middleman buying cattle for local farmers and a 19s. 6d. weekly pension, squeezed out of the War Office after the intervention of the local MP. His son reflected that it was ‘no wonder tears trickled down his cheeks’ when he called home late in 1940 to say goodbye before following his squadron to North Africa. ‘He must have been thinking how a grateful nation would treat us when we returned from “our” war.’
The recruiting campaigns were almost too successful. In March 1939 Charles Portal, then in charge of personnel at the Air Ministry, reported that there was a shortfall of fitters, wireless and electrical mechanics, instrument makers and armourers. However, he concluded, ‘basically the problem is not volunteers but the facilities in which to train them’.27 The inability of the training machine at every level to keep pace with the increase in men and machines would contribute much to the RAF’s multiple failures in the opening stages of the war.
Like their Army and Navy counterparts the men who ran the RAF regarded their service as a manifestation of British identity and a repository of British virtues. They were wary of outside attempts to portray it, no matter how great the resulting publicity might be. In July 1937 the weekly meeting of the Air Council which brought together the Air Minister Lord Swinton, his deputy and the top staff officers discussed a Hollywood proposal to make a movie with an RAF theme. British settings were popular with American audiences and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had recently set up a subsidiary, MGM-British, to develop co-productions.
One of the first projects was Shadow of the Wing. It had a screenplay by a Briton, Sidney Gilliat, but box office considerations demanded an American lead and Clark Gable, already a star, had been picked by Louis B. Mayer himself to play the hero. The minutes of the meeting record have Swinton stating that he was ‘strongly in favour of films as valuable recruiting agents’ – both the Navy (Brown on Resolution) and the Army (OHMS) had already co-operated with film makers in an effort to boost their appeal. However, he was ‘in some doubt in this case as to whether we could or should acquiesce in an arrangement whereby the leading role – that of a Royal Air Force pilot – was to be taken by an American actor, Mr Clark Gable, who might prove to be possessed of a strong American accent’.28
He was followed by the CAS, Air Marshal Edward Ellington, who in a characteristic contribution affirmed that ‘he too was opposed to such an arrangement but added that he did not know whether the actor in question had such an accent’. The senior civil servant at the Air Ministry, Sir Donald Banks, raised the possibility that MGM might be prepared to accept a British actor, though he warned that if they insisted on this point ‘he feared that the company would abandon the project’. This prompted a discussion as to possible British stars. Leslie Banks (no relation to Sir Donald), a well-known character actor of domestic stage and screen but with no pretensions to stardom, was ‘generally felt to be the most suitable’. The item concluded with Swinton proposing that he sit down that evening with his deputy to study a Clark Gable film and decide whether or not his accent was acceptable.
In the event neither was able to make the screening. However, at the next meeting Ellington reported that he had since seen Gable play the English seaman Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the Bounty and found him ‘not offensive in any way’. The consensus remained that a Brit would be better. Seven months later there was still no progress. Sir Donald ventured that ‘he rather suspected that our modest display of enthusiasm for Mr Clark Gable who had been Mr Mayer’s selection might to some extent account for the film proposal to have hung fire …’ (Clark Gable went on to fly several combat missions as an air gunner with the USAAF.)
Shadow of the Wing never made it to the screen but there were plenty of other air movies to keep audiences happy. Doom-mongering efforts like Things to Come were outnumbered by productions that showed military aviation in a heroic light. The Dawn Patrol was so popular it was made twice in the space of eight years. The second version starring Errol Flynn, Basil Rathbone and David Niven was a box office hit when it came out in 1938. It was an unsparing account of the life of Royal Flying Corps pilots operating on the Western Front in the summer of 1915 when German Fokker eindecker fighters were winning the battle for air superiority over the trenches. The men of 59 Squadron are a hard-drinking, fatalistic bunch. Among them are two friends, Dick Courtney and Douglas Scott, played by Flynn and Niven. They are at odds with their leader Major Brand (Rathbone) who has lost sixteen of his pilots in the previous fortnight, most of them greenhorns fresh from flying training school. The mental strain on a commander forced to send novices to almost certain death is convincingly depicted. But it also reinforces the propaganda message broadcast by both sides during the real war, which presented air fighting as a clean, almost chivalrous business in contrast to the industrial carnage going on in the mud below. Courtney is killed after shooting down the German ace von Richter. The film ends with an image of inescapable duty as Scott orders the remnants of the squadron off on another dawn patrol.
To many British boys who watched it, the film acted not as a dire warning about the perils of life in the Air Force but as a call to their spirit of courage, sacrifice and adventure. ‘It may sound a bit odd and unlikely but this film really did have a tremendous influence on me,’ remembered Charles Patterson.29