Fighter Boys. Patrick Bishop
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and flying helmet, approached the machine and vaulted into the cockpit watched by Camm and other Hawker executives, who stood at the edge of the damp field, smoking nervously. The Hurricane bumped away into the distance then turned into the wind. The rumble of the Rolls-Royce engine deepened into a roar. The machine moved forward, gathering speed, but slowly, so that some thought Bulman would not get airborne before he ran out of field. At the last moment the Hurricane left earth in an abrupt bounding movement and climbed steeply. The spectators watched the undercarriage retract and the muscular shape dwindle into the distance until it disappeared and the sound of the engine faded. Half an hour later the reassuring drone was heard again. Bulman performed a perfect three-point landing and taxied over to where Camm was waiting to report the flight had been ‘a piece of cake’.23
The Spitfire, the first prototype of which flew in March 1936, was a more modern design, all metal with a monocoque fuselage and thin, elliptical wings, the more sophisticated offspring of the Supermarine C6. It had the same Merlin engine as the Hurricane and carried the same guns, but at 5,180 pounds it weighed 1,000 pounds less and went 30 m.p.h. faster. The name was proposed by the chairman of Vickers, Sir Robert McLean, whose company had taken over Supermarine. R. G. Mitchell, whose designs carried the machine through its various evolutions to become the most beautiful and efficient fighter of its era, was not impressed. ‘Just the sort of bloody silly name they would choose,’ he is reported to have said on hearing the decision.24 But in the propaganda film of his life The First of the Few, which appeared in 1942, he is portrayed as devising the name himself: ‘A curious sort of bird…a bird that spits out death and destruction…a Spitfire bird.’
The orders came quickly, with the Air Ministry ordering 600 Hurricanes and 310 Spitfires in the summer of 1936. The accelerated pace reflected alarm that the next war might come sooner than expected. Preparations at every level speeded up as successive intelligence reports, and the Germans’ own boasts, suggested that Britain’s reluctant rearmament programme was insufficient either to deter or defend.
The sense of urgency, and the rapid twists and turns of circumstance, were evident in the brevity of the shelf-lives of the schemes that succeeded Scheme A, as both government and the Air Ministry tinkered with the plan to take account of a situation that always seemed to be changing for the worst. Only one scheme, Scheme F, approved by the cabinet in February 1936, was implemented as planned, coming to fruition in March 1939.
But the expansion was real. From 1935 forty-five new air stations were ordered to be built, most of which were finished by the time war came. Scheme C, which was approved in May 1935, envisaged 123 home squadrons as opposed to the 76 designated in Scheme A. That meant recruiting 1,500 pilots in the next two years. Altogether the RAF was to increase fivefold between 1934, when there were 31,000 officers and men, and the outbreak of war, when the service had an actual strength of 118,000 backed by about 45,000 reserves.
The Air Minister, Lord Swinton, inherited Trenchard’s system of short-service officers, who since the early 1920s had supplemented and outnumbered the cadre of permanent RAF officers. He intensified links with public schools, attracting 1,700 entrants. A further 800 pilots were found among RAF non-commissioned officers. Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa were all asked to contribute men. The number of auxiliary squadrons increased from eight to twenty in the run-up to the war. But more radical measures were needed to satisfy the new demand and, equally important, to provide a reserve.
A pool of pilots would be essential to replace the dead and wounded once the fighting started. The Director of Training at the Air Ministry, Air Commodore A. W. Tedder, a Trenchard protégé who had inherited some of his briskness of thinking, conceived the idea of a ‘Citizen Air Force’. It was to be democratic in character, and linked to a locality, but to the factories, offices and avenues and crescents of semi-detached homes in the new estates springing up around towns rather than to the shires to which the army’s territorial units attached themselves. The Air Ministry added that the new force should be ‘open…to the whole middle class in the widest sense of that term, namely the complete range of the output of the public and secondary schools’. Given its nature it was felt ‘inappropriate to grade the members on entry in as officers or airmen according to their social class’. Everyone therefore started out the same, as airmen under training, with commissions being awarded later on ability and leadership qualities.25 The Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, as it was christened, started in August 1936. It gave young men of between eighteen and twenty-five the chance to learn to fly, at no cost, in their spare time. They received £25 per annum and were expected to attend an annual fifteen-day flying course at one of the training centres set up around the country. The aim had been to take on 800 a year over three years, but the potential number of recruits was much greater and by the spring of 1939 there were 2,500 RAFVR pilots in training. When war broke out, 310 had already entered Fighter Command.
The second half of the 1930s saw the RAF transformed from a small, professional élite into a mass force with the potential to fight a major war. The question of how it would go about doing that was not finally resolved until the end of 1938, when the great strategic conundrum of bombers or fighters, offence or defence, was settled, at least for the first stage of the coming war. In December that year the balance shifted decisively in favour of fighters and ‘close defence’. The change was initiated not by the air force itself but by the government. Despite radar and the advent of the Hurricane and Spitfire, the Air Ministry pressed for parity with the German bomber force. But the government decided this was no longer possible within the time available. The goal had always been unrealistic. Britain was a democracy, reacting wearily to the threat of a war it had no wish to fight. Rearmament had been late and grudgingly paid for, with the aircraft factories still operating at peacetime levels of production. Germany was a dictatorship, heading at full speed and with no concern for cost towards a conflict of its own making. Britain was not going to catch up before the war was launched. It was the minister in charge of defence coordination, Sir Thomas Inskip, who forced the air force to accept the change in strategic thinking. In a memo to Swinton of 7 December he stated the new thinking crisply:
I cannot take the view that our Air Force must necessarily correspond in numbers and types of aircraft with the German Air Force. I cannot, therefore, persuade myself that the dictum of the Chief of the Air Staff that we must give the enemy as much as he gives us is a sound principle. I do not think it is the proper measure of our strength. The German Air Force…must be designed to deliver a knock-out blow within a few weeks of the outbreak of war. The role of our Air Force is not an early knock-out blow – no one has suggested that we can accomplish that – but to prevent the Germans from knocking us out.26
The inference was clear. For the time being at least the emphasis would be on defence and making any German attack on Britain too painful to sustain. Despite the strenuous opposition of the Air Ministry and RAF senior staff, the Cabinet backed Inskip’s view. The next years would belong to the fighters, and those who flew them.
3 ‘Free of Boundaries, Free of Gravity, Free of Ties’
The great RAF expansion gave thousands of young men the chance to realize an ambition that had seemed remote and probably unattainable when they first conceived it. That flying was possible was still a relatively novel idea. For most people in the world the thought that they would ever actually do so themselves was fantastical. The banality of aviation has hardened our imaginations to the fascination it excited in the years between the wars. Once, in Uganda in the 1980s, I was at a remote airstrip when a relief plane took some adolescent boys for a joyride. It was the first time they had been in an aeroplane. When they landed their friends ran out to examine them, as if they expected them to have been physically transformed by the experience.
So it was, or nearly so, in the inter-war years. ‘Ever been up?’ people would ask each other at the air displays that attracted hundreds of thousands in Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. Those who could say ‘yes’ were admired for their daring, their worldliness, their modernity. The men and women who flew the beautiful treacherous machines were exalted and exotic. In the eyes of many, their courage and skill put them at the apex of human evolution.