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Bill Buckingham has thrown out a strong challenge to my claim that RAF strategic air operations flowed directly from the tactics of air superiority operations intended to defend metropolitan Britain. Let me respond to his specific points. I expected by now to be accused of nitpicking. I shall append a brief note on "why we should care." First, there is a critique that goes right to the core of the isse by asserting that the RAF ought never to have existed at all, that it represented an unnecessary dispersal of defence dollars and produced a "service in search of a role." Jill Russell has already made this point in reference to the USAF. Does it apply to the RAF? I suggested that it does not. Why? First, at the time of the creation of the RAF, the RFC and RNAS, the respective air arms of the British army and navy, faced several problems that clearly made both willing, even eager, to see the creation of an RAF. These were i) Divided procurement authority. Navy and Army both sought aircraft to meet their particular needs and competed for equipment. Further, lines of authority to the directing technical establishments such as RAE and the concerned laboratories at the NPL, as well as to other government departments such as the Meteorological Office and the Post Office were confused. Under the parliamentary system of government, the obvious course was to create a cabinet ministry parallel to the Admiralty that would control civilian research facilities, commercial aviation (when such appeared), meteorology, and an Air Inspectorate Division. Under it, a single service could more efficiently administer procurement. As to the question of whether this service would neglect army and navy needs, the two senior services were already familiar with this dynamic in a binary universe, and it would not necessarily get worse in a trinary one. ii) Divided training and related manpower policy threatened misallocation of manpower. More insidiously, either service might cannibalise its supply of valuable technical specialists for other missions, because they were tempted to subordinate air superiority to other, more urgent requirements. While this might seem to be an obviously "RAF" argument, the army might object to the navy shorting air superiority to naval missions, and vice versa, since "the air is one and indivisible." iii) Speaking of the "air being one and indivisible," let us not forget that the main axis of RAF effort in 1917 was in Flanders. Here the RFC supported the BEF in operations along the coast, while the RNAS was equally committed to suppporting the Dover Patrol in closing the mouth of the English Channel to German destroyers and submarines. But what if the German navy was lieing low during a BEF offensive, or conversely, there was activity at sea? In an air raid against Brugges, at once a major German naval base and army railhead, how should targets be allocated? Obviously, at a practical level there had to be interservice cooperation and coordination. What's more, it was argued, correctly, that the air arm had to have the final say on the particular prioritising of these air operations in the light of technical issues. In other words, air command had to be "independent" in this sense: and this requirement for independence only became more pressing in WWII. Second, traditionally, Britain has relied upon point defences as well as an active navy to defend itself against raiding and bombardment from the sea. In the course of a naval scare in the 1870s, this defence apparatus was modernised. The RN developed a coastal artillery capability to protect its bases,while the Army's Royal Garrison ARtillery manned batteries overlooking various invasion beaches. In order to provide timely warning of enemy forces operating on British coasts, an Observers Corps was set up. Most importantly, a telecommunications network with a central "information clearing house" was established to coordinate responses and pass information ranging from the strategic to tactical data such as fall of shot. This basic apparatus developed considerably in sophistication, area of coverage, and cost, when air attacks on Great Britain began. In the interwar period a civilian side of this system developed to meet traffic control needs. The question was, which military service would control this system? This had remained an open question before WWI because it was not yet a large or expensive apparatus. WWI changed this dramatically. Obviously, it only made sense for it to be tied in to the air defence system, and it would continue to control army and navy elements. But who would control it? The RAF was an obvious answer, but even had it been operated by the RNAS or RFC, this Air Defence of Great Britain would have looked much like the interwar metropolitan RAF. That is, if you accept that counterforce strategic bombing is a valid form of air superiority combat. Which, except for critics of the interwar RAF, no-one has ever doubted. Nevertheless, as CAS, Hugh Trenchard felt that the ADGB should not be permitted to retain an excessive number of fighters. In the light of 1940 this seems unreasonable, but Trenchard had experienced only 1914-18, not 1940. In 1917 the BEF's Ypres offensive was crippled at an embarrassing moment by the government's demand that fighting squadrons be returned from the front to defend London against bomber raids by Luftstreitkrafte aircraft based in Flanders that could and did operate against either London, or the rear of the BEF. Therefore, from the first Trenchard was a strong critic of the idea that any large number of fighters be assigned to the purely defensive role in a future European climate, waiting to respond to an offensive that might never come. Naturally, a much better solution (in Trenchard's mind) was to "lean towards" the enemy, attacking its aircraft on the ground, and their supporting infrastructure. This, again, is _not_ logic that is inseparably associated with an independent strategic offensive. Rather, it was common sense, and it did not imply neglect of the fighter arm, only of its metropolitan detachments. Of all the might have beens of 1940, surely we cannot exclude the thought that if the RAF had had a sufficiently strong strike arm it could have driven the Luftwaffe's fighters out of the Channel area and thus prevented the hideous losses of 7 September? The Israeli Air Force did not defend Tel Aviv by waiting for the Egyptians to attack... In his 1919 White Paper, Trenchard made a further interesting point. Inasmuch as the RAF's role could be fully defined by the operations above, there was no reason that the army and navy could not each have an independent air force. In the short term, Trenchard argued, this would be an error. Britain's WWI aircrew had been hideously undertrained, and the technical side of aviation had been basically dependent on large numbers of engineer volunteers from industry. In order to avoid these problems in the future, it would be necessary to build up a massive training infrastructure that would consume the larger part of the RAF budget for the foreseeable future. For this reason it would be best to defer the foundation of an independent FAA and AAC until the central training establishment was robust enough to support division of effort. This thinking led directly to RAF Halton, the great trade school that formed the basis of the interwar RAF, and [controversial point to follow] saved the USAAF/USN's bacon. From retirement, Trenchard argued very differently when the question of an independent FAA and AAC was proposed after the collapse of the MacDonald government's air disarmament initiative in 1933/4, and it has been suggested that this change of heart delayed the establishment of both until much later than was wise. This is, however, a complex question. For instance, the FAA was under RN financial and operational control long before the formal separation, and I suspect that only the collapse of the autogyro programme prevented the same from happening to the interwar Army Cooperation branch. In any case, the 1919 statement recognised that aircraft were a separate issue from the RAF. Air armament was inevitable, whether an _air force_ existed, or not. I mention this with special emphasis because it has been argued that the RAF constituted an unnecessary dispersal of resources. This, I think, evades the real issue, that air weapons were a necessary part of British armament after 1918. There would be aircraft, training, and procurement. Why not, then, consolidate the strategic side of military aviation? The argument to the contrary is only that this might lead to a neglect of army cooperation and naval cooperation. It needs hardly be added that the creation of an Air Staff out of the side of the existing army and navy did not create a service lobby of Mephistopholean cunning, able to beat out Navy and army in the battle for resources. Just ask a TSR-2 pilot. Nor do I wish to give the impression that the Army and RN voluntarily gave up their air arms. I mean to assert this as fact, even if they came to regret it after 1934. Now, the RAF was not merely a metropolitan, or colonial defence force. _Aircraft_ were not going to be left out of any postwar exercise of force, and therefore RAF, or alternatively RFC/FAA aircraft would be used for Imperial policing. This conclusion flows from the CORRECT view that air cooperation made Imperial policing, and other exercises of force more economical. I suggest that otherwise, we would not have military aircraft. That said, I stand by my interpretation of the decision to place Iraq under the military administration of the Air Staff, instead of the Army, Indian Army, or RN. I'm at a loss to understand why this would be a bad idea, in any case. Note again that air control (Iraq) is different from the air policing that happened everywhere in the world where British forces performed "police" duties in the post-aircraft age. Bill kindly cites an interesting comment by Cyril Newall about the inefficacy of air support of ground operations. Most air officers get cranky about demands for direct air suppport before the main air superiority battle is won. The fact remains that official doctrine called for massive air support of a future BEF, that Slessor, Leigh-Mallory, and others echoed this doctrine long before the outbreak of war, and that the proof was indeed in the pudding. Bill raises the question of RAF strategic air operations in the first 10 months of the war and asks whether it was capable of bombing at all. I hesitate to further extend an already overlong email on this point, so I will confine myself to pointing out that it is premature to assess the RAF's capabilities in this regard without taking into account the question of French bases. Even existing RAF equipment would have been much more effective operating from France. As for the night bombing 15-20 May, 1940, it is likewise misleading to extrapolate the meagre results of bombing in 1941-2 back to the more highly trained crews of 1940, or for that matter to neglect various defensive measures that steadily pushed bombing heights upwards in 1938-41, or to aggregate bombing carried out in poor weather in 1941 with results that it was proposed to obtain mainly by bombing in clear moonlight. There is also the question of air operations in support of the BEF as carried out from 10 May, 1940 on to the fall of France. As we have seen, records of sorties conducted exist only for Britain-based squadrons. This means the 10 Blenheim IV squadrons of No.2 Group Bomber Command directly attached to the 28 squadrons of the Air Component and Advanced Air STriking Force in France, and those that remained to Bomber Command, which were also extensively employed in direct support of the army and in interdiction. In other words, the BEF had very heavy direct air support, including more than 200 close air support sorties carried out by Wellingtons, very heavy bombers for the era. Perhaps some in the Air Staff thought this was a waste of effort, but I await proof of this. Finally, why should we care if RAF strategic bombing was "counterforce," rather than "counterasset?" First, because it means that the RAF did have a coherent strategic mission from which strategic bombing arose, rather than strategic bombing being a rationale for the existence of the service. Second, it has been objected that since the RAF was committed to counterasset bombing, it was guilty of fundamental unrealism about the likely efficacy of air bombardment of cities and industry. On the contrary,it would seem that RAF planning took into account the often reiterated arguments that such bombing would be ineffective, although it did come to overestimate likely civilian casualties. At least this reason to accuse RAF planners of optimism can be rejected. Third, the RAF has been accused of being morally depraved for aiming to make war on women and children. On the contrary, RAF spokesmen not only rejected this as immoral, but also explicitly argued that such attacks could not win wars because existing air forces could not drop enough bomb tonnage. What was immoral was also impractical. Readers interested in pursuing this point further might wish to look at Philip Meilinger's article in the latest J. Mil. H. (Sorry about the misspellinng in an earlier posting!) Whatever we think of the validity of these arguments, they do at least narrow the ground for thinking of the Air Staff of the RAF, and the Air Council above them, as men "bitten by a mad aeroplane" (to borrow a description of Samuel Hoare). [Erik Lund]
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