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Hello all, Welcome to the latest round, as I find myself again moved to respond to Eric Lund's latest post. I would not call it nitpicking myself - after all, one scholar's nitpicking is anothers clarification... :-) Before repsonding to specific points, I should perhaps clarify my own stance, which may not be clear in the current discussion. First, I too disagree with the contention that the RAF should never have existed. Some form of independent air arm was necessary in the immediate post-World War One period to prevent the experience gained in that conflict from evaporating. This would most likely have been the case had responsibility for air matters been re-divided between the Army and RN. This would not necessarily have been deliberate, although it is inevitable that the specific focus of the two arms would have not have resulted in the overarching provision that a dedicated air arm should have ensured. Incidentally, this very problem was discussed relatively recently, I think during the Options for Change debate about restructuring the British armed forces for the post-Cold War period. The problem after WW1 is therefore not the fact that the RAF existed, but the conditions and parameters that bound it into the British defence structure. Consequently, there are two caveats to this. First, the RAF was run by professional officers who considered bombing to be the be all and end all of airpower. As a result, the gap in coverage between the Army and RN was divided in two and exacerbated, rather than being eliminated. It was exacerbated because the RAF was unable to provide the doctrine or means to fulfil its obsession with bombing across the whole inter-war period, but was not willing to divert sufficient attention to meeting the air needs of its sibling services either. Second, the command and control structure under which the RAF was set up was inadequate, and was not reformed after 1918. This was arguably because the government was fixated on cutting defence spending, and therefore dod not wish to embark upon a course which might involve additional expenditure. The status quo also admirably suited the government's divide and rule tactics toward the services - an addition "purple" command layer might have permitted a united military front to challenge the government's financial stringencies. In fact, the RAF's superlative grasp of the bureaucratic game gave it a crucial advantage over the Army and RN within that system. Arguably the best example of the drawbacks that arose from this flawed system was the Battle of Arnhem. A combination of RAF refusal to consider any perspective but its own, allied to inexperienced and overconfident Army airborne leaders, resulted in a disaster which a higher level of authority with teeth might have been able to turn into a success, or at least avert. Now, to return to Eric Lund's post. First, I am willing to concede that the RAF's strategic bombing fixation flowed from British metropolitan defence, but only in a very distant sense which is largely irrelevant to developments in the inter-war period. The 1915 RNAS raid on the Zeppelin works by Lake Constance was justified by an extremely elastic interpretation of the RN brief to defend British territorial integrity. From the this flowed the commission under which Handley Page constructed its "bloody paralyser" 0/400 bomber, and later the V1500. The former were handed over to the RFC in 1917, and subsequently became part of the Independent Force, and then the RAF. Thus, in something of an ancestral sense, the argument holds water. Incidentally, this linkage may also hold the key to the RAF's long standing fixation with strategic bombing, which it can be argued parallels the use of artillery by the Army in WW1. The initial bombing effort in 1915 was hamstrung by the lack of effective bombers - so the HP 0/400 was born. However, this type failed to deliver the expected results in bombing German industrial targets in the Ruhr and Saarland in 1917-1918 - so the V1500 was commissioned to strike at Berlin instead, although the end of hostilities prevented this theory being put to the test. This process is surely an air equivalent of the bigger and longer barrage approach of ground forces, with the significant difference that the air example was never carried through to its logical conclusion, at least in that war. Be that as it may, some of the justifications Eric Lund cites in support of the establishment of an independent air arm do not hold water. All of these should have been applicable, but in fact the opposite proved to be the case in practice. For example, the RAF had no interest in providing aircraft tailored for use by the Fleet Air Arm (FAA) in the inter-war period, for two main reasons. First, the perennial British shortage of military funding encouraged focus upon service-specific needs first and foremost, and there was invariably little or no surplus available for anything more. Second and more crucially, the RAF's fixation on bombing made it inveterately opposed to any air venture that did not contribute to that self-appointed role. This of course meant that the needs of the RN and Army were virtually ignored, which is why naval aviation was restored to the RN in the 1930s. Eric Lund's comments on the shape of British air defence, and particularly on the legitimacy counterforce strategic bombing as a defensive tactic are perfectly reasonable. They do, however, contain a rather serious flaw. The fact is that the RAF was incapable of launching any such operations, however defined, until at least 1937-1938. Neither did it possess a fighter force capable of defending British airspace until roughly the same time. The latter point is neatly reinforced by the shock the private venture Bristol Blenheim caused the RAF in 1934, because it was consdiderably faster than the RAF's existing fighter force. This, in my opinion, is where Eric Lund's argument falls down, because the RAF had neither a doctrine or force capable of mounting an effective metropolitan air defence of whatever type for the bulk of the inter war period. I am also curious about the contention that the Ypres offensive in 1917 was in some way stymied by the withdrawal of RFC fighters for home defence. I assume this is a reference to the battle of Passchendale, which I understood was carried out in extremely wet weather, which would surely have minimised their contribution... With reference to British WW1 aircrew being hideously undertrained, that may well have been the case. However, Trenchard's 1919 White Paper appears to have done little to remedy the situation. Only on the eve of war did the RAF officially recognise any aircrew specialisation beyond that of the pilot, and it was common practice to co-opt any spare personnel as bomb-aimers, radio operators or air gunners as and when needed. Indeed, the Air Ministry did not sanction official navigation courses for non-pilots until April 1938. As a result, in August 1939 the Chief of Air Staff admitted that only 40 per cent of his bomber crews were capable of locating a target in a friendly city in daylight. A few further points before I close this overly long piece. First, with regard to Iraq and Air Control. There is a simple reason why placing the RAF in control of Iraq was a bad idea. Air Control in Iraq was exactly the same as elsewhere in the empire, insofar as it relied on bombing as its primary means of coercion. Much of the unrest facing British forces in Iraq was urban, against which bombing was of dubious utility - although that did not prevent some in the RAF from seriously advocating bombing in that circumstance. Consequently, the RAF was placed in the embarrassing position of having to airlift Army troops to quell urban unrest regularly from the early 1920s, hardly a good advertisement for a policy which was supposed to guarantee fiscal savings by replacing manpower with aircraft... It can thus be argued that Iraq was a singularly inappropriate location for the RAF to control, given its lack of (and disinterest in) an integral ground force of sufficient size. With reference to bombing operations in 1939-40, I would argue that it was irrelevant whether RAF bombers were based in France or the UK, because they were manifestly incapable of penetrating German airspace in daylight, and of locating targets at night. It is thus extremely relevant to extrapolate the pathetic results of RAF night raid on Hornum in May 1940, for this illustrates the state of the night bombing art at that time. RAF bombers were unable to find Hornum despite the fact that it was an island, and thus supposedly easy to locate. This in turn calls into question the effectiveness of all the Wellington "close-support" missions Eric Lund cites. As I stated in my previous post, the involvement of the Blenheim squadrons was irrelevant from a Bomber Command perspective, although No. 2 Group was not despatched to France because Portal, Bomber Command's new commander expressed "serious doubts whether the attack of 50 Blenheims based on information necessarily some hours out of date are likely to make much difference to the ultimate course of the war as to justify the losses I expect." This links into my final point, which is in response to Erik Lund's point about the Air Staff's attitude to supporting the BEF. Portal's comment, made during a War Cabinet meeting on 15 May 1940, is not indicative of a burning RAF desire to render massive air support to the BEF. A further comment by Portal, I would argue, provides conclusive proof that the pro-bomber lobby at least in the Air Staff were diametrically opposed to supporting ground forces: "Bomber aircraft have proved extremely useful in support of an advancing army, especially against weak anti-aircraft resistance, but it is not clear that a bomber force used against an advancing army, well supported by all forms of anti-aircraft defence and a large force of fighter aircraft, will be economically effective." This is further supported by the fact that the same night Bomber Command launched all its available aircraft (between 96 and 105 according to source), an assortment of Wellingtons, Whitleys and Hampdens, against the following targets: nine against railway marshalling yars, nine against blast furnaces, and 78 or 96 against oil targets. Only the rail yards can be interpreted as LoC targets, and even then depending on where they were located. Striking blast furnaces and oil targets does not equate to close air support whichever way you cut it. My apologies for the length of this post, and thank you to anyone who has stuck it this far. best regards Bill Buckingham PhD candidate, University of Glasgow
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