Wings

by Patrick Bishop

  They were supplemented by the University Air Squadrons, which fulfilled a similar function. The inspiration for them came from RFC veterans who went to Cambridge to study engineering. With Trenchard’s encouragement, others were set up at Oxford and London.

  One section of the population from which cheap and diligent labour could be drawn was no longer available. Women had begun to infiltrate the British military organization in France in the latter years of the First World War, when it was officially decided that they were fitted to do clerking and support staff jobs that had previously been the province of males. In January 1918 a Womens’ Auxiliary Air Force Corps was formed to work with the nascent RAF, which was then renamed the Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF). By the end of the war it was about 25,000 strong. As well as clerical work they also did domestic duties: cleaning, cooking and laundering. But there was also a growing technical section engaged in working as welders, riggers, electricians and mechanics, as well as drivers.

  The path into the world of men was not easy. In a letter to the Daily Telegraph in January 1919 a WRAF told how she ‘joined up as a carpenter’, but instead of getting the month’s training she had been promised she received ‘only a few drills’. She was eventually drafted to an aerodrome and put to work in the carpenter’s shop. She found she was ‘tolerated by the men as another military nuisance. There I have been six weeks, spending eight hours a day (most days) in that shop, and have never yet done one single day’s work. I should go on like the rest, enjoying my drills, physical and otherwise and my hockey and dances, but I have a conscience.’17

  In the post-war budget-slashing the WRAF was marked down for the chop. Throughout 1919 women who had operated wireless sets, ridden motorbikes and painted liquid cellulose ‘dope’ on the fabric of wings and fuselages were laid off, leaving only a handful kept on to help run a hospital and the records department. Women would have to wait nearly twenty years before the demands of war made them employable once again.

  Even in its reduced state the RAF managed to keep its place in the popular imagination. It showed itself off at the annual air display at Hendon in north London, where enormous crowds gathered to watch aerobatics.

  The reluctance to entertain the dreadful thought of another world war hung over all decision-making. It was enshrined in the ‘ten-year rule’ covering all service planning – the idea, based on little more than wishful thinking, that there would be no major conflict for a decade. The effect of this rule was felt most heavily in the quality of the equipment available to the reduced RAF. Between 1919 and 1934 the squadrons flew aeroplanes that were little different from those they had flown in the First World War. The names of the types have a forlorn and redundant air. For bombers they had Handley Page Hyderabads, Fairey Fawns, Vickers Virginias and Victorias, and Westland Wapitis. For fighters, Armstrong Whitley Siskins and Gloster Gamecocks. At a time when monoplanes were starting to appear in the fleets of the civil airlines linking the great cities of Europe all the RAF’s models were biplanes. Little attempt was made to develop the science of navigation – a disastrous omission that was to render the British bombing effort almost completely ineffective in the first years of the next war.

  As it was, these primitive machines were more than capable of carrying out the tasks that fell to them in the years before German rearmament galvanized governments into action. For much of the time they were engaged in police actions, quelling unrest in remote parts of the Empire. In January 1920 a dissident who became known as ‘The Mad Mullah’ rose up against British rule in Somaliland. After the army failed to deal with him, Trenchard sent a squadron of De Havilland DH-9s to bomb the rebel forts and camps. The Mad Mullah surrendered and British control was reestablished. By dropping a few bombs and loosing off their machine guns the RAF had shown it could achieve results for very little cost. A pattern was established. Thereafter the air force was used to impose order in Palestine, Mesopotamia, Aden and the North-West Frontier. This activity resulted in an exotic and adventurous existence for service airmen, some of whom would go on to the commanding heights of the RAF in the next big war. They included John Slessor who, in the spring of 1921, was sent to command a flight of 20 Squadron then stationed at Parachinar, ‘a delightful place’ just over the border with Afghanistan.

  In many respects life was pleasant. ‘We enjoyed ourselves in India,’ he wrote. ‘In those days officers and airmen went overseas on a five-year tour and often remained with the same squadron throughout. Squadrons changed stations as units. The aircraft, of course, flew to their new station, while the personnel, wives and children followed in slow, dusty troop trains – with two or three trucks of polo ponies tacked on behind. We played a lot of not very high-class polo. We went on leave to Kashmir or down into Central India and shot or fished. We played a bit of cricket.’18

  In other ways life could be trying. The remoteness of the location meant that the RAF squadrons on the North-West Frontier were under army control and funded from the Government of India budget. Many of those in authority had spent the war years in India and had only the dimmest idea of the developments in the air. According to Slessor, ‘it was inevitable that among the senior advisers of the Viceroy the combination of ignorance about air matters, ingrained tradition and the Englishman’s natural suspicion of anything new, should have had the result that when cuts in military expenditure were required, they should fall upon this new service which no one understood.’ At one point a blunder in the accounting department meant that there was an embargo on stores and spare parts being shipped out from Britain. The result was that while the RAF had a theoretical strength of six squadrons in India, each with an establishment of twelve aircraft, ‘I doubt whether we could have put a dozen aircraft into the air on any one day.’19

  Arthur Harris, who in January took command of 31 Squadron, equipped with Bristol Fighters, felt keenly the consequences of the neglect. ‘We lacked everything in the way of necessary accommodation and spares and materials for keeping our aircraft serviceable,’ he wrote. ‘The only thing there was never any shortage of was demands for our services when the trouble blew up on the frontier.’ That autumn the squadron was based at Peshawar and busy with bombing and strafing raids against tribesmen, who launched periodic attacks on border posts. ‘It was not unknown for aircraft to take off on operations on wheels with naked rims, because there were no tyres, and with axles lashed on with doubtful, country-made rope, because there was no rubber shock-absorber rope. We flew on single-ignition engines which the Air Force at home had long discarded as un-airworthy.’ It was, he concluded, ‘no joke to fly over the mountains on the frontier with worn-out and out-of-date equipment, where a forced landing meant probably being killed outright in the crash, or if you survived this, a still less pleasant death on the ground.’20

  Harris felt angry enough about the situation to offer his resignation, though he was persuaded to withdraw it and moved on to Iraq for a further stint of showing the natives who was boss. Anger at Britain’s failure to grant the independence the tribes had been promised when inveigled onto the allied side during the First World War had boiled over into sporadic rebellions. In Iraq the RAF was free of army control. Indeed the senior RAF officer in the country, Sir John Salmond, commanded not just the air force but also the small number of ground forces. In March 1921 Winston Churchill, whose clutch of portfolios included the Colonial Office, had called a conference to sort out how Britain would administer Iraq and Transjordan, which, thanks to a League of Nations mandate, it now governed. Trenchard had persuaded Churchill that control could be imposed from the air and the Air Ministry was given responsibility for maintaining law and order.

  Harris was to command 45 Squadron, with which he had flown over the Western Front. His flight commanders were Flight Lieutenants the Hon. Ralph Cochrane and Robert Saundby, both of whom became trusted lieutenants in Bomber Command, twenty years later. The squadron was equipped with Vickers Vernons and engaged in transport duties. The aeroplanes lumbered rathe
r than flew – they could manage only 68 mph. But they were strong, capable of carrying one ton of freight and staying airborne for seven hours. Harris soon persuaded Salmond to allow him to convert them for bombing. Rather than consult London and get bogged down in a bureaucratic process, they would do the job themselves. ‘By sawing a sighting hole in the nose of our troop carriers and making our own bomb racks we converted them into what were really the first of the post-war, long-range heavy bombers,’ he wrote.21

  He then set about devising an accurate means of dropping 20, 50 and 100 lb bombs, and incendiaries using a home-made bomb-sight made of a length of shock absorber and a trigger-release mechanism. If Harris is to be believed, in practice sorties it was able to achieve an average accuracy of 26 yards from 2,000 to 3,000 feet – a far better result than would be achieved in the early years of the coming war.22 They first went into action against the Turkish army, which had crossed the border and was threatening Kirkuk. The appearance of the bombers forced the Turks to withdraw. Salmond was delighted. Much of the work amounted to aerial intimidation of tribes that rejected the rulers imposed on them by the British.

  Harris recalled the period with characteristic rough candour. ‘When a tribe started open revolt we gave warning to all its most important villages by loud speaker from low-flying aircraft and by dropping messages that air action would be taken after forty-eight hours. Then, if the rebellion continued, we destroyed the villages and by air patrols kept the insurgents away from their homes for as long as necessary until they decided to give up, which they invariably did.’ It was, he claimed, ‘a far less costly method of controlling rebellion than by military action and the casualties on both sides were infinitely less than they would have been in the pitched battles on the ground which would otherwise have been the only alternative.’23 Dropping bombs on mud huts and cowing primitive warriors was effective and, for Harris at least, fun. It was no preparation for the confrontation that was looming against a modern enemy armed with more than just rifles.

  Chapter 8

  Arming for Armageddon

  At the end of January 1932 Japanese naval aircraft bombed the Chapei district of Shanghai, a thickly populated area on the north bank of the Suchow river. A few days later film of the event appeared in newsreels in cinemas all over the world. The images were shocking. They showed mushrooming explosions, rolling clouds of black smoke and tottering buildings. More sinister to the men and women watching were the scenes of folk like themselves, trundling barrows loaded with their household goods, rushing in a blind panic for the open countryside, leaving pavements littered with bodies. ‘The marksmanship of the fliers is uncanny!’ raved the American commentator on the Universal Newspaper Newsreel report. ‘Streets that were once a hive of activity are clammy with the shadow of death, and things that were once human beings lying where they fell.’

  In London the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin watched and was sickened. ‘Shanghai is a nightmare,’ he declared. The attack took place a few days before the opening of the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva. The vast outflow of pious declarations about world peace did nothing to allay a general feeling that another cataclysm might be on the way, one in which civilians – like the poor, fear-maddened flocks of Shanghai – would be the principal victims.

  In Britain the Government admitted as much. In November, during a disarmament debate in the House of Commons, Baldwin made a prediction that would haunt the years to come. ‘I think it is as well for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that prevents him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.’ He went on to spell out the logical consequences of that reality. ‘The only defence is offence, which means that you will have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.’1

  Baldwin was stating – with appalling eloquence and clarity – the essential strategic thinking of the RAF at that time. It stemmed – inevitably – from Trenchard and was the result of the second of his great about-turns. Once, he had set his face against the idea of an autonomous air service. He had retired as Chief of the Air Staff in 1929, applauded as the ‘Father of the RAF’. He had vigorously asserted that bombing should only be carried out in alliance with the objectives of the ground forces. Now he was an equally energetic proponent of ‘strategic’ bombing, based on the theory that air power could deliver a ‘knockout blow’ against the enemy, and that aeroplanes rather than armies could decide the outcome of a conflict.

  In the 1920s it was unclear who Britain’s enemy was likely to be. Germany was crippled by reparations payments and neutered militarily by the punitive restrictions forced on her by the Versailles Treaty (1919). The absence of an obvious foe and the peaceable, often pacifist mood pervading European electorates allowed a sort of relieved complacency to settle upon decision-making whenever military spending was considered. However, when Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933 everything changed. Within a few months Germany had withdrawn from the Disarmament Conference and then from the League of Nations. The only recently defeated enemy was stirring once again. Despite periodic bouts of appeasement, only the suicidally naive could kid themselves that while grovellingly pursuing peace there was no need to prepare for war.

  It was going to cost. The RAF’s reliance on struts and wires and canvas had inured it to the price of the modern, metal-skinned monoplanes that were now skimming the skies of the world as civil aviation took aircraft on their next great evolutionary step. It was with horror that the Air Ministry learned that a new generation of fighters might cost £20,000 each, and a bomber five times that sum.2 New aircraft would require proper runways, not the 1,000 x 800 yard grass strips that sufficed for the lightly loaded likes of the Gloucester Gladiator; a fine, lively aeroplane much loved by those who flew it, but as a war machine hopelessly anachronistic. In 1934 this biplane, which had the antique lines of a bygone era, was billed as the RAF’s new generation front-line fighter. The bombers were no better. The Handley Page Heyford, which came into service in late 1933, was another biplane. It looked like an airborne lorry, slab-sided and trailing enormous underslung wheels.

  This mood of parsimony penetrated all aspects of procurement. The Air Staff were reluctant to test the patience of the politicians and officials holding the purse strings. Junior officers pointed out that the existing warning system of sound locators and observer posts was inadequate to deal with modern bombers zooming in at 200 mph and more. Perhaps a better telephone system would help communications between the headquarters and the squadrons. Reluctantly, a grant of £2,000 was made. ‘So,’ wrote Philip Joubert, then commandant of the RAF Staff College that Trenchard had established at Andover, ‘the administrative machine creaked and groaned and its slaves winced under the fear of the Treasury lash.’3

  At least the young officers had aeroplanes to fly and anterooms to repair to for a drink before a good dinner. The NCOs and skilled tradesmen also lived in decent comfort. At the lower levels, however, existence was grim, as T. E. Lawrence, enlisted as an aircraftman under the pseudonym ‘John Hume Ross’, discovered. Describing life in the Uxbridge Depot in the early 1920s, he wrote: ‘Our hut is a fair microcosm of unemployed England, not of unemployable England, for the strict RAF standards refuse the last levels of the social structure.’4 The standard of living seems to have been little better than that endured by men in the dole queues. The food was horrible, the uniform misshapen and scratchy, and the haircut he was given would have embarrassed a convict. Lawrence of Arabia, upon whose words princes and prime ministers had once hung, was put to work in the kitchen of the officers’ mess. The gap between those with commissions and those who served them was oceanic. ‘Through the swing doors came an officer’s head . . . sherry and bitters, gin and bitters, martinis, vergins, vermouths. Three whisky sodas quickly . . . the bartender splashed full his glasses and hurried to and fro.’5

  With much energy and persistence it was possible to cross the great di
vide. George Unwin was a clever Yorkshire miner’s son who had passed the Northern Universities Matriculation exam aged sixteen. But there was no money to put him through college and the only job available was to follow his father down the pit. Just before he was due to leave school his headmaster showed him an RAF recruiting poster. Unwin joined as an administrative apprentice at the training centre at Ruislip and in 1931 passed out as a leading aircraftman. The sights and sounds of the aerodrome excited his ambition to join the aviators. He soon discovered flying was regarded very much as the preserve of officers and of those who applied from the ranks ‘only 1 per cent per six months was taken’.

  Unwin persisted. ‘I was getting a bit fed up at not being accepted,’ he remembered. ‘I had everything else. I was playing for the RAF at soccer and that was one of the things you had to be, to be very good at sport. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t being selected.’ Eventually he reached the final stage of the interviewing process and, determined to succeed, mugged up on the interests of the senior officer who would decide his fate. He discovered that he ‘loved polo and kept his own polo ponies’. At the interview, the inevitable question was raised about Unwin’s hobbies. ‘I said “horse riding”. He pricked up his ears and said, “Really?” I said “Of course I can’t afford it down here, but the local farmer at home has a pony and lets me ride it.” The only time I’d ridden a pony or anything on four legs was in the General Strike when the pit ponies were brought up and put in the fields.’ It worked. Unwin was in and in 1936 would be posted to 19 Squadron at Duxford as a sergeant pilot.6

  Hitler’s arrival in power and the acceleration of German rearmament forced a decision to scramble to make up the ground lost in the 1920s. In July 1934 Expansion Scheme A was announced. It was the first of thirteen such schemes unveiled over the next four years, most of which never got beyond the proposal stage. The aim was to achieve some rough parity with Germany, though the target would keep shifting. The initial intention was to signal to Hitler that Britain was prepared to compete in an aerial arms race. The plan laid the foundations for a training programme and a framework for wider expansion, should the warning be ignored. The programme increased the targets for RAF growth laid down in 1923 – though not by much. The planned number of Britain-based home defence squadrons would rise from fifty-two to sixty-four. Of these, twenty-five would be fighter squadrons – eight more than in the earlier plan.