Fighter Boys. Patrick Bishop

Eton and a spell in the French Foreign Legion, had served as a pilot in the RNAS in the First World War. Like several forward-looking grandees he believed air power would decide future conflicts. Auxiliary squadrons, he felt, would allow men to go to war surrounded by comrades with whom they shared ties of place and friendship. Seriousness of purpose was overlaid with thick layers of upper-class fun. He recruited from his own circle. The squadron historian noted that he ‘chose his officers from among gentlemen of sufficient presence not to be overawed by him, and sufficient means not to be excluded from his favourite pastimes – eating, drinking and White’s’.¹⁸ Candidates were invited to his home in Eaton Square and sluiced large glasses of port. If they passed muster it was on to the club bar for gin and tonics. The squadron’s town headquarters were at 54 Kensington Park Road, in Notting Hill. They were furnished and equipped to cavalry regiment standards with silver, military prints on the walls, costly vintages and rich food. The gatherings echoed to the sound of broken glass. After dinner it was customary for diners to try and circumnavigate the room without touching the floor. Another game involved persuading some visiting dupe to ‘calibrate the table’. One of the company would lie on his back with his legs hanging over the edge of a large oval table while other squadron members tilted it back and made a show of measuring the angle between wood and limb. Then it was the victim’s turn. Once he was helpless, his ankles were grabbed, the table was tipped back and tankards of beer poured down his trouser legs.

      Members held an annual training camp at Port Lympne on the Kent coast. It was the summer home of their patron, Sir Philip Sassoon, who combined a wild enthusiasm for flying with almost total ineptitude as a pilot. Squadron pride was nourished by manufactured rivalries with other Auxiliary Air Force units, japes designed to annoy the regular RAF, and self-conscious displays of individualism such as the wearing of bright red socks with uniform.

      The snobbery was in keeping with the times and provoked indulgent smiles. But this was not what Trenchard had had in mind. At Cambridge he had emphasized that in the AAF and university squadrons, there was room for everyone: ‘the man of initiative and the man of action, the methodical man and even the crank. We open our ranks widely to all.’

      Despite the gilded image, not all the auxiliary pilots were rich. Applicants to the AAF needed to be able to fly solo and hold an A licence and courses cost £100. It was a considerable investment. The Air Ministry recognized the reality, refunding tuition costs once a trainee had qualified. Altogether there were to be twenty-one auxiliary squadrons drawn from all over the country. From 1934 they were equipped with fighters instead of bombers. When the war came they made up a quarter of Fighter Command’s front-line strength.

      Trenchard retired at the end of 1929. His energy and advocacy had ensured the survival and growth of the RAF, albeit slowly and painfully. The RAF was undernourished. From 1921 to 1930 the annual expenditure estimates hovered between £19 million and £18 million. In 1923 the government had promised to build a metropolitan air force of fifty-two squadrons for home defence. Six years later, there were only twenty-five home-based regular squadrons in service, augmented by eleven auxiliary and reserve units, and no official hurry to make up the shortfall.

      But the service had an existence and an identity. It had a sky-blue ensign, adorned with one of the red, white and blue roundels the First World War pilots had had painted on their aircraft to shield them from ‘friendly fire’. It had its own slate-blue uniform and forage cap. It had a good motto – Per Ardua ad Astra. A system of squadron organization, evolved in the battlefields of France, had been established and an independent rank structure, painfully worked out in face of mockery from the army chiefs, that climbed from aircraftman to Marshal of the Royal Air Force. There was an apprentice school to ensure a steady flow of skilled technicians to maintain the aeroplanes and a cadet school and a short-service commission scheme to provide pilots and commanders.

      Great energy and thought had gone into the work of creating the new service, comparatively little on defining its purpose. The RAF had men, machines, organization and identity. What it did not have as yet was a clear idea of its purpose. A post-war Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Slessor once wrote that ‘before 1939 we really knew nothing about air warfare’. It was a frank admission, but Slessor was in a position to know. Twenty years earlier, in May 1937, he had been promoted to the post of deputy director of plans at the Air Ministry and was appalled to discover how unfitted the RAF was to defend Britain.¹⁹

      The state of the air force during most of the inter-war period was a reflection of a general unwillingness, found in every corner of society, to contemplate another bloodbath. Preparing for war seemed more likely to encourage than prevent it. There were clear political, economic and psychological reasons for Britain’s reluctance to rearm. The aversion to doing so was reinforced by confusion as to what weapons were required. Everyone agreed that air power would be crucial. No one knew exactly why or how. If there was a consensus it centred on the belief that bombers and bombing would play a predominant role. Something of the effects of aerial bombardment was already known, from the British and German experiences in the First World War and from small wars that had flared up around the world subsequently. Many military and political analysts believed that hostilities would begin in the air and the results, particularly for civilians, would be horrible.

      German Zeppelin airships, then Gotha and Giant bombers, had provided a glimpse of what could be expected, from their intermittent and haphazard bombing campaign on British cities and coastal towns that began in January 1915. Altogether, in 103 raids they killed 1,413 people, all but 296 of them civilians. They wounded between 3,400 and 3,900, the vast majority of them non-combatants.

      What impressed was not the quantity of the violence but the quality. In one raid carried out in daylight on 13 June 1917, fourteen Gothas, each loaded with a 500-kilogram bomb, reached the centre of London. One bomb struck a school in Poplar, killing 18 children and maiming 27. Zeppelins excited particular terror. Their destruction provoked un-British displays of glee, with crowds clapping, singing and cheering in the streets as the airships sank to earth with their sixty-strong crews roasting in the flames.

      Henceforth, civilians could expect to be in the front line and neither military nor political thinking placed much faith in their ability to endure the experience. As the overture wars of the 1930s established the themes of the great symphony of violence to come, it appeared more and more certain that civilian morale would be unable to withstand the coming ordeal. As early as 1925, the Air Staff were predicting casualties of 1,700 dead and 3,300 injured in London alone in the first twenty-four hours of hostilities, resulting in ‘the moral [original italics] collapse of the personnel employed in the working of the vital public services’.²⁰ The Japanese bombing of Shanghai in 1932, the German Condor Legion’s destruction of Guernica in April 1937, the Italian bombardment of Barcelona, all reinforced notions of aerial warfare’s crucial, possibly decisive, importance.

      There were two obvious approaches to countering the danger. One was to improve Britain’s defences to a point where the enemy – always Germany, apart from a brief, fantastical moment in 1922 when France was identified as the threat – would be deterred from launching an attack or would suffer severely if it did. Proponents of this view believed that the war had shown that fighters mustered to defend British airspace were, after a slow start, competent to handle raiding airships and bombers. At the same time, the experience had accelerated the development of effective anti-aircraft gunnery and searchlights. The second approach was to concentrate on building up a strong offensive bomber force. That, too, would have a deterrent effect. But if deterrence failed, it left Britain with the means of striking back.

      It was the second view that took hold, both in air force and political thinking, although never to the point where alternative reasoning was suppressed. The strategic debate of the inter-war years was dominated by two phrases. They were slogans rather than expressions of profound thought. One was the idea of the ‘knock-out blow’, which could bring victory in a single action. The other was the conviction that ‘the bomber will always get through’ – a phrase popularized by Baldwin in November 1932 in a Commons speech which sent a spasm of foreboding through the country. What that meant, he continued brutally, was that ‘the only defence is offence…you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves’.²¹

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