Air Force Blue: The RAF in World War Two – Spearhead of Victory

The absence of data did nothing to undermine the Air Staff’s confidence in the doctrine. It rested unsteadily on several untested propositions. One was that airspace was so vast that British bombers would be able to proceed directly to the task of destroying the enemy’s war industry relatively unhindered. But what was true for British bombers would presumably be true of German ones. Surely, at some point, a battle would have to be fought to gain air supremacy in order to avoid an endless attritional cycle of attack and counter-attack?

Another was that bombing would have a devastating effect on enemy morale. Again if that was so – and some critics argued from the evidence of the Spanish Civil War, where the bombing of Barcelona by the Nationalists in March 1938 had galvanized Republican resistance, that if anything the opposite was the case – then British morale would be similarly affected. To the first the airmen had no answer. The second could only be dealt with by the assertion that innate racial superiority meant that, whereas Britons could ‘take it’, Germans couldn’t.

Despite these obvious flaws the views of the Air Staff were generally accepted in Downing Street, Whitehall and Westminster. They harmonized with the mood of the times and the priorities of politicians. Everyone was desperate to avoid a war, especially one that meant sending troops to fight again on the Continent. Building up the Army and Navy could only provoke the Germans. Building up the Air Force might deter them. Expansion was seen as a defensive measure, popular with government and public alike. The decision to go ahead with it was essentially a political not a strategic choice. Once taken, the Air Force hogged both the public limelight and the Treasury’s still limited largesse.

The Army and Navy boiled with exasperation at the favour bestowed on the new boys. It bubbles in the diaries of Henry Pownall, a sharp-eyed Army officer who watched the process from his seat on the secretariat of the Committee for Imperial Defence which brought together the professional service heads, cabinet ministers and senior officials. ‘The public cry is all for the Air Force [first], Navy a distinct second, and the Army a very bad third,’ he complained after a major report into how to repair the country’s run-down defences that paved the way for rearmament was unveiled in February 1934.9 (#litres_trial_promo) ‘The RAF have got too much,’ he snapped a few months later as the details of how the budget would be carved emerged.10 (#litres_trial_promo) The Army’s appeals for funds to build up a field force to send to France in time of war received a stony reception. ‘Everyone will shout loud enough for the Army to practise as an Army when war comes but in peace it is the Cinderella of the Services,’ wailed Pownall in 1938.11 (#litres_trial_promo)

It was not just about money. There was resentment at the tremendous strategic airs the Air Force had given itself. ‘A constant bone of contention in our discussions was the role to be played by the Air Force,’ wrote Major General Sir John Kennedy, the Army’s Deputy Director of Plans on the eve of the war. ‘Both the General Staff and the Naval Staff opposed the fanatical efforts of the Air Staff to press upon us their theory that the war would be decided by the action of air forces almost unaided by the other two services.’12 (#litres_trial_promo)

They were also aggrieved by the RAF’s extreme reluctance to divert resources to meet their particular needs. The Army and Navy ‘fought hard and unsuccessfully for the provision of adequate specialized air forces, properly trained and equipped for the support of naval and military operations’. The airmen’s attitude was combative and defensive. Kennedy claimed that a senior officer at the Air Ministry had told him that the Air Staff regarded such co-operation as a ‘prostitution of the Air Force’.

The fight for a share of air assets would go on far into the war. In the high-level meetings where defence priorities were decided the admirals and generals could only grind their teeth while the RAF got their way. ‘The politicians were much attracted by the Air Force doctrine,’ recalled Kennedy. ‘The soldiers and sailors could never persuade the cabinet or the defence committee to settle the dispute in a way we thought right, either before or during the war.’13 (#litres_trial_promo)

For all their perceived cockiness, the newcomers showed respect towards political authority and voiced their arguments softly. Edward Ellington, CAS for the crucial 1933–7 period, was regarded by his own senior officers as being too deferential in the company of politicians. His successor, Cyril Newall, was more forceful but got on well with Lord Swinton and Sir Kingsley Wood, the air ministers who presided over the expansion period.

The Air Marshals’ approach contrasted favourably with the high-handed ways of the soldiers and sailors. The Army brass barely bothered to disguise their contempt for Leslie Hore-Belisha, Secretary of State for War from 1937 to 1940. ‘An obscure, shallow-brained, charlatan political Jewboy’ was Pownall’s verdict.14 (#litres_trial_promo) Their treatment of him is revealed in an episode recounted by Kennedy when he was taken on a tour of the front in northern France by Lord Gort, commander of the British Expeditionary Force, in November 1939.

It was a cold, wet windy morning. We motored through the rain to the western side of the British salient … on our way we crossed Vimy Ridge. Gort got us out of our cars … he made Hore-Belisha climb a very muddy bank and kept him shivering in the howling gale while he explained the battle fought there in the 1914–18 war. In spite of his discomfort Hore-Belisha kept up a good appearance of polite interest. By this time his patent leather boots must have been giving him hell.15 (#litres_trial_promo)

There were further stops at other windswept battlefields. They paused at a château to meet the French commander and were taken to an attic window for yet another tour d’horizon. Gort deliberately ‘opened a window and let in a piercing draught on Hore-Belisha; when we went out again into the rain he shouted jovially, “Isn’t it a grand day!”’16 (#litres_trial_promo)

This schoolboyish bullying was all the more extraordinary given that Gort owed his appointment to Hore-Belisha’s patronage. Nor would the War Minister be thanked for the great efforts he made in cabinet to obtain funds and equipment for the army Gort now commanded. Edmund Ironside, who Hore-Belisha appointed as Chief of the General Staff, was equally obnoxious towards his patron. Ironside, an outstanding linguist, gleefully recounted to Kennedy over lunch one day in his club how he had instructed his political master not to try and address French commanders in their own tongue: ‘I told him that his French was Le Touquet French – good enough for talking to Mademoiselle X on the plage but no good for military conversations.’17 (#litres_trial_promo)

The hostile and surely anti-Semitic attitudes of Gort and Ironside were in sharp contrast to the warm relations between the RAF and Sir Philip Sassoon, Under Secretary of State for Air between 1931 and 1937. Sir Philip was rich, Jewish and unmistakeably gay.18 (#litres_trial_promo) He was famously generous and hospitable and every summer hosted the annual camp of the Auxiliaries of 601 (County of London) Squadron, of which he was honorary CO, at Port Lympne, his sumptuous country house on the Kent coast. In between flying, the young airmen lounged around the twin swimming pools in the grounds and there was a party every night. Sassoon’s death aged only fifty in June 1939 caused the Air Force real sorrow. At a meeting of the Air Council ten days afterwards much of the discussion was taken up with whether or not to cancel the RAF garden party held each year at Trent Park, another Sassoon mansion in Hertfordshire, as ‘the absence of Sir Philip would revive memories and cast a gloom over the proceedings’.19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Expansion piled enormous bulk on the organizational skeleton devised by Trenchard. In April 1934, on the eve of the great transformation, the RAF had 814 aeroplanes at home and abroad. When the war broke out it had 3,860.20 (#litres_trial_promo) The Air Force’s new physique might look impressive but was there real muscle underneath? The speed of events in Europe had the Air Ministry perpetually scrambling to keep up. The Nazis’ obfuscations about the extent of their own expansion programme meant there were no solid metrics on which to base the pursuit of parity. The result was that much of the budget was squandered on unsatisfactory aircraft which were ordered mainly to create the illusion of strength – an attempt at ‘scaring Hitler by “window dressing”’, as senior officers privately admitted to each other.21 (#litres_trial_promo)

The political imperative for numerical parity with the Luftwaffe had taken little account of the quality of the aircraft. In a time of fast-changing technology the policy was shockingly wasteful. The Air Ministry ordered new types in the knowledge that they would be out of date before they reached the squadrons. The Fairey Battle light bomber was known to be a dud from the outset, underpowered and short-ranged, yet more than 2,000 were bought before a halt was called, leaving their crews tethered to a lethally useless machine when the fighting began.

The RAF could argue that it was not their fault. Building a modern air force was hampered by the underdeveloped state of the domestic air industry and the government’s laissez-faire economic policy. In Germany, the Nazis ensured that aircraft manufacturing was at the service of the state and the national airline Lufthansa was to a large extent the Luftwaffe in sheep’s clothing. A senior Rolls-Royce executive, Willoughby Lappin, visited the Heinkel works on the Baltic coast in April 1936 and on his return reported his findings to British intelligence. Workers started their shifts at 6.15 a.m. and finished at 5.15 p.m., with two fifteen-minute meal breaks. ‘The most significant thing,’ he noted, ‘is probably the fact that everyone young and old is disciplined and is thinking nationally, whether from fear or choice does not matter … the Government are solely responsible for the policy and working of all the aircraft factories and the directors thereof have no control except to provide the Air Ministry with what they require.’22 (#litres_trial_promo)

In Britain the state gave limited support to a range of smallish ‘family firm’ constructors, who had to pay the costs of developing new designs themselves and competed for orders when the Air Ministry issued specifications for a new type. Until late in the day, British governments avoided intervening, refusing to allow the international situation to interfere with the principle of ‘non-interference with the flow of normal trade’.23 (#litres_trial_promo)

The result was a piecemeal approach to design producing a plethora of types. Multiplicity meant a lack of mass-production capacity and, though this was remedied when the government paid big motor manufacturers like Austin and Rootes to build ‘shadow factories’ for airframes and engines, there was a reluctance to mobilize industry on a war footing until it became absolutely necessary. Ultimately the failures and shortcomings were a consequence of Britain’s political system – what happened when a free-market democracy tried to prepare for total war.

Each side used smoke and mirrors to try and persuade the other that there was no point in trying to outdo them in the air. They engaged in a pantomime of good fellowship which looks surreal at this distance in time. The fraternizing began at the instigation of the RAF when in the spring of 1936 the Air Minister Lord Swinton invited General Erhard Milch to Britain.

General Milch was the man who could claim most of the credit for building up the Luftwaffe in the space of a few years from a puny collection of ill-assorted aircraft into the most feared air force in Europe. The Germans reciprocated and a party of senior RAF officers toured Luftwaffe facilities and aircraft factories the following January.

On 17 October 1937, Milch was back again, together with his chief of staff, Lieutenant General Hans-Jürgen Stumpff and Major General Ernst Udet, an internationally famous air ace and head of the Luftwaffe’s technical division. Arriving at Croydon Airport Milch declared he had come to ‘destroy mischievous rumours and create an atmosphere of comradeship and friendliness’.24 (#litres_trial_promo)

The programme that followed gave the impression that Britain was welcoming a trusted ally rather than a potential enemy. The day after arriving, Milch was taken to Buckingham Palace for an audience with King George VI. The itinerary covered almost every aspect of RAF operations, including visits to Cranwell and Halton and tours of the new shadow factories. Everything was done to make the Germans feel at home. At a cocktail party at the Carlton Hotel in the West End of London attended by everyone who was anyone in the British aviation world, the RAF band struck up the ‘Badenweiler Marsch’, which was always played at Hitler’s public appearances, as well as ‘Old Comrades’ and ‘Our Flag Flutters Before Us’, a marching song of the Hitler Youth.25 (#litres_trial_promo)

On 19 October the Germans were given the run of the bomber station at Mildenhall in Suffolk. It was occupied by 99 and 149 Squadrons, both equipped with Handley Page Heyford biplane heavy bombers which lined up in facing ranks on the grass runway for the visitors to inspect. According to The Times, the German officers, who were dressed in Luftwaffe uniform, ‘sat in the cockpits, waggled the controls, trained movable guns in their turrets, had bomb trapdoors opened for their inspections [and] asked questions which were readily answered …’26 (#litres_trial_promo) They were then treated to a mass flypast by an assortment of the bombers then in service: Vickers Wellesleys, Fairey Battles, Handley Page Harrows and Bristol Blenheims. Lunch was served in the officers’ mess. The table was decked out in the red, black and white Nazi colours.

The eagerness to please created moments of black farce. On 23 October Air Vice Marshal Victor Goddard, the RAF’s deputy director of intelligence, took the Germans to Hornchurch in Essex which was home to two fighter squadrons. They were equipped with Gladiator biplanes which were swift and elegant but antediluvian compared to the sleek Messerschmitts now arriving at Luftwaffe fighter units. They did have one piece of equipment that was bang up to date – the latest optical reflector sights. Pilots had been told by the station commander Group Captain ‘Bunty’ Frew that ‘if the Germans ask about the sight, keep mum’. So when General Milch peered into the cockpit of one of the Gladiators and inquired how the sight worked, the pilot, Bob Stanford Tuck of 65 Squadron, replied smartly: ‘I’m sorry, General, it’s so new, I’ve not yet found out.’27 (#litres_trial_promo) Tuck was ‘quite appalled’ when ‘suddenly AVM Goddard interrupted and proceeded to give him the full details’. According to one version of the story, when Goddard had finished Tuck suggested: ‘Sir, perhaps General Milch might like to take one home with him as a souvenir?’

The visit was presented by government and press as a hopeful sign that Hitler could be curbed. Flight magazine, the aviation bible, claimed that ‘when the British mission visited German air force centres in January last, the members all felt that they knew, understood and respected their German hosts. It is permissible to hope and indeed to believe that the German party under the leadership of General Milch returned to Germany with the same feeling.’28 (#litres_trial_promo)

Others doubted that the Germans were fooled for a minute. Winston Churchill, the arch opponent of the government’s policy of non-provocation, did not believe that the performance would have the slightest deterrent effect. It was, he wrote to the powerful Cabinet Secretary Maurice Hankey, ‘a desperate effort … to present a sham’. The truth was that at the Mildenhall display Bomber Command had struggled to ‘put little more than a hundred bombers in the air – the great majority of which (as the Germans will readily see) can barely reach the coast of Germany with a bomb load’.29 (#litres_trial_promo)

Churchill’s assessment of the RAF’s power to intimidate was accurate enough. The Heyfords the Germans inspected had double-decker wings and fixed undercarriages and belonged to a bygone age. The machines in the flypast looked modern but were underwhelming in almost every department. The Battle was powered by a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine but carried only two single machine guns to defend itself and had a range of a sparse thousand miles. The Harrow, classified as a ‘heavy’, could manage a 1,250-mile round trip but was pathetically slow. The Wellesley ‘medium’ was capable of long distances but was also sluggish. The Blenheim, another medium, was the fastest of the lot, but was able to penetrate only to the fringes of German territory. These were the aircraft with which the RAF’s bomber squadrons were currently equipped.

Better performing aircraft were emerging from the pipeline – the Whitleys, Wellingtons and Hampdens with which the RAF would fight in the first years of the war. But long-range aeroplanes capable of carrying a substantial bomb load were still in development. It would be twenty months before the Stirling, the first of the four-engine ‘heavies’, made its maiden flight. The Halifax did not start flying operationally until March 1941, the Lancaster a year later. In the meantime, the RAF would have to make do with machines which were plainly inadequate for the very ambitious role that had been claimed for them.

The Milch visit was merely a reminder of what the Air Staff already knew: that the service was utterly unprepared for war. Bomber Command – which had been created in a major structural reorganization of the Air Force in 1936 – had nothing in its armoury that was likely to cause Hitler to hesitate. Fighter Command, set up at the same time, was in better shape. It would be some time, though, before it had the machines and the system of detection, command and control needed to deploy them efficiently enough to withstand a mass attack. As things stood in the autumn of 1937, the Air Force was incapable of either deterring, defending or retaliating.

Slessor and the planning staff had already laid out the situation in stark terms in a paper to Newall a few days after he took over as Chief of the Air Staff on 1 September 1937. It stated that they would be ‘failing in their duty were they not to express the considered opinion that the Metropolitan [i.e. home-based] Air Force in general and the Bomber Command in particular, are at present almost totally unfitted for war; that unless the production of new and up-to-date aircraft can be expedited, they will not be fit for war for at least two and a half years; and that even at the end of that time, there is not the slightest chance of their reaching equality with Germany in first line strength if the present German programmes are fulfilled’.30 (#litres_trial_promo)

The warning produced yet another scheme – J – but unlike its predecessors this was more than a mere exercise in upping the numbers. Quantity gave way to quality. The plan was based on what the Air Staff considered to be its minimum strategic requirements rather than on hoped-for deterrent effect, or some ill-defined numerical ‘parity’. The goal was to have 3,031 front-line aircraft at home and abroad available by April 1941, that is 800 more than in Scheme F – the last one to get government approval.

As always, most of the new aircraft would be bombers, which would outnumber fighters by a factor of two to one. Nothing that had happened since the start of expansion had shaken the Air Staff’s belief in the proposition that a big bomber force was the foundation for all air strategy. When submitting the new scheme for government approval, the Air Minister Lord Swinton made it clear ‘there is no question of altering the ratio of fighter and bomber squadrons in the sense of reducing bomber squadrons to make fighter squadrons’.31 (#litres_trial_promo)

Faith in the offensive had blinded the Air Force professionals to the meaning of technological, military and political developments, the significance of which was dawning on amateur, civilian minds. Britain’s defensive situation was improving fast. The domestic aircraft industry was at last producing fast, modern, low-wing monoplane fighters that could at least hold their own against the Luftwaffe. At the time Scheme J was proposed, 600 Hurricanes were on order from Hawker and the first small batch would start to arrive on squadrons at the beginning of 1938.32 (#litres_trial_promo) An order had been made for 310 Spitfires from Supermarine, though delays and complications meant production was stalled. Radar infrastructure was expanding rapidly. The first five stations in the Chain Home radar network covering the approaches to London became operational in 1938.

The Air Staff could take the credit for having identified and backed two world-beating fighters and for moving fast to exploit Radio Direction Finding. What they failed to grasp fully was the damage these developments had done to the premises on which their theory of air power rested. The combination of radar, the sophisticated command and control system that it made possible and fast, well-armed fighters seemed to provide a plausible shield against an attempted ‘knock-out blow’.

The implications were spelled out by one senior officer who saw clearly the new reality. Hugh Dowding was appointed commander-in-chief of Fighter Command when it was created in July 1936, having been passed over for CAS in favour of Newall despite being his senior. He was regarded by his peers as humourless, earnest and aloof and well suited to his nickname, ‘Stuffy’. Before his appointment he had been in charge of research and development at the Air Ministry and it was largely on his initiative that the Hurricane and Spitfire were ordered. He had no scientific training but was open to new ideas and soon grasped the significance of RDF. It was he who devised the finely tuned system of collating raw radar reports and sightings from ground observers, filtering them through control centres and translating the refined information into orders to the fighter squadrons.

Dowding’s views ran head-on into the prevailing orthodoxy. He rejected the notion that counter-attack by bomber was the best form of defence in favour of a simpler idea. ‘The best defence of this country is Fear of the Fighter,’ he wrote. ‘If we are strong in fighters we should probably never be attacked in force. If we are moderately strong we shall probably be attacked and the attacks will gradually be brought to a standstill … if we are weak in fighter strength, the attacks will not be brought to a standstill and the productive capacity of the country will be virtually destroyed.’33 (#litres_trial_promo) The overwhelming duty of the Air Force, he argued, was to secure the safety of the home base. Dowding’s views were heresy to the bomber cult. It took courage to maintain his beliefs in contradiction to the overwhelming official wisdom but he did so tenaciously, in the words of the official historians choosing ‘neither to understand other arguments, nor to compromise, nor even to accept with good grace the decisions that went against him’.34 (#litres_trial_promo)

On his own, Dowding was unable to deflect the Air Staff from the fixed notion that inspired all their strategic thinking. It needed an outsider to do that. The first major challenge to the primacy of the bomber arrived from an unexpected quarter. Sir Thomas Inskip came from a line of stolid West Country solicitors and parsons and was known, if at all, for his parliamentary objections to a new version of the Book of Common Prayer. The announcement early in 1936 that he was to be moved from his post as Attorney General to the newly created position of Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence was greeted with derision and incomprehension. The role had been created by the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, in an attempt to harmonize the rearmament effort. It was a vitally important job and big names were bandied about to fill it, among them Winston Churchill’s. Baldwin eventually decided Inskip was a safer bet, a decision that was approved by the Chancellor of the Exchequer Neville Chamberlain who noted in his diary that while he would ‘excite no enthusiasm’ he would ‘involve us in no fresh perplexities’.35 (#litres_trial_promo) Inskip would confound the low expectations set for him.

When Scheme J arrived on his desk he coolly reassessed the a priori assumption contained within it that it was essential for Britain to possess a bomber strike force to match that of the Luftwaffe. To the quiet, God-fearing lawyer, it seemed that for the time being at least the emphasis should be on defence rather than offence and priority given to fighters. Admittedly, if war came that would mean that Britain would suffer more damage than it could inflict, but ‘the result would not at once be critical’.36 (#litres_trial_promo) He believed that Germany did not have the resources to sustain a prolonged war and would therefore have to ‘knock us out in a comparatively short time’. The best course was to concentrate on warding off the initial assaults while preserving military and economic strength for a long-drawn-out fight which Britain would win through its superior staying power. He was prepared to propose an increase of only £100 million on top of the existing allocation for the previous expansion scheme. If the money was to be used effectively, the Air Ministry should spend it on relatively cheap fighters rather than expensive bombers.

The airmen fought back vigorously against this impertinent rejection of the professional wisdom that suffused their thoughts and actions. Swinton reiterated the mantra that ‘counter attack still remains the chief deterrent and defence’ and warned that ‘we must not exaggerate the possibilities’ arising from radar and other developments. He also mounted a political defence, suggesting strongly that the change of direction would play badly with the public, making it seem as if the government was abandoning its public promises to keep up with the Germans in the air.

He had misread the changing mood. It was the here and now that mattered currently, not theories for the future. When the whole question of defence expenditure was considered in cabinet on 22 December 1937, it was Inskip’s view that ‘parity with Germany was more important in fighter aircraft resisting aggression, than in the offensive role of bombers’ that prevailed.37 (#litres_trial_promo)

The Air Ministry was now compelled to work with him to draw up a new scheme – K – which reflected the reversal in policy. The bomber force was reduced from ninety squadrons to seventy-seven and allowance was made for only nine weeks of reserves, at the end of which, Newall observed bitterly, ‘the war would have been lost’. The numbers of the front-line fighter force remained the same at thirty-eight squadrons and 532 aircraft but there would be more than half as many again in reserve.

The Inskip intervention was taken badly by the Air Staff who resented an amateur trespassing on their territory and, as they saw it, endangering Britain’s security purely for the sake of financial expediency. The assault on the thinking that had sustained the Air Force for much of its short life was most resented by the chief evangelist. The fact that he was nine years retired did not stop Trenchard from publicly and privately denouncing the shift to fighters. ‘The old man was obstinately unrelenting – not only at this time but even after the war broke out – about adherence in any circumstances to the bomber policy,’ John Slessor remembered.38 (#litres_trial_promo) It would turn out that, in the short term at least, Inskip was right and the Air Staff were wrong. This realization did little to shake the faith of the bomber cult, an attitude that would have profound consequences when the time came for Britain to fight on land and sea.

4

Brylcreem Boys (#ulink_80af541a-29d8-5714-9a5f-4a22fa08be79)

The great lexicographer of slang Eric Partridge recorded that in 1937 soldiers and sailors began to refer to their Air Force colleagues as the ‘Glamour Boys’.1 (#litres_trial_promo) The term was not necessarily admiring or affectionate. A little later on the RAF attracted another nickname. They were the ‘Brylcreem Boys’, a reference to their habit of slicking their hair with a best-selling pomade. The manufacturers, County Chemicals of Birmingham, were delighted with the association. In 1939, launching the ‘handy active service tube’ they chose to dress the model in Air Force forage cap and tunic and during the war a glossy-haired airman appeared regularly in their advertisements. It was only many years later that the man in the ads, one Tony Gibson, was revealed as a conscientious objector who did several stints in jail for his beliefs.2 (#litres_trial_promo)

Hair cream and the Air Force seemed to go together. The product had a practical use. Richard Passmore, a wireless operator/air gunner on Blenheims in the early part of the war, recalled how his ‘side cap hung above my ear at angle which mocked gravity and was a mute testimony to the adhesiveness of Brylcreem’.3 (#litres_trial_promo) However, the main point of it was that it allowed you to look like an up-to-the-minute civilian male while wearing military uniform.

Like many of the trends adopted by the youth of Britain in the 1930s, the trend for sculpted men’s hairdos was imported from America via Hollywood movies. The notion of glamour was a contemporary one. If any branch of the armed services had claim to it, it was the Air Force.

The RAF’s modern image gave it a marked advantage over the other services in the competition for human resources. Expansion required men as well as machines, to fly them and to service them. In 1933 the RAF needed only one recruiting depot to fill its manpower needs, and took on less than a thousand extra men in addition to the regular Halton and Cranwell intakes. By the spring of 1938 there were eleven depots and thirty-one sub-depots which over the next eighteen months scooped up 43,795 recruits. With the introduction of conscription and the outbreak of war the numbers exploded. Between September 1939 and January 1942, 789,773 joined the ranks. By the time recruiting was halted in 1944, nearly 1.2 million men and women were wearing Air Force Blue.4 (#litres_trial_promo)

Trenchard had identified the need for manpower structures that were light and simple yet strong enough to support a rapid increase in numbers when needed. Initially, the system worked very well. In peacetime, in addition to the small core of regulars, the RAF could rely on a steady throughput of short service commission officers to supply most of its aircrew requirements. After doing their time they then passed into the Reserve of Air Force Officers (RAFO). The front-line squadrons were backed up by the amateurs of the Auxiliary Air Force and University Air Squadrons.

By early 1936, with the likelihood of war growing by the month, it was clear that these sources would soon dry up once the fighting began and a much bigger reservoir of aircrew would be needed. The experience of the last war had taught that ‘casualties in air warfare are high and the replacement of wastage is an even greater problem for a personnel than an equipment department’.5 (#litres_trial_promo) The need to make good the ‘wastage’ – the term must have struck some as inhumane even then – prompted the creation of a pool of airmen who had received at least a basic level of flying training. They would learn theory at evening classes in city schoolrooms and practise at civilian air schools at the weekend, in readiness to fill the gaps torn in the front line when hostilities commenced.