Air Force Blue: The RAF in World War Two – Spearhead of Victory. Patrick Bishop
extraordinary personality was, without doubt, one of the greatest assets of the RAF in its fight for survival … when it was likely to have been wound up, if the other services had had their way’.11
His claims to greatness went further than that. He devised the institutions and established the traditions that enabled the Air Force to merge quickly into Britain’s institutional landscape. He oversaw the development of the strategic theory that – rightly or wrongly – placed offensive air power at the centre of Britain’s defence arrangements. Above all, he gave the RAF its identity, its self-belief and its credo, which was implanted in the DNA of the service in the years after the Great War by a cohort of disciples, suffusing the RAF ‘with a vigour and aggression, a mixture of dogmatism and iconoclasm, characteristic of the Father of the Royal Air Force’ himself.12
Trenchard initially stuck loyally to the Army chiefs’ view that aeroplanes should be strictly subordinated to their own terrestrial needs. He began to change his mind after being given command of the ‘Independent Force’, which emerged from the deliberations of the Smuts inquiry. Its purpose was to give the Germans a taste of their own medicine by launching air raids into enemy territory to attack war industries. The campaign achieved little apart from killing German civilians but the notion of using aircraft to pursue strategic rather than simply tactical war aims was planted. Trenchard would end up the most energetic and effective preacher of the primacy of air power in future conflicts and the need to place an offensive air policy at the centre of all planning, organization and procurement.
Trenchard was a notoriously bad speaker but he had a physique and presence that more than made up for his inarticulacy. No one who met him forgot the experience. Many did meet him, for he clung to his baby long after his guardianship was ended, and he pops up often in memoirs and diaries, carrying out inspections and delivering pep talks, indulged by his old protégés who were reluctant to suggest his visitations might be inconvenient.
Arnold Wall, the officer who quizzed Trenchard about the origins of Air Force Blue, remembered a freezing day in December 1926 when he came to the RAF College at Cranwell to inspect the passing-out parade. Even at this early stage Trenchard’s stature was immense. Wall, a young New Zealander in his first term as a cadet, noted every detail as he passed by. His first impression ‘was of bigness. He was a tall man, heavily built, bearishly, this accentuated by his great-coat, his head seeming on the small side for a man of his size. Heavy eyebrows, shaggy; eyes deep set and rather close set, very keen in expression but friendly; greying moustache worn rather more heavily than was fashionable. His whole bearing was kindly and interested; an amiable Great Bear.’13
The parade trooped into the gymnasium for prize giving and speeches. All the cadets knew that Trenchard’s nickname was ‘Boom’ on account of his penetrating voice. They ‘were curious to discover whether he would speak to us in the voice of a howitzer, but in this he was a disappointment. He was gruff, certainly, and loud and clear but not a boomer …’
Early in 1929 Wall went to RAF Uxbridge to hear Trenchard, who was stepping down as Chief of the Air Staff (CAS), deliver a farewell speech. ‘I don’t remember much of what he said, but one of the metaphors sticks in the mind,’ he wrote. ‘He stressed that all he and his contemporaries had been able to do since the RAF was formed was to lay “foundations (long pause), foundations for the future (pause). For you fellows to build on (pause). Could be a cottage, could be a castle. I don’t know (pause). Nobody knows. Whichever it is, hope you’ll find that the foundations are sound, strong …”’
Laying a ‘sound framework on which to build the service’ had been one of Trenchard’s main aims when he resumed the post of CAS in the spring of 1919 (a brief earlier stint had ended in his resignation after repeated clashes with the Air Minister, Lord Rothermere). The other was to find a role for the RAF that would justify its existence. Unlike his predecessor and rival Frederick Sykes, he understood the need for modesty and frugality. He came up with a proposal for how an Air Force, now pared down to a tenth of the size it had attained by the end of the war, could be employed in a way that projected military power effectively and cheaply.
The concept was called ‘force substitution’. It meant simply that instead of relying on expensive ground forces to keep down rebellious natives in hot and dusty corners of the empire, the RAF could do the job by deploying a few aeroplanes. Inevitably, the idea raised Army hackles. The new boys were seeking to take over work that had previously been done by soldiers. Winston Churchill, who was both War and Air Minister, backed the idea, however, and henceforth the RAF would be engaged heavily in imperial policing.
The first success came early in 1920 when they crushed an uprising by the Dervish leader Mohammed Abdullah Hassan in Somaliland. The ‘Mad Mullah’ was defeated in a few weeks at a cost of £77,000 – ‘the cheapest war in history’ it was said.14
In one year, 1929, the RAF was in action in Iraq, Aden, Sudan, and the North-West Frontier. Its achievements were vaunted by the Air Minister Samuel Hoare in the House of Commons. In Iraq, it was ‘the encroachment of certain tribes many miles over the Iraq frontier and the butchery of large numbers of men, women and children’ that triggered operations. In Aden, it was ‘the kidnapping of two sheikhs friendly to Britain’. In Sudan, it was ‘the murder of a British Commissioner, a Greek trader and several natives’. The results were very satisfactory. ‘The operations were carried out successfully with scarcely any casualties amongst either the Air Force or the native population,’ Hoare reported. As a result of all this activity the RAF lost only one man. As for cost, the Aden mission came to £8,000, where ‘under the older conditions of warfare the expenditure would have run into perhaps £6 millions’.15
These operations were of little use in preparing aircrews for modern warfare. Few of the tribesmen they subdued had ever seen an aeroplane, let alone had the means to shoot one down. Nor did they provide much practice in Army–Air Force co-operation. They did, however, have the beneficial effect from the airmen’s point of view of keeping the RAF firmly in the public eye and in the minds of politicians.
At home Trenchard was anxious to establish and build up an institutional framework that would consolidate the Royal Air Force’s independence forever. He set out to form a new generation of officers and airmen by training them from the outset in Air Force thought and method.16 Cranwell – the first air academy in history – opened in February 1920. Alongside it was established the School of Technical Training to provide a pool of skilled ground crews.
The first Cranwell cadets were housed in a hutted camp formerly occupied by the RNAS planted on the windswept plain of south Lincolnshire. In time it would grow into a grand establishment that could hold its own with Sandhurst or Dartmouth. In October 1934, the Prince of Wales opened the new College Hall. The architect Sir James Wood had chosen the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, home to Army pensioners since 1692, for inspiration. The structure was a gigantic metaphor for Trenchard’s approach. The brick and stone elevations and large dome looked as if they had been there for centuries. In fact, the classical exterior was all façade and the building was held up by thoroughly modern steel beams.
Cranwell graduates were, as the founder intended, a small and exclusive clique, ‘the very heart and centre from which the RAF derives her vitality’, as an inter-war Air Secretary Lord Londonderry described it.17 This was the nucleus around which the service would grow. Trenchard made the ability to fly an aeroplane well a basic condition of entry to the RAF’s future elite. As well as being a flying school, the college taught aviation technology and aeronautics alongside a basic academic curriculum. The course lasted two years and at the end the graduates passed out as ‘General Duties Officers’ ready to take their place wherever the service required them and in time to rise to the summit of the RAF.
There were two entries a year, and in the period between the wars the total number of annual entrants never exceeded seventy-one.