The RAF in the Battle of France and the Battle of Britain: A Reappraisal of Army and Air Policy 1938-1940 by Greg Baughen

Author:Greg Baughen [Baughen, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781781555255
Publisher: Fonthill Media
Published: 2017-09-12T04:00:00+00:00

Arras on 21 May 1940.

There was an air of haste about the decision and panic about its implementation. Masses of equipment was abandoned, unserviceable aircraft were destroyed, and brand new aircraft suffered a similar fate if no pilots were around to fly them away. Hurricanes at storage parks were hauled into groups of three, nose-to-nose, and set alight.9 Others were lined up and destroyed by anti-aircraft guns.10 Elsewhere, transport planes were flying over to France to collect pilots with no planes to fly.11 If air transport was not available, RAF personnel were told to make their way back to Britain as best they could. Some fled as far as Cherbourg, nearly 250 miles behind the French front line, to find a boat back to Britain.12 On hearing that tanks were approaching, the staff of the Merville operations room clambered through the toilet window at the rear of the building and fled across the fields. The nearest German forces were over 20 miles away at the time, and they were not heading for Merville. The staff made their way to Boulogne and back to England.13 They were actually fleeing towards the German forces; Boulogne would fall into enemy hands several days before Merville.

The evacuation was premature to say the least. Over forty Allied divisions were north of the German breakthrough in a pocket that extended from Abbeville in France to the Scheldt estuary. There was scarcely a shortage of space to deploy an air force. Blount and the Air Ministry seemed to be in rather a hurry to get the RAF back to Britain and Gort did not seem to mind; indeed, he seemed to believe that the sooner the BEF followed them, the better. Between them, British Army and Air Force commanders had scattered the RAF far more effectively than the Luftwaffe.

The attitude of Pownall, Gort’s chief of staff, is particularly intriguing. He had spearheaded the pre-war Army drive to acquire more effective air support, but he seemed to raise no objections to the Air Component returning to Britain. Even if Gort’s preferred option was to retreat to the coast, his Army would still need air support. It may be that Pownall and Gort were persuaded that the RAF could operate just as effectively from airfields in Britain, or it might just have been a way of pre-empting any decision to keep the British Army on the continent.

Part of the problem was that neither Pownall nor Gort seemed to understand what was happening around them. To some extent, the BEF was in the eye of the storm. British troops were only facing German infantry; they had not yet experienced the full ferocity of the air/tank blitzkrieg combination. Pownall could not understand why Dutch, Belgian, and French forces were faring so badly. He was convinced the French in the south had collapsed in the face of a few small-scale raiding parties. He did not think the main German Army had even been committed yet; he was so consumed by contempt for

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