The Birth of the RAF, 1918 by Richard Overy

Author:Richard Overy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241274224
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-01-11T05:00:00+00:00

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‘A Very Gruelling Business’: Saving the RAF

We contend that the British policy is to develop the independent conception of the air as an art, as an arm, and as a service; and that this method alone will secure that qualitative ascendancy and superiority which the safety of the country requires …

Winston Churchill, October 19211

In June 1933 Air Vice-Marshal Brooke-Popham gave the after-dinner speech on ‘The Spirit of the Air Force’ at a special event organized to celebrate twenty-one years of the Royal Air Force. The date actually commemorated was the founding of the Royal Flying Corps in 1912, but the RAF elided the two organizations together as if there had been a continuous history of an independent flying arm. Brooke-Popham’s remarks made evident that the naval air service was a historical detour. The RFC-RAF lineage was paramount. Brooke-Popham had wanted to mention famous names from the wartime years but realized that they had almost all died in combat and that this might give the air force an unnecessarily morbid image. Nevertheless, dead or alive, the airmen contributed by their ‘courage and determination’ to creating the soul of the RAF, which after twenty-one years Brooke-Popham regarded as ‘permanent and fundamental’.2

The speech marked a particular historic moment for the RAF, but Brooke-Popham’s seamless narrative masked a very different reality. The RAF was created out of bitter arguments over its necessity, and for half a decade after 1918 the future of the RAF as an independent service, separate from the army and navy, hung by a thread. The principal advocate of an end to air power independence remained the Admiralty, which might explain the absence of the navy in Brooke-Popham’s talk, but by 1921 the army too began to have grave doubts about whether it made strategic and budgetary sense to keep the RAF. This was a far cry from the optimistic expectations of the Air Staff when the war ended that the RAF ought to play an expanded role in the defence of the motherland and the Empire. On 9 December 1918, a month after the Armistice, Sykes drew up a memorandum for the Cabinet on ‘Air Power Requirements of the Empire’. He urged the government not to demobilize the air force too rapidly, because specialized air forces were essential to the future security of Britain’s imperial territories. Air power, he continued, had tremendous potential, so that in peace or in war ‘the nation which thinks in three dimensions will lead those still thinking in two’.

What followed was a classic description of a strategy that has come to be known as ‘Douhetism’, after the Italian airman Giulio Douhet, who argued in his book Il dominio dell’aria (The Command of the Air), first published in 1921, that any future war ought to begin with an annihilating air strike against the enemy’s cities and civilians as a swifter and ultimately more humane route to victory than the four costly years of attrition between 1914 and 1918. Sykes ‘strategic considerations’ anticipated Douhet by some years:

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