ROYAL AIR FORCE

HISTORICAL SOCIETY

JOURNAL

The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the

contributors concerned and are not necessarily those held by the Royal

Air Force Historical Society.

First published in the UK in 2008 by the Royal Air Force Historical

Society

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical

including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and

retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing.

ISSN 1361 4231

Printed by Advance Book Printing

Unit 9 Northmoor Park

Church Road

Northmoor

OX29 5UH

ROYAL AIR FORCE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

President Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Michael

Beetham GCB CBE DFC AFC

Vice-President Air Marshal Sir Frederick Sowrey KCB

CBE AFC

Committee

ChairmanAir Vice-Marshal N B Baldwin CB CBE

FRAeS

Vice-ChairmanGroup Captain J D Heron OBE

SecretaryGroup Captain K J Dearman FRAeS

Membership SecretaryDr Jack Dunham PhD CPsychol AMRAeS

TreasurerJ Boyes TD CA

MembersAir Commodore H A Probert MBE MA

*J S Cox Esq BA MA

*Dr M A Fopp MA FMA FIMgt

*Group Captain N Parton BSc (Hons) MA

MDA MPhil CEng FRAeS RAF

*Wing Commander A J C Walters BSc

MA FRAeS RAF

Wing Commander C Cummings

Editor & PublicationsWing Commander C G Jefford MBE BA

Manager

*Ex Officio

CONTENTS

EDITOR’s NOTE6

ERRATA6

20 October 1986. THE INTELLIGENCE WAR AND THE7

ROYAL AIR FORCE by Professor R V Jones CB CBE FRS.

16 March 1987. WORLD WAR II – THE BALANCE26

SHEET by John Terraine.

14 March 1988. THE IMPACT OF THE SANDYS44

DEFENCE POLICY ON THE ROYAL AIR FORCE by

T C G James CMG MA.

29 June 1988. THE POLICY, COMMAND AND66

DIRECTION OF THE LUFTWAFFE IN WORLD WAR II by

Dr Horst Boog.

31 October 1988. Seminar – THE ROYAL AIR FORCE AND86

CLANDESTINE OPERATIONS IN NORTH-WEST

EUROPE.

BOOK REVIEWS112

SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS

ABMAnti-Ballistic Missile

ACAS(Int)Assistant Chief of the Air Staff (Intelligence)

ADI(K),Assistant Directorate of Intelligence (K)

AIAir Intelligence

ASWAnti-Submarine Warfare

CASChief of the Air Staff

CDSChief of the Defence Staff

CIGSChief of the Imperial General Staff

DDDeputy Director(ate)

DFDirection Finding

DCASDeputy Chief of the Air Staff

DZDrop/Dropping Zone

FEAFFar East Air Force

FINRAEFerranti Inertial Rapid Alignment Equipment

HUDHead Up Display

IFFIdentification Friend or Foe

MAMilitary Intelligence

QRAQuick Reaction Alert

SACEURSupreme Allied Commander Europe

SACLANTSupreme Allied Commander Atlantic

SAMSurface-to-Air Missile

SISSecret Intelligence Service

SOESpecial Operations Executive

VCASVice Chief of the Air Staff

EDITOR’S NOTE

The established cycle that determines the content of our

Journals means that the edition which appears in or about

January of each year reflects the proceedings of the event held in

the previous spring which it does by publishing the papers read on

that occasion.

In 2007, however, we interrupted the usual sequence by

sponsoring, instead of the usual seminar, a visit to the recently

opened National Cold War Exhibition at the RAF Museum’s

Cosford site. While those who attended were treated to some

presentations, they were to do with the design and operation of the

splendid new building and the preparation of the displays. In

other words, while interesting in their own right, they were not to

do with RAF history per se. That created something of a problem

as we would either have to skip an edition or find something else

to print. Your Committee decided that we could usefully fill the

gap by reprinting some of the more significant papers that were

read to the Society in its early days and which appeared in

publications that are no longer readily available.

ERRATA

Anthony Furse has pointed out an error on page 11 of Journal 40

where it says that Newall was CAS in December 1940. Newall had, of

course, been succeeded by Portal in October.

Tim Wingham has noted an error in the caption to the photograph of

HSL 2550 on page 57 of Journal 40. He points out that those are not

‘twin Lewis guns on pillar mountings’ as stated; they are Vickers

0.303 inch Gas Operated Mk 1, No 1s aka Vickers Class Ks, or VGOs

for short. As Tim says, when ‘presented with a picture of a drum-fed

machine-gun in an RAF setting, the immediate assumption is – Lewis

gun.’ I plead guilty as charged. That was my caption, so mea culpa.

Ed.

RAF HISTORICAL SOCIETY INAUGURAL LECTURE

20 OCTOBER 1986

The Society’s inaugural lecture was given by Professor R V Jones,

CB, CBE, FRS, author of Most Secret War, the account of British

Scientific Intelligence during the 1939-1945 war, published in 1978,

serialised in the Sunday Telegraph and used as the basis for the

television series The Secret War. Introducing Professor Jones, Air

Commodore Probert said:

‘In introducing this evening’s lecturer I’d like to take your minds

back to the middle 1930s, the time when – according to some – the

RAF was doing so little to prepare to meet the German threat. The

facts are rather different for, as John Terraine has recently reminded

us in The Right of the Line, those years witnessed a silent, almost

unseen, transformation.

It was Professor Blackett, in his 1960 Tizard Memorial Lecture,

who pointed out so clearly that one aspect of this transformation was

the growing intimacy between senior officers of the armed forces and

the scientists in the government research establishments. It stemmed

primarily, of course, from the formation in 1935 of the Committee for

the Scientific Survey of Air Defence, and R V Jones was one of the

young scientists who came to work for the Air Ministry at that time.

Incredible as it now seems, by 1940 his field of research led to his

being summoned to attend a meeting of the Cabinet on the subject of

the German beams – at the tender age of twenty-eight!

Throughout the rest of the war he was closely involved in almost

every aspect of intelligence, including Ultra, and nobody is now better

placed to talk to us from personal experience about the RAF and the

intelligence war. Moreover, ‘RV’ addresses us this evening, not as a

guest, but as a fully paid-up founder member of our Society!’

THE INTELLIGENCE WAR ANDTHE ROYAL AIR FORCE

by Professor R V Jones CB CBE FRS

In the frantic decade of the thirties, when some of us were doing all

we could to tackle the problems of air defence, Professor Lindemann

once told me that he had written to the Air Ministry accusing it of

taking so much time to do anything that it must be attempting to

emulate the Deity to whom we sang ‘A thousand ages in thy sight are

as an evening gone’. On that scale the sixty-eight years since the

creation of the Royal Air Force would seem as a minute or less in the

long cavalcade of human history; but they have seen more spectacular

advances in knowledge and technology than had occurred in the entire

preceding span of historical time. Jet engines, supersonic flight, radar,

television, computers, guided missiles, atomic bombs, artificial

satellites and interplanetary probes have all come into being since the

Royal Air Force was formed; and it has had to evolve with them

through the most intense period of technological development the

world has yet known.

So whatever the history of the Royal Air Force may lack in

duration is much more than compensated by the range and scale of its

activities, both technological and operational, and by its vital part in

the momentous battles of the Second World War. It is, therefore,

entirely opportune that this history is now to be recognised by the

formation of the Royal Air Force Historical Society, and it will be

gratifying to all of us who served in Intelligence that the Society has

chosen for the subject of its first lecture the relations between the

Royal Air Force and Intelligence.

The title of the lecture incorporates more than one ambiguity when

it refers to ‘the intelligence war’, even if we confine the context to

World War II. Does it mean the war between the British and German

intelligence services? Or might it refer to the struggle that sometimes

occurred between the intelligence branches of the three Services; for

example, in getting the highest priority in the cryptographic effort at

Bletchley? Or to that other war that broke out from time to time

between the intelligence and operational branches, when the operators

found intelligence assessments of their success too low to be

palatable?

If that were not enough, we in Intelligence occasionally found

ourselves in dispute with some of the leading experts in the country

regarding the interpretation of evidence concerning new German

weapons; for example, in the weight of the V2, of which an American

witness, Professor W W Rostow, wrote ‘Although I was at that time

relatively young (27), I had acquired some experience with both

academic and governmental bureaucratic structures and their capacity

for bloodless tribal warfare. But I had never been present at, let alone

presided over, a meeting charged with more emotional tension than

that centred on the weight of the V2 warhead’.

A further interpretation of our title might point to the part played

by the Royal Air Force, not in using intelligence, but in gathering

information which was to be collated with that obtained from other

sources to build up the intelligence assessments of our opponents’

intentions.

What I shall have to say will probably draw on experiences in all

these aspects, not primarily in reminiscence but in the belief, with

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, that ‘history is philosophy teaching

through examples’. At the same time, some degree of reminiscence

will be inevitable, if only to express an appreciation of some of the

personalities involved.

My own contact with Air Intelligence started in 1938, and I

became regularly involved from September 1939 onwards. The main

objects of pre-war intelligence were the size and technical capabilities

of the various branches of the Luftwaffe, and of its bomber component

in particular. On estimates of size from 1935 onwards the Air Ministry

found itself in conflict with other bodies, including Winston Churchill,

who contended that its estimates were too low. This was, in fact, true

up to September 1939, when Air Intelligence began to over-estimate;

for example by one-third in the numbers of the German long-range

bomber force. Some of us can remember the fantastic official

predictions for the numbers of casualties to be expected in London in

the first week of the war. Frank Inglis, who as DDI3 was head of the

German branch of Air Intelligence early in the war, told me how the

prediction had originated. He had been asked, at very short notice, for

an estimate of how great the casualties might be and so he assumed

that every available German bomber might be employed on a round-

the-clock programme, allowing only enough time between sorties to

be re-armed and re-fuelled. He realised that this would result in a wild

over-estimate of what would probably happen and had not expected

any rational being to take it seriously; he had merely supplied an

answer which matched an irresponsibly posed question.

It was interesting to watch the change of positions in the first two

years of the war. Churchill, who before the war had challenged the Air

Intelligence figures as being too low, now began, prompted by

Lindemann, to challenge them as being too high; one of the key points

being the fighting strength of a Staffel, which Air Intelligence held to

be twelve, whereas Lindemann was for nine with three in reserve. The

controversy resulted in a judge, Mr Justice Singleton, being appointed

in December 1940 to settle it. I was summoned to his Inquiry, the

erroneous impression having gone around that I was an expert on the

size of the Luftwaffe. I managed to avoid embarrassment by telling the

judge that I was no such expert, but might be able to help him in one

way, which was to give an opinion of the reliability of the various

sources of evidence that would be laid before him, based on the

experiences that I had had with Knickebein and the other beams. Quite

the most reliable source for numbers, I told him, had been the Y

Service (now Sigint) records of the W/T call-signs of individual

aircraft. An enormous amount of painstaking observation and

recording must have been undertaken by the call-sign section of what

was then called DDSigsY, under Gp Capt L F Blandy. Time after

time, when I asked Flt Lt Maggs, the head of the section, whether he

had any trace of a particular call-sign, he was able to tell me when the

aircraft had been heard and the airfield with which it had been in

contact. The Singleton Report noted that the Y Service coverage of

call-signs of the long-range bomber force was as high as eighty to

ninety per cent. Lindemann, too, gave the Y Service evidence great

weight; and the final assessment justified his original challenge which

reduced the estimate of German front-line strength by a quarter.

While such estimates involved the collation of evidence from

different types of source, which was the prime function of many of the

branches in the Air Intelligence Directorates, the call-sign evidence

also illustrated another area of Air Intelligence; this was to collect raw

information for itself. Apart from what it might receive from secret

agents via MI6 it could, of course, draw on reports from Air Attachés

and on whatever might be available in the press. But, particularly in

war, other channels of information could be opened up; photographic

reconnaissance, electronic reconnaissance, prisoner interrogation and

captured equipment could all provide valuable evidence and would

require specialist staffs with air force and kindred personnel to operate

and exploit them. And in the case of World War II, the Royal Air

Force had another direct part to play in the hazardous ferrying of

agents into and out of German-occupied territory. Let us look briefly

at these activities in turn.

As regards pre-war secret agents, they produced very little for

scientific and technical intelligence before 1940. One telling failure in

this respect was the absence of any report of the erection of two

massive and remarkable radio structures, one at Schleswig-Holstein

and the other near Cleves, only a few miles from the Dutch border,

which were the Knickebein beam antennae, a hundred feet high and

mounted on turntables three hundred feet across. As the war

progressed, of course, there were new opportunities for MI6 in

encouraging and working with the resistance organisations which

developed in the occupied territories. In Most Secret War I gave a few

examples of the bravery of the men and women of the Resistance; and

as a result of the book being published I have learnt of further

examples, and of the identities of individuals whose stories I told but

whose names I did not know; the Belgian agent, for example, whose

reconnaissance report of German radar stations ended with an

emphasis of their importance which he illustrated by the vigilance of

the sentries who had shot at him, ‘fortunately’, he said, ‘with more

zeal than accuracy’. He went on, ‘As far as our work is concerned, it

would be helpful if we knew to what extent you and the British

Services are interested. We have been working so long in the dark that

any reaction from London about our work would be welcome to such

obscure workers as ourselves. We hope this will not be resented since,

whatever may happen, we assure you of our utmost devotion and the

sacrifice of our lives.’ One of the Belgian resistance organisations has

since identified the writer as a thirty-year old doctor, André Mathy,

who was later captured by the Germans and executed on 21 June 1944

at Halle after more than a year as a prisoner; he had kept his word to

the last.

Another gallant episode which only came to light after my book

was published involved a Frenchman, Pierre Julitte. A member of de

Gaulle’s staff, he had joined the Resistance, and was captured by the

Gestapo in March, 1943. He then spent the next twenty-five months in

prisons and concentration camps, including Buchenwald and Dore. At

Buchenwald he and his comrades realised that what they were being

made to work on were the V-weapons, and they managed to get a

message out recommending that the factory, in which they themselves

might well be working, should be attacked. On 24 August 1944, he

said, it was indeed bombed. At first I wondered whether his story

could be true, for there was no trace of such an attack either in Basil

Collier’s The Defence of The United Kingdom or General

Dornberger’s V-2 nor in The Rocket Team by Ordway and Sharp.

Fortunately, I asked Air Cdre Probert at AHB whether there was

anything in the records that might confirm the story because, although

in his book Pierre Julitte had changed the names of all the characters

involved (he afterwards told me that he wanted to tell a truthful story

but did not want to identify individuals who had behaved badly), his

account rang true. And indeed this turned out to be the case, for the

Air Staff Operational Summary for 25 August recorded that, on the

previous day, 128 Flying Fortresses had attacked ‘an armaments

factory’ at Buchenwald with ‘excellent results’ which were later

detailed as ‘severe damage to nearly every major building’, including

some of the barracks in the concentration camp. Julitte and his

immediate colleagues survived, but they could well have been among

the many who did not.

Such sacrifices are rarely recorded in official histories, partly

through the difficulty of historians getting near enough to the

evidence, particularly when, as in this instance, there is no clue to the

underlying truth in the bald statements of operational summaries. I am

reminded of Lord Slim’s book, Unofficial History, where he begins

each chapter with a statement from the official History of Military

Operations in World War I and then spends the whole chapter

describing what actually happened from his own direct involvement in

the episode concerned. And I know how he felt because of my own

experience in the Baedeker raids of 1942, where the Official History

merely records that, after 4 May, ‘almost everything went wrong for

the attackers’. The main thing that went wrong was that their

percentage of bombs on target fell from about 50% to 13%, thanks to

our introduction of supersonic jamming of the X-beams. How we

knew that supersonic jamming would be needed, how we prepared for

it but failed to use it for the first fatal fortnight, was a story that

merited a chapter in itself.

Actually, official historians are not to be blamed if the relevant

information is not available to them or when time does not permit

them to ferret it out. I am reminded of this point in connection with

reports from the Resistance that sometimes failed to get through to us

in London. Thanks again to the publicity arising from Most Secret

War, one or two of these have now come to me, in particular from

General Pomes Barrere of the Deuxième Bureau, who had sent in

reports on the V-weapons in 1943 and 1944 which would undoubtedly

have been helpful had they reached us at the time. There were

probably many such instances, some of which were due to some

intermediate official not realising the importance of sending the

reports on, incomprehensible to him though they might have seemed.

No such problem affected photographic reconnaissance, which was

the unique contribution of the Royal Air Force to the intelligence war.

It owed much to the enterprise and technical skill of Sidney Cotton

whom his successor, Geoffrey Tuttle, described to me as the greatest

leader he had known. Since I have described my own relations with

photo-reconnaissance in some detail in Most Secret War, I will say

little more here beyond repeating my admiration for the outstanding

work that was done at all levels, both by the pilots and by the

interpreters and also by the army of men and women who processed

the photographs – those whose work, in Lord Slim’s words, usually

only comes to notice when something for which they are responsible

has gone wrong.

This was equally true of another service for which the Royal Air

Force was directly responsible, that of the radio intercept operators

who listened to German radio signals and had to spend long hours

taking down streams of Morse characters whose significance was to

them quite unintelligible and yet whose accurate recording was

essential if the cryptographers were to have any success in deciphering

them. It was rather better for those operators who had to record the

radio-telephone messages between, for example, German night

fighters and their ground control stations, because once we had

worked out the significance of various calls such as ‘Emil Emil’ or

‘Rolf Lise’ it was possible to listen to the activities of the German

night defences against our bombers almost as though we were in a

ringside seat. But it was a strain, all the same.

Cryptography, of course, deserves far more than a lecture to itself,

even at the tactical level where codes were relatively easy to break.

Curiously, not so much has been told of the work at this level, beyond

Aileen Clayton’s excellent book The Enemy is Listening. As regards

cryptography at the then highest level, Gordon Welchman has given a

detailed account in The Hut 6 Story which has been supplemented by a

posthumous paper earlier this year (ie 1986 Ed) in Intelligence and

National Security. In this latter he pays a more adequate tribute to the

work of the Poles who, in 1939, were substantially ahead of us in

breaking Enigma and who handed over their work, including

reconstructions of actual Enigma machines.

Let me say rather more about the Poles, for not only did they lead

the way, but they succeeded in covering their tracks on leaving

Warsaw when it was being overrun by the Germans. They escaped via

Rumania to France and by the end of October 1939 they had started to

work again on German cyphers in Paris. On the collapse of Northern

France, they moved to a site in Vichy France, but finally that too

became untenable when the Germans took over. Once again, in

January 1943, they tried to escape, this time over the Pyrenees into

Spain. But their commanding officer, Colonal Lange, and three others

were betrayed en route and were sent to concentration camps where

two of them died. And yet the Germans never extracted from them any

inkling that Enigma was vulnerable; to me, their devotion is as

impressive as their intellectual feat in breaking Enigma. And in

passing we may note that 139 Polish pilots actually escaped to fight in

the Battle of Britain and that they were Polish Army units which in

1944 took Monte Cassino after it had successfully withstood all our

own gallant efforts to take it.

A few Poles, too, came into Air Intelligence; one, a flight

lieutenant, was in the Central Interpretation Unit at Medmenham,

where he worked as a photographic interpreter. His commanding

officer, Gp Capt Peter Stewart, told me that on one occasion he was

taking the late Duke of Kent on a tour of inspection and the Duke

asked the Pole what he was doing. Standing to attention, he very

correctly replied, ‘Please, Sir, you must ask my commanding officer.’

After the Duke had left, the group captain took the Pole aside and,

while praising him for his sense of security, told him that when a

senior officer was escorted around the unit in the company of the CO

the Pole could, if asked, say exactly what he was doing. A few weeks

later, the CAS himself visited Medmenham and in due course he came

into the Pole’s section and asked him what he was doing. Coming

stiffly to attention, but with a twinkle in his eye, he replied, ‘Please,

Sir, I am making the secret waste!’ Such experiences as all of these

made me realise the poignant force of that part of Poland’s National

Anthem which runs ‘Poland is not yet lost’.

Another important channel by which a Royal Air Force

organisation gained information was that for interrogating prisoners:

this task was undertaken by a branch that ultimately became an

Assistant Directorate, ADI(K), and was headed throughout the war by

Denys Felkin. He and his other interrogators secured much

information by their gentle questioning, including the earliest mention

of the X-Gerät, in March 1940, which occasioned my first meeting

with him. From that fortunate start we worked together in complete

confidence and with very fruitful results for the entire war.

Equipment and documents, besides prisoners, also fell into our

hands, the principal items being, of course, crashed aircraft. In

general, the documents went to Felkin, who would send them on to

whomever he knew would be most interested. The examination and

recovery of crashed aircraft was undertaken by the technical

intelligence branch originally designated as AI1(g) and which

ultimately became an Assistant Directorate. Its officers did excellent

work in the field, which was followed up by detailed examination at

Farnborough. One example of Farnborough’s careful analysis was its

noting in 1940 that the Lorenz Blind Landing Receiver installed in

German bombers was much more sensitive than would be needed for

its ostensible purpose: this clinched our theory that it was to be used

for beam bombing.

As the war progressed, radar equipment, too, became targets for

Intelligence, the first and most spectacular example being the

Wurzburg that we deliberately set out to capture at Bruneval, and

which formed the objective for the classic raid in which the Parachute

Regiment won its first battle honour.

Most of our information about radar had, however, to be gained by

other means, of which the easiest appeared to be the direct

interception of German radar transmissions. Since such transmissions,

and also those associated with radio-navigation such as the beams,

took place in the same medium, classically called the aether, as that

used for Morse and telephonic communications, there was a case for

these new tasks of interception to be undertaken by the Y (or Sigint)

Service. But the two problems, though technically similar, were

philosophically different; in signalling, the aether was being used to

transmit information from one human brain in which it had originated

to another human brain, by means of frequency or amplitude

modulation of the radio waves leaving the transmitter; in radar and

radio-navigation the waves were being used, not to transmit

intelligible information, but to establish from their times and

directions of travel, geometrical relationships between points in space.

While the Y Service was excellent in the former task, it was not at first

attuned to the second; and it was only after one of my own officers in

desperation took a receiver to the south coast in February 1941 that we

detected the transmissions from the German Freyas that the Y Service

had missed from July 1940 onwards.

In parenthesis here, the differences in the two ways in which one

and the same medium, the aether, can be exploited may be illustrated

by the analogy of our ability to use the single medium of paper and

pencil both to produce written messages and to make sketches; two

different forms of expression that lead on to literature in the one case,

and pictorial art in the other. Electronic intelligence can, therefore,

require specialists as different in their skills and backgrounds as are

pictorial artists from writers. This difference was not appreciated by

the classic Y Service, nor for that matter by their post-war successors

at GCHQ.

We in scientific intelligence had a mixed relationship with the Y

Service as a result. Some degree of difficulty was inevitable, for if the

Y Service was responsible for signals intelligence and we for

scientific intelligence, whose was the primary responsibility for

investigating any German development that involved a new

application of science to signalling? At one of the more difficult

periods in our relationship I happened to read in The Times of the

engagement of the second-in-command of DDI4 – the Air Intelligence

Branch responsible for the Y Service; he was Wg Cdr Claude

Daubeny, and so I telephoned him anonymously and rendered what I

could of the Mendelssohn Wedding March on a mouth-organ. Being

in signals intelligence he succeeded in tracing the call and, as he later

told me, decided that I could not be so unco-operative as some of his

colleagues claimed me to be. So, on being appointed a few months

later to take over as head of RAF ‘Y’, he telephoned asking if he could

come to see me. On arrival he said, ‘I am now DDI4. I have served as

deputy to two previous DDI4s and I saw them do everything they

could to get you out of your job; they did not succeed; I want you to

know that I am not as clever as they are, and so I am not going to try!’

This was the start of the warmest of friendships; Daubeny had been

at Cranwell with Douglas Bader and was well into a career as a

General Duties officer when he was posted to the Y Service. Here he

did so well that the Navy and Army agreed that he should head the

organisation that was set up for post-war ‘Y’. He told me that in the

final interview that led to his appointment he was asked whether he

had any special requirements. ‘I told them’, he said to me, ‘that I must

have plenty of time to attend meetings, and they agreed. Of course, I

didn’t tell them that I meant race meetings!’

In the immediate post-war period he had found that he could make

money through betting. His theory, which ultimately ruined him, was

that although the odds were stacked in favour of the bookmakers, what

an intelligent punter was doing was to bet, not against the

bookmakers, but against the public through the bookmakers. There is

one lasting memorial to his interest in horseracing; it is the siting of

GCHQ, for when a new establishment had to be built for

cryptographers when Bletchley was evacuated, he picked Cheltenham

because he could then look forward to combining visits to GCHQ with

attendance at the Cheltenham meetings. He would have been amused

to see an incident on television two or three years ago, when GCHQ

was invaded by racegoers who thought that they were entering the

gates of the racecourse.

Mention of Bletchley recalls the fact that several of our

organisations were accommodated in former country houses:

photographic interpretation at Medmenham; prisoner interrogation at

Latimer; technical intelligence near Harrow; besides signals

intelligence at Bletchley; radio countermeasures at Radlett; MI5 at

Blenheim; Political Warfare at Woburn, and so on. This fact at times

encouraged the development of a ‘country house’ complex, where the

inmates genuinely believed that theirs was the most important, and

sometimes the only significant, contribution to the intelligence war. It

is easy to see how this could happen; each in relative isolation would

see relatively little of what the others were doing; and then, in a visit

of encouragement, some senior officer would attempt to pep them up

by telling them how valuable their work was, sometimes slipping into

such hyperbole as to say that theirs was the only contribution that

mattered. I myself never did this; even though I visited them as often

as I could, I tried to show each the whole intelligence picture as I saw

it, and where their particular contribution fitted in.

It is a point that is worth watching for any future intelligence

organisation, for the ‘country house’ complex can be a source of

weakness of which I saw two other examples. Fortunately, the first

was in Germany where military research after World War I was

restarted in clandestine establishments which could only come out into

the open after 1933. The Germans then found that they had a relatively

large number of small establishments, individually too small to be

ideally effective, but also strong enough to resist absorption into

bigger establishments. As a result, the Germans were unable to co-

ordinate their efforts as effectively as we had been able to do, and only

late in the war did they attempt the task. My second example was in

the French Resistance organisations where, for security, if for no other

purpose, small networks had to operate in isolation, and many

naturally came to believe that their contributions were unique. Friction

could start when two networks overlapped, especially when some

networks had different political complexions from others; and there

tended to be rivalry for credit and status at the end of the war when the

networks could come out into the open.

Another kind of intelligence source, too, tended to be found in

country houses; these were our British experts in the field of

weaponry. Radar, for example, had been housed at Bawdsey Manor,

and later at Worth Matravers before settling into Malvern College; and

even in large establishments such as Farnborough and Porton

something of the same complex could be found. In fact we sometimes

had an intelligence war between ourselves and the experts whom we

came to regard as our spies on the laws of nature in the field

concerned, while they regarded themselves, and not us, as the ultimate

authority in what the Germans were doing in that field. I have already

mentioned the battle over the V2 warhead; and I would tend to blame

what was probably our greatest failure over a new German weapon –

the failure to discover the nerve gases – on the fact that in chemical

warfare the authority for assessing what the Germans were doing did

not rest with the regular intelligence organisation but with the

chemical warfare experts at Porton.

The main Air Commands, too, resided in country houses. Fighter

Command at Bentley Priory, Bomber Command at High Wycombe

(Not actually in a country house. Ed), Coastal at Northwood and 2nd

TAF at Bracknell. In a sense, too, the Commands were sources of

intelligence, for they fed us the combat reports of their aircrews. At

times these tended to confuse us, for example in the overclaims in the

Battle of Britain, or the bomber myth that IFF paralysed the radar

control of German searchlights. But the crews’ experiences did

intensify our own efforts to discover the nature of that control and it

did prove to have a radar component. Although overclaiming had led

us to regard fighter reports with reserve, they proved to be remarkably

good as regards the damage inflicted on German radar before D-Day.

One important episode in which the bomber crews thought that we

were doubting their claims concerned the proportion of our bombers

in 1941 that were succeeding in hitting their targets. Senior officers,

and even Henry Tizard, believed that we were doing well, using astro

navigation and dead reckoning; but some of these had doubts which in

my case were reinforced by an indignant report from a secret agent in

Czechoslovakia that on a night when we claimed to have bombed the

Skoda works at Pilsen there were no bombs within many miles of the

town. I told Lindemann, who succeeded in pressing a most unpopular

investigation of our bombing accuracy, the acid test of which would

be flashlight photographs taken by each bomber. There was

resentment from the crews, who thought that the investigation called

into question their courage in pressing home attacks on defended

targets. But they co-operated well, and the evidence proved damning

to all illusions of accuracy, for on the average, only one-fifth of our

bombs had fallen within five miles of their targets.

This was one of the occasions when Intelligence had to utter

unwelcome truths. I myself had to do this several times, notably

regarding our jamming of the X-beams in 1940, and in the use of IFF

by Bomber Command over Germany in 1943 and 1944. I could hardly

blame the CinC for resenting my critical reports, one of which resulted

in him being carpeted by the Secretary of State, Sir Archibald Sinclair.

CAS’s secretary told me that from time to time when one of my

reports showed that things were going wrong, CAS would telephone

the CinC and ask him whether he had seen the report and what he was

going to do about it. At last, in autumn 1944, I was able to report that

with IFF switched off and more discrete use of H2S, and all our

counter-measures, things were now going well for the Command. This

time the CinC phoned the CAS first, saying, ‘Have you seen Jones’

latest report?’ It obviously meant all the more because of our previous

refusal to flinch from saying when we thought things had gone wrong.

Indeed, a trust had gradually developed which can be simplest

illustrated by the difference in attitudes between 1941 and 1944. In

1941 I had wanted to try to deceive German bombers by sending them

counterfeit messages, which we could easily have done, but DCAS –

who happened to be Bert Harris – refused permission on the grounds

that we might well give away more than we would gain. But in 1944

not only did we have permission to give spoof instructions to the

German night-fighters, but Bomber Command would te1ephone me

every afternoon before operations with exact details of targets, timings

and routes, so that I could try to guess which beacons the German

night fighters would be sent to orbit as our raids developed, so that our

own night fighters could be sent to attack them at the beacons.

As illustrated in our relations with Bomber Command, the need for

Intelligence to have both integrity and a voice that is independent from

the operational staff must be paramount in a healthy military

organisation. If anyone doubts this, let him read the second chapter of

Freeman Dyson’s book Disturbing the Universe, describing his

experiences in the Operational Research Section at Bomber Command

– or Winston Churchill’s verdict on the Battle of the Somme: ‘Sir

Douglas Haig was not at this time well served by his advisers in the

Intelligence Department of General Headquarters. The temptation to

tell a chief in a great position the things he most likes to hear is the

commonest explanation of mistaken policy. Thus the outlook of the

leader on whose decisions fateful events depend is usually more

sanguine than the brutal facts admit.’

Thus one of the features of working with Churchill was his interest

in getting the facts from Intelligence, even to the extent of sometimes

wishing to see the raw reports for himself. He only had the time to do

this occasionally; but as in all his other activities he wanted to

maintain contact with the front line with as few intermediate links as

possible, and so at times he would summon individuals such as

myself. And even though he might have flashes of anger when you

had to tell him some particularly unwelcome news, he knew from his

earlier experiences that this was the only way to correct ‘mistaken

policy’. Incidentally, among his earlier experiences were some 140

flights to acquaint himself with the handling of aircraft – before June

1914!

Besides Churchill himself I was privileged to come into working

contact with many of the senior Air figures in the war, and an entire

talk could be devoted to reminiscent appreciations of their

achievements and characters. Charles Portal as CAS for example, took

a great interest in our work and invited me to contact him direct if I

had a problem that the normal organisational arrangements would not

clear. This was never necessary when Charles Medhurst was

ACAS(Int) because he gave us splendid support. Sholto Douglas, too,

as CinC of Fighter Command, was determined to use all the

information we could provide, both in the Battle of the Beams and in

exploiting the decrypted German radar plots of our fighter sweeps. If I

had to single out the senior Air Officer who has had least recognition

from posterity for the magnitude of his contribution it would be

Wilfrid Freeman, who as the pre-war Air Member for Research and

Development had warmly and powerfully supported the development

of radar by Watson-Watt and of the jet engine by Whittle, the

Mosquito by de Havilland and several of the ideas of Barnes Wallis.

In 1940 he might well have become Chief of Air Staff, but unselfishly

agreed to be Portal’s Vice-Chief, even though his seniority was such

that he had been on the Directing Staff at Staff College when Portal

was taking the course. And again, in 1941, when things were going

wrong in the Mediterranean, and Churchill had such doubts about

Tedder’s leadership that Freeman was sent out to investigate, Portal

signalled him with the suggestion that he should stay and take over

from Tedder. On receiving the suggestion, Freeman signalled back; ‘It

is obvious that evidence of friend sent out to investigate is being used

to incriminate. You and S of S will understand that role of Judas is

one I cannot fill.’ And so he gave up the chance of going on to be

Deputy Supreme Commander in Normandy. I still have an entirely

unsolicited and handwritten note from him as VCAS congratulating

me on my report on the X-Gerät of January 1941 which, because it

incidentally showed that our countermeasures organisation against the

X-beams had so far been almost entirely ineffective, aroused so much

hostility from the staff concerned that they succeeded temporarily in

enforcing its withdrawal. But Freeman went well out of his way to

encourage me, describing the report as ‘admirable’ despite the

controversy it had raised among the staff. That was the kind of man he

was – and no-one deserves a biographer more. (Again, this was said in

1986; the gap has since been filled by Wilfrid Freeman by Anthony

Furse; Spellmount, Staplehurst, 1999. Ed)

If I may mention one other officer who has received little mention

in the records but whom I came to admire, this would be Air Cdre

Frank Woolley, the Chief Intelligence Officer of the Mediterranean

Air Forces in 1944, which reminds me that yet another kind of

Intelligence War that we had sometimes had to fight was with our

American counterparts when it came to deciding the destination of

captured German equipment. Naturally, they wanted it to be sent

direct to America, and we to Britain. At one stage there was a crazy

ruling that anything small enough to go into an aircraft should come to

us, and anything bigger should go by ship to America. One friendly

American colonel said to me that this was resulting in my chaps going

around with hacksaws and his with welding torches. At times, though,

things could be unpleasant, and one of my civilian officers got so

worked up that he threw an inkstand through the window of an

American colonel (not the one of the previous sentence) from inside

the colonel’s room. I thought it tactful to recall him, and in due course

I sent out a replacement, having taken the greatest care to pick one on

whose equable temperament I could depend. I was grateful to Frank

Woolley for even accepting a replacement after all the trouble he had

had in smoothing out the previous fracas.

I was, therefore, horrified when before long there was an even

more serious fracas when my new representative asked to go to

Rumania to examine captured radar there. The Americans insisted on

sending one of their civilians to accompany him, even though their

man was not nearly so well qualified and was, in fact, junior in rank;

and they insisted that their man should be in charge. In Bucharest

there was a flare-up which went so far as the American striking our

man – but because the American had the signals link, he radioed a

formal complaint alleging that he had been struck by our man, and

asking for the latter’s withdrawal. ‘This makes stirring reading,’

minuted ‘Tubby’ Grant, the Director of Intelligence in London, when

the papers were laid on his desk. It became quite an inter-allied

incident and I would have entirely understood if Frank Woolley,

having had the previous trouble over one of my staff, had insisted on

the second man being recalled, and been only too glad to be relieved

of us turbulent scientists. Instead he signalled that he was taking no

action until he had heard my officer’s account of the incident and in

the meantime he weighed into the Americans stressing the vital

importance of our work to the Americans and the Russians as well as

ourselves. It fortunately turned out that the behaviour of our man had

been exemplary in the face of provocation, and Woolley’s faith in us

had been justified; but I learnt much from his restraint in not passing

judgement until he had heard both sides, despite any predisposition to

believe the worst.

At that point he and I had never even met; and our meeting was

delayed because of serious injuries he sustained at Cassino. He may be

remembered by some from pre-war air force days, for he carried out

the acceptance trials for the Anson, which developed into one of the

great workhorses as a result of his suggestions.

Fortunately, Woolley was one of those Royal Air Force officers of

whom it has been my privilege to know many, who are patient enough

to endure the peccadilloes of civilian scientists. In retrospect I

gratefully recall how patient most senior air officers were with us. The

tradition evidently goes back to RFC days, for the late Sir William

Farren wrote of his experiences in 1916 in learning to fly along with F

A Lindemann (later Lord Cherwell) when they were civilian scientists

at Farnborough. ‘I doubt’, wrote Farren, ‘whether anything about him

impressed me quite as much as his complete indifference to the

difficulties of arriving at an RFC station in a bowler hat and carrying

an umbrella. Lindemann was unperturbed and, to my surprise, so was

the RFC. Their instructions were to teach us to fly, and presumably

did not extend to what particular kind of clothes we wore.’

I found almost the inverse situation one day in 1943 when I was

visiting the Central Interpretation Unit at Medmenham and I was

asked over a pre-lunch drink what kind of man Professor J D Bernal

was. I cautiously replied that he was a very good physicist, and asked

the cause of the enquiry. I was then told that he had visited

Medmenham in the previous week because he was concerned with

bomb damage assessment, as they also were. They had been set back

by his untidy appearance and they commented, ‘After all, we are a

regular RAF Station, and he might have put on a decent suit to visit

us. But he seemed quite a pleasant chap, and at the end of the

afternoon he invited us to go over to see his own work at Princes

Risborough. We went yesterday, and as soon as we saw him in his

own place we realised we had done him an injustice — he had put on

his best suit when he came to visit us!’

There are many other points that I should like to have made, but

they would stretch far beyond the compass of a single lecture. I have

said nothing, for example, about the many gallant actions by RAF

personnel in the pursuit of the intelligence we required, such as the

contributions of Sqn Ldr Tony Hill and FSgt Charles Cox to the

success of the Bruneval raid, and Plt Off Harold Jordan and the entire

crew of the reconnaissance Wellington who, although wounded,

survived eleven attacks by a German night fighter while listening to its

Lichtenstein radar, and brought their riddled aircraft, and their vital

information, back to England. Also, I have not discussed the problems

of deciding priorities between short-term and long-term intelligence,

for example in competing for the cryptographic effort at Bletchley.

Nor have I mentioned the complementary task of Intelligence in trying

to mislead the intelligence organisation of an opponent, such as the

part played by Flt Lt Cholmondeley in The Man Who Never Was, or

the hazardous operations of dropping and picking up Resistance

agents. These and many other topics could be among those that the

Society may care to consider in its future deliberations.

Looking back on those aspects with which I myself was

particularly concerned, our successes, such as those against the beams,

radar and the V-weapons, were obvious enough, but we sometimes

had failures even in the midst of success, and something might be

learned from studying them. The nerve gases, for example, were not

recognised; this was due at least in part to the fact that, although we

heard of nerve gas in 1940, the correlation of intelligence in chemical

warfare was not done in the intelligence organisation proper, but at

Porton where the interpretation of reports may have been biased too

much by a knowledge of what Porton itself had succeeded or failed in

developing. We may have been slow to detect upward firing guns on

German night fighters, and it seemed that we did not emphasise

sufficiently, although we had reported it, the awkward height at which

the V1s flew – too high for light, and too low for heavy, AA guns. We

also failed to recognise the aerodynamics research institute at

Volkenrohde. In nearly every case part of the explanation lay in

inadequate liaison between different sections of intelligence or

between the intelligence organisation and the operational commands

or our own research establishments.

Where we succeeded, I felt, this was due to strengths of

understanding that came from contacts that were all the closer and

warmer under the stimulus of a perceived danger. And here, in

conclusion, I would echo Tizard’s verdict on the success of his famous

Committee on the Scientific Survey of Air Defence:

‘The first time, I believe, that scientists were ever called in to

study the needs of the Services as distinct from their wants, was

in 1935, and then only as a last resort. The Air Staff were

convinced of the inadequacy of existing methods and equipment

to defeat air attack on Great Britain, and a Committee was

established for the scientific survey of air defence. I want to

emphasise that this committee, although it consisted on paper

only of scientists, was in fact from the first a committee of

scientists and serving officers, working together.

When I went to Washington in 1940, I found that radar had

been invented in America about the same time as it had been

invented in England. We were, however, a very long way ahead

in its practical applications to war. The reason for this was that

scientists and serving officers had combined before the war to

study its tactical uses. This is the great lesson of the last war.’

And that lesson applies with as much force to intelligence as it

does to science.

MEETING ON 16 MARCH 1987

Introduction by Air Marshal Sir Frederick Sowrey

Introducing John Terraine, the Chairman said that he was ‘... an

historian who is perhaps best known for his work on World War I and

he needs little introduction to us. His volumes on that war stand four-

square on their style and accuracy, and also on their judgement. His

linking through to the last war, which I think appears between the

lines of The Right of the Line, gives him a perspective on the use of air

power which is invaluable to us.

John Terraine could also perhaps be credited as the fertile soil on

which this Society grew, because it was after his lecture at the RUSI

that a straw poll was held to see whether there was likely to be support

for a Society such as ours, when we knew that there was incipient

response but nothing had been put practically to the test. He speaks to

us tonight, not only as an historian, but as a patron and a member.’

WORLD WAR II – THE BALANCE SHEET

by John Terraine

I must say first of all that I am very sensible of the honour that the

Society has done me by inviting me to address you tonight at what is

only the second meeting. I am also sensible, in a wryer sense, for

myself, of my difficulty in following a speaker like Professor Jones

who got our inaugural meeting off to such a magnificent start.

I think I should first of all make it clear what this ‘balance sheet’ is

that I shall be speaking about tonight. As you may guess, it is strictly a

World War II RAF balance sheet. I do not venture beyond 1945; I do

not put myself forward as a crystal-ball-gazer of any kind; and the

‘balance’ in question is a balance between intention and performance,

which I do not propose to measure by ledger accountancy, but simply

to describe and leave the accountancy to you.

In any such computation it must, of course, be a heavy weighting

factor that we – the British Empire and the Royal Air Force – emerged

from World War II on the winning, and not the losing, side. It is a

significant consideration. Also, I think I should add one qualifying

rider to what I have just said, which may best be expressed by an

illustration. A few weeks ago I opened a seminar at the Royal United

Services Institute with an historical résumé on the subject of Land/Air

warfare. Each speaker was to talk for 35 minutes, and I was somewhat

disturbed to find that rather more than 20 minutes’ worth of my talk

was taken up with World War I. Disturbed, that is to say, until I totted

up (for my own benefit as well as that of the audience) the list of

subjects that I had been discussing; it was this:-

• long-range reconnaissance

• short-range reconnaissance

• photographic reconnaissance

• aerial survey

• artillery co-operation

• interdiction

• the tactical use of air power.

If you add to those, naval co-operation (with particular emphasis

on anti-submarine warfare), the beginnings of air supply, and

appreciable development of strategic air offensives, you will see that

there is not much left; World War I virtually ran the air power gamut.

Sadly, however, as it turned out, the RAF never quite took the

measure of its own antecedents.

Institutionally, as we all know, the RAF was born on 1 April 1918

but as an instrument of military aviation I would suggest that a better

date would be 13 August 1914, when the first three squadrons of the

infant Royal Flying Corps flew into the theatre of war; one of

history’s significant first occasions if ever there was one. When their

back-up organisation, known as the Aircraft Park, also arrived, the

RFC was a going concern, and since the Western Front was the

decisive location of the First World War, it could not have been more

effectively placed.

Equipment, of course, was always the limiting factor – there were

very strict limits to what the aircraft of the day could do; but one role

the RFC seized upon unhesitatingly – long-range reconnaissance.

Throughout the Mons campaign in 1914 and the retreat to the Marne,

the RFC established itself as the ‘eye in the sky’ to such an extent that

British GHQ, which had originally been more than somewhat

patronising, abruptly swung over to ‘almost embarrassing deference’ –

a condition which, of course, carries with it certain dangers of its own.

When the war settled down into trenches and became (as it very

soon did) an artillery war, short-range reconnaissance in collaboration

with the guns became the prime duty of the airmen, and remained so

for the rest of the war. An early refinement of this function was

photographic reconnaissance which made possible an accurate

charting of the enemy’s lines, defences, supply dumps and

communications. A further refinement of this, whose ‘finest hour’ for

the RFC came in 1917, was a meticulous aerial survey of the whole

British front, which the Royal Engineers translated into the first really

reliable map. This became the basis of the ‘artillery boards’ supplied

to all the batteries. Thanks to this, and the introduction of the

technique of calibration, the artillery was now able to open fire

without previous registration at exact targets (instead of what I have

called ‘blazing away at a landscape’), thus restoring surprise and

bringing precision into battle practice. These two factors, plus

protection supplied by smoke, unlocked the trench-bound battlefields

and restored the war of movement in 1918. That was a direct fruit of

Land/Air co-operation – in fact its most valuable fruit – and it is one

of history’s extraordinary circumstances that it took until 1942 for the

penny to drop in the next war.

But that was not all. There was interdiction, or rather, attempts at

interdiction. The first (by the RFC) was the attempt to do severe

damage to the railways behind the German front during the Battle of

Loos in September 1915. With the aircraft and bombs of the day this

could only be a pathetic failure – which it was. A later attempt, on 8

August 1918 (the opening of the highly successful Battle of Amiens,

‘the black day of the German Army’), was intended to destroy the

Somme bridges to prevent reinforcements from reaching the German

front. It proved to be a ‘black day’ for the RAF also; 45 aircraft were

shot down and 52 more were so badly damaged that they had to be

written off. The bridges stood. It was, nevertheless, a day worth

mentioning in the history of air power because on it the RAF deployed

some 800 machines, and the French on their right over 1,100 – an

amazing total of 1,900 aircraft bearing the clear sign that this was

what great battles of the future were going to be like.

I mention air supply in my list of contributions. The scale, I need

hardly say, was trivial by the standards of the later war, but everything

has to have a beginning. For the RAF this was on 4 July 1918 when

aircraft dropped 100,000 rounds of small arms ammunition to

Australian machine-gunners on the battlefield of le Hamel. During the

advance in Flanders in October, when rain turned the old Ypres

battlefields into swamps which threatened to cut off supplies to the

forward troops, the RAF joined in a drop of 15,000 rations – a

ludicrously small amount by comparison with, say, RAF supplies to

the Fourteenth Army during the monsoon advance in Burma in 1944,

but as I say, there has to be a beginning.

The same was true of close tactical support. This was always

difficult, and very dangerous, to practise against forces well

entrenched. During the great German advance in March 1918 the

landscape suddenly filled with troops and vehicles out in the open.

The British and French fliers needed no urging to ‘have a go’ and they

certainly produced effects, but these were local and, in relation to the

scale of the battle, insignificant. However, there was a very clear hint

of what the future might hold in General Allenby’s final advance in

Palestine in September. His small air contingent flung itself upon the

Turks and turned their retreat into a rout, with scenes of destruction

which seem to be previews of the Falaise Gap in 1944. All in all, the

air performance in World War I was impressive and one might have

supposed that it would leave imperishable memories and a clear

example for both Army and Air Force. Alas, it did not! As Sir

Maurice Dean wrote:- ‘Between 1918 and 1939 the RAF forgot how

to support the Army.’ Since it turned out that the RAF had also

forgotten how to support the Navy it may be said that this was a costly

lapse of memory. It certainly prompts the question – What did the

RAF think it was for in the 1930s? That question is, of course, no

sooner asked than answered.

Members of this Society are unlikely to forget that the RAF, as a

separate Service, was in fact born of a strategic air offensive, launched

by the German Air Force with Gotha and R.VI ‘Giant’ aeroplanes in

May 1917. The attack on British cities by these aircraft was not, by

our standards, very destructive of life or property but the effect on the

morale of people and Government was enormous. As the Chief of the

Imperial General Staff remarked after a Cabinet meeting following

one of the raids, ‘One would have thought the world was coming to an

end.’ So, the Smuts Committee was set up, and out of its findings the

RAF was born.

Already the German performance was being challenged by a

British counter-offensive and in June, 1918 the Independent Force

came into existence under Major-General Sir Hugh Trenchard – and

that was a date in history, too. In the time given, Trenchard’s

Independent Force actually caused even fewer casualties and less

damage than the Germans had done, but once again the morale effect

was considerable and Trenchard himself pronounced that:- ‘the moral

effect of bombing stands to the material effect in a proportion of 20 to

1.’ This belief became the foundation-stone of RAF strategic thinking

thereafter.

In the inter-war years the pursuit of a strategic air offensive as a

substitute for the existing modes of waging war, the deep faith in war

by bombing, and the equal faith that, in Mr Baldwin’s famous phrase,

‘the bomber will always get through’, took on the attributes of

religious dogma. It may, indeed, be said that bombing was what the

RAF was all about. Some Imperial policing had to be done, some

concession had to be made to civilian fears, some fighter squadrons

had to appear on the strength, but bombing was what the RAF

understood by real air warfare, and bombing was what it chiefly

intended to perform.

In the 1920s and ‘30s the constant refrain of both the champions

and the enemies of air power was the prospect of what was called ‘the

knockout blow’. It was the hope of delivering a quick crushing blow at

the enemy’s heartland, instead of engaging his armed forces, that

enthused the air power prophets. This, they said, would be the new

style of warfare, the revolutionary language of the future. As such it

was very welcome because the still fresh memory of 1914-1918, and

particularly the costly battering-ram procedures of the Western Front,

was viewed with intense revulsion by many people. So, the ‘anti

World War I’ school lined up on the side of air power, with its

promise of a short, sharp conflict in which, with luck, bricks and

mortar would be the chief sufferers.

Politicians echoed the national mood as they usually do. The

Treasury, always trying to cut military expenditure by every available

means, approved of the air force as an economical alternative to a

conscript army and a big battle fleet. Supporters of disarmament and

collective security through the League of Nations were quick to seize

on the ‘knockout blow’ as a powerful argument on their side. Add to

this the science-fiction output in literature and the cinema and one can

see that a considerable degree of hysteria attached itself to the subject,

and with it a degree of unreality. What I find hard to accept is the

virtually complete failure to take note of the actual air warfare that

was taking place at the time.

In 1932 the Japanese bombed Shanghai, and people paying their

weekly visit to the cinema were able to see the bombs fall and the

smoke go up, and a very shocking sight it was. Exact information

about what was happening was, of course, just about impossible to

come by – I mean figures showing how many aircraft were used, how

many tons of bombs were dropped, how much damage, how many

casualties, how many killed, etc. Very difficult to establish, but I

wonder how hard anyone really tried. One fact about the Japanese war

in China does stand out, however, and steadily made itself clearer at

the time; that whatever might be happening in it, what was not

happening was a ‘knockout blow’. In the ten years that separated the

Shanghai bombing from Pearl Harbour the cities of China experienced

a pretty fair amount of air bombardment, but China was still in the

war. It seems to have been a point worth noting but there is no

evidence that anyone did.

There was another example too, if anything even more striking.

The Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936 and for three years Madrid

was a beleaguered city, under some degree of air attack for most of

that time, with large international Press coverage and some very

striking newsreels to illustrate the event. Barcelona was also heavily

attacked, the bombing there in March 1938 causing a casualty total

about the same as Britain’s in the whole of the First World War.

Civilian air raid deaths in the entire Spanish war would seem to have

been about 14,000 in the Republican area and about another 1,000 in

the Nationalist zone. That amounts to roughly 3% of the full total of

people killed in the war. Once more, there was no ‘knockout blow’.

What there was, however, was a very considerable air contribution

to the land battles by each side. The Nationalists in particular

compensated for a serious shortage of artillery by using German

bombers, most spectacularly the Junkers 87 dive-bombers, which thus

obtained a new lease of life on the threshold of obsolescence and

would be heard of again. It was in August 1938 that ‘command of the

air passed decisively to the Nationalists’, after which the issue of the

war was never in doubt. Yet the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Cyril

Newall, pronounced that this aspect of the war was a ‘gross misuse of

air force’, and there is nothing to show that he had changed his mind

by September 1939 or even May 1940. So we see that the RAF

between the wars was dedicated to long-range bombing as its chief

expression of air power and it is, therefore, the more curious, I think

you will agree, that it was not until the spring of 1938 that it began to

make actual plans for carrying this out.

Now, when we talk of the RAF we are talking of a technical

service which is not to be understood in any other sense; divorced

from its aircraft the RAF, unlike the Luftwaffe of that period, ceases to

exist. So it is important to remind ourselves of what comprised

Bomber Command in 1938:-

17 squadrons of Fairey Battles

16 squadrons of Bristol Blenheims

5 squadrons of Handley Page Harrows

2 squadrons of Vickers Wellesleys

9 squadrons of Armstrong Whitworth Whitleys.

The Battles, Harrows and Wellesleys were recognised as obsolete

and were on their way out; the Blenheims never pretended to be

anything but short-range aircraft and, as I said in The Right of the

Line, ‘nine squadrons of Whitleys did not make a strategic bombing

force’. Yet it was precisely at this time that the Air Staff and Bomber

Command were insisting that by concentrating on 19 power plants and

26 coking plants in the Ruhr, flying 3,000 sorties at a cost of 176

aircraft, the RAF could bring German war-making capability to a

standstill. The bomber mandarins seem to have existed in a ‘Never-

Never Land’ unrelated to geographical, mechanical or numerical

reality: knocking out the German war industry in a fortnight with 144

Whitleys takes some beating!

Fortunately a sharp wind of realism was about to blow. Air Chf

Mshl Sir Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt became AOCinC, Bomber Command

in September 1937. He had a penetrating mind and a sharp eye, and

was forthright in expressing his views. It was his belief that war

planning without operational efficiency is merely hypothetical, and on

taking up his post he set about investigating every aspect of Bomber

Command’s readiness for war. He presented two reports, which make

astonishing reading after all the talk of independent air power and

‘knockout blows’; they display the RAF’s centrepiece, its favourite

child, with merciless clarity on the very eve of war. It amounted to

this; in Ludlow-Hewitt’s opinion his Command was ‘entirely

unprepared for war, unable to operate except in fair weather, and

extremely vulnerable both in the air and on the ground.’ Well might

the official historians say, on this authority, that ‘.... when war came in

1939, Bomber Command was not trained or equipped either to

penetrate into enemy territory by day or to find its target areas, let

alone its targets, by night ... This seems a strange result after twenty

years of devoted work.’ It does indeed. It meant, as Webster and

Frankland say, that the RAF’s most treasured instrument was

‘incapable of carrying out the operations on which the Air Ministry

had based its strategy for the last four years.’ Indeed, with war

immediately imminent, there was a very real difficulty in finding

anything effective at all for Bomber Command to do – an

extraordinary state of affairs.

And this was not all. Fighter Command, under Air Chf Mshl Sir

Hugh Dowding, was a thing apart, inasmuch as it contained the two

most effective weapons in the RAF’s armoury, the Hawker Hurricane

and the Supermarine Spitfire. Both were combat aircraft and both

were unquestionably capable of performing the tasks for which they

were intended, which was something you could not say for most

others. Dowding’s problem was very simple, to get and keep enough

of them, and this brought him up against an unpalatable truth; that

despite a practically nationwide aversion we were, once again, going

to be engaged in a coalition war on the European continent. Once

again there would be a BEF as in 1914, but unlike the 1914 article this

one would require immediate large-scale air support, and this air

support would have to have a fighter component. Dowding had no

doubts about what that would consist of; the only RAF aircraft that

could deal with modern German fighters (already seen in action in

Spain) were his precious Hurricanes and Spitfires. The Spitfires he

was determined not to let out of his grasp, so it would be Hurricanes,

at first just four squadrons of them. But the demand from all quarters

kept growing and Dowding grimly remarked ‘the despatch of 4 Field

Force squadrons has opened a tap through which will run the total

Hurricane output.’ His unflagging fight was to keep a hand on that tap

– if it was possible.

When war came some fundamental matters were soon decided.

First, there was the immediate abandonment of the anticipated

strategic air offensive against Germany – a traumatic volte-face.

Coupled with that was the discovery that daylight operations against

the German mainland were out of the question, and whatever was to

be done – leaflet dropping or bombing – would have to be done at

night. In other words, Bomber Command would have to become a

night force, which was something for which it had never been

intended, equipped or trained. This was traumatic, too. Also, it was

realised with much dismay that, even in attacking the more accessible

targets just across the North Sea, bombers were not able to defend

themselves against modern fighters, even in tight formation. Another

trauma. And when the real fighting in the West began the lessons

flowed in thick and fast, with the Battle of France in May and June,

1940 supplying the real tutorial.

It is difficult, in my opinion, to exaggerate the historical

importance of the Battle of France. It was what Ronald Lewin would

call the ‘pay-off’, of a whole complex of errors – political, ideological,

technological and strategic – which possessed the Western world

between the wars. The German triumph in France in 1940 has been

attributed to various factors with more or less truth. For myself, I have

no hesitation in saying that the decisive element was what I call ‘the

saturation of a battle area by air power’ – and at the root of that

achievement was the fighter. In France in 1940 the fighter was the

sanction of all that occurred or did not occur. The Allies discovered

that their weapons and their system of war were irrelevant to the 1,200

Messerschmitt 109s and 110s which saturated the battle area and made

possible the operations of about 1,700 assorted bombers and ten

Panzer divisions. The only weapon on the Allied side that proved to

be able steadily to cope with the stresses of the battle was the RAF’s

Hurricane. The Hurricane pilots never had the sense of being

outclassed – but they were only too well aware of being outnumbered.

The grim outcome was, as I said in my book, that the RAF now

found itself in the position of ‘looking over both shoulders at once,

which is an awkward posture for a man and tends to blur his vision’.

The Air Staff and Bomber Command were still looking at Germany;

Dowding was looking at Britain, which it was his duty to defend. But

the decisive battle was happening in France and the hard truth is that

the RAF was virtually irrelevant to it. If we are looking for a lesson it

is clear enough, don’t be irrelevant. The humiliating disaster of the

Battle of France is one of history’s great punctuation marks. It totally

altered the terms of reference of the Second World War. It marked the

end of an epoch – of dreams, unreality, theories and follies. It could all

too easily have marked the end of Britain and the British Empire: but

after June, 1940 the realities came thundering in.

After France, Britain: that was the obvious logic – but history is

rarely so simple. The question in July, 1940 was whether the Luftwaffe

could now take command of the sky over the narrow waters of the

Channel as it had done in France, thus neutralising British sea power

and making invasion possible. Its commander, Hermann Goering,

thought it could, and Hitler allowed himself to be persuaded. What

followed was the Battle of Britain, the first decisive air battle in

history – decisive in all senses of the word. It was also one of history’s

ironies. The battle was fought and won by Fighter Command, yet the

separate RAF really existed for the opposite purpose – offensive

bombing. The RAF was not really about fighters at all.

In the Battle of Britain, as usual in air matters, we see technology

again at the centre of the event. There were, first, the two admirable

fighters, the Spitfire and the Hurricane, and there was the system of

using them – a system itself based on the new technology of radar

which had provided the guideline for Fighter Command since its very

beginning. The Dowding battle system was one of tight control and

deployment founded on the intelligence coming from the radar chain

and other sources, received in Fighter Command’s famous Operations

Room at Stanmore, filtered and transmitted outwards to the

Operations Rooms of the Groups and Sectors, and finally passed to the

squadrons in the form of precise instructions about location and

altitude and what to expect, through one of the most comprehensive

communications networks so far seen. Control was definitely tight, all

the way down. I said in The Right of the Line, there was no place in it

for ‘free-range’ activity or mavericks’. I was referring, of course, to

AVM Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory, AOC 12 Group, and that

distinguished flyer Sqn Ldr Douglas Bader, and the ‘big wing’ dispute

which blemishes the ultimate achievement. It is my view that there

was never very much reality in the ‘big wing’ theory. The whole thing

was really a matter of personality – the ambitious personality of

Leigh-Mallory and the eager, combative personality of Douglas

Bader. The blemish lies in the apparent inability of RAF command

procedure to deal with a situation which ought never to have

developed at all.

The RAF’s achievement in the battle (and we should remember

that both Bomber Command and Coastal Command did also play a

part in it) was victory, clear and unmistakable: the clear defeat of the

Luftwaffe, Germany’s first defeat in the war. And from that victory Air

Chf Mshl Sir Hugh Dowding emerges as the only air commander with

an unquestionable ‘battle honour’ of his own.

So, the invasion of Britain was ruled out, but by any rational

military judgement Britain’s overall position was hopeless.

Fortunately, rational military judgement did not decide the issue,

Hitler took the astonishing, and really lunatic, course of attacking the

Soviet Union with an undefeated enemy at his back. So Britain was

saved after all, but her survival was nevertheless precarious. For those

at the centre of affairs another threat visibly developed in 1940 which

somewhat dulled the lustre of the victory in the skies.

I am, of course, referring to the U-boat campaign against Britain’s

whole supply system, which took on a new dimension when the

Germans occupied the European littoral from the North Cape to the

Spanish frontier. We had faced a U-boat peril before, above all the

‘unrestricted U-boat warfare’ which began officially in February, 1917

and remained a serious threat until the second quarter of 1918. It was

in 1917 that the Secretary of State for War told the Commander-in-

Chief of the British Expeditionary Force, ‘... we have lost command of

the sea.’ His words would be ominously echoed in 1942. In the event,

solutions were found in 1917-1918. The U-boats were defeated but

they had provided the most serious naval threat since the Spanish

Armada, and probably the worst scare that the Admiralty had ever

had. Amazingly, in 1937 we nevertheless find the Naval Staff

asserting that ‘the submarine should never again be able to present us

with the problem we were faced with in 1917’. ‘Never again’ – fatal

words; call-sign of too many disastrous notions between the wars!

The new battle against the U-boats effectively began in the summer

of 1940 and for the next three years, as Churchill says, that ‘one

anxiety reigned supreme’. From the western point of view the Battle

of the Atlantic, fought from 1940-1943, was the decisive battle of the

war – in two ways. It was, first of all, a decisive defensive battle on

which Britain’s survival depended as surely as it did on defeating the

Luftwaffe in the sky in 1940. This defensive phase lasted from mid-

1940 until the first days of 1942. The battle ceased to be defensive

when the decisions taken at the Arcadia (Anglo-American)

Conference in Washington in December 1941 and January 1942

became official Allied policy. The most important of them was the

American decision to take on ‘Germany first’; it was fundamental, and

shaped the rest of the war. The natural corollary of ‘Germany first’

was an Allied landing in north-west Europe, which meant a massive

build-up of American land and air forces in Britain (BOLERO) for an

assault in 1943 (ROUNDUP). From the moment of that decision the

Battle of the Atlantic became also the lynch-pin of Allied offensive

strategy.

Now, where does the RAF come in? It comes, of course, in the

form of Coastal Command under a succession of able AOCinCs: Sir

Frederick Bowhill, Sir Philip Joubert and Sir John Slessor. Coastal

was the Cinderella of the Commands in 1939, the most obvious victim

of the ‘locust years’ of pre-war neglect. Nothing illustrates its

‘Cinderella quality’ better than its armament: the core of its strength in

1939 was ten squadrons of Avro Ansons, scarcely military aircraft at

all, lacking speed, lacking range and virtually unarmed. The

Command as a whole had practically no combat capacity and in fact

reconnaissance was just about all it was expected to do. It took a long

time – until 1942 in fact – to change this deplorable state of affairs and

get back to the highly effective methods of co-operation between

naval and air anti-submarine forces which had become regular,

standard drills in 1918. The Navy had forgotten the hard-bought

lesson that what it liked to call ‘offensive tactics’ (large-scale U-boat

hunts) were a sheer waste of time. The one sure place to find U-boats

was near convoys and in World War II, convoy escort, derided as

‘defensive action’, was in fact the opposite. Convoy escort was where

you made your kills. And for convoy escort, 1918 also taught that the

right kind of aircraft was essential.

‘The right kind’: Well into 1943, Coastal Command’s great

struggle was for the necessary equipment of all kinds: for more and

better aircraft, especially VLR (in particular the Very Long Range

B-24 Liberators); for weapons – illuminants and depth charges with

the right fuses and fillings; for ASV (air-to-surface-vessel) radar, in

fierce competition with Bomber Command. And all the time there was

intense tactical study, the ceaseless perfection of techniques; methods

of attack, speeds, heights and angles of approach, fuse settings, depth-

charge spacings, communications with naval vessels and ships in

convoys, etc.

At last the day came (in July 1942) when air action, which in the

first half of the year accounted for just over 30% of a very small

number of U-boat kills, in the second half accounted for 53% of a

substantial number. That was the turning point. The moment of

decision was May 1943, during which no fewer than 41 U-boats were

sunk. Aircraft claimed 56% of these kills, and of the aircraft total

Coastal Command claimed 69.5%. Among the various forces engaged,

it had become a major U-boat killer. And it remained an outstanding

scourge of the U-boats for the rest of the war. D-Day in 1944 put the

crown on Coastal Command’s efforts, as it did on the Atlantic battle

as a whole: 30 Coastal Command squadrons covered the south-

western approaches to the D-Day convoy routes, quartering every

square mile of sea every 30 minutes by day and night, with the result

that the U-boats proved totally ineffective against the great combined

operation.

The D-Day landings and the Battle of Normandy were the supreme

offensive action of the Western Allies in the war, contributing

incalculably to the defeat of Germany. The victory in the West could

not have taken place without the victory in the Atlantic, which thus

rates as an offensive victory of maximum importance. It is fair to say

that Coastal Command had restored the lost art of naval co-operation

with a vengeance!

So Britain, at the end of 1940, had won one fight for survival and

was firmly locked in another. But what was she doing – what could

she do at that stage – about actually defeating Germany? It is clear that

the Royal Navy with all its merits cannot be the direct element in

winning victory over a major land power based in central Europe. The

Army, after Dunkirk, took a long time to rebuild its strength, and from

June 1940 until the end of 1942 (with the exception of the brief,

disastrous campaign in Greece) it saw little of its main enemy. Its

chief opponent, the Afrika Korps, never numbered more than four

weak divisions out of a German battle order of 471 divisions in the

spring of 1942. That left the RAF. Bomber Command could at least

have a go at what it was always intended for: the attack on

communications, military installations and war industry in the

enemy’s homeland, and at the same time a blow at the morale of his

population. And so, with a force which, until 1943, was almost

entirely composed of Wellingtons, Hampdens and the ancient

Whitleys (and which very rarely in 1941 numbered more than 200

operational aircraft) Bomber Command set out to do just that, because

there was absolutely nothing else that Britain could do to damage

Germany. Bomber Command thus shared the hard experience of the

BEF in 1915 and 1916, lacking weapons, lacking necessary equipment

of all kinds, lacking experience and training for the new style of war,

but forced by inexorable circumstance to engage a powerful and

determined enemy.

We should always remember that the strategic air offensive, as it

developed between 1940-1945, was born of defeat. Without utter

defeat in France, if the front in the West had continued to exist, I do

not see how there could have been a strategic air offensive; the RAF

would have been far too busy supporting armies which would have

had their work cut out to survive. However, there was such an

offensive, and a vast enterprise it ultimately became. I must freely

admit that my admiration for the aircrews of Bomber Command,

British, Dominion and Allied, is so deep as to be virtually

inexpressible: theirs was ‘the right of the line’ indeed and a damned

uncomfortable place it can be, as they found out. The strategic

offensive is always associated – understandably – with Bomber

Command’s most famous AOCinC, Sir Arthur Harris. It was not his

brain-child, nor was it ever his sole responsibility; it was not even the

sole responsibility of the Air Staff. It was the responsibility of the

Chiefs of Staff (and later the Combined Chiefs of Staff) and of the

British and American Governments with, let it be said, the warm

approval of the overwhelming majority of their peoples. The form of

it, which aroused considerable dismay later, was above all dictated by

the distressing discovery in 1941 that the only target that Bomber

Command could be trusted to hit by night was a large German town.

At that stage of technology, in other words, its only reliable technique

was area bombing, a name that would gather evil associations.

Area bombing had the attraction that it offered a fair chance of

hitting some sort of military or industrial target, and at the same time

of striking at that German morale which Bomber Command, inspired

by Lord Trenchard, believed to be the weak spot in Germany’s

armour. There is no point in being mealy-mouthed about the attack on

morale; in my book I said this:- “Morale’ is a cosmetic word.

Attacking morale, whatever phrases it may be dressed up in, really

means only one thing: putting the fear of death into individuals. On a

collective scale it means threatening a massacre.’ The scale of the

proposed massacre is somewhat breathtaking. In November, 1942 the

Chief of the Air Staff, Air Chf Mshl Sir Charles Portal, stated that,

given enough aircraft, it would be possible in 1943 and 1944 to drop

one and a quarter million tons of bombs on Germany. He outlined the

material damage that could be expected from this and added:-

‘Twenty-five million Germans would be rendered homeless, 900,000

would be killed, and one million seriously injured.’ ‘One thing’, I

said, ‘emerges with absolute clarity: this was a prescription for

massacre, nothing more or less.’

Hindsight, of course, can be a trap; we have to remember that this

was November 1942, near the close of a very bad year littered with

disasters; none of the hopeful things that came in 1943 had yet

appeared. The war was still dominated by German strength, and as Dr

Noble Frankland insisted, ‘The great immorality open to us ... was to

lose the war against Hitler’s Germany. To have abandoned the only

means of direct attack which we had at our disposal would have been

a long step in that direction.’ One thing, I believe, is as certain as

anything in human history can be: that some form of bombing

offensive by the RAF was inevitable between 1940 and 1944 and was

also essential if Britain’s continued participation in the war was to

have credibility in the eyes of the British people, in the eyes of the

Germans and in the eyes of Britain’s allies. It is also my belief,

however, that morale, so far from being Germany’s weak spot, was

just about the worst target to attack explicitly.

Once more, a bad misreading of World War I was having a serious

delayed effect. The British at all levels, in their horrified recoil from

the heavy losses between 1914 and 1918, had come to believe that

these were due mainly to the idiocy of their generals. They were

nothing of the kind; our losses were caused by the German army,

whose main body the BEF had engaged for three hard years. It was an

army which, for most of that time, displayed very high quality indeed,

and most of which maintained its morale to the end under fearful

pressures. And it was a conscript army, which means that it reflected

the character of the people from whom it sprang. The same was true of

its successor between 1940 and 1945; the morale of German civilians,

like the morale of the German army, remained steadfast to a point

beyond all expectation.

There is, I fear, one more aspect of the bombing offensive which

grates on me. Both the Air Staff and successive AOCinCs of Bomber

Command – but none more loudly than Sir Arthur Harris –

complained constantly of what they called ‘diversions’ of the

Command to what they seem truly to have believed were fringe

activities. Harris, at the end of 1942, suggested to Churchill in all

seriousness that all British bombers should be brought back from the

Middle East, and that every possible bomber should be obtained from

America (irrespective of American needs). He even proposed that

Stalin should be urged to send the Soviet bomber force across to

operate from Britain. And worst of all, because it was marginally more

practicable, he demanded that all suitable aircraft should be

transferred from Coastal Command, which he chose to call ‘merely an

obstacle to victory’ – and this, you will note, at precisely the moment

when Coastal Command was at last becoming an effective U-boat

killer. I made a list of the chief ‘diversions’ that the bomber prophets

so strongly objected to, giving reasons for each one of them – and I

concluded that you could sum them up succinctly and accurately as

‘the war itself’. Indeed, I felt compelled to remark, ‘... it is at times

difficult, taking into account the ineffectiveness of Bomber

Command’s ‘proper’ activity, and its strong resistance to all

‘improper’ activity, to decide whether it is more correct to say that

Bomber Command was irrelevant to the war, or the war was irrelevant

to Bomber Command.’ I have already drawn attention to the

undesirability of being irrelevant.

I now come to a very different but highly effective style of warfare

which its most distinguished practitioner called ‘air warfare in its own

right’. He was Sir Arthur Tedder, who emerges to me as the

outstanding airman of the war, with the largest view of its conduct.

This is not surprising; Tedder’s Middle East Command was quite

unlike the functional metropolitan Commands – it was itself an air

force. It contained something of everything because it had a use for

everything, so naturally Tedder’s view was different and generally

larger than that of the Home AOCinCs. He expressed it very clearly in

a letter to Admiral Cunningham, commanding the Mediterranean

Fleet, in the course of a lively dispute in June 1941. Tedder said:- ‘In

my opinion, sea, land and air operations in the Middle East Theatre

are now so closely inter-related that effective co-ordination will only

be possible if the campaign is considered and controlled as a

combined operation in the full sense of that term.’ This was a view

from which Tedder did not depart. In 1944 he is on record as saying:-

‘I do not myself believe that any modern war can be won either at sea

or on the land alone or in the air alone ... war has changed to three-

dimensional, and very few people realise that.’

This perception drew Tedder towards another of the greatest

importance, which crystallised in the dark days of the Middle East in

1942. I have summed it up like this:- ‘... the war was driving home the

lesson that when critical land operations are in progress, army co-

operation is not simply a specialised activity of part of an air force. It

is the function of the entire force with all its available strength.’

Operation OVERLORD illustrates this perfectly. I have mentioned

Coastal Command’s part in it; Bomber Command (in conjunction with

the United States Strategic Air Force) took on a number of vital roles,

including the isolation of the whole Normandy battle area by

interdiction; and the Tactical Air Forces ‘saturated the battlefield with

air power’ as the Germans themselves had done in 1940.

These two perceptions – that the war was a combined operation,

and that the combination might well require the entire available

strength – seem to me to be of the highest quality. Tedder added

another. From December 1941 onwards the war in the West was a

coalition war again, subject to all the searching disciplines of such.

Britain in World War II, threw up three great coalition commanders;

Lord Alexander in Italy, Lord Mountbatten in South-East Asia and

Tedder, who became General Eisenhower’s Deputy Supreme Allied

Commander in 1944, having already shown himself a true coalition

leader in the Mediterranean theatre.

I have mentioned tactical air forces, a name first heard in January,

1943. It was under Tedder and Air Mshl Sir Arthur Coningham that

the long-neglected art of Army Co-operation was revived in the desert

and, with the addition of some valuable work by Army Co-operation

Command in England, evolved into a fairly exact science as practised

by the tactical forces.

We dwell too much, I think, on D-Day and the Normandy beaches.

We should think more about what made D-Day possible, and it is

difficult to call to mind anything more important for that than the

nine-week campaign conducted by the Allied air forces – at a cost of

12,000 casualties – before the sailors and soldiers ever approached the

Normandy coast. Once the battle ashore was launched there were very

few days indeed, in a very bad summer, when the tactical air forces

did not fly in support of the armies. When the Germans made their last

counter-attack – at Mortain in August, 1944 – the tactical forces, in

Coningham’s proud words, ‘made air history’. The counter-attack was

smashed and it was, he said, ‘proved that a tactical air force may be a

decisive battle winning factor.’

What the RAF achieved in Normandy was an outstanding triumph

of air power within a combined operation. I said in my conclusion:- ‘It

was air power that paved the way into Europe; air power covered the

landings and made it impossible for the Germans to concentrate

against them; air power maintained interdiction and pressure on the

enemy when the ‘master plan’ failed; air power completed the

overwhelming victory.’ So we see how, per ardua, the RAF returned

to its original purposes; how it lent wings to the victories of the Navy

and the Army, and in so doing, I firmly contend, placed itself at ‘the

right of the line’.

MEETING ON 14 MARCH 1988

Introduction by Air Chief Marshal Sir David Lee

I was Secretary to the Chiefs of Staff during part of the period we

are considering this evening and relations between the Chiefs of Staff

and Mr Sandys were, not to put too fine a point on it, uneasy. He did

not like having to deal with a number of important, powerful, military

officers. He wanted to talk to one person and it was simply the Chief

of the Defence Staff. The three Service Chiefs still had immense

responsibilities and he did not like having to deal with this very

powerful committee and so, during that period, there was a bit of

wishful thinking and a whispering campaign was going around the

corridors of power which said the time of Sandys was running out!

Now we are very fortunate this evening to be able to have this talk

from Mr Cecil James whom I have known personally for something

like thirty years or more. He has had a long and distinguished career in

the Civil Service, most if not all of which has been in connection with

the Royal Air Force, either in the old Air Ministry, the Ministry of

Defence, or in the Far East. Since retiring, Cecil James has written a

book which is entitled Defence Policy and the Royal Air Force 1956-

1963. Unfortunately for most of us it is a classified document and

presumably will remain so for some time to come but I mention it

because it does illustrate what a very deep knowledge of this particular

period in Defence Policy he has, and I think we can now look forward

to a most interesting and accurate account of the very controversial

events of those days. Without further ado, may I introduce Mr Cecil

James.

THE IMPACT OF THE SANDYS DEFENCE POLICY ON

THE ROYAL AIR FORCE

by T C G James CMG MA

No Defence White Paper has been more eagerly awaited than that

which Mr Duncan Sandys presented to Parliament in April 1957. The

threat from nuclear weapons, which the White Paper described in

apocalyptic terms yet with an insistence that these nevertheless offered

the best hope of avoiding global war, led to intense public debate on

the morality as well as the merits of what was seen as a new deterrent

policy. How far this policy was new is one of our themes. What was

certainly new was the intention to abolish National Service, which

meant that the manpower strength of the Services would be virtually

halved over the next five years. This was not all that significant for the

Royal Navy; on the other hand, the future role of the Navy was less

than clearly defined in the White Paper. The army faced major

reductions in its fighting strength and thus the difficult task of

disbanding or amalgamating units with long and proud histories. Its

commitments in Europe and outside remained; but it was going to

have less with which to meet them. The Royal Air Force was the most

curiously placed. On the face of it, it was not undervalued. The Prime

Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, who had just departed the scene, had

appointed Sir William Dickson the first Chairman of the Chiefs of

Staff Committee because, he said, ‘the RAF must play an increasingly

important part in our military scheme of things in future.’ The 1957

White Paper confirmed the RAF as the custodian of the key

component of the deterrent policy. Such argument as Ministers

allowed themselves was about the size and equipment of the

V-bomber force, not about the need for it. On the other hand, the logic

of nuclear deterrence, coupled with foreseeable developments of both

offensive and defensive missiles, was widely construed as the

beginning of the end of the military aeroplane.

So the 1957 White Paper was a major event. But the shadows had

been cast before. How far back they had begun to loom is arguable. It

is said that a day or two after Sir Winston Churchill returned to office

in October 1951 he was being driven along Horseguards Avenue on a

Sunday. The massive doors at the north end of what is now the MOD

Main Building were shut. Sir Winston glowered at these new, and no

doubt expensive, structures and said to his Private Secretary: ‘This is

what we have come into power to stop, Socialist extravagance.’

Whatever hopes the Services might have had that they would be

generously treated by the new government were soon disappointed.

The chill wind of economy blew from the beginning. We certainly felt

it in the Air Ministry where Lord de L’Isle and Dudley took over as

Secretary of State. One distinguished air marshal, very distinguished

indeed, is said to have thumped the table and said that he was not

going to be told how to run the Air Force by a guardee peer, only to be

reminded by the Permanent Under-Secretary that the guardee peer was

also a chartered accountant. The need to achieve a better match

between defence expenditure and economic capabilities was

recognised in successive Defence White Papers up to and including

that of 1956. The 1956 White Paper came out a few months after the

appointment of a new Minister of Defence, Sir Walter Monckton,

whose brief according to his biographer ‘was to devise a method by

which the figure of £1,500M spent annually on defence could be

substantially reduced.’ We can regard this White Paper as the

beginning of a political process which led directly to the 1957 White

Paper and which had important consequences for NATO as well as for

British policy. It set out the roles of the Services like this:-

a.They must make a contribution to the Allied deterrent

commensurate with our standing as a World Power. This means

not only building up and maintaining a nuclear stockpile and the

means of delivery, but also contributing to the maintenance of

NATO’s defensive effort by land, sea and air.

b.They must play their part in the Cold War. By their mere

presence they can contribute to the stability of the free world and

the security of overseas territories whose peaceful development

may be threatened by subversion whether overtly Communist or

masquerading as nationalism.

c.They must be capable of dealing with outbreaks of limited

war should they occur.

d.They must also be capable of playing their part effectively in

global war should it break out. They will have to include support to

the civil authorities.

It is clear from the White Paper and elsewhere that these roles were

to be understood as an order of priority. It is also clear that

preparations against a global war, including substantial investment in

civil defence, even though these were the lowest priority were having

an important and expensive influence on the Services’ programmes.

This is not to say that separate ranges of equipment were regarded as

necessary for the separate roles; some capabilities were obviously

relevant to more than one role. But it was no less obvious to the

Ministers who mattered most – the Prime Minister, the Chancellor

(Mr Macmillan) and the Minister of Defence – that the budgetary and

economic implications, if the Services continued at anything like their

present size and shape, were unacceptable. Defence was getting too

big a share – of money, production, scientists and engineers, and

manpower in general. A key date in this pre-Sandys period is

20 March 1956 when Macmillan and Monckton sent a joint minute to

the Prime Minister. They expressed their concern at expenditure on

defence measures that were ‘little more than a facade’. They called for

‘a reappraisal at the highest level of the whole basis on which our

defence policy should rest.’ They posed a number of basic questions,

the thrust of which was to minimise expenditure on fighting a major

war in favour of a policy of nuclear deterrence. As the National

Service Act would expire in 1958 there was no time to be lost.

Ministers eventually got down to the task in June when they were

presented with a far-reaching memorandum on ‘The Future of the

United Kingdom in World Affairs’, to quote its title: not one, we must

note, produced by the Chiefs of Staff even though it had been

triggered by doubts about defence policy. It was the work of a small

group of senior officials, commissioned by Sir Norman Brook, the

Secretary of the Cabinet. He seems not to have told the Chiefs about

it. At any rate, Mountbatten wrote to Monckton some time after the

group had begun its work. He said the Chiefs had heard that ‘some

form of committee is being set up to advise the Government on the

general policy to be followed in future ... such a wide survey of policy

must include the defence aspect and we are gravely disturbed that our

constitutional responsibilities to advise the Government are being by-

passed.’ Monckton gave him very little change: Ministers alone would

consider broad aspects of policy before more detailed areas such as

defence were addressed. Norman Brook might have given him even

less change. Even on the broader issues of defence, let alone national

policy, he was wary of leaving the initiative to the Chiefs of Staff.

When a Future Policy Committee was set up a year or so later, Brook

deliberately designed its framework of studies in such a way that, as

he put it, ‘the Chiefs of Staff could not take the bone away and gnaw it

in a corner by themselves.’

Copies of the report by Brook’s group of officials landed on the

desks of the Chiefs of Staff on 6 June. It was scarcely a coincidence

that the first meeting of the Policy Review Committee that the Prime

Minister had set up, in response to the pressure from Macmillan and

Monckton, was held that same day. The Brook group paper was the

only one considered by the committee; and the Chiefs of Staff were

not present. It all seems to have been carefully contrived to ensure that

it would be Ministers only who had the first gnaw at the bone.

Not that the bone was all that appetising. The memorandum was a

notably perceptive appreciation of the national condition. It identified

the two main factors that called for a thoroughgoing review of policy

and identified both the policy objectives and a programme of studies

designed to produce answers to questions of defence as well as the

civil sector. The two factors were put like this:-

a.The external situation confronting us has changed. The

hydrogen bomb has transformed the military situation. It has made

full-scale war with Russia or China unlikely. And conventional

forces, though still of great importance in some situations, have

become a relatively less important factor in world affairs. The

Russians have recognised this change, and they are adapting their

actions to it. While their objectives may remain unaltered their

methods of attaining them are changing. We must modify our own

tactics accordingly.

b.It is clear that ever since the end of the war we have tried to

do too much – with the result that we have only rarely been free

from the danger of economic crisis. This provides no stable basis

for policy in any field. Unless we make substantial reductions in

the Government’s claims on the national economy we shall

endanger our capacity to play an effective role in world affairs.

Only thus shall we be able to find the means to place our economy

on a stable basis and to counter the new forms of attack with which

we are being confronted.

Of the defence imperatives in the memorandum, first and foremost

was the need to apply the logic of nuclear deterrence to NATO policy,

which meant that the British conventional forces in Europe should and

could be substantially reduced. The overseas situation outside NATO

called for different treatment but there too garrison forces and

contributions to the Baghdad Pact and SEATO could be reduced;

improved air transport was the key to economy. Another emphasis we

should note was on home defence; was the United Kingdom

defensible in any real sense? At a meeting of senior Ministers even

before the Policy Review began Mr Macmillan said that the sensible,

though difficult, decision for the government was the abolition of

Fighter Command. This could not be done immediately but in his

view the Hunter and Javelin should be the last aircraft for UK defence;

the case for a more advanced fighter should rest on overseas needs and

those of the Navy.

The Prime Minister was anxious to move quickly. Numerous

papers were commissioned by the Policy Review Committee, on all

aspects of defence as well as on the economic situation, with the aim

of completing its work by the end of July. The Committee was hard at

it in June and July; nine meetings in some seven weeks. It was due to

hold its tenth meeting on 27 July but on the 26th Nasser announced

the nationalisation of the Suez Canal and the meeting was cancelled.

The Policy Review Committee did not meet again until December. So

Suez had two consequences affecting the 1956 Review. It meant that

much of the earlier impetus was lost and that the case for radically

revising defence policy was even stronger. But the main issues were

identified.

The first was the need to persuade NATO Allies of the overriding

importance of nuclear deterrence, which called for a new NATO

strategic concept: ‘one’ said the Brook official group, ‘that can be

interpreted in terms of lower but militarily definable force levels, and

a planned and coherent Allied effort ... it might perhaps be based

mainly on the idea of a ‘plate-glass window’ or ‘trip-wire’.’ Is then

this memorandum the origin of ‘trip-wire’ both the term and the

strategy? Whether or not this is so, the fact is that a diplomatic

offensive was launched in the last few months of 1956 to persuade

first the United States and Canada and then the other NATO Allies to

adopt a new strategic concept.

And it was successful, up to a point. A new NATO directive was

agreed at the NATO Council in December 1956, ambivalent in some

respects, not wholly accepted in all its possible implications,

positively disliked by SACEUR and SACLANT (‘as of now I hate the

British’, said General Gruenther on one occasion), but nevertheless

providing British Ministers with the rationale they needed for making

major cuts in BAOR and 2TAF. It was to provide later a rationale for

a determined attack on Air Staff plans for air defence of the UK. Even

the British nuclear deterrent force was not to be sacrosanct. Sign,

visible though it was, of the government’s convictions, it was already

in some danger. Macmillan, as Chancellor, thought it larger than

necessary. The current plan was for a front-line of some 200

V-bombers; he thought 120, or even 100, would be enough. And

neither Mountbatten nor Sir Gerald Templer, the CIGS, were at all

convinced by either the concept of the new strategy or its

consequences for conventional forces. They thought that the

government had got the priorities the wrong way round. The first thing

to settle was the size and shape of conventional forces for

commitments within and outside Europe; only what might be

afforded, after that had been done, should be allotted to nuclear forces.

Moreover, they were concerned about the risk of conventional war in

Europe once Russia had achieved nuclear parity with the West. CAS,

Sir Dermot Boyle, totally disagreed and this disagreement among the

Chiefs had to be exposed to the Defence Committee during the 1956

Policy Review. The view of CAS prevailed, as it did when the issue

was again put to ministers in 1957 and 1958. Unfortunately, to win is

not necessarily to be popular. Teacher’s pet tends to get beaten up in

the playground; and I feel bound to give you my personal impression

that the extremely rough ride the RAF was to be given during the rest

of the fifties can be ascribed in part to a feeling in some quarters that

the junior Service had been getting too big a share of the cake.

The last question before we get on to the impact of the Sandys

policy itself, is – how did the Air Council respond to the turbulence of

the last six months of 1956? This has to be done to reach a judgement

on how far Mr Sandys was innovator as well as architect. The Air

Staff warmly welcomed the memorandum of the Brook official group,

especially the case it made for a new strategic concept. The Air

Council was in fact ahead of the game; it had put in hand a study of

the future Air Force early in 1956. This was discussed by the Air

Council in June 1956. It might well have startled the Air Force at

large. As compared with the existing plan for a V-bomber front-line of

200, the study saw this falling to 100 as the BLUE STREAK missile

came into service and did not rule out eventual replacement of

bombers by ballistic missiles. Fighter Command would come down

from currently some 500 aircraft to 200 in phase with the introduction

of SAM missiles, and after the middle sixties SAM would be the

predominant weapon for air defence. The Command was perceived as

primarily a contribution to the nuclear deterrent. But another fighter

beyond the Lightning was envisaged, as indeed was a successor to the

V-bombers to ensure against slippage in the ballistic missile

programme. No role was allotted to the air defence fighter in Europe.

Nothing emphasises more clearly the extent to which the Air Council

was convinced that most of the eggs should go into the deterrent

basket than what was in mind for 2TAF: a cut of two-thirds in its

existing strength of some 400 aircraft, with the residue entirely

devoted to strike and reconnaissance: no fighters, no helicopters for

army support. This disbelief in preparations for a serious conventional

phase was reflected as well in the outline plan for Coastal Command,

which the Air Council saw coming down from some 70 aircraft to 36

– six squadrons. Overseas, Middle East Air Force would remain at its

present strength but Far East Air Force would be little more than a

token presence. Reinforcement from the UK would be part of the

answer if there was serious trouble overseas; another part – interesting

in view of later developments – would be a mobile striking force

based on carriers. The Secretary of State for Air, Nigel Birch, is

recorded as expressing ‘considerable apprehensions’ at this particular

notion. Logically, this view of policy for the Air Force overseas

demanded a bigger Transport Command. The first orders for the

Britannia had been placed in January 1956 and a substantial force was

planned. The last point to stress, and we must remember that all this

was before the 1956 Policy Review Committee began its work, was

that the Air Council assumed that National Service would be

abolished.

In broad terms, and in many details as well, these Air Council

discussions in the summer of 1956 were in harmony with what finally

emerged at the end of the year from deliberations of the Policy

Review Committee. Mr Antony Head (who had replaced Sir Walter

Monckton) proposed as follows:-

• Fighter Command and 2TAF to be halved.

• Bomber Command restricted to 184 V-bombers.

• What was described as a ‘small force of MR aircraft in Coastal

Command or overseas’.

• A stronger Transport Command.

• Small tactical air forces as contributions to the Baghdad Pact

and SEATO.

• A smaller fleet, with no more than two fleet carriers and a light

carrier; the South Atlantic, American and West Indies stations

abandoned.

• A smaller army, with BAOR coming down from over 80,000 to

55,000 and possibly less.

The manpower allocations were 90,000 to the Navy, 200,000 to the

Army, 155,000 to the RAF: some 450,000 in all, with National

Service assumed to continue on the basis – so Antony Head proposed

– of a ballot. All this was sufficiently accepted for Ministers to tell

their American colleagues and SACEUR and SACLANT of what they

had in mind. But no final commitment had been made, certainly none

to Parliament and the general public, before Sir Anthony Eden

resigned. Eden himself had wanted to get rid of National Service; and

much work had been done during 1956 on the maximum strength of

forces that could be sustained by all-regular recruitment. About

350,000 seemed to be the best guess, compared with the 450,000 in

Head’s final proposals.

Comprehensive national service produced larger drafts than would

be required to meet this gap of 100,000. So the question of a selective

draft had to be addressed. The problem for Eden was that he saw great

political difficulty in providing a method which the country at large

would regard as fair. A Premium Bond Lottery was one thing; a ballot

to decide who should or should not be called up was a different

proposition.

National Service was thus the first issue that had to be settled when

Mr Macmillan became Prime Minister in January 1957; to embark on

size and shape exercises for the front-line strengths of the Services

would otherwise be pointless. Amongst the first actions of Mr

Macmillan, having selected Mr Sandys as his Minister of Defence,

was to give him a directive requiring him as his first task ‘to formulate

in the light of present strategic needs a new defence policy which will

secure a substantial reduction in expenditure and manpower.’

What we shall now be dealing with is, first, the National Service

question; secondly, strategic deterrence and the associated force plans;

air defence; Coastal Command; and finally the air transport force

against the background of the government’s attitude to overseas

commitments outside the NATO area. There will not be time to deal

with the RAF’s administrative problems, severe though they were.

Defence White Papers are usually published in February; the

Sandys White Paper came out in April. Difficulties over National

Service explain some of the delay. Collectively the Chiefs of Staff

believed that the Services would not be able to meet the current

commitments to NATO, or maintain adequate garrisons, with

manpower of less than 450,000. Mr Sandys was quite unimpressed.

The Navy, under the 450,000 scheme, was claiming a four-carrier

group force, bigger than Mr Head had proposed. The Army would

have to reduce BAOR by one division but it was with at least this kind

of reduction in mind that Ministers had painfully negotiated the new

NATO policy directive. The Air Force component assumed that 2TAF

would be halved in little more than a year but the Air Council itself

envisaged further reductions later on. In any case, taking the view as

he did that it would take five years to achieve all-regular forces, Mr

Sandys reasonably doubted whether there would be any significant

difference between a 450,000 force including national servicemen and

all-regular and more efficient Services of around 370,000. So, in mid-

February he told the Chiefs of Staff to examine the implications of a

force of that size. This was a rebuff for the less radical members of the

government. Lord Salisbury had submitted a paper to the Cabinet in

January advising that a limited National Service intake would be

required until at least 1965. I have found no record of it ever being

discussed in Cabinet. Indeed, the unhappily strained relations that

developed between Mr Sandys and the Chiefs were as much the result

of the way defence business was being conducted as of differences

over policy. At what was a crucial meeting of the Defence Committee

on 27 February the Chiefs of Staff’s memorandum arguing the case

for 450,000 manpower was not presented; the Committee at Mr

Macmillan’s direction considered only the aim of achieving all-regular

forces by the end of 1962. After that meeting the Defence Committee,

which usually met every two weeks, was not to meet again until July.

There is no doubt that the Chiefs of Staff were deeply disturbed by

what seemed to them a failure to use the normal procedures for their

relations with and access to Ministers collectively. They continued to

maintain that 450,000 was the lowest acceptable strength and they

formally represented that a serious constitutional issue would arise if

the White Paper gave the impression that the economies were justified

on military and strategic grounds and were therefore acceptable to the

Chiefs. Yet in the view of the Air Staff the case made for a 450,000

force was itself flawed: ‘not a logically concerted paper which first

establishes the essential strategic commitments and then estimates the

forces needed to meet them.’ This reflected a concern that an

essentially deterrent policy might not be thought through and applied

as rigorously as it should be: misgivings that were not misplaced.

So it was against their advice that the Chiefs were required to

structure the Services within manpower of some 380,000: 80,000 to

the Navy, 165,000 Army, 135,000 RAF. Compared with the 450,000

figure the Navy would have to reduce from 150 to 130 fighting ships,

including three rather than four carrier groups; the Army from 136 to

118 major units. RAF force plans showed little change. The Air

Council felt that it had already proposed a minimum force and that it

would somehow have to use its reduced manpower more efficiently.

They could be excused from thinking that the Air Force was less

vulnerable to pressure since their views on the deterrent concept and

its implications were similar to those of Mr Sandys. The most vivid

expression of that concept is to be found in the 1957 White Paper: ‘the

overriding consideration in all military planning must be to prevent

war rather than prepare for it.’ The Chief of the Defence Staff tried to

persuade Sandys to leave it out because it was liable to be

misunderstood in NATO. Sandys left it in precisely because it was the

crux of the case for cutting back in Europe. His convictions about

nuclear deterrence were argued with typical obstinacy, against

opposition at home as well as in NATO. He would not be moved on

the concept and he must have been disappointed that he was not

wholly successful in persuading others, particularly in NATO, to

attach less importance to conventional defences. This was why the

first tranche of BAOR reductions was no more than 20,000; a second

and later reduction brought the force down to 55,000. It has stayed

there or thereabouts although the 1957 intention was to bring it down

to 45,000, possibly even less: 2TAF, in contrast, was very rapidly

reduced: to just over two hundred aircraft by March 1958. The Air

Council’s plan to come down to a smaller strike/recce force was

scheduled for completion in 1961. That in the event a fighter

component was retained, although the intention to remove it was

declared to NATO in 1958, is a story that lies outside the period. None

of this was at all easy to negotiate; German Ministers were particularly

concerned at the reductions. Sir Frank Roberts, the Ambassador to

NATO, put his finger on the root difficulty in his annual report for

1957: ‘NATO is mainly interested in our presence in Europe and not

so much in our responsibilities in the Middle East or Asia, nor even in

our possession of the major deterrent ... the United States contribution

to the deterrent is generally considered to be enough for the Alliance

as a whole.’ Sandys was unshaken. He delivered a stern lecture to the

NATO Council in December 1958. Britain was spending more on

defence than any of the European allies, partly because of its

commitments outside Europe. These, however, had the same purpose

as NATO itself in containing Russia. ‘It is essential’, he said, ‘to

ensure that our flank in the Middle East and beyond is not turned.’ As

for the ultimate sanction, this would remain valid even when Soviet

nuclear capabilities matched those of the West. But there were two

conditions: the deterrent should be so organised that it could not be

destroyed in a first strike, and the Russians should not come to think

that the West no longer had the courage to use it. And the British were

determined to be involved; he said that most of the aircraft in an initial

retaliation would be British.

The V-bomber force was, it seemed, to have priority; and it did,

despite the protests of Mountbatten and Templer. Yet Mr Sandys

could not wholly defend the frontline of 184 aircraft which was called

for in the latest Air Council plans. What he secured at a meeting of the

Defence Committee in August 1957 was a frontline of 144, most of

which – 102 – would be Mk 2 Vulcans and Victors. The Air Staff

were not too disappointed. The Mk 2 V-bombers were the crucial

element. With BLUE STEEL Mk 1 already under development, to be

succeeded by the much more capable Mk 2, a credible airborne

deterrent could be poised until well into the 1960s. Moreover, by 1957

the advent of a missile component in the deterrent had come much

closer. Whereas nobody expected the British BLUE STREAK to be in

service until some time in the ‘60s, the American Thor was just over

the horizon.

The possibility of deploying Thor in Britain had emerged in 1956.

Ministers were in favour from the outset; the Air Staff were not so

convinced, mainly because they thought they were being rushed into

accepting what even the Americans regarded as an interim, first-strike

weapon and one whose technical provenance left something to be

desired. Nevertheless, President Eisenhower and Mr Macmillan

reached agreement in principle at the Bermuda Conference in March

1957 and from then on things moved quickly: first to an

intergovernmental agreement in February 1958 which settled the

number of missiles to be deployed – sixty. A training and deployment

programme was successfully completed before the end of the decade;

an extraordinary achievement by the two Air Forces and especially by

Bomber Command. We have to leave it there. The opportunity to hear

much more about the history of the nuclear deterrent will come in next

year’s Society programme. But a final point: as Thor came closer to

deployment the possibility was discussed of substituting it for BLUE

STREAK. Give it a British warhead, emplace it underground and the

Americans might then give up operational control of the weapon and

we would still have an independent deterrent and save the expense of

developing BLUE STREAK. The detail of this episode and the history

of the demise of BLUE STREAK must be left till another occasion.

A diversified deterrent – manned aircraft with air-to-surface

weapons and ballistic missiles – was in prospect. But it was not cheap,

particularly if BLUE STREAK remained in the programme and also if

what Sandys had told NATO was essential for effective deterrence

was taken seriously: the operational credibility of the deterrent force.

Sandys certainly took this seriously, as did Bomber Command; hence

the expensive scheme for widespread dispersal airfields, overseas as

well as at home, and the quick reaction procedures which Bomber

Command perfected and demonstrated in training and exercises.

Sandys was determined that the deterrent should be seen to be

effective as well as politically independent.

But now to air defence, where his attitude to RAF plans was very

different. Nobody, the Air Staff included, was in any doubt that

Fighter Command’s 1956 strength was insupportable. But even when,

as the Air Staff planned, this was reduced to twenty squadrons, plus

three overseas, there was formidable opposition on both conceptual

and financial grounds. As early as March 1957 Mr Sandys cancelled

all work on OR329 – the all-weather interceptor to succeed the

Lightning. Not that this meant that the Lightning as a weapon system

was unthreatened. Orders for the Lightning Mk 1 had now been placed

but it was the Mk 3, with first Firestreak and then RED TOP air-to-air

missiles, that the Air Staff had in mind for the twenty-squadron force.

Doubts about the extent of investment in UK air defence had been

voiced, as you have heard, in 1956. What we can regard as beginning

an exhaustive and exhausting review was a minute from Mr

Macmillan to Sandys in August 1957: What is the threat over the next

ten years, the plans for meeting it and the military arguments on which

they are based? – these were his questions.

First, the threat as the Air Staff and the Joint Intelligence

Committee assessed it: up to 1960, from nearly 300 Badger medium

bombers backed by a large nuclear stockpile: from 1960 a similar

weapon to BLUE STEEL Mk 1 would come into service and so would

ballistic missiles with the range to reach Britain but probably not with

the accuracy to eliminate missile sites. These could well be targets still

allotted to bombers. Sometime in the mid-1960s a new Soviet

strategic bomber could come into service: quite an aeroplane – combat

radius with flight refuelling of 3,500 miles, cruising at 1.7 Mach, 200

mile dash capability of Mach 2 at 60,000 feet. No hard evidence, I

suspect: a hypothetical aircraft which I doubt has materialised even

now. But a belief in a continuing threat from the manned bomber to

the UK-based deterrent forces was one reason for the Air Ministry’s

persistent defence of a substantial force of air defence fighters.

Next, the plans for meeting the threat: twenty squadrons, SAM

defences – at their peak amounting to 700 launchers, over one hundred

with nuclear warheads on a developed Bloodhound Mk 2 – and air-to-

air weapons which included the nuclear-tipped Genie to be obtained

from the Americans; and, underpinning fighters and missiles, a

modernised control and reporting system. A costly programme,

estimated to be more in the period from 1957 to 1962 than would be

spent on Bomber Command. ‘It can be justified,’ said Mr George

Ward the Secretary of State for Air, ‘only if we can show that it makes

all the difference to the success of the deterrent.’

And the military arguments: these were as much psychological and

political as military. There was a real difficulty. The size of a deterrent

force could be quantified by reference to whatever criterion of damage

to an aggressor was selected. It was much more difficult to

demonstrate that a particular scale of air defence was necessary to

implant doubt in an aggressor’s mind about his ability to neutralise the

nuclear strike forces. And that was the object: doubt, not effective

defence against an actual attack.

It was not until 1960 that the size and equipment of UK air defence

was determined, at any rate for the next ten years: five squadrons only

and no SAM units. The catalyst at that time was a report by the Joint

Planning Staff (JPS): Sir Fred Rosier, who is here this evening, was

the JPS Chairman. The views of the JPS were much the same as Mr

Sandys had argued in 1957, with support from other Ministers. Mr

Watkinson, Mr Sandys’ successor, was at least as determined to

economise in air defence. From the beginning of this lengthy debate

Mr Sandys doubted whether fighters were needed to protect the

V-bomber airfields. He argued that the Soviet Union would not mount

an attack against this country until it could simultaneously destroy

nuclear bases in the United States. If ever that was possible, it would

certainly not be until well into the sixties, and the weapons would be

ICBMs to which fighters were irrelevant. As for SAM defences,

ministerial opinions oscillated in the late fifties. Sandys himself

doubted their value, as he did, and others beside, the practicability of

effective ABM defences. Just before one of the numerous Defence

Committee meetings at which air defence was on the agenda the Daily

Express printed an article by Chapman Pincher which questioned the

value of SAM. It was noted in the Air Ministry that he and Mr Sandys

had lunched together the previous day. What mattered most to Sandys

was V-bomber dispersal and QRA; and BLUE STREAK emplaced

underground as well. He continued to argue for BLUE STREAK even

after the Air Staff had accepted defeat, and the Chiefs of Staff had

unanimously and categorically disowned it as being only a first-strike

weapon. This view is arguable but not perhaps tonight.

The Air Ministry fought a good fight for a bigger fighter force than

the government was prepared to concede. Closely argued papers were

produced on both sides of the debate; rightly so, but what was hard to

bear was the absence of what Sir Dermot Boyle called ‘the same

thoroughness, the same objectivity’ in analysing the programmes and

policies of the other Services. Which leads us to look next at the

maritime scene and Coastal Command.

To begin with, Mr Sandys accepted his predecessor’s proposals for

a smaller Navy: three carriers only and manpower limited to 80,000.

The 1957 White Paper showed uncertainty about the Navy’s NATO

role, though it stressed its value for limited war outside the NATO

area and in peacetime emergencies. For the Air Ministry, Coastal

Command came last in its priorities and it planned to reduce it to six

squadrons. The battle then commenced; and after intense lobbying the

issues were presented to the Defence Committee in November 1957.

An Admiralty paper scarcely troubled to conceal its distaste for a

nuclear deterrent policy and argued for a four-carrier group fleet. Yet

in drawing attention to losses at sea during 1943, inflicted by a

German submarine fleet substantially smaller than the Russians could

deploy, it might well in objective terms have destroyed the naval case

for a bigger North Atlantic presence. It seemed nonsensical to the Air

Ministry to get excited about the need to protect convoys; if this was

to be taken seriously it postulated a conventional campaign, in which

case strong air defences would be needed to protect the ports and

anchorages for the convoys. And strong air defences were unlikely to

be conceded. Nevertheless, Mr Sandys shifted his position towards the

Navy. He agreed to a fourth carrier group, with an emphasis on ASW

capability in the Atlantic, and allowed the Navy extra manpower

above the original White Paper allocation – 88,000 instead of 80,000.

And even before the meeting of the Defence Committee was held he

had arbitrarily instructed the Air Ministry to plan on the basis of eight

and not six Coastal Command squadrons. The Air Ministry protested:

‘such an increase would be inconsistent with approved strategic

priorities, and it would not be militarily significant, bearing in mind

the size of the long-range maritime forces which it was necessary

during the war to deploy against a submarine threat nowhere

approaching in numbers or in quality the threat which confronts us

today.’ It did no good; the instruction to plan for eight squadrons was

soon turned into an order actually to maintain that number.

This was only the first phase of the battle. The second was even

more worrying for the Air Ministry. In the first half of 1958

speculation began about the transfer of Coastal Command to the

Admiralty: speculation in the Press, questions in Parliament. When

this had last been discussed – in 1954, when the decision was to leave

well alone – Mr Sandys had been in favour of transfer; and he put a re-

examination in hand in November 1958. This second-phase battle

lasted until the following July. It should never have been started; with

all the turbulence in the Services, there could not have been a worse

time for an inter-Service row. However, Mr Sandys made a mistake

which was to prove crucial; he seems to have omitted to tell the Prime

Minister. For some weeks he appeared to be getting his way. The

Chiefs of Staff were evenly split; CDS and CAS were against change;

Mountbatten was naturally in favour; CIGS – Field Marshal Festing –

reluctantly supported Mountbatten, with some reservations. One

reason for the CDS appointment was to have an adjudicator when the

Service Chiefs could not agree; and having set out the reasons for

making no drastic changes Sir William Dickson offered Sandys a way

out. This was to revise the existing arrangements for control of

maritime aircraft, placing CinC Coastal Command and his group

commanders under the operational command of their Naval

counterparts as deputies and not co-equals. But Sandys would not be

put off. A report concluding that a case on merits had been made for

transfer was considered by the Defence Board. From the minutes of

the meeting one would think that the Air Force was on the point of

losing. Mr Sandys could have claimed the support of the majority but

his own summary at the end of the meeting was that while the case

had been made he had been impressed by the effect of a transfer on

the morale of the Royal Air Force. He had previously seemed

impervious to precisely this consideration. Why did he change his

mind? Sir Richard Powell, his Permanent Secretary, may have

influenced him. What is certain is that the Prime Minister some time

before had sent Mr Sandys a private minute to the effect – according

to one account that this was not an appropriate time to change the

status of Coastal Command, or more precisely – according to another

– that he did not wish the issue to be dealt with before a General

Election (which took place in October 1959). It is no less certain that

before the Defence Board meeting the Cabinet Secretary was being

advised that the case for transfer ‘had considerable failings and a fairly

destructive argument against it can be produced by the Air Ministry.’

Soon after that meeting Mr Sandys issued a directive which began

with the statement that Coastal Command would continue as a

separate Command. It had been, said the Cabinet Office, ‘an

unnecessary and deplorable exercise.’ The outcome was not wholly

satisfactory. The issue of principle was still open; more resources than

the Air Ministry considered appropriate were allotted to the North

Atlantic; and some basic questions of maritime policy were swept

under the carpet, at least for the time being. But a decision had been

reached. The Air Ministry put in hand a programme of Shackleton

modernisation for a bigger Coastal Command and also a specification

for a Shackleton replacement which led to the Nimrod. And changes

in the command relationships which Sir William Dickson had

suggested at the beginning of the controversy were introduced.

And so, finally, to air transport where policy was not bedevilled by

such fundamental doubts as marked nuclear deterrence, air defence

and the maritime scene. Improvements in air transport capability

stemmed inevitably from a policy of reducing in Europe but, despite

the cut back in Service manpower, maintaining an effective influence

in the Middle East and Far East. The difficulties were recognised,

whether contingencies arising overseas were limited wars in either

theatre or the kind of emergency that was to occur over Kuwait. Mr

Macmillan thought that ‘with skill and ingenuity’ British positions

could be maintained. One of the keys to success was obviously more

long-range capability and secure reinforcement routes. As things stood

in 1957 neither was satisfactory. Mr Macmillan was very scathing

about the inadequacies of the Hastings/Beverley force; and what was

the determinant of the size of force required – the movement of a

brigade from Britain to Singapore in seven days – could only be

secure if Indian Ocean staging posts under firm British control were

available. India and Ceylon were likely to refuse facilities if the

emergency did not meet with their political approval. Gan was being

prepared in 1957 to meet this need; the Air Staff would have liked

another Indian Ocean staging post – in the Seychelles. Improvements

to Masirah in South Arabia also had route security in mind as well as

V-bomber dispersal. Interestingly, HQ FEAF preferred Diego Garcia

to Gan.

One of Mr Sandys’ early decisions was to relax somewhat the

requirement for Far East reinforcement. As then stated, this could be

met by a force of twenty Britannias, plus a few Comet 2s. This was

the first objective for an enlarged Transport Command. It was not

achieved until the end of 1960, happily in time to make all the

difference to the Kuwait Emergency in 1961. Amongst a number of

industrial and technical difficulties, which resulted in only one RAF

Britannia coming off the line each month, the crucial factor was the

failure to secure big enough orders for the civil Britannia to justify a

higher production rate. But the Britannia fleet was not the biggest of

the problems. These derived more from what the Army began to

demand, under three heads: a long-range strategic freighter, tactical

transports and short-range transports, including helicopters. The War

Office presented Mr Sandys in August 1957 with a demand for a long-

range freighter capable of carrying up to 13 tons over a range of 3,000

miles. This was a much bigger requirement than anything previously

stated. It coincided with the completion of studies of a Beverley

replacement which pointed to an aeroplane of similar performance to

the C-130 which had recently gone into service with the USAF. But at

first this was considered too small for the strategic role and too big for

the tactical. Moreover, the Army wanted the aircraft quickly: by 1963,

by which time their manpower strength would have been reduced by

National Service. So if it were to be British, aircraft developed for

other purposes would have to be adapted; otherwise, it would have to

be a foreign aircraft, which meant an American buy. The Air Staff

came to favour a compromise: the C-130 after all, with the larger and

more expensive C-133 another possibility.

The trouble was that the Army had moved the goal posts. A Chiefs

of Staff sub-committee had earlier stressed the importance of

stockpiling heavy equipment at the main overseas bases as a much

cheaper alternative to carrying them about the world in large

aeroplanes: heavy equipment such as armoured cars and the

Thunderbird SAM, and also the BLUE WATER surface-to-surface

missile (which was later cancelled). Since it was not agreed policy that

tactical nuclear weapons such as BLUE WATER should be deployed

outside Europe, the case for a high-quality strategic freighter was not

all that strong. With hindsight, the Air Ministry might have argued the

case more than it did, especially as its budget made no allowance for a

new strategic transport in the Army’s time-scale. One could wish that

Mr Sandys had thrown his weight about, as he did on other issues. As

it was, he agreed that a new aeroplane was needed, and that neither the

C-130 nor C-133 would be considered. But what British aeroplane?

The various possibilities were examined throughout 1958: beef up the

Beverley; a freighter version of the VC10; re-design the Britannia and

give it rear-loading doors; a Handley Page freighter based on the

Victor wing and tail. Then there was this turboprop aircraft, the

Britannic, that was being developed in Belfast: good range, very good

load, but a turboprop and slower than some of the other candidates.

The Air Staff strongly favoured a turbojet and eventually persuaded

the Air Council and Mr Sandys and the War Office to back the

Handley Page aeroplane, the HP111.

The Cabinet, no less, decided the issue early in 1959. There can be

no doubt that politico/industrial arguments were decisive. Shorts in

Belfast was government-owned; the end of Britannia production was

in sight; without a major order most of the labour force would have to

be laid off. To select the HP111 would prolong the life of the

company and hamper the policy of progressively rationalising the

aircraft industry. A late entrant into the race, the rear-loading

Britannia, was favoured by the Ministry of Supply as a useful and

relatively inexpensive interim solution. Both Mr George Ward and Mr

Sandys were advised to speak against it (the HP proposal Ed). So it

was that the Belfast was ordered: at best, the Air Council’s second

choice; for which there was no allowance in forward costings; an

untypical aircraft and highly unlikely to have a civil market; and with

an engine (the Tyne) not in service elsewhere in the RAF. It made

little sense in logistic and engineering terms. The VCAS of the day

said, ‘they will be obsolete when we get them.’

The background of policy to this unfortunate decision was the need

to move reinforcements of equipment as well as men to deal with

limited wars outside the NATO area. The War Office was also

demanding more air transport within theatres. So in addition to

unplanned expenditure on a long-range freighter, the Air Council

found itself presented with a much bigger bill for tactical and close-

support transport aircraft than it had allowed for in its 1957 plans.

The scenario is important. War Office air transport requirements

were for:

• a brigade group parachute drop;

• the move of two brigade groups in an overseas theatre within a

fortnight;

• air supply of up to six brigade groups during the first month of a

limited war.

The bill: an additional 75 medium-range aircraft (Argosies; and we

haven’t the time to examine why this aeroplane was chosen); at least

another 200 short-range transports and helicopters, including 80 – a

totally new requirement – for the Army in Europe. This bill was never

met. It was excessive even if the scenario had remained unchanged;

and it included expensive items such as the Rotodyne and Chinook-

type helicopters. But the Air Council had to go some way towards

meeting it. Some fifty Argosies were ordered and delivered and the

Whirlwind force was usefully increased. What eventually reduced the

War Office bill – and to mention this takes us outside Mr Sandys’

time as Minister of Defence – was a revision of overseas policy by

which the Army’s commitments in the contingency of limited war

were very substantially cut back. And behind that revision were

growing financial difficulties and also doubts about the security of

British bases overseas. Even so, the post White Paper insistence of the

Army on maximising air supply to maintain itself in the field was one

more factor affecting Air Ministry plans for the size and shape of the

Air Force. Transport aircraft of all types in service in the early sixties

were nearly twice as many as the Air Council had proposed in 1958.

The number of helicopters trebled. With these changes came a change

in the geographical deployment of the Air Force: fewer squadrons in

Europe than had been planned and more overseas.

A very brief summary: looking on the one hand at the Air Force

which the Air Council considered appropriate to a deterrent strategy

and on the other, to that which was emerging when – nearly three

years later – Mr Sandys ceased to be Minister of Defence, there had

been several developments. A smaller, but still powerful, V-Force but

with increasing doubts about BLUE STREAK, which the Air Ministry

knew about and to some extent shared, and also about BLUE STEEL

Mk 2, which they may not have known. Polaris was beginning to be

discussed though there was not yet what an Air Ministry official was

to describe as a ‘Gadarene rush throughout Whitehall’. A much

smaller fighter force: final decisions as to exact size not yet taken but

the writing was clearly on the wall; indeed, the Air Staff itself had

reduced its claim for a fighter force of twenty squadrons to twelve and

also the size of the SAM force for UK Air Defence. Coastal Command

was somewhat larger: not a wholly unpalatable consequence but the

controversy about control of the Command had needlessly involved

much time and effort. Developments in the air transport force I have

just described. This increase was arguably greater than was strictly

necessary; it was certainly financially embarrassing. It had been a

difficult time for the Royal Air Force. The sad fact is that even more

difficult times were not far away.

MEETING ON 20 JUNE 1988

Introduction by Air Commodore H A Probert

This evening we are returning to the air war in World War II, and

this time we are going to look at it from the German side. Dr Boog,

our speaker, is one of the leading air historians in West Germany. He

came originally from what is today East Germany, from Leuna-

Merseburg, where he obtained first-hand experience of Allied

bombing. In 1944, at the age of 16, he underwent training as a glider

pilot but then, instead of going on to the Heinkel 162 as had been

intended, he found himself in the Volksturm, an experience which he

fortunately survived. After the war he came to the West. He spent a

short time as a translator and interpreter at Nuremberg and then went

as an exchange student to the United States; one of the first exchange

students to go from Germany to the USA in the late 1940s. Returning

to Germany in 1950, he worked for the United States Air Force in

Germany on intelligence duties until 1964 and also studied part-time

at the University of Heidelberg where he obtained his PhD in 1965.

Since then he has worked in the Military History Research Office in

Freiburg, where the main research in West Germany into wartime

history and the history of the post-war Bundeswehr takes place. His

work has concentrated upon the air aspects of World War II and as

Senior Air Historian he has contributed to the main writers’

programme and also lectured extensively in and outside Germany. A

major work which he has written is German Air Force Leadership and

Command, 1935-45. He has also written on The Strategic Air War and

German Home Air Defence, American, British and Soviet Foreign

Policy and Strategy, 1939-1943 and is co-author of a volume, The

Attack on the Soviet Union: many more items have flowed from his

pen. I personally, in my time as Head of AHB, have met him a number

of times and it gives me great personal pleasure that he has agreed to

come over and address our Society on the air war from the German

standpoint.

THE POLICY, COMMAND AND DIRECTION OF

THE LUFTWAFFE IN WORLD WAR II

by Dr Horst Boog

Chief Air Historian, West German Military

History Record Office, Freiburg

Mr Chairman, thank you very much for your kind introductory

words. I consider it a great pleasure and an honour to be here,

especially in view of such distinguished predecessors as Professor R V

Jones and Mr John Terraine.

It is, I believe, not unusual that those who have lost a war are more

critical of themselves than those who came out of it as victors. I shall,

therefore, not concentrate on the strong points of the Luftwaffe, that is

on its able application of technical principles such as the use of

interior lines, mobility, concentration of forces at decisive points,

surprise and successful co-operation with ground forces. I shall

consider instead some special traits of the Luftwaffe’s command and

leadership which constituted the basis, as well as the limits, of the

performance of the German Air Force and turned out to be decisive

and constituent causes of its defeat. Now this does not mean that

without these particular characteristics the Luftwaffe would have won

the war: it would have been out-produced anyway, but to crush it

would have been harder, and maybe resistance to the war in the year

1939 would have been greater. Of these characteristic traits, which

were most clearly reflected in the training of the general staff officers,

I think five are important:

First, there was a gradual reduction of Luftwaffe leadership and

command thinking to purely military aspects, in which the General

Staff Officers certainly became specialists with great abilities although

the principle of general assignability continued to be cherished by the

General Staff theoretically. We shall see later that this reduction of

scope did not solely follow from the fact that Hitler pressed for rapid

expansion of the armed forces to make them ready for his war at the

cost of shortening the training of the officers. During the war there

was a further reduction of General Staff training to the needs of the

routine work of troop staffs. The original objective of this training, the

education of future Chiefs of Staff, was renounced as being no longer

possible. Understanding the world outside Germany became

increasingly difficult for these officers, for other reasons too, such as

punishment for listening to foreign broadcasts, and unclear

conceptions about the outside world were the result. For instance,

when Pearl Harbour happened nobody in the armed forces operations

staff knew where it was located; I heard this from the Chief of the

Luftwaffe Section. War conditions further led to a limitation of the

experience of staff officers, because there was no time for

familiarising them with other Service Branches or careers or theatres

of war or even with the life of the troops at the front. Specialisation

was the natural consequence and certainly the fastest way of getting

results from these officers, though in limited fields.

This basis was too narrow to produce officers accustomed to think

in terms of all the Services. As the last energies were mobilised

towards the end of the war (it was already early in 1943) a further shift

of values took place, from knowledge and ability to courage, bravery,

resolution, youthfulness, belief in Hitler, and strong nerves as

requirements for General Staff Officers. Irrational values were now to

replace the rational approach to things which ought to have been the

business of the General Staff and higher officers.

A second trait, of fundamental importance, was the over-emphasis

on tactics and operations at the expense of the other spheres of

command like logistics, intelligence, technology and signal

communications, training and air transport. This attitude was called

S3/A3 thinking. To become an operations officer, and eventually a

chief of troop staff, was the goal of most General Staff Officers and

for various reasons the Luftwaffe had relatively more S3/A3 positions

than the other services.

Thirdly there was in practice, not in theory, underestimation of the

importance of technology in relation to tactics and operations. While

the first Chief of the Luftwaffe General Staff, General Wever,

repeatedly stressed that tactics and technology were of equal

importance, his third successor, Jeschonnek, in 1939 rejected the

opinion of his engineers that technology was the basis of the Luftwaffe

and that the technical superiority of the air force would therefore be

decisive. Since all industrialised nations had reached about the same

technological level, he argued, it was hardly possible to gain technical

superiority for any significant period of time. It would be better to

stress the development of air tactics, which were still largely

undeveloped. This would secure the Luftwaffe its superiority over the

enemy in case of war. Later in the war it was exactly the temporary

slight technical advantages that were decisive for the outcome of the

air war. Suffice it here to add that technology was not in high favour

among most officers and that engineers were often regarded by them

with disdain, the whole situation being symbolised at the top by

Goering who bragged about his technical ignorance.

The fourth trait was the doctrine of the offensive, which was valid

until almost the end of the war. The first Chief of the Luftwaffe Staff

regarded the bomber as the decisive weapon in the air, a conviction

that entered into the basic Luftwaffe manual on the conduct of air war.

He at first meant the heavy bomber, because he was influenced by

Douhet. Later, in a realistic appreciation of Germany’s situation, he

favoured fast medium bombers, the operational radius of which was

large enough to cover the necessary distances to the potential enemy

capitals. Offensive thinking was conditioned by Germany’s

unfavourable geo-strategic situation in the middle of the Continent

which required that the war be carried into enemy territory right from

the beginning, to conquer, together with the army, a glacis deep

enough to offer some protection against enemy air raids. That Hitler

and Goering later developed ideas of the global use of very large

bombers must be mentioned here although this plan was never

earnestly pursued and never materialised. The idea that the country

could also be defended by a strong fighter force was foreign to the

German Air Staff because in Germany as elsewhere there was a strong

conviction that an effective air defence against bomber raids was

impossible.

Finally, and as already implied by the concentration of air

armament on the medium bomber, it was the co-operative type of air

war that prevailed, although the idea of the necessity of strategic

bombing under certain conditions always existed latently in German

air doctrine and came to the fore when the situation was considered

favourable for it, as in the summers of 1940, 1941 and 1942. Indeed it

had already appeared in late 1938 when Hitler ordered the

quintuplication of the Luftwaffe, an expansion which was thwarted by

the outbreak of war.

Offensive thought in the German Air Force did not follow the lines

of Douhet but was generally orientated towards co-operation with the

ground forces and, theoretically at least, with the navy. Since

experience in close air support was only gained during the Spanish

Civil War, the Luftwaffe planners at first considered this type of air

battle to be most difficult and therefore believed that the normal co-

operative air war would comprise indirect missions in support of the

ground forces against the rear areas of enemy forces, but within the

zone of operation of army groups (Operationsgebiet). So they called

this type of ‘normal’ air war ‘operativer Luftkrieg’ (operative air war).

The limits of Operationsgebiet were, of course, flexible so both terms

were also applied to missions and flying forces providing either

technical support on the battlefield or independent strategic bombing

operations.

The concept of operativer Luftkrieg was thus unclear. The Bomber

Chief of the Operations Department of the Luftwaffe General Staff,

Major (later General) Deichmann, told me that when, in 1936, he

called together all General Staff Officers and made them write down

their definition of the concept of operativer Luftkrieg, he got as many

definitions and interpretations as there were officers present.

Unclear thinking led to the attempt to conduct a strategic air war by

tactical means as, for instance, in the Battle of Britain. The term

‘strategic air war’ did not exist in official Luftwaffe terminology. It

was developed only late in the war after the Allied strategic bombing

offensive had demonstrated the nature and effects of strategic air war

and when it had become clear to the German Air Staff that it was more

economical to destroy enemy tanks and weapons where they were

produced than on the battlefields.

The factors contributing to the development of an essentially co-

operative air doctrine were the following:-

• The experience of WW I, when support on the battlefield

(starting in 1917) brought favourable results more quickly than

the Zeppelin and giant bomber (Gotha) raids on Britain.

• The fact that the Luftwaffe by itself could not occupy the glacis,

or forefield, thought necessary for Germany’s protection in case

of war, but had to do it together with the army. Only the army

could occupy territory.

• The fact that most of the higher air force officers were former

army officers.

• Shortage of the raw materials necessary to conduct a time-

consuming strategic air offensive.

• The intention not to destroy the industries in the countries to be

occupied on the Continent, but rather to use them for one’s own

purposes later on.

• The fact that the principles of independent strategic bombing

were not yet solidly confirmed, the Spanish experience rather

having proved the effectiveness of direct and indirect support of

the ground forces.

Although the main incentive for Hitler and Goering to create the

Luftwaffe as a third service was the idea of an independent strategic

bomber force (as an attribute of a big power and as the raison d’être

of an air force independent of, and equal with, the other Services and

as a means to avoid the repetition of the bloody trench warfare of

WW I), independent strategic bombing was to be only the last of the

Luftwaffe’s three main tasks. The primary and continuous mission was

the destruction (or at least paralysis) of the enemy air force through

attacks on its ground organisation and production workshops. Later in

the war it was learned that this had also to be done by continuous air

battles. The second task was support of the operations of the ground

forces, support of the navy enjoying equal rank in theory, but

becoming the stepchild in practice because of lack of aircraft. The

bombing of the centres of enemy war potential (strategic bombing)

came last and was to be resorted to only when there was a standstill in

land warfare and when a decision of the war could not be brought

about otherwise, because this kind of air war consumed, so it was

believed, too much material and time before its effects (if there were

any at all) made themselves felt at the land front. The land front was

considered to be Germany’s main ‘theatre of war’. Frederick the Great

was aware that he could not sustain a long war and so were Germany’s

military leaders in subsequent centuries. After all, another means of

overcoming positional warfare had been developed, the strategic use

of tanks supported by the air force, a method that really functioned for

the first time in the western campaign.

The necessity to economise led to the early development of

navigational and bombing aids (Knickebein, X- and Y-Geräte), the

adoption of the dive-bomber and the extension of the dive-bombing

requirement, even to the He 177 heavy bomber. You will all know its

story and that, in order to reduce air resistance during the dive, two of

its four engines worked on one crankshaft. This caused so many

technical difficulties that the bomber never became operational. It was

finally built with four separate engines and designed for horizontal

bombing, but though about 1,200 He 177s were produced they could

not be flown for lack of fuel. The dive-bombing requirement reduced

the range of the bombers because of the extras needed and thus forced

the designers towards the short- and medium-range tactical bombers.

Lack of raw materials was one reason why the air staff in 1939

refused to develop area-covering munitions, and it was only in 1942,

after the incendiary attacks on Lübeck and Rostock that their

development was ordered. The necessity to economise, and the

recognition of the international laws governing the air war (which

were like Swiss cheese and very inconclusive at that time) were,

together with the classical continental European distinction between

combatants and non-combatants, the main reasons why the Luftwaffe

doctrine expressly forbade indiscriminate bombing to be part of the

strategic air war concept, except as a reprisal measure. I must say,

however, that the instrument of reprisal was resorted to so often that it

soon lost its meaning: the more so since it was British policy to carry

through strategic air attacks not as reprisals but as a method of warfare

and for a long time the only way they could reach into Germany.

It was accepted that no bomber force in the world was able to drop

its bombs exactly on target, either at the beginning of the war or later,

and that collateral damage was thus unavoidable. I can say, however,

that it was the Luftwaffe’s intention to adhere to the principle that its

foremost objective was the enemy armed forces and targets of military

relevance, until the spring of 1942. Admittedly (as in other bomber

forces) the necessities of war usually prevailed over non-intentional

collateral damage; civilian casualties were accepted if they could not

be avoided in the execution of operations. But even Hitler, who must

be blamed for many inhumane actions, warned his Chief of the Air

Staff not to wage an indiscriminate bombing war, only ten days after

his public announcement of 4 September 1940 that he would ‘erase’

British cities, and he repeated this order in his directive of 6 February

1941. Indiscriminate bombing would lead to nothing, he said. Of

course, Hitler did not warn for humanitarian reasons. It was the

economic point of view he considered, and his fear of British

retaliation.

When the Luftwaffe started to engage in some intentionally

indiscriminate bombing attacks on British country towns in 1942, the

so-called ‘Baedeker raids’, it did so without sufficient bombers

because these were tied down in Russia and the Mediterranean. The

V1 flying bomb, the development of which was accelerated in 1942,

was designed as an area-covering terror weapon and the V1 offensive

was designed to be an indiscriminate air war.

Let me repeat, after all this evidence, that the Luftwaffe was mainly

designed to be a co-operative air force in the widest sense, not a

strategic instrument or a terror instrument. Although this latter

function was propounded by the Germans themselves before the war,

to threaten potential enemy nations into submission, and deliberations

about the possible use of the Luftwaffe as an instrument of terror were

not abhorrent to the Luftwaffe’s leaders, either before or during the

war – such ideas were pondered over by most aviation writers and air

strategists at one time or another, all over the world.

I shall now try to demonstrate some of the consequences of the five

basic features of the Luftwaffe, insofar as I have not yet done so. The

most striking example of the narrowing of Luftwaffe staff and

command thinking to military matters and, within this limitation, the

dominance of operational matters over the support and infrastructure

sectors, was the organisation of the German Air Force High

Command. The Luftwaffe was a new service without much command

experience and it therefore changed its top echelon organisation more

often than any of the other Services. There was the difficulty of

combining the tactical with the technological side; there were personal

feuds between the top officers which were fostered by Goering’s

policy of ‘divide et impera’ and by favouritism.

Governing this top organisation until 1939 was the desire to

streamline it in accordance with the immediate requirements of the

expected short war, at the beginning of which all forces, including the

reserves, had to be used for the decisive blow. Chief of Staff

Jeschonnek reduced the General Staff to something like Goering’s

personal operational staff, confining it voluntarily to operational and

tactical matters and excluding, as an unnecessary burden, everything

not needed for the immediate purposes of operations, such as training,

technology and the inspectorates. The Chief of the General Staff also

assumed the position and duties of the Chief of the Luftwaffe

Operations Staff in order to shorten the chain of command and thus

make it more effective. The Quartermaster services had been

downgraded organisationally.

This was certainly an effective organisation for a short campaign

but turned out to be insufficient for a long war of attrition. The

reorganisation that took account of this came too late, in 1944 and

1945. The Luftwaffe General Staff had become an operations staff –

just for the execution of orders. Nowhere was there a permanent

planning staff, neither in the organisation of the Ministry, nor with the

air fleets. Nowhere was there a permanent advisory or co-ordinating

counsel or agency, for long-range planning, and (although the

necessity of conducting the air war economically was always stressed)

nowhere was there anything like an Operations Research Section.

Planning was only one of the many tasks of the operations officers on

the higher staffs. They did it besides their daily routine and

operational work and at the most for just a battle or for a short

campaign. There was no overall plan for the war in Germany, there

were no technical planning and advisory committees for the conduct

of the strategic air war against Britain; this was considered to be a

military domain. It was not until 1943 that the Chief of the General

Staff grew aware of the fact that this type of air war also required the

knowledge and advice of the civilian technical and economics experts

of the Armaments Ministry.

The predominance of the military aspects, and of operational

matters, was further reflected by the low esteem enjoyed by the

Quartermaster Service, employment in which could prejudice an

officer’s career. When the Operations Officer of Air Fleet 4 was given

the function of Quartermaster of his air fleet by the Commander-in-

Chief, Field Marshal von Richtofen (who also told him that this was

only an intermediate step to becoming the air fleet’s Chief of Staff),

the officer protested, even though a Quartermaster was higher in rank

than an Operations Officer in the Operations Section. Not the best

officers were assigned Quartermaster duties. There is ample proof that

many operations, indeed the entire war, was fought on the basis of

operational and political objectives and not on the basis of logistics.

The chief of the economy and armament department of the Supreme

Command of the Armed Forces admitted this in January 1942 in a

speech before his assembled armament inspectors. This is not to say,

that under certain circumstances, the quick and bold utilisation of a

favourable opportunity does not also lead to success, but this applies

more to the tactical and operational spheres. To base one’s strategy on

sudden opportunities does not seem to be a successful method.

Air transport as a means of supply was theoretically neglected until

1940, although the Luftwaffe carried out substantial air lift operations

between Morocco and Spain in 1936 at the beginning of the Spanish

Civil War. The Chiefs of blind flying training schools and of air

transport operations were one and the same person in the first years of

the war, since the same type of aircraft (the Ju 52) was used for both

purposes. Once aircraft support operations became necessary the

Ju 52s, with their instructor crews, were gathered together from the

training schools and assembled into ad hoc transport units. Had there

been an Air Transport Command early enough the problems of air

supply for Cholm, Demjansk and Stalingrad in Russia, and for Tunis,

would not have been given to Hitler so readily by Goering and the

Luftwaffe General Staff. This command was, however, only

established late in 1943 after the great losses in the air supply

operations of the winter 1942/43, losses that could never be replaced

and which substantially impeded the training of bomber crews.

This brings us to training, which, as Field Marshal Kesselring and

the Quartermaster General of the Luftwaffe confirmed after the war,

was the stepchild of the Luftwaffe. If cuts had to be made in the supply

of gasoline or of new combat planes, the training sector had to suffer

first. At the end of the war, a German fighter pilot received only one-

third of the flight training time of an American pilot and more than

50% of the flying accidents were due to inadequate training. The

number of aircraft lost without enemy action was generally higher

than that caused by enemy action and ranged around 1,800 aircraft per

month in early 1944 as against about 1,500 per month caused by

enemy action. The comparatively low esteem of the military for

technology resulted in important technical positions being filled by

incompetent people, the best-known case being that of Udet, who was

not the manager needed to direct air armament and the German

aviation industry. Goering appointed him because he knew that Hitler

regarded him as the most able and popular flyer in Germany.

In the Luftwaffe General Staff there was no civilian engineer or

scientifically trained officer in a position of responsibility and, as

mentioned above, there was organisationally a gap in the Luftwaffe

High Command between operations and technology. Goering

preferred highly decorated combat officers in positions of technical

responsibility; their combat experience counted more than the expert

opinions of engineers. Successful young engineers were, therefore,

allowed to demand alterations to aircraft already in series production

which resulted in delays in mass production. Jeschonnek, the Chief of

the General Staff of the Luftwaffe said in March 1942 that the front-

line officer should not have to accept everything that the aircraft

industry wanted to get rid of.

The Corps of Engineers of the Luftwaffe was created in 1935 to set

the active officers free for their operational tasks, with the result that

these officers, who were always the superiors of the engineers, were

not forced to familiarise themselves with technology, which for many

of them meant dirty fingers. In fact, when this uniformed civilian

Corps of Engineers was replaced by an Engineer Officer Corps in the

later years of the war, the Luftwaffe High Command could not make

up its mind as to whether or not those engineer officers were to bear

visible insignia marking them as engineer officers, because it was

feared that an officer recognisable as an engineer officer would not

enjoy the authority and reputation of an ordinary line officer. The

question was never solved during the war.

The prevalence of the operational point of view led responsible

officers to underestimate the importance of completing each

individual stage of aircraft development and to squeeze them together

in time so that series production began before testing had finished.

This happened elsewhere too, in times of need, but in the Luftwaffe it

was the rule and resulted in the jamming and delay of series

production. The best examples are the multipurpose Me 210 and

He 177. Goering, especially, had no idea of the duration of the

different development phases of aircraft. He was always astonished

and furious when he was confronted with the fact that this policy did

not lead to results as fast as he had thought. Lack of understanding of

the laws governing technical development and production, coupled

with the prevailing military principle of order and obedience, resulted

in the belief that the aircraft industry could be commanded like an

infantry company. Moreover, the technical uncertainty of the

responsible officers as to the type of aircraft suited best for each

purpose brought about too many experiments in aircraft designs. In

1943, Germany produced more than 50 types, with about 250

variations and modifications, against only 18 standard models of the

Americans. There were, in addition, more than 130 experimental

types.

The preoccupation of the General Staff with operational matters

further stifled the issue of tactical and technical requirements for the

direction of the aircraft industry and allowed this lavish

experimentation, when mass-production of the most important types

should have been the order of the day. On the other hand, Goering and

Field Marshal Milch, as well as Udet, seemed not to have sufficiently

understood the importance of continuity of research and development.

Goering and Milch especially, were more interested in production.

Before the war, the research funds decreased continually in relation to

the production funds and the aviation research department was

steadily downgraded organisationally until its chief resigned early in

1942. In early 1940, all research and development projects were

ordered to be stopped unless they yielded results within one year, after

which, it was thought, the war would be over. This, and not Hitler’s

later meddling with aircraft production, was the main reason why the

first jet fighter, the Me 262, was not mass produced earlier. There was

also Milch’s reluctance to risk putting a revolutionary new aircraft,

with all its teething problems, into production.

Obviously, the leader of the Luftwaffe assumed that the conduct of

an air war required a good tactical general staff officer in the first

place, and could eventually do without technical general staff officers.

So, under the pressure of Hitler’s war policy, the Technical General

Staff College was disbanded two years after its establishment, and

technical courses at the College were completely dropped in late 1938,

to be resumed only late in the war without success. There was also

much reluctance among general staff officer candidates to become

technical general staff officers because of the latter’s low reputation.

In this they shared the fate of the engineers in the Luftwaffe. The

disdain with which the latter were regarded by many officers was

enhanced by the fact that officers usually had a broader education,

better manners, were able to lead men and had an esprit de corps.

Above all, they had the authority of command which the engineers did

not have. Many a young engineer left the Engineer Corps to become

an active officer at a lower rank, but with a chance of a better career.

The relatively low esteem enjoyed by technologists and scientists is

best demonstrated by the fact that such people, if they had not had

previous military training, were drafted as ordinary soldiers and put

into the trenches with a rifle, instead of being kept in their civilian

capacities and put into laboratories. This attitude changed only later in

the war, when it was too late.

Intelligence was another field which did not enjoy a reputation

comparable to that of operations. The best staff officers were not

assigned to such duties and, after the first setbacks, Goering and Hitler

no longer wanted to believe in intelligence. The Luftwaffe intelligence

service was disorganised as much as the entire German intelligence

community, the co-ordination of the different Services being

attempted only in 1944. German air intelligence substantially

underestimated the three main opponents, England, the Soviet Union

and the United States, in the decisive pre- and early war years,

especially since ideological bias and euphoria arising from initial

successes impeded its work. Whether Hitler, had he received correct

data on the enemy, would have thought twice about going to war is,

however, questionable. The results of intelligence work were usually

realistic in relation to the enemy deployment, front-line strength,

training, organisation and equipment, ie as regards tactics and

operations. The signals intelligence service produced particularly good

results. The cypher service, however, seems to have produced very

little, and only information of a tactical kind.

Where intelligence failed was in its strategic perceptions

concerning the enemy’s economy, production capacity, morale and so

on. To explain this failure one must remember that the Luftwaffe

general staff officers who were in charge of the major positions within

air intelligence, were trained more in the military field and not so

much in areas important in grand strategy, such as economics, politics,

science and technology. The belief in a short war, which had to be

decided right at the start, by the use of all available forces led to the

assumption that the potential that might be developed by the enemy

later on in the war could be neglected. It was rather short sighted, but

that’s how it was. It is no wonder that, in a society that valued fighting

and leadership qualities in the field more than good performance in the

supporting sectors and at the desk of the intelligence officer in the

rear, there was a traditional disdain for intelligence work, which was

considered to be close to spying. It should also be kept in mind that a

military organisation that cherished the principle of the offensive is

naturally more inclined to impress its will on the enemy by force,

rather than attempt to understand him. In fact, only after Germany had

been thrown onto the defensive did the Luftwaffe reorganise and

intensify its intelligence activities, because now it needed to know

more about the intentions of the enemy, in order to take appropriate

measures for defence. Organisationally the intelligence officer on a

staff was always subordinate to the operations officer.

As regards the principle of the offensive, let me just say that it

prevented the timely preparation of a strong German air defence. You

all know the words ‘fortress without a roof’. As to the consequences

of the overemphasis on co-operative air war, it suffices to say that the

German bomber force had its greatest losses in this type of warfare –

co-operative close escort – especially in Russia – something that was

considered to be the most difficult kind of air war before the Spanish

Civil War. Low-level attacks by medium bombers were frequent and

costly and in 1943 the German bomber force had to be renewed twice,

ie the losses were three times its initial strength at the beginning of the

year.

Many of the fatal consequences of the main ideas around which the

Luftwaffe was built up can be explained by the pressures of the

situation: ie by the pressure exercised by Hitler to expand the armed

forces (especially the Luftwaffe, which had to be established

practically from scratch) and by the resulting armament in breadth

rather than in depth, which cared for front-line strength more than for

spare parts and reserves, and was to make the armed forces ready for

the assumed short war as soon as possible. This explains the

Luftwaffe’s attitude towards technological research, training, strategic

intelligence and reserves. Indeed, Field Marshal Milch told the

Director-General for Air Armament, Udet, before the war that Hitler

would conduct only short wars, so that all aircraft repairs could be

done during the breaks between the campaigns. The fiasco came when

the war turned into a European, and later into a World, War of attrition

which Hitler had hoped to avoid by settling affairs in Europe before

the big powers of East and West became too strong. Such an

explanation, however, can only partially be accepted and would

otherwise be rather superficial, because it neglects the fact that the

traditional German militarist’s thinking led to quite a few of Hitler’s

demands. This does not mean that all the military leaders also

accepted Hitler’s political and ideological goals, but the limitation of

higher military leadership thinking to military matters, which was to

Hitler’s liking, had started already under the elder Moltke and had

been intensified by Count Schlieffen, until General Ludendorff

developed the idea of total war, in which politics was the servant of

war. So attempts to widen the horizon of general staff officers, failed

both in the 1860s and in the 1920s and early 1930s. Logistics, another

of the non-operational fields, had been the weak point of the so-called

Schlieffen Plan before WW I. Rommel was another good example of a

tactician for whom logistics became important only when it did not

function. The priority of the offensive was always a fundamental

element in German military thought, mainly for the geo-strategic

reason already mentioned.

The treatment of technology and technicians in the Luftwaffe also

had deeper causes, originating from the social and political situation

since the beginning of the industrialisation process, which started half

a century later in Germany than in England. Most of the Luftwaffe

leaders were born in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, well before

the First World War. At this time the army would have preferred

officer candidates from high schools which stressed the sciences and

modern languages, the so-called Realgymnasien. For political reasons,

however, it looked for candidates from the Humanistische Gymnasien,

high schools that stressed the humanities, because they were the sons

of families of the higher classes, of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy,

which stood for throne and altar against the egalitarian and democratic

ideas of the lower, more technical-minded classes of workers and

craftsmen, who were even suspected of intending to overthrow the

monarchy. The Humanistische Gymnasien produced graduates with a

classical and all-round education, humanists who did not like the

specialisation that went with technology. This does not mean that they

did not like science. On the contrary, many of them became famous

scientists. But scientific achievement to them was something that

depended on the capabilities, on the genius, of the educated individual.

In short, graduates from the Humanistische Gymnasien were not

particularly prepared for the technical professions. More than 75% of

the later Luftwaffe generals came from upper middle class officer

families or belonged to the nobility. Only 17% of the generals’ fathers

had technical professions. Two-thirds of the generals grew up in rural

environments. Only 5% of the Luftwaffe generals and general staff

officers obtained technical degrees. During the time of the Weimar

Republic these officers could not familiarise themselves with higher

technology because Germany was not allowed to have aircraft and

heavy weapons. The belief was kept alive that the officer with a higher

education was superior to the engineering specialist and could carry

out the majority of duties. So, when the Technical General Staff

College was closed, it was obviously believed that the ‘tactical’

general staff officer could handle operations as well as technology,

whereas it had never been assumed that the technical general staff

officer would be able to do both. To demonstrate the prevailing belief

that the broadly-educated officer was competent in the technological

sector and at the same time to elucidate the misconception of

technology which existed, I should like to quote a sentence from an

official report on Luftwaffe performance during the Wehrmacht

manoeuvres in 1937: ‘Officers’, it said, ‘who received commissions as

commanders of airfield service companies for the duration of the

manoeuvre were not able to fulfil their difficult task, even if they were

public prosecutors.’ This implied that a public prosecutor (ie a person

who had studied law at a university and was considered to be an

educated man) was expected to be able to run a highly technical outfit

without any preparation.

National Socialist ideology thought of the rational approach to life

in an industrialised society as ‘Americanism’, against which it

glorified pre-industrial and irrational values like faithfulness, bravery

and so on; without these, of course, no society and no armed force

could exist, but they needed to be supplemented by rational values.

The ideology thereby created an atmosphere which did not exactly

favour a rational approach to life and to technology. There were many

good technologists and scientists in Germany and Hitler used them for

his purposes, but he, and National Socialism, did not want to submit to

the laws and regularities inherent in technology. Technology was

considered to be an art, the product of the creative individual genius;

that a lot of team work by ordinary men was necessary to achieve

results here was simply not understood. So, when the Germans

realised that they were far behind the Western Allies in radar

technology, Goering staged an inventors’ contest in the belief that a

spark in the brain of a genius could bridge the gap. The suitably

qualified scientists – who first had to be released from the armed

forces – could, however, not solve the problem at short notice, as may

be understood.

Let me now mention the so-called Auftragstaktik (mission type

order) as a further cause of inadequate technical understanding among

many air force officers. The army, where most of them had come

from, had developed this principle in the previous century. It

permitted a commander to execute an order in accordance with the

actual situation and did not lay down how he had to execute it. In land

operations, for which this principle was developed, it allowed quick

changes in response to new situations. In air operations, however, the

principle did not work so smoothly, because they were largely

conditioned by predetermined technological factors, which could not

be changed so readily and required much more planning and

adherence to advance programming.

Once an air operation had started, there was little scope for further

orders and many an older Luftwaffe officer, having been educated at

the Humanistische Gymnasien, and originally trained in the army, was

driven to despair. One of them wrote after the war that, whereas

general staff work used to be an art, in the Luftwaffe it was a

mechanical business with a slide-rule, which required ‘just common

sense’, organisational abilities and some technical skill. Such duties he

obviously considered to be beneath the general staff officer. Younger

officers certainly thought otherwise, but they had no say.

The neo-humanistic belief in the well-educated individual who was

able to understand and fulfil a multitude of tasks had produced in the

early 19th century the principle that officers could be assigned to any

kind of role. In a perverted form this ideal seems to have amalgamated

with the otherwise social-Darwinistic leader-principle of the National

Socialists. Goering, in particular, favoured it in the Luftwaffe. While

the other service headquarters were called High Command of the

Army or Navy he had his Air Ministry and Air Force High Command

designated as ‘The Reich Minister of Aviation and Commander-in-

Chief of the Luftwaffe’ until shortly before the end of the war. The

belief in the capabilities of the individual leader went so far that,

whenever a problem had to be solved quickly, Goering appointed a

dictator (eg when electronic valves became rare, a tube-dictator) or a

plenipotentiary for the specific task and gave him almost unlimited

authority to deal with it. At the end of the war there existed many of

these plenipotentiaries, each encroaching on each other’s business and

creating turmoil. Together with the traditional military principle of

obedience, which had been instilled into the generals while they were

still schoolboys in a Gymnasien before WW I, and with the prevailing

Nazi-authoritarianism, it was this individual approach to leadership

that tied the Luftwaffe to the traditional authoritarian style of

command requiring almost omniscient leaders at the top. In addition,

the traditionally high reputation of the military, and of the officer, in

militarised German society created a gap between civilians and the

military and induced the latter to look at war as the exclusive business

of the soldier. Since there was not much horizontal exchange of

information and since the staff organisation stressed the vertical lines

of authority ending in the respective commander or leader – for

instance, the only connection between the various intelligence services

was in Hitler’s head – the leader was supposed to be able to decide

virtually everything on his own with little advice from experts and was

certainly overburdened. Another example of the belief in the all-round

capabilities of the individual staff officer was the early attempt to

educate general staff officers to be good operations officers at the

same time as good engineers, an attempt which failed.

For all of these reasons, the Luftwaffe did not develop a co-

operative style of command and leadership, as I have indicated already

when mentioning the absence of mixed military and civilian advisory

and controlling bodies. It did not try to compensate for the natural

limitations of the knowledge and abilities of any one individual leader

by establishing boards and committees. One would have expected that

in an air force, a highly technical instrument capable of interfering

with enemy economies and consuming the highest share of the

nation’s armament expenditure, a co-operative style of command

would have been the first thing to develop, because there, more than in

the army, many technical and economic factors had to be considered.

No single person could master all of these issues without the

permanent advice of experts and committees, firmly established

throughout the whole organisation. For the conduct of a strategic

bombing campaign it was, for instance, necessary to have the advice

of civilian experts on questions of the economy, the industrial grid

system, science and so on – just as Bomber Command and the British

Air Staff were assisted by various civilian ministries and agencies.

Officers by themselves cannot know everything necessary for such

a war. If Goering and Hitler chose to ask outside individuals for

advice, they did so only on an ad hoc basis. Advisory and controlling

boards ought also to have been set up in the fields of operations and

technical administration of the Luftwaffe. But since the officers had

the say here, and there was a gap between the civilian and military

side in German society, the climate for such an organisation did not

exist. Moreover, Hitler’s basic order No 1, of 11 January 1940, for the

safeguarding of military secrecy, prevented the steady flow of

technical, political, scientific, military and economic information that

had to form the basis for higher decision-making in a modern war,

because nobody was to know more than was necessary for his

immediate task. Hitler – and similarly Goering and many little

Führers in this social-Darwinistic system of command – relied on his

own genius and refused to submit to a rigid routine of regular

attendance at conferences of permanent boards. When the Wehrmacht-

Akademie, in 1938, drew up a manual for the conduct of war at the

highest level (Kriegführung) providing for such a top organisation,

Hitler prevented this manual from becoming effective. He did not

want to have anybody telling him whom he would have to consult and

when. The overall conduct of the war he made his own domain. This

was also one of the reasons why the general staff training of the

Luftwaffe did not include courses in grand strategy and why the

Wehrmacht-Akademie, which tried to train higher officers in this,

ceased to exist in 1938. The Supreme Command of the Armed Forces,

and especially the Armed Forces Operations Staff, was kept small and

could thus not undertake the effective direction of the war as a whole

and the operations of all the Services. Under all these circumstances it

is no wonder that nothing like the British and Allied committee

system ever developed. Hitler’s conferences were usually

monologues; Field Marshal Milch’s air armament conferences were

parliamentary debates with very few definite or recognisable

conclusions and hardly any decisions to be carried out. Too many

people participated.

In conclusion I should like to point out that many of the problems

of the Luftwaffe were also encountered by other air forces, and indeed

still occur in new disguises. The Luftwaffe was too young – just 4 to 6

years of age, when the war started – to have enabled its leaders to gain

sufficient experience in the handling of such a highly technical

service, and during the war it had no time to cope with the multitude

of problems which were mainly caused by Hitler’s irresponsible

policy and strategy, on which the Luftwaffe had next to no influence.

Goering’s political influence on Hitler had been on the decline since

1938. The Luftwaffe had no time to get away from the old army style

of command and its leaders were still too much involved in thoughts

and attitudes that corresponded more to those of a pre-industrial and

authoritarian society and had not yet developed to match the degree of

industrialisation which Germany had now reached and which had

enabled her to build a strong air force. The mental approach to the air

war was inadequate. While the outward appearance and form of

contemporary RAF and British staff documents already demonstrated

a great amount of rationality, comparable German documents did not.

This indicates an irrational, or romantic, approach to the overall

direction of the war on the German side (though not to tactics and

operations) in contrast to the systematic grand strategy employed on

the British and Allied side. On the strategic and grand strategic level,

Luftwaffe leadership was poor. But within its own limitations and the

ones imposed on it from the outside – here I mean Hitler, the National

Socialist regime, the war itself, and allied superiority in men, material

and advanced thinking – the Luftwaffe, I believe, performed very well.

That it lasted so well through this long war was mainly due to its good

tactical and operational leadership, its initial technical superiority and

the fighting virtues of its soldiers. The fact must, however, be faced

that it was the fate of the Luftwaffe to have to serve Hitler’s political,

and inhumane ideological aims in the most terrible war ever

experienced.

What I wish to make clear above all is that if the air war, as

Richard Overy says, was a test of the modernity of industrialised

nations, then its outcome was the proof of that modernity.

SEMINAR ON 31 OCTOBER 1988

THE ROYAL AIR FORCE AND CLANDESTINE

OPERATIONS IN NORTH-WEST EUROPE

Introduction by Air Marshal Sir Frederick Sowrey

This evening we have amongst our guests those who have

participated in special operations in north-west Europe. It would be

invidious of me to pull out the names of those great protagonists and

gallant operators who took part, but perhaps I could just mention those

who are not members of the Society, in no particular order except the

way they are sitting in the front row – Brigadier Michael Calvert,

starter of the SAS, great leader, SOE operator in north-west Germany;

Robin Hooper, again involved, himself, to a very great degree; Sir

Douglas Dodds-Parker, delighted to see him with us this evening, and

Sir Brooks Richards who is also President of the Special Services

Club. A very warm welcome to you, gentlemen, from the Royal Air

Force Historical Society.

But to the team which we have on the platform, in the order in

which they are going to speak – Professor Michael Foot, Group

Captain R Hockey, Air Chief Marshal Sir Lewis Hodges, Group

Captain Hugh Verity and Mr Tony Brooks, who was our man on the

ground, despite in fact being put in from the air.

Professor Michael Foot will take the chair and there will be a short

break before the discussion period, during which the panel will take

questions, discussion and contributions, which we hope this

magnificent audience will make towards an august and historic

evening. It’s all yours, Sir.

Professor Michael Foot

In Air Chief Marshal Sir Christopher Foxley-Norris’s Royal Air

Force at War, which the Benevolent Fund published in 1983, two

chapters dealt with tonight’s subject, and the author of each is here.

One of them, Bob Hodges, will talk about the business of parachute

dropping in which he engaged and the other, Hugh Verity, will say

something about what it was like manoeuvring a light aircraft; he went

twenty-nine times to France in 1943, landed, and came back. Before

either of them speak, Ron Hockey will explain how the thing started

up from scratch, and at the end, Tony Brooks, who was really at the

sharp end, spending two years in France pretending to be French, will

explain what that was like.

This was an odd corner of the war; among the oddest. It was not

the first field into which somebody would put himself who was

anxious for personal publicity or personal renown. It had to be kept

well out of the public eye, though oddly enough the main airfield at

Tempsford from which the special duties squadrons operated was

alongside the main line from Kings Cross to Edinburgh, and abutted

on the Great North Road, so it was not all that private. Every wartime

operation had to be secret until it took place (that was taken for

granted) but the special duties squadrons did not enjoy the publicity

that so often attached successively to fighter and to bomber squadrons

because what they were doing had to remain secret as they were doing

it for the Secret Services. In the earliest days it didn’t seem that any of

their work would ever be admitted and some of it may remain

inadmissible even at the present day. It was an extra lonely kind of

flying because outside one’s own flight hardly a soul in the country

was aware of what one was doing. It also called for dedicated

airmanship and, even for the Royal Air Force, an unusual degree of

readiness to press on. For a few dizzy weeks in the summer of 1940

the Chiefs of Staff, believing they had no other offensive resources at

all, looked to sabotage and subversion from inside the Nazi new order

as their only available weapon. By the time the Special Operations

Executive (SOE), the dirty tricks department, had been set up, hardly

before time, in mid-July 1940, the Chiefs of Staff were already

beginning to look for salvation elsewhere. SOE could, it turned out, do

two main kinds of thing. It could organise sabotage, or it could help to

organise secret armies. Each task required stores and agents to explain

how to use them, who had to be put in, because there was no other

way of getting them in that was practical in any quantity, by air.

It would be going too far to say that without the RAF’s support the

resistance movements of north-west Europe could have done nothing,

but they would certainly, without that support, have done a great deal

less than they did. The first British clandestine air operation in this

war, of which I have heard, is supposed to have involved the

parachuting of a single man, near Paris, as early as 20th June 1940,

two days before the French signed the Armistice, too secret to go into

anybody’s operational record book, but years later the man, who had

become vain, talked. Phillip Schneidau, recruited into the Secret

Services by J C Masterman on the international hockey field,

parachuted into France in September 1940 and was brought out next

month by Lysander. Both these operations were for SIS and they will

remain unacknowledged. The first attempt for SOE was made on the

night of the Luftwaffe’s big raid on Coventry, 14/15 November 1940.

A Whitley got to the neighbourhood of Morlaix in north Brittany, the

solitary agent took a long look through the hole in the floor and

decided he wasn’t going to jump. Before much more could happen,

there was a stiff hedge to cross – Portal’s opposition.

Gladwyn Jebb, now Lord Gladwyn, then SOE’s Chief Executive

Officer, sounded Portal out early in 1941 about an Air Ministry

proposal to drop some Frenchmen into south Brittany to disrupt the

Luftwaffe’s Pathfinder Force by ambushing a busload of pilots. Portal

replied on the same day, ‘I think the dropping of men dressed in

civilian clothes for the purpose of attempting to kill members of the

opposing forces is not an operation with which the Royal Air Force

should be associated. I think you will agree that there is a vast

difference in ethics between the time-honoured operation of dropping

a spy from the air and this entirely new scheme for dropping what one

can only call assassins.’ Jebb managed to talk Portal round. The

RAF’s first successful operation for SOE, a flight of more than a

dozen hours in an unheated Whitley to Poland and back, dropping

three men at the limit of’ the aircraft’s range, took place on 15/16

February 1941. That French party dropped into Brittany after all in

March, only to find their target already dispersed. The first party from

the rival independent – that is, non-Gaullist – French section dropped

into the centre of France in May. Thereafter, gradually, these flights,

though always exciting for the agents taking part, became for the air

crews something of a routine.

Though Portal had been talked round, Harris, then his deputy, soon

thereafter Commander-in-Chief of Bomber Command, remained

hostile to SOE throughout the war. He had a sound, professional

reason for this. Aircraft allotted solely to secret work were, from

Bomber Command’s point of view, part-wasted assets because they

could only work for 10 or 12 days out of every 28. They had to have

moonlight to see where they were going, just as the agents and

reception committees to whom they worked had to have moonlight to

see what they were doing. As Sir Robin Brook put it in retrospect, in

SOE, ‘for at least two years the moon was as much of a goddess as she

ever was in a near-eastern religion.’ This apparently lunatic line

concealed some hardbitten airmanship. At a time when many aircraft

in Bomber Command did well to know what country, let alone what

county, they were flying over, aircraft on special duties had already

begun, not only to find particular counties, but to find particular fields

in them. This they could only do by meticulous map-reading both

before and during the flight; much easier of course for the navigator of

a multi-engined aircraft than for a Lysander pilot who had to do

everything himself. Once SOE settled down to its sums, the requests it

made for aircraft became, from Bomber Command’s point of view,

alarmingly large.

I might instance the ‘Carte’ organisation with which the SOE

sections working into France were toying in the spring of 1942; that

was going to require nearly 4,000 tons of stores to get armed. As it

turned out, ‘Carte’ was purely notional; it was a complete illusion; it

had no real existence at all, apart from one man with one bright idea,

but the idea that it might be necessary to shift this quantity of stores,

was one that SOE staff thus learnt to handle comparatively early.

Portal remained sceptical. He used to describe Bomber Command as a

gilt-edged investment certain to bring in a return, a steady return,

while SOE was a gamble which might bring in a fortune or might

bring in nothing at all. There were never anything like enough aircraft

from SOE’s point of view. Care was taken to slot their allocation and

their use as carefully as possible into the general course of allied

strategy and by the spring of 1944, though not till the spring of 1944,

the United States Army Air Force had begun to lend its powerful

support.

To satisfy the RAF’s sense of the proprieties, SOE never actually

gave orders to operational units. A new sub-branch of the Air

Intelligence Directorate, called AI2c, was set up to deal with SOE’s

operations staff. This staff requested AI2c to mount operations

arranging them, if need be, in an order of priority; AI2c then directed

Tempsford to carry them out. Harris is said, perhaps unfairly, to have

picked on Tempsford for the special duty squadrons’ base because it

was the foggiest airfield in his command. Almost all the work that

Tempsford did, about nine-tenths of it, was for SOE rather than for the

intelligence, or the escape, services. But there is one escape operation

that does command mention. A girl called Trix Terwindt, a former

KLM air hostess, was dropped very late on 13 February 1943, to an

SOE reception in Holland and was handcuffed at the side of her

dropping zone, for SOE’s work in Holland at the time was entirely in

the hands of the Gestapo. Her training as an air hostess stood her in

excellent stead: she was trained to be used to sudden shocks. She, at

least, of those fifty-odd unfortunate prisoners said nothing she should

not have said, kept her head, kept quiet and survived. In the

Netherlands, only, the loss rate on special duty operations went up to

18%, one aircraft in every six dispatched, so in June 1943 the Air

Ministry imposed a temporary ban on special duty flights there.

At the same time in France, the Germans were often aware of

Lysander and Hudson flights through the notorious Dericourt who was

working for as many sides as would pay him. The Germans in France

took care never to interfere, not wishing to kill the goose that laid a

number of golden eggs for them. When, in November 1943,

operational responsibility for special duties flights into north-west

Europe was transferred from AI2c to Bomber Command, Harris

moved at once. He did his best, in conjunction with several of SOE’s

many enemies in Whitehall, to get SOE wound up altogether and not

until January 1944 when Lord Selbourne, the Minister in charge of

SOE, managed to play the ace of trumps in the shape of Churchill’s

personal support, were both SOE and Special Duties Operations put

firmly back on to the road. They are only just coming forward into

respectable public gaze. Historians of international relations and

historians of war usually omit what Andrew and Dilks have called ‘the

missing dimension’, the problems of intelligence, security and

subversion that can dominate so much of government policy.

Inevitably the question comes up – did these operations do any good?

Or were they, as Harris always maintained, scandalous diversions

from the proper task of the main force?

Some of SOE’s main triumphs, and they did exist, were not in

north-west Europe. That extraordinary series, for example of

smuggling and black market deals in Chiang Kai Shek’s China that

netted £77M, about £950M at today’s prices, and enabled SOE to

wind up with its accounts in the black. But some were, Eisenhower

reckoned, for instance, that resistance had been worth up to half a

dozen divisions to him in the course of Operation OVERLORD, for

which SOE had caused the RAF to deliver arms for about half a

million men into France. As I have said elsewhere, arms were as

indispensable to a successful resistance movement as rain is to a

farmer; no arms – no armed struggle.

Before Eisenhower’s armies landed in France, one of SOE’s best

agents there, Harry Ree, had invented a technique of blackmail-

sabotage. The agent calls on a factory manager, carefully chosen of

course, and explains that if the manager does not allow a little discreet

sabotage, the whole plant may be laid flat by an air raid – a

tremendous saver of casualties had it only been worked out sooner and

much more widely applied. Of actual sabotage there was a good deal,

especially in France and Denmark. I was able in my book on SOE in

France to include a list, originally worked out by Tony Brooks, of

ninety-three enterprises put out of’ action for various lengths of time

with a total weight of plastic considerably smaller than the bomb load

of a single Mosquito. On the secret army front also, quite a lot got

done. How much might be summarised in a table, not yet published on

this side of the Channel, of the quantities of warlike stores parachuted

on SOE’s indent into various parts of Europe:

Yugoslavia16,469 tons

France11,333 tons

Italy5,907 tons

Greece4,205 tons

Albania1,205 tons

Denmark700 tons

Poland600 tons

Rest of Europe2,327 tons

Yugoslavia, you see, got much the most, the odd 469 tons were

probably food, but all the rest were arms or explosives. France got

11,000 tons, Italy nearly 6,000, Greece 4,000, Albania just over 1,000;

Denmark, which came rather late to the business of resistance, 700

tons; Poland only 600 tons, because it was so far away and aircraft

going there were not allowed to land in Russia – they had to come

back. The rest of Europe, Holland, Belgium, Norway and a few

oddments such as Czechoslovakia thrown in.

In these operations the RAF forged a strong, though usually

unnoticed, link between this country and the particular districts where

they reached their climax of a parachute drop or a clandestine landing.

That, during a world war, a local stretch of meadow or moorland

could be picked out for individual attention sometimes seemed not

much less than a miracle to members of reception committees. It did

not suit the diplomats, either side of the Channel or the North Sea, to

remember this later – it was too far outside the normal run of

diplomacy. There are still many witnesses alive to testify to this fact

and the well of affection for England arising from it has not quite

dried up. It was also of supreme importance to all the occupied

countries that their citizens should regain, if they could, the sense of

national self-respect that they had lost at the time of occupation and

defeat which through resistance, as it was armed and fostered by SOE,

they could. And much can be forgiven the organisation that stymied

Hitler’s attempts to build an atomic bomb.

I am now going to hand you over to the man who dropped, himself,

the two men trained by SOE who helped to get rid of hydrogen –

Group Captain Hockey.

Group Captain Ron Hockey

I have been asked to talk about the early days of the build-up of

this unit and the days when we were trying to sort out what we had to

do – tactics, procedures and all that sort of thing. The initial RAF unit

which was known as 419 Flight, was formed at North Weald, north of

London, on 20 August 1940. Its original purpose was the aerial

transport of SIS personnel and one of its early operations, of which

you have heard, was the deposit and collection of the late Phillip

Schneidau from France in 1940. Phillip’s story of the eventual landing

near Oban and the difficulty of identifying himself and the pilot of the

Lysander, Wally Farley, to the local Home Guard and police was a

classic yarn and always of interest to his restricted circle, invariably

told with his usual humorous anecdotes. Phillip was a great chap and

we miss him very much.

I eventually joined 419 Flight from my previous unit at Stradishall

in November 1940. The original aircraft establishment was two

Whitley Vs and one Lysander. We had five pilots and all captains

were very experienced for that era. Most had done much flying pre-

war: 1,500 hours was laid down as the minimum requirement. At that

time we carried co-pilots for navigation and map-reading purposes

except in the Lysander. In those days, there was no separate navigator

trade in the RAF and all pilots were trained in navigation up to a basic

standard. Later, air observers, so called, were trained in navigation and

bomb-aiming and eventually these specialities also became separated.

Co-pilots continued to be used for the very long sorties, to help with

the pedalling and also for training purposes, of course.

My initial briefing was to carry out a number of the longer Whitley

sorties followed by a few shorter Lysander operations, depending

upon operational requirements. This original policy was overtaken by

events. Because of the formation of SOE, its expansion and its

demand for our specialised services through an ever-widening area of

Europe, the original policy never caught up with events until after 161

Squadron was formed.

The original unit was later renumbered 1419 Flight because of the

advent of Canadian units, all of whom took the 400 sequence. We

were flying from Newmarket racecourse and were raised to Squadron

strength in late 1941. After a short return to Stradishall it moved to its

final destination at Tempsford in March and April 1942.

I had the job of moving the squadron from Stradishall and I think

Professor Foot said it was picked because it was the foggiest

aerodrome in Bomber Command. I think it was the boggiest

aerodrome in Bomber Command, because when we moved in only the

runways were just showing through the water and when I inspected

the aircrew accommodation, most of it was a foot under water as well

– Nissen huts and so forth. So the first job I had to do even before we

unbogged one of the aircraft was to billet all the aircrew out – eighty

of them anyway – in the local village that same night. I must say that

the police really reacted pretty swiftly and we got them all out that

same evening.

Well now, by this time the expanded unit, now 138 Squadron, was

operating over a wide area including Norway, Poland, I don’t have to

tell you where it is, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, as well as France,

Belgium and Holland. Sorties were also flown into Yugoslavia on one

or two occasions, staging through Malta. This, we found. was not very

cost-effective, as our very few aircraft were away from base so long,

often jeopardising other priority sorties, and so 148 Squadron, which

was based in the Middle East, took over this area, operating initially

from Derna in about 1942. A small number of Halifaxes, Mark I and

Mark II aircraft, were made available in late 1941 for the longer

sorties, although Whitleys had been used for the initial flights to

Poland and Czechoslovakia. The latter, in October 1941, succeeded in

inserting radio signals facilities, allowing the first direct contacts

between the Czechs and London since the occupation. The first

Halifax sortie from the unit in December 1941 was also to

Czechoslovakia carrying the assassination squad which eventually

eliminated Heydrich. The provision of larger aircraft allowed more

load to be carried further. Packing facilities of SOE to provide the

additional containers were sorely tried by the sudden increase of

capacity. The aircrew naturally always wished to carry their maximum

load, which could vary with range of sortie. When SOE packers

caught up with the capacity available there were occasionally

complaints from the field as the load was beyond the capacity of the

transport available.

A few experienced ex-bomber crews from the Polish Air Force

joined 138 Squadron in early 1942. These were trained on Halifaxes

with the squadron and were mad keen to fly to their homeland. They

were a great acquisition to the unit and performed excellently. In 1942

further expansion took place by the formation of a further squadron.

161 Squadron was formed from B Flight of 138 as a nucleus. Most of

the Whitley and all of the Lysander aircraft moved to 161, leaving 138

to specialise in the longer sorties. Other aircraft were considered from

time to time and in 1941 extensive trials were conducted during the

period we were at Newmarket and Stradishall with a Martin Maryland

to determine whether the season of the longer sorties could be

extended with a faster aircraft, up to 300 mph, particularly to Poland,

etc. Unfortunately the Maryland proved unsuitable due to fouling of

the tailplane by parachutes causing unacceptable damage. Also the

windscreen reflections at night were confusing and could not be

improved without major fuselage modification. I don’t think the

Americans ever flew them at night actually. The Curtiss electrical

constant speed propellers were also prone to run away without

warning and rather liable to give a noisy greeting at an inopportune

moment. So we had to scrub that one. It was an ex-French Maryland,

actually, originally ordered by the French and so of course the first

thing we had to do was to change the throttle direction otherwise we’d

be in problems there. All our French aircraft opened their throttles by

pulling them back for some reason – I suppose that’s because they

drive on the right hand side of the road.

The Halifax, I think, was a sturdy aircraft with enough redundant

structure to keep it flying if damaged in action – this is very important,

I tell you, with military aircraft; it was also good for servicing repair,

with the structure subdivided for component replacement. The

Liberator for example is all in one piece, you can’t take the wings off

without taking the rivets out, so if you have to repair it you’ve got to

put it back in the building jig. A Merlin-engined version of the Halifax

was used because of its better fuel consumption and longer range. The

later Bristol-engined ones were rather thirstier of course, so we kept

the Merlin ones. The fuel carried for maximum range was 2,732

gallons, if anyone is interested; I can always remember it. With more

recent machines an additional wing-tip tank gave 2,982 gallons, so

that would keep your car going for a little while! The later Merlin 20

and 22 engines in the Halifax had a coolant mixture of 70/30

water/glycol which was a great improvement on the Merlin 10 or the

Whitley which had 100% glycol and so if you had an engine fire and

you got to the flash point of glycol – it of course added to the

conflagration, which was quite dangerous for the Whitley. In May

1944, after my time in the unit, Stirling aircraft replaced Halifaxes

when the Stirling proved inadequate for main-force bombing due to

height limitations. By that time the longer sorties to Poland, etc, were

being organised from Foggia in Italy.

Now just a few points about some of the problems. There were a

few problems, particularly with the longer sorties in the early days but

we tried to anticipate as many as possible. One of the major problems

was weather reporting. For our targets in eastern Europe there was

little information and generally you had to assess and find out. The

Group Met Offices were generally concerned about Main Force

operations. and naturally could not give priority to a few odd places on

the weather map, particularly with no reports in the area. There was

also the problem of security, and going to the Met Office and saying

we want to know what the weather is ‘there’ was a breach of security

right away, of course. Nearer sorties were easier and often results of

Met Flight sorties were available which could confirm probably local

synoptic changes. The service certainly improved when we arrived at

Tempsford with our own Met Office.

It was the long jobs which presented the problems, as conditions

may be suitable over the target area and yet be bad en route.

Remember, we were still in the era of icing problems so there were

often abortive operations, and it was very frustrating for a crew to go

time after time on the same operation and have to bring the whole load

back, knowing that they or another crew would have to repeat the

same trip again shortly. This required a special type of crew on these

long operations, often 10 to 12 hours, who were really dedicated to the

job, because there were no alternative targets in this sort of work.

To deduce the weather pattern whilst in flight, analysis of wind

vectors could help. One requirement is to set the altimeter, at the

correct datum of course, to monitor the height above ground in the

target area. There were no radar altimeters in those times. The

operating height for parachuting was generally about 500 ft. This

datum setting could vary considerably from one’s starting datum and

30 millibars lower would indicate about 1,000 ft over-reading. Rather

like Russian roulette of course, always hoping you’re on the right side.

Having lost two trailing aerials in the trees in Czechoslovakia, I have

some sympathy with it. The associated navigation on the long sorties

was right back to basics. As electronic boxes were developed so they

could be used when within range (for example Gee, also equipment

like Rebecca/Eureka and S-phone which were developed later) but

these could not be dropped in some countries because of

compromising equipment, or where ground facilities for secure

transport of such loads were not available in difficult terrain. There

were some enemy DF stations (which needed decoding) but were

generally too inaccurate at the range required. So if the target was out

of range of sophisticated navaids one had to navigate, above clouds –

successive star sights, more wind vectors, reset the altimeter, decrease

height near the target, hoping to identify a ground feature and be able

to map-read to the dropping zone. It was often difficult on a dark

night, even with some moon to tell when you broke cloud if the

ground was snow-covered, especially if the cloud was also snowing.

Anyway we had a certain amount of success which relieved the

monotony of course.

Undoubtedly the most difficult country in which we operated was

Czechoslovakia – a long flight, all over enemy territory, much high

ground (the Tatras and associated ranges), flights only in the winter to

benefit from the long nights, so terrain was often snowbound, and no

reception facilities in Czechoslovakia.

Although Poland was also a long flight the terrain was fairly flat

and by routing over the North Sea and Denmark intermediate

checkpoints were obtainable. There were also reception committees.

There was also a very large river throughout Poland, the Vistula.

Unfortunately target areas in southern Poland were out of range until

operations from Foggia started. After serving continuously on this unit

in its formative years (419, 1419 Flight, 138 Squadron) from

November 1940 until February 1943 I was posted to Mediterranean

Air Command to build up a similar facility to operate from that theatre

into Europe. After forming 334 Wing which subsequently moved to

Foggia, I returned to the UK in early 1944 and found myself operating

38 Group squadrons in support of SOE’s build-up for D-Day. This

proved effective training for the units which were subsequently to land

the Sixth Airborne Division in Normandy on 6 June 1944.

In conclusion, I should add, as one of the planning staff for

OVERLORD, NEPTUNE, MALLARD, etc, that I was very pleased to

include my old squadron, 138, in the spoof raids over the Pas de

Calais. They carried out this operation, whose timing was critical, in

the manner to be expected, which certainly helped to delay the enemy

armour and movements towards the real battle.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Lewis Hodges

Group Captain Hockey has described the beginnings of the Special

Duties Squadrons supporting the work of the clandestine services,

SOE and SIS. He has explained the vast area over which we were

required to operate from Norway, through Poland, Denmark, Holland,

Belgium, France, Czechoslovakia, and of course at the same time

parallel operations were going on in the Mediterranean covering the

countries there, Greece, Yugoslavia, Albania and Italy.

To be able to do an efficient and effective job we needed the right

aircraft, with the necessary payload and range, and it was the arrival of

the Halifax that made this all possible. As Group Captain Hockey has

explained, the Whitley in the early days was all we had for the job and

we had to make the best use of it, but its performance did restrict very

much indeed what we were able to do. I personally only did one

operational sortie in a Whitley, in fact my first operation on the

squadron, 161 Squadron, when I joined it in November 1942, and that

was to take two agents to France and to drop them in the Loire valley

to a reception committee, and by that I mean agents on the ground

who were trained specially to lay out the lights, a pattern of torches,

and then they would flash a pre-arranged code signal so that the air

crew could identify that the right people were on the ground.

These operations were all arranged by coded radio signals between

the agents in the field and London, and then the final clearance on the

night, to say that the operation was on for that night, would be given

by a pre-arranged personal message over the BBC after the news

bulletin.

If I could just digress and say a word on how I came to join 161

Squadron at Tempsford. I had been in Bomber Command since the

beginning of the war with 49 Squadron, bombing targets in Germany

up until the spring of 1942. Then I went to a Whitley operational

conversion unit training crews for bomber squadrons. At that time

Wing Commander Charles Pickard was the CO of 161 Squadron,

having just taken over that squadron at Tempsford. I knew Pickard

and we had both been serving on the same station in Bomber

Command previously, and he asked me if I would be interested in

joining this special squadron as he was looking for a Flight

Commander and having already done a tour of operations in Bomber

Command, I had a lot of experience of night flying, night experience,

and having been at a Whitley OCU, I knew that aircraft well and so in

November 1942 I was posted to 161 Squadron at Tempsford to

command a Whitley flight. that is to say the parachuting job. Now I

mention this just to illustrate the point that the crews that we had in

the Special Duty Squadrons were normally selected on the old boy

network. They were personally selected by the Squadron Commander

so that we were sure that we had people with really good experience

and that they would fit in to these special units for this special type of

work. It was done very much on a personal basis.

When I joined the squadron, there were two flights, the Whitley

flight, later replaced with Halifaxes, and the other was the Lysander

flight augmented later by Hudsons. 138 Squadron was the other

squadron at Tempsford, as Group Captain Hockey has mentioned, and

he was commanding it at that time and they had already been re-

equipped with Halifaxes. As the Chairman mentioned in his

introductory remarks, as special squadrons undertaking this highly-

specialised role, we were not in the early days working under the

operational control of Bomber Command at High Wycombe, as were

of course the Main Force bomber squadrons, and we were regarded

certainly with considerable suspicion, as is usually the case I think

with special units and we were certainly not popular with the boss, Sir

Arthur Harris. He looked upon us as a diversion of effort from the

main task of bombing Germany, and hence the reluctance to give us

priority for the newer type of aircraft which were of course in great

demand for the bomber squadrons.

In fact this sort of tussle went on throughout the war, not only in

Europe but also in the Far East where I went later on to command a

Special Duties Squadron. We had exactly the same experience in

south-east Asia.

And so I started operations on Whitleys and shortly after my

arrival at Tempsford we were re-equipped with the Halifaxes and we

set out to convert the crews to the new aircraft and to start navigation

training and parachute training, dropping dummy loads to simulate

operational conditions. Dropping was normally from 500-600 ft and

we carried the normal Halifax crew, except that we had in addition a

despatcher, whose job it was to look after the parachuting side of the

business, and to see to the dropping of agents and stores carried

internally in the fuselage. The lower turret of the Halifax had been

removed and doors were fitted in the hole and it was through this

aperture that agents, personnel and stores were dropped. Heavy

containers for arms and ammunition were carried on bomb racks in the

bomb bay. Thus from the beginning of 1943 with a full complement

of Halifaxes we were poised to carry out our job for SOE and the

other clandestine services, delivering people and stores to the various

resistance groups in north-west Europe. We ranged over all the

countries, but the largest effort in north-west Europe was directed to

the resistance groups in France. 1943 saw the introduction of radar for

navigation in the form of Gee, which transformed the whole picture

for us and enabled us to get much greater accuracy in penetrating

enemy territory, particularly in bad weather.

Each different area had its own problems. In Poland, Denmark and

100

Holland, for example, we had to penetrate the main defences

protecting the Ruhr and north-west Germany, the fighter and anti-

aircraft belt, a particularly lethal area. In Norway we had extremely

difficult terrain, making parachuting in the mountains very hazardous

both for the agents and for the air crews. And then Czechoslovakia, as

Group Captain Hockey has said, involved a very long penetration

across enemy territory, right across south Germany, a very long way

out and a long way back. We carried out our operations and this was

usually when there was a special urgency. We sometimes dropped

agents in the dark period with no moon, and these were often what we

call blind drops – there was no reception committee on the ground and

this method had security advantages, but then there was always the

risk of injury in the parachute landing. But it was the moon period

which dominated our lives, the moon period was all-important to us

and we were very conscious of it all the time.

The tactics we used were to fly to the enemy coast at low level to

avoid radar detection and then to pull up to about 1,000-2,000 ft

crossing the coast to be able to identify one’s position accurately by

visual means, but with Gee if one was getting a good signal we could

penetrate at low level. Once over enemy territory we usually kept

fairly low, 500-1,000 ft depending on the terrain, to avoid radar

detection. Routing was always very carefully planned to avoid all

known defended areas, such as enemy airfields, and very accurate

map-reading was essential and this needed a great deal of training and

practice and close co-operation between the captain, the navigator and

the bomb-aimer in the nose of the aircraft.

All through 1943 the intensity of operations increased and then in

early 1944 the American squadrons arrived on the scene, part of the

Eighth Air Force, similarly engaged on special operations for SOE and

also for the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS, the American

equivalent of SOE. They were based at Harrington, near Bedford, not

far from Tempsford and we worked very closely together and in the

early months they came over to Tempsford quite a lot and learned

from our experiences. They were flying B-24 Liberators which were

ideally suited to the task and they had an excellent range and payload,

and the addition of the American squadrons more than doubled the

available resources, and so you can see that the build-up was gradually

taking place to support our eventual return to the continent.

101

The Main Force bomber squadrons of Bomber Command by this

time were fully equipped with four-engined aircraft, Halifaxes,

Lancasters and Stirlings but the Stirlings were not capable of climbing

to high altitude with a full bomb load and suffered heavy losses, and

as a result they were largely withdrawn from main force bombing

operations and became available for low level work, parachuting arms

and ammunition in the period immediately prior to D-Day. And by

using Stirlings en masse and often in daylight in the latter stages, very

large quantities of weapons were supplied to the Maquis groups,

particularly in France. And so a whole effort in support of the

resistance, especially in France, reached a peak in preparation for the

Normandy landings in June 1944.

To conclude, I would just like to say a word on security which

Professor Foot touched on. These operations demanded a very high

degree of security as you can imagine. The risks were very high and

could involve whole networks of agents in the occupied countries.

When we parachuted agents into the field we never, or very rarely,

knew who they were. We perhaps knew their codenames but that was

all. They were brought to Tempsford at the last moment from a special

holding unit, a country house in the vicinity, and they were brought on

to the airfield with as much secrecy as possible. They were taken to a

special building where their clothing was thoroughly and finally

checked for any incriminating evidence such as English markings, rail

tickets, cigarette packets and so on. And then they were given their

false identity papers and finally fitted with their parachutes with the

RAF despatcher present. And they were then taken to the aircraft

dispersal where the Halifax was waiting ready to start engines.

It is remarkable, I think, the degree of security that was achieved

on the station amongst the aircrews and the ground staff. It is only

since the war that we have got to know many of these people who we

dropped into occupied countries and we have established many

friendships which have endured for the last forty years, right up to the

present time.

Group Captain Hugh Verity

Between October 1940 and September 1944, 400 people were

picked up by moonlight from France alone. A handful of pilots in half

a squadron landed their Lysanders or Hudsons secretly on rough fields

102

marked by a few torches. Now this was a very small commitment of

aircraft and aircrew which returned a major contribution to the success

of the French Resistance. Other Lysanders based in Italy did pick-ups

in northern Italy, Greece and Yugoslavia between May 1944 and April

1945. Dakotas did them in Yugoslavia and Poland. Now all this

started, as you have heard, when the British spy, if I may use that

word, Pilot Officer Phillip Schneidau, was picked up near

Fontainebleau in October 1940 in a modified Lysander. Ron Hockey

told us that this flight ended in Oban in western Scotland and you may

be wondering why. They had together designed a flare path of three

torches (they actually worked this one out on the tablecloth at

Oddenino’s) but the flare path was three torches tied to sticks, 150

yards long and 50 yards wide – an inverted L. The Lysander was

modified by the removal of all armament and the fitting of a fixed

permanent ladder on the port fuselage, so that the agent could climb

into the cockpit. Well now, what went wrong? I’ll tell you what went

wrong. First of all, on taking off, a German sentry’s bullet went

through the compass. The next thing was that, to make it easier for

Phillip to climb in, Wally Farley had taken off the roof and it was

pouring with rain, so the radio set had got soaking wet and wouldn’t

work; then they had cloud all the way up to about 16,000 ft where it

was very cold, and the only way they could let down was to wait for a

gap in the cloud and that didn’t happen until they were over Scotland.

In 1941. the Special Duties Flight based at Newmarket racecourse

used airfields near the south coast for staging pick-ups, much closer to

the target areas in France. In that year Gordon Scotter did two pick-

ups and Squadron Leader John Nesbitt-Dufort did three including the

first for SOE. In December 1941 when the flight had grown into 138

Squadron, Flight Lieutenant Alan Murphy, known as ‘Sticky’,

attempted the only pick-up ever in Belgium. He was ambushed, as a

result of treachery in the network, and managed to bring his Lysander

back to Tangmere with 30 bullet holes through the aircraft and one

through his neck.

In February 1942, when 161 Squadron was formed, it took over the

Lysander Flight. This new Squadron was commanded by Wing

Commander ‘Mouse’ Fielden who had been the King’s Pilot and

Captain of the King’s Flight. Nesbitt-Dufort was hiding in France,

having failed to penetrate heavy icing in cloud on the way home from

103

a pick-up. A month later Murphy rescued him and his passengers in a

borrowed Anson. By June 1942, Murphy had completed five

successful pick-ups and he was replaced as CO of the Lysander Flight

by Squadron Leader Guy Lockhart who had done his first pick-up as a

flying officer in March. Just work it out – flying officer in March,

squadron leader in June! In August his flare path was laid over a ditch

by an agent who later seemed to be drunk, and that finished off that

Lysander. Lockhart himself was picked up off a beach by a felucca

from Gibraltar, crewed by a rather strange part of the Royal Navy. He,

Guy, flew back to Tempsford a fortnight after his crash. The third

pilot to leave a Lysander in France in 1942 was John Mott who was

bogged in the mud near Bourges. He was imprisoned but he later

escaped. In October 1942, Group Captain Fielden took command of

Tempsford and, as you have heard, Wing Commander Pickard took

over 161 Squadron.

It was these two who pioneered the use of Hudsons for pickups,

twin-engined Hudsons weighing 11 tons, and one of these was the

King’s personal aircraft, which ‘Mouse’ Fielden had kept by him.

Now, while Lysanders could squeeze in three passengers, the

Hudson could take ten. They needed strips 1,000 yards long,

compared with the 500 yards which was enough for the Lysander. The

Hudson’s so-called flare path was 450 yards long and it consisted of

four bicycle lamps, plus a fifth to the right to show how wide the strip

was. ‘Pick’ did the first successful Hudson pick-up in February 1943.

With a navigator, a wireless operator, Gee, and a radio loop for

bearings, it is obvious that the navigation of the Hudson was easier

than the pilot’s task in a Lysander – he had to hold a map in one hand

and fly the aircraft with another and I am going to go into this in more

detail before I sit down if you’ll permit me. But of course landing a

Hudson was a very much more difficult task than landing a much

more manoeuvrable Lysander, and this was particularly difficult on a

dirty night. In 1943, 161 Squadron’s Lysander Flight had a very busy

and a very lucky year, at least until November. Over half the

successful landings in France from 1940 to 1944 were completed in

1943 – that is 104 out of 183 Lysanders and 19 out of 36 Hudson

landings. Six of these Hudson landings were by Wing Commander

Hodges, who commanded the squadron from May 1943 to March

1944, after commanding the Halifax Flight of that squadron.

104

Now to the ground side in France. In spite of heavy losses during

the summer, the networks of agents in France were building up during

1943 and needing more and more pick-ups as well as parachute drops.

They worked for various intelligence organisations, co-ordinated by

MI6, for General De Gaulle’s resistance, whose air operations were

laid on by SOE, for SOE’s own French section and for MI9’s escape

and evasion lines. The agents responsible for finding fields and

receiving aircraft, most of whom had been trained by pick-up pilots at

Tempsford, included Paul Reviere, who handled 144 passengers on 14

operations, mainly near the Saone, and Henri Dericourt, of whom you

have heard, the double agent, who handled 87 passengers on 15

operations, mainly near the Loire. One didn’t know at the time that,

because Dericourt’s security was important to the Germans, we had a

safe conduct from the Luftwaffe for those flights! It would have been

rather helpful if we had known that!

Losses of RAF pilots and aircraft were surprisingly light, and due

more to fog and mud than to enemy action. Although two Hudsons

were bogged for hours in mud, not one was lost. Thirteen Lysanders

were lost, four were shot down over France, four crashed on landing

in France for various reasons, three crashed in fog on returning to

England and two were inextricably bogged in mud. Seven of these 13

pilots survived, including one who is sitting in the front row, and only

six were killed on pick-up operations. On the other hand, the reception

teams and the farmers and their wives who sheltered the agents and

their passengers had heavy losses, and many of them died in

concentration camps in Germany.

The RAF’s operational control of Special Operations was

streamlined as you have already heard – I would just like to say a

word about Air Ministry approval of the fields we landed on. The

details of each field were sent to Air Ministry AI2c by the air liaison

sections of MI6 and SOE. Fields for landings were then specially

photographed by a photographic reconnaissance unit – high flying

Spitfires from Benson – and stereo pairs were scrutinised to see

whether the fields were acceptable for landings. And then the decision

about whether the op was on on a particular night or not was made at

Tempsford in the light of the rather ropey weather forecasts that were

available in those days.

So much for a thumbnail sketch of the history of pick-ups. But I

105

have been asked to go into some detail in answer to a question which I

am often asked – How did we find the fields? There are several

Lysander pick-up pilots in the audience who may well give you

different answers, but this is my answer, because we did generally find

them.

Two-thirds of all pick-ups attempted were successful, and failures

were often because of fog or very low cloud, and sometimes because

the agents couldn’t make the rendezvous. Very few pick-ups failed

because of enemy action or errors in pilot navigation. With only a

voice back-bearing over the Channel, a map, a compass, a clock and

blind flying instruments, how was it done? Well, there were six things

one had to do, and four of them before taking off.

The first was to plan a route avoiding Flak, with a good landmark

at the end of each leg. Second, cut half-million maps to cover 50 miles

on each side of the planned track, and fold it like a concertina. Now

this is an actual operational map from 1944, not one of mine, I was too

security-minded to keep target information like this, but another

pilot’s widow was kind enough to send it to me, and you will see that

entry point here near Caen, and the track marked down here past

Blois, down to near Issoudun, the gen card here with the navigational

detail for each leg, there and back. And then in the target area (that

was a half-million map), a quarter-million map like this giving you the

detail on the approach to the actual target. Having prepared the map,

the third thing to do was to study it for an hour or two before take-off,

memorising the shapes and the compass bearings of major landmarks.

Fourthly, one had to calculate the gen card in the light of forecast

wind, and then, fifthly, and this was the first thing you had to do after

taking off, you had to fly the planned headings and speeds very

accurately until the error in the forecast wind showed up because you

had drifted off your planned track. Then you had to do a bit of mental

geometry in the light of the different wind, and adjust your heading

and of course, the sixth thing, very obviously, map-reading when

weather permitted. I mean, very often you couldn’t see the ground on

the way to the target, so you couldn’t do any map-reading, but when

there was a clear bit and you could see the ground, that obviously was

vital. And for this water was the best landmark, coast, rivers or lakes,

and, after that, forests and railways, and the last leg, which could only

be a couple of minutes long, really, had to be from a really certain

106

visual fix, a particular village or stream, or railway crossing or

something like that which you could be certain you were identifying

and from there do an accurate timed run of two or three minutes when,

lo and behold, you would see the agreed Morse letter flashing up from

the dark ground and that was really quite a thrill.

Chairman

This is the man who delayed a German armoured division for ten

days on its way to Normandy.

Tony Brooks

A lot of what I was going to say to you about the ‘other end’, as it

were, has already been hinted at, but I think it is worth repeating in

some ways.

’

I was dropped ‘blind by parachute from a Halifax on 1 July 1942

near Limoges, and I operated in France until overrun by the Allied

armies, the French First Army and the American Seventh Army, in

October 1944. My organisation was a clandestine one, as opposed to a

paramilitary guerrilla type of organisation – as opposed to a Maquis.

The men and women who worked for me lived ordinary lives every

day, worked in the factories, were doctors, farmers, railwaymen, quite

a lot of railwaymen, and after they had done their work, in the

evening, they had to return home and carry on with their ordinary

daily activities. Now my mission in France, the Pimento mission as it

was called, and any aircrew may remember doing drops to Pimento,

was firstly to attack specific targets such as supplies of sulphuric acid

to the submarine bases on the Atlantic coast in 1942, superchargers for

aero-engines being made by Pensavia, which I see today is going to be

taken over by Lucas, and reinforcements to Italy during the Anzio and

Salerno landings when we had to muck about with Hermann

Goering’s armoured division going through the Mont Cenis tunnel.

And then, more importantly at the end, on London’s orders, or

Eisenhower’s orders, to paralyse – that’s what it said on my brief – the

French railway network in support of D-Day. A small task, I was only

20 at the time, but nevertheless it was very enjoyable. Derailing trains

comes naturally. I used to put chewing gum on our toy railway to

derail my brother’s steam engine when a small boy.

To do this task we obviously needed a lot of demolition stores. We

107

had a very small requirement for weapons, ie the complete reverse of a

secret army. A clandestine organisation with the task of preparing for

D-Day was absolutely useless unless we could get out demolition

stores, of various sorts, not just explosives, but also incendiaries and a

thing called abrasive grease, which is a way of improving the

movement of railway trains! We had to get these stores as near as

possible to the targets that we were to deal with on D-Day. The only

way we liked to do this was to get the RAF to come along and drop

them as near as possible, and by as near as possible – I mean say 100

km. But (I don’t mean an error of 100 km) I mean within 100 km of

our target we would have a dropping zone where we could get at the

stores. But in the earlier part of the war, when Whitleys were dropping

to us in October and November 1942, my first two drops, they would

drop north of Lyon; but my targets for dealing with sulphuric acid

were down near the Pyrenees. This meant that we had to shift the

explosives across France, a very difficult task, and a task, if you were

caught, carrying the death penalty. The major casualties in my

organisation, seventy-two people in all, were caught shifting

explosives from A to B.

Now, in the early days, the south-west of France, down near

Toulouse, was where the Das Reich SS Division was located, and this

was one of my top targets in 1944, the drops by parachute of stores

down to that area only began right at the end of the winter of 1943 and

then the spring of 1944. You’ve already heard about the way the

system worked – there was a BBC message on the radio, listened to

after the news through the jamming – that terrible racket! – at 21.15

and then, if the message came through, the reception committee, who

only knew their own dropping zones, perhaps three or four, and the

messages for those particular drops, would hear this and they would

go out on foot, or on bicycles after curfew to the field, which, when

we could, we tried to make 400m by 400m. If the operation was

successful they would have to pick up the containers, in the early days

only three or four: in 1944 sometimes seventy-two containers on the

ground – that is quite a lot of stores to shift. After having picked up all

the equipment and hidden it away they then had to go home and then

clean up and then go to work without looking too excited the next day.

When an operation was successful, the fact that the powers that be

in the UK thought it worthwhile risking a valuable aircraft and a

108

highly-trained crew to fly 750 km to drop to us – a scruffy bunch of

terrorists on the ground – 150 kilos of stores – it was a terrific boost to

their morale.

The early light pattern was a triangle with pocket torches, les piles

vindaires as they were called, with red sweet papers on them. I

consumed a terrific number of lousy sweets to get the red sweet

papers, but the RAF complained about this after a bit, and we went

over to white lights and the L formation. Now the light pattern was

laid out in the field, indicating, as it was an inverted L, indicating to

the pilot the direction of the wind, and the speed of the wind indicated

where we put the lights in relation to the dimensions of the field.

Windspeed was calculated by a lady’s stocking with the heel cut off

and held up in the wind on a stick or by hand, and depending on the

angle we knew that if it was 45 degrees it was 30 km an hour and it

was pretty dicey.

It was very rare that we had in the early days containers outside the

DZ: occasionally they did, but they never landed in the middle where

we always had the cart, the wheelbarrows or whatever to shift the

stuff, but nevertheless, the early drops were very accurate. The fact

that the RAF could find our small field and actually drop on four of

these piddling little torches, completely foxed the French, and still

foxes me. But the trouble was when there was a ‘no show’ and the

message had come out perhaps two or three times during the moon

period, morale would go absolutely right down into their boots, and

the fact that these people risked their lives, moon period after moon

period, to go out or sit by and wait for a BBC message and then go out

to the field. I might tell you in the better weather we used to poach

crayfish in the streams, and have a portable radio, but nevertheless we

used to sit around waiting for this, which used to put their morale

down very much indeed. And it was very difficult to explain to them

that over the UK there might be fog, although it was a beautiful clear

moonlit night where they were, or that the low ground mist was hiding

our torches from the pilot, although we could see the Halifax circling

around in a great big sort of S looking for the DZ.

But also we had a difficulty when a drop was delayed. Contrary to

most clandestine networks or contrary to most networks, I was

fortunate in not having a wireless operator. I had a very rapid courier

system through Switzerland, where I had been brought up as a kid.

109

Thanks to French customs men who are after all part-time smugglers,

or the other way round, I never quite know, and the railwaymen, it

only used to take five days from my headquarters in Lyon to Head

Office and back again for me to get my instructions, which was a jolly

sight quicker than by W/T, ciphering and skeds and moving the radio

set and so on. And so, one of our problems was that we would have to

have a method of telling London that the chap had sown or ploughed

the field that we were going to use as a DZ and this meant that each

team had to have an alternative field in case the peasant would say,

‘Look, you can do it till the end of the month but then I’ve got to

sow,’ and of course if it was all nicely smooth and harrowed there

would be a hell of a lot of round holes where the containers had gone

and if we’d driven a cart across it, he took a dim view. That was all

right when the peasant was on our side; sometimes of course the best

fields we had were ones where the peasant was on the other side and

was hostile, because then we didn’t really worry much what we did to

his field.

In late 1943 SOE decided to standardise, and it has already been

mentioned, the preparation of the build-up to D-Day, the increase in

the need for containers and stores, headquarters decided to make

standardised loads, ie a fifteen-container load on a Halifax would be

so much weapons, so much ammunition, so many rifles, so many

dressings, food, tobacco and possibly a tiny amount of explosive,

which meant that we were continually getting vast quantities of

weaponry which we didn’t want and we had to go and hide away

somewhere. And it meant also that we had to organise an unnecessary

number of drops to get the stores we wanted, therefore aircraft were

being put at risk unnecessarily and so were we on the ground, and so,

if ever there is a third war, which I hope there never is, anyway not in

my time, that this should be very carefully looked at. We’ve worked

out on the ground – I was over in France only a month ago with one of

my most successful reception committee operators, Henri Mander –

we worked out that we could have had all the stores we needed and all

the weapons we needed with 30 drops instead of the 100 successful

drops we did have.

Now the next point which I would like to make is also the way

stores were packed, or delivered rather. There were two types of

containers. The C-Type, which was like a long tubular suitcase which

110

had three 50-gallon drums in it and was all held together – nice and

solid – very heavy. The other type was an H-Type, which was five

canisters which were held together by two rods from the cushion at the

bottom to the parachute box at the top with two rods on each side. If

the ground was at all hard, either rocky or frozen, on contact with the

ground they broke open. That didn’t matter if you were in guerrilla

country because the chaps could pick up these smaller units, which

had webbing straps on them, put them on their backs, and scarper.

They didn’t worry about leaving a few Whitworth-threaded bolts lying

about in a French field. But our dropping zones, some of them were

football fields, things of that sort, were very near a town. I was

working just before I came out, I was looking at it, and we had about

thirty dropping zones which were within 25 km of the second biggest

city in France. So to us, leaving a bit of hardware in the middle of a

field was absolute death. So we loathed the H-Type. And again, I

think, from our point of view, it was much easier to get four men to

lift a C-Type container or dump it into a cesspit and then come back

the next day and collect it. and sort it out if we were a bit rushed on

the ground.

We noticed, of course, at the end, with the terrific build-up for D-

Day, that the standard of dropping accuracy did drop off. And this I

think is fairly obvious; it was because of 38 Group, wasn’t it? – which

were not of the same skill and training as the Special Duties

Squadrons.

Notwithstanding these various problems we did have 100

successful drops and received 140 tons of stores. And we had 122

dropping zones marked out and registered in London and all they

needed to do was to broadcast a codeword at the beginning of the

moon period and I knew which DZs were going to be operating that

month, and then teams were alerted and then they listened for their

individual messages each night.

I haven’t included in those figures the drops that we had on what

we used to call in 1944 – I think it was about February or March 1944

– we were asked to provide ‘dump grounds’, ie grounds that would be

manned throughout the moon period so that if the RAF could not find

them, because of low cloud or no show-up of the team, the reception

committee, they didn’t fly all the way home with their stores as they

could drop them to someone who could use them and on one occasion

111

we had over 100 containers but, thank goodness, that was in August

1944 down in the south-west and we were pretty well, at least a chap

called Colonel Starge (Hilaire) was pretty well in command of the area

by then, and so there was no disaster. But we did have several drops of

72 containers and that needs an awful lot of manpower on the ground

to actually shift it.

112

BOOK REVIEWS

RAF Flying Training and Support Units since 1912 by Ray

Sturtivant. Air Britain; 2007. £37.50.

This is an updated and extensively revised edition of a book that

first appeared ten years ago. It is a real tour de force providing the

essential facts (dates of formation, disbandment and changes of

location plus a brief summary of function, examples of specific

aeroplanes on charge and, where appropriate/available, some

indication of the numbers involved) about practically all RAF, and

RFC, units, world wide, other than the (aeroplane) squadrons that have

been adequately recorded elsewhere, from 1912 to date. The spectrum

runs from Command HQs, down thorough Groups and Wings, taking

in all the OTUs, OCUs, HCUs, AFUs, FTSs, ANSs, B&GSs, MUs,

RSUs, etc along the way. That batch of abbreviations will be well

known to most members of this Society but RAFFT&SU’s glossary

runs to five pages and has something like 750 entries, so this book will

also tell you about, for instance, the far less familiar BBU, BCRS and

LAAGS of WW II, the CDCF and IAAD of the 1920s and the various

SoMAs, TDSs and SoAGs of WW I.

The parameters that governed a unit’s inclusion in the first edition

were that it needed to have ‘owned’ an aeroplane at some time, or to

have been involved in training aircrew or controlling aircraft

operations, although these ‘rules’ were interpreted fairly liberally to

permit the inclusion of, for instance, Staging Posts, the OASC, and

various OCTUs and Staff Colleges. The net has been considerably

widened for the 2007 edition which now runs to some 8,000 entries, a

third of them additions, and with amendments having been

incorporated to some 2,000 of the original selection. Among the more

significant additions are a variety of Marine Craft, including Air-Sea

Rescue, Units, the numbered Serving Commandos and Servicing

Echelons, and a bewildering array of Aviation Candidates Selection

Boards, Recruit Centres, Personnel Transit Centres, Personnel

Holding Units, Personnel Despatch Centres and the like. Another

important gap has been filled by the inclusion of details of the Balloon

Flights and Squadrons.

Since units are listed alphabetically by title, RAFFT&SU is

virtually self-indexing, although one may have to use one’s intuition

113

on occasion. For instance, the SofTTs are under ‘T’ for Technical

Training, not ‘S’ for School. On the other hand, while the Air

Headquarters Middle East Communications Flight is under ‘M’,

Headquarters RAF Middle East is under ‘R’. So, if you do not find

what you are looking for where you expected to find it, persevere; it is

almost certainly in there somewhere. If you know where the unit was,

of course, you can find it via the very useful cross-index by place

name which will take you to the relevant page(s). To assist the many

folk who are chiefly focused on squadrons, there is even a cross-

reference to the units in which they happened to be mentioned,

notably the wings and bases to which they were subordinated.

Errors? In a work of this size and complexity, there are simply

bound to be. That said, they are, I am sure, few and far between,

although I did spot one. An AONS was an Air Observers Navigation

School (not an Air Observer & Navigator School) – it is correct in the

glossary, but not in the actual entries. Photographs? Yes, about 200 of

them, all of aeroplanes actually operated by units identified in the text,

running from Handley Pages of WW I via Harts, Harrows and Hornets

to today’s Hercules and Harriers.

Astonishingly, while this edition contains substantially more

information than its predecessor, it is presented on fewer pages, 336

vice 368 – a triumph of the typesetter’s art. Furthermore, the new

edition uses a higher quality, coated paper which makes it much more

pleasant to handle. While this book is undoubtedly excellent value for

money, it is not cheap – unless you join Air Britain, of course, in

which case you can save yourself £10.

Ray Sturtivant, ably assisted by John Hamlin, has added yet

another feather to his cap with this essential work of reference. Mine

is never far out of reach.

CGJ

History of Air Intercept Radar & The British Nightfighter, 1935-

1959 by Ian White. Pen and Sword; 2007. £25.00.

This well researched and highly detailed account opens with the

pre-1939 experiments to build a radar set light enough and small

enough to go into an aircraft, and ends with the full deployment of the

Gloster Javelin force in 1959. Its 326 pages take the reader through the

problems of building a working AI radar, getting it into production,

114

into service and then into action. This, against a background of

wartime shortages and competing priorities. As a separate, but equally

important matter, it describes the problems of recruiting people with

the intelligence to become effective AI operators or radar technicians,

and of training the instructors to teach them.

It was well into the spring of 1941 before Fighter Command was

able to bring together the disparate elements of an effective night

fighter arm. By then it had six squadrons of Beaufighters equipped

with AI Mk IV either fully worked up or in the process of doing so.

Eight Ground Controlled Interception radars were in position to cover

the south and much of the east of England, to direct them into action.

At last Britain had a night air defence system worthy of that title.

Then in June 1941, as Britain’s air defences were getting into their

stride against the night raiders, Adolf Hitler packed off the bulk of his

bomber force to airfields in central Europe in readiness for the attack

on the Soviet Union. Few of the aircraft and crews would return to

attack Britain, when they did the defenders exacted a heavy toll.

For this reviewer’s taste the author strikes the right balance in the

depth to which he goes with his technical descriptions. However,

those who wish to skip over these can do so without losing the thread

of the story.

Quibbles? This reviewer has a couple of relatively minor ones. It

would have been nice to have had some photos of the various items of

equipment. The only ones in the book are seven images on the dust

jacket, which lack captions and therefore convey little useful

information.

The other quibble concerns the treatment of the Gloster Javelin.

The author goes into great and fascinating detail on the failings of the

other night fighter types, but there is a lack of similar criticism of the

Javelin. That might be taken to imply that it was perfect, and it wasn’t!

The aircraft exhibited some tricky handling traits, and during its

service life stalling and manoeuvres in the vertical plane were

prohibited.

Overall, however, this book can be strongly recommended to

anyone interested in following the evolution of Britain’s night and all

weather fighter force during World War II and the early part of the

Cold War.

Dr Alfred Price

115

RAF Harrier Ground Attack Falklands by Jerry Pook. Pen and

Sword; 2007. £19.99.

‘It does exactly what it says on the tin’, could apply to Jerry Pook’s

graphic account of RAF Harriers in action in the Falklands campaign

where the ponderous title RAF Harrier Ground Attack Falklands

describes exactly what is contained in this fascinating book. It is based

on the diary which the author kept during his time as a Harrier Flight

Commander spanning the weeks of Operation CORPORATE when

No 1 Sqn was embarked aboard HMS Hermes. By the spring of 1982,

ten years after converting to the Harrier, he had gained wide

experience in the ground attack and reconnaissance roles in the Hunter

in the Arabian Peninsula, in the Harrier both in Germany and in the

UK and, while on exchange duties elsewhere in NATO, flying the

RF-104G Starfighter. Thus he is well qualified to publish his views,

many of which are contentious.

The author reminds the reader that the RAF had very little

experience of operating the Harrier from ships. His squadron had

carried out trials some twelve years earlier on board the conventional

carrier HMS Ark Royal but the aircraft modifications identified for

regular maritime activities had not been incorporated. Although

several of these were common to the Sea Harrier it took time to

prepare the RAF aircraft for the campaign and to train the pilots for

deck operations where he describes the pressures which affected his

unit during the preparation for the deployment to the South Atlantic.

The transit from Wittering via Ascension and cross decking to and

from Atlantic Conveyor to HMS Hermes are described in detail, as are

the inadequate arrangements, both domestic and operational, to

accommodate No 1 Sqn on board the carrier. Clearly, the relationship

between the squadron and HMS Hermes was difficult and it is no

surprise that the patience and diplomatic skills of his Boss, who was

the senior RAF officer on board, acted as a shock absorber between

the captain and the squadron pilots. At working level the author

reserves praise for the RN flight deck crews who performed superbly

throughout and there appeared to be an easier bond between the

Harrier and Sea Harrier pilots where, as an experienced Flight

Commander, Jerry Pook’s status helped to preserve harmony.

The initial planning assumption was that the Harriers would

116

become attrition replacements as day fighters to cover Sea Harrier

losses, hence the urgent modifications to enable the carriage and

launch of the Sidewinder, but this was overtaken by events. Of the six

Sea Harriers which were lost, only two were thought to be the direct

result of combat operations, one to anti-aircraft guns and one to a

surface-to-air missile. So the traditional, but more risky, role of the

RAF Harriers, offensive air support, for which the pilots were trained,

became the main reason for the squadron’s presence, leaving air

defence to the specialist Sea Harriers. However he does admit to being

slightly envious of the air defenders’ more benign role compared to

that of the mud movers who were being placed regularly in harm’s

way. He goes on to suggest that the Harriers could also have been

tasked to provide visual air defence against Argentinean air attack

using Aden guns and the excellent AIM-9L Sidewinder. Perhaps this

was not altogether a balanced view in the face of the high volume of

ground attack tasking which faced No 1 Sqn’s small number of

aircraft and pilots.

His narrative style captures vividly several dramas in his cockpit

where the reader can sense the tension of low level attack and

reconnaissance operations while in action. The author and his

colleagues were hit several times by ground fire, sometimes following

a second pass over the same target, an ill-advised tactic but necessary

where target acquisition was difficult. On one occasion battle damage

to his aircraft resulted in a major fuel leak which led to its loss when

he ran out of fuel and was forced to eject during his return to HMS

Hermes. Two days earlier he had flown one of the three Harriers

which attacked Goose Green on 28 May in support of the beleaguered

2 Para. This mission was described by the ground force commander,

Brigadier Julian Thompson, as crucial to the outcome of the battle and

led to the capture of the settlement and surrender of Argentinean

forces in the area.

He is very critical, repeatedly, of the Royal Navy’s command and

control of these vital ground attack assets and the inadequate tasking

and briefing procedures on board. Perhaps his evident anger and

frustration serve to counter some of the views expressed by

Commander Nigel Ward in his book, Sea Harrier over the Falklands,

where the latter made scathing reference to RAF actions in the South

Atlantic. In Ward’s eyes the RAF should have been restricted to

117

supporting the RN’s war and that operations by the RAF, such as the

BLACK BUCK Vulcan raids, contributed little and detracted from the

associated PR visibility which the RN wished to retain exclusively. To

illustrate this bias, Jerry Pook cites the desperate need for additional

Harrier GR3s to replace those lost in action and the refusal by the

captain of HMS Hermes to accept such reinforcements which were

planned to fly directly to the ship from Ascension Island, some 3,800

miles to the north, taking fuel from Victor tankers. In the captain’s

eyes this was a publicity stunt by the RAF and it took a finely judged

intervention by OC 1 Sqn who put his case directly to the Flag

Officer’s staff, also based on board HMS Hermes. The captain was

over-ruled and the Flag authorised the deployment of four additional

aircraft. After flights which lasted some nine hours these arrived in

two pairs, about a week apart, piloted by crews from Gütersloh and

Wittering in unique feats of courage and superb airmanship.

The author is critical too of the Harrier’s electronic equipment,

beginning with the inertial platform which could not be aligned

satisfactorily while at sea, despite the use of the FINRAE trolley

which, although developed from an earlier model, failed to perform

this essential function. So the navigation and weapon aiming computer

could not be used, thus committing pilots to navigate using only map

and stopwatch and deliver weapons using the HUD’s fixed

reversionary display. He claims that the IFF, which was essential for

operations, was unreliable, as was the reconnaissance pod carried on

the centre pylon, and he expresses particular frustration at the radio’s

performance, particularly when communicating with forward air

controllers.

After the cease fire he asserts that his Harrier Force contemporaries

in Germany were reluctant to reinforce the Falklands but this is a

narrow criticism of his colleagues. The Gütersloh Harrier Force was

declared to NATO as a primary asset and despite several approaches

to the MoD to reduce this declaration in recognition of the Harrier

Force’s commitments in the South Atlantic, these pleas were ignored.

The station remained under a formal obligation to produce sufficient

aircraft and crews to fulfil this political task at a time of military

tension in NATO with a Tactical Evaluation of the Force scheduled

for September. In the absence of a satisfactory response from MoD,

pilot availability criteria were set aside and replacements from No 3

118

Sqn were sent by Hercules to Stanley by early July. Furthermore some

Sea Harrier pilots and two of his squadron colleagues who flew

directly from Ascension were Gütersloh men. Also the other

Gütersloh squadron, No 4, was preparing to embark several Harriers

aboard HMS Illustrious, the RN’s new aircraft carrier to provide her

crew with experience of the aircraft. She was undergoing an

accelerated commission to replace HMS Invincible as the air defence

guard ship pending the introduction of land based radar units and the

activation of RAF Stanley with Phantoms.

Following his return from the Falklands, Pook drafted parts of the

post-conflict report but records his irritation that, in his eyes,

headquarters and MoD staff marginalised the contribution made by the

Harrier GR3 and its crews to the successful outcome of Operation

CORPORATE. He does not seek self aggrandisement but is puzzled

also by the lack of interest from other RAF ground attack and

reconnaissance units in hearing and debating the conclusions and

recommendations from those involved in the short, but very active,

campaign.

Some of the thirty-eight photographs are familiar, although that of

the Harrier with its outrigger in the catwalk is printed in reverse, but

there are several new illustrations including the author’s personal

photographs, maps and HUD recorder film which, despite some

images being ill-defined, are dramatic. Only one factual error was

noted where the author’s caption accompanying the vertical

photograph of Stanley airfield states that it was the last bomb of the

first BLACK BUCK mission which cratered the runway. It was, of

course, the first bomb which did the damage. Also some names are

misspelt and others wrongly identified but these are very minor

observations.

Although frank and outspoken, and in parts unbalanced, the author

tells the story of RAF Harrier Ground Attack Falklands from his

personal experience, both the good and the bad, and in recognition of

his bravery and leadership under fire Jerry Pook was awarded the

DFC. Setting aside inter-Service rivalry, he and his eleven Harrier

pilot colleagues, together with their thirty-six Sea Harrier

counterparts, several of whom were seconded from the RAF, were

‘the Few’ of Operation CORPORATE and any personal account of the

air war in the South Atlantic bears testimony to their courage. Despite

119

his uncompromising views, I recommend this excellent 219-page

book as a selective reference for military historians and as gripping

reading for fellow combat aviators, operations staff officers and

aircraft enthusiasts.

Gp Capt Jock Heron

Black Night For Bomber Command – The Tragedy of 16th

December 1943 by Richard Knott. Pen and Sword; 2007. £19.99.

This is a good read and I have no hesitation in suggesting that a

better way of spending a winter’s evening would be difficult to find.

There are some quite slim volumes that purport to cover, not only a

number of war years, but vast intricate campaigns; this modest 260-

odd page book focuses on a single day, 16 December 1943, and a

specific Bomber Command mission to Berlin and, of course, back

again..

I do not like dramatic reconstructions or ‘thought up’ dialogue, no

matter how ingeniously based on probabilities and I was relieved to

find that the author has avoided that pitfall, most reported speech

being reproduced from first-hand written accounts or from

contemporary crew or squadron members and they read pretty

authentically.

In some respects, when you are sitting in the comfort of your 21st

Century home, it is not very nice to be transported back almost sixty

years to be reminded of those atrocious winters of the 1940s – I

shudder at the thought. Exactly two years before the events described

in this book, I was with No 21 OTU at Moreton-in-the-Marsh, flying,

it seemed, nearly all the time in similarly awful weather conditions but

without the pressures of actually being on operations. For this reader,

Richard Knott has certainly succeeded in recreating the contemporary

atmosphere. Once or twice, my spine actually tingled as he describes

the events of 16 December 1943, when, with the weather just about as

bad as it could be, a formidable force took off on the seven plus hour

trip to Berlin. More than 300 of those airmen lost their lives. Read of

their time you young men – and marvel.

Some of Knott’s book is devoted to statistics and, while I found

little to surprise me in the facts and figures, I found it all very readable

and was pleased to see this information presented without resort to the

sort of hyperbole and unnecessary superlatives that mar too many TV

120

documentaries.

From a strictly personal point of view, I really felt for those air

gunners with heated flying suits and heating for the mid upper. The

Wellington of two years previously had had no heating for the air

gunners and I, for one, had not heard of heated flying suits, so we just

froze and hoped we could walk again after a longish cross country in

sub-zero temperatures. No aids for the navigator, just DR and a spot of

astro, but I was surprised that the training appeared shorter and less

comprehensive in later years than it had been for us and also that

crewing-up was still left to chance and a few minutes conversation.

It would be churlish of me to nit pick as the author has, as result of

a great deal of painstaking work, gathered together a mass of very

interesting information and I would not begrudge him the occasional

error. The odd little slip aside, I reckon it is a good 19.99

poundsworth.

Tony Richardson

Vulcan Test Pilot – my experiences in the cockpit of a Cold War

icon by Tony Blackman. Grub Street; 2007. £20.00

Stand under the bomb bay of a Mk 2 Vulcan at the RAF Museum

at Hendon or at Cosford, look towards either wing tip, and just marvel

at the beautiful shape of that extended wing. That sculpting, because

surely that is what it is, did not come about by accident or by

Computer Aided Design. It came, to a certain extent, from trial and

error but primarily from imaginative and consistent application of

basic design principles.

In this gem of a book, Tony Blackman, who test flew 105 of the

136 Mk 1 and Mk 2 Vulcans built, explains how the aerodynamic

shape of the Vulcan gave the aircraft several unusual flying

characteristics; he tells how this most advanced aircraft for its time

was made to fly so safely that young pilots like me, with only two

year’s experience as a co-pilot on top of Jet Provost and Vampire

training, could be allowed to captain a nuclear qualified crew and take

the aircraft all over the world.

When the ‘Ministry of Defence’ (surely the Air Ministry then)

issued operational requirement OR229 in 1946(!) for a nuclear armed

bomber with a range of 3,350 nm at 50,000 feet at 500 kts, not much

was known about the flying characteristics of the delta wing so Avro,

121

very sensibly now with hindsight, built the 707-series of single

engined, small deltas. The author describes the development period in

detail; then the emergence of the Mk 1 Vulcan and the first flight, by

Roly Falk in 1952, just in time for that year’s SBAC show at

Farnborough – the pilot wearing a grey, pin striped suit, shirt and tie.

And then the hard work of sorting out the more potentially

dangerous flying characteristics of the shape especially at high Mach

numbers – for example, violent buffeting at the planned cruise Mach

number of 0.85 was obviously going to be unacceptable.

Tony Blackman joined the Avro team as Deputy Chief Test Pilot

on 1 January 1958 having flown the first production Mk 1 a dozen

times as an RAF test pilot (part of the initial evaluation team) at

Boscombe Down. Three modifications incorporated into future

production aircraft, namely a Mach trimmer, a yaw damper and then

pitch dampers, gave the test pilots enough confidence to explore the

flight envelope right up to Mach 1.

The author, with impressive recall and research, not least from

former colleagues whose help he acknowledges, sets out in two

detailed chapters how Avro went about developing first the Mk 1

Vulcan and then the considerably different Mk 2. A short chapter on

demonstration flying follows and the final third of the book is given

over to analyses of Vulcan ‘accidents and incidents’ beginning,

inevitably, with the infamous Heathrow landing accident on 1 October

1956 where Blackman concludes ‘……but, in my opinion, the key

cause was the pilot coming below his decision height under the great

pressure put on him to land and without his accustomed co-pilot to

help him by warning him of the aircraft altitude.’ Other accidents,

including a few I know of intimately, are concisely and, as far as I can

judge, accurately and dispassionately described.

Tony Blackman concludes with a chapter about the ‘Vulcan

(XH558) to the Sky’ project – the RAF’s first Mk 2 that he helped

deliver to Waddington on 1 July 1960, and that was the last to fly in

1993.

He states, accurately, that designing the Vulcan and making it work

from its inception 60 years ago to its first flight eight years later, and

then further developing it into the Vulcan Mk 2 was a monumental

task for Avro, for Bristol Siddeley, for the RAF, and for the politicians

who had to justify the project. Ordinary RAF squadron pilots like me

122

have much to be grateful for.

One cavil: I would like to have seen some discussion of the one

black mark that, in my opinion and that I am sure of many ex-Vulcan

captains, hangs over the Vulcan’s otherwise distinguished history:

what did those early test pilots think and say about the lack of ejection

seats for the rear crew? When the man who took over command of No

50 Sqn at Waddington from me in 1979, the then Wing Commander

Tim Garden, was asked just before he died recently if he was bitter at

being so suddenly struck down, he typically said that many of his

fellow aircrew had had even less luck and were lost in their twenties

and thirties. I know what he meant.

Tony Blackman says in his Introduction that, ‘The book is mainly

for people not particularly associated with the Vulcan.’ Don’t you

believe him!

AVM Nigel Baldwin

Avro Vulcan by Phil Butler and Tony Buttler. Aerofax; 2007; £19.99.

The thing that rankled with Handley Page throughout the Second

World War was the way their Halifax was overshadowed by the

Lancaster, which they ascribed to the fact that the Lancaster was

capable of carrying far greater bomb loads. Charles Joy, Handley

Page’s Assistant Chief Aerodynamicist in 1947, told me that they

strove to give their Victor a bomb load double that of the Lancaster.

But although the Victor could carry 35,000lb of bombs as against the

Vulcan’s 21,000lb, once again it was the Avro design that stole the

limelight. Just as the awesome, preternatural Vulcan invariably starred

at air displays, so too books on the Vulcan seem to be churned out

every six months or so.

Messrs Butler and Buttler admit that their book ‘does not claim to

be the ultimate narrative for the type but should be seen as a

complementary work to those that have gone before.’ They are spot

on. Harking back to my flying training days, I will start with the good

points such as, ‘You strapped in well, Bloggs and you taxied out to the

holding point in good order. It was just the section after take-off that

let you down.’ In like fashion, the illustrations in this book are

comprehensive and the reproduction quality is first rate. There is much

here that will interest the modeller and the 25 pages of colour photos

at the back are particularly noteworthy.

123

But the words are something else. The prose is laboured, the story

unstructured and the information is all over the place. A massive

amount of detail has been culled from flight tests reports and

specifications and Ministry files, but it has just been dropped in front

of us with no attempt at analysis, defining time lines or historical

evaluation. And some information is just plain wrong. Avro designers

did not start off thinking that the delta was the solution to the Ministry

of Supply requirement. The Project Team in Manchester began with a

conventional tailed aircraft of 45 degrees sweepback. However, swept

wings produce less lift than conventional wings of equivalent size, yet

the requirements of altitude demanded greater, not smaller,

coefficients of lift. To compensate for this Avro had to increase the

swept span, but this resulted in a design of poorer performance that

weighed 80,000-90,000lb too much. It took nearly a month to

dispense with the tail altogether. Since a bomber carries its load

concentrated around its centre of gravity, and as a swept wing

increases longitudinal stability, all the old reasons for having a rear

fuselage supporting a tail no longer applied and it could be deleted

once longitudinal controls were fitted to the wingtips. But even though

this gave an immediate saving in weight and drag, the wing itself was

still disproportionately large for its purpose and much heavier than

required. There was nothing left but to reduce the span. To chop

pieces off the wing just meant decreasing the wing area, thereby

upsetting all the carefully calculated factors of wing loading, thinness,

and aspect ratio. As the wings got broader and stubbier, the Project

Team kept the wing area constant by filling in the space between the

wing trailing edge and the fuselage. By the time the span had been

reduced sufficiently to get the weight within acceptable limits while

maintaining sweep and reducing tip chord to give adequate induced

drag for maximum range, the gap between the short body and the wing

trailing edges had been virtually filled in, forming a natural triangular

plan form resembling the Greek letter delta. This then was the logical

evolution of the distinctive Vulcan shape.

The authors’ use of phrases such as ‘metal bashing by now was

underway’ not only grate but also demonstrate a limited understanding

of how much advanced technology and structures went into V-bomber

design and construction. It is also annoying to see material lifted from

other authors’ works without any acknowledgement or bibliography.

124

There is no index, which limits this book as a work of reference. As

for the sections on Service History and Memories, the authors are at a

disadvantage by their lack of understanding of V-force operations.

BLUE STEEL’s ‘Achilles Heel’ was not the time it took to prepare it

for operations. It could be a pig to mate all 471 electrical connectors

between aircraft and missile but once done, and with volatile fuel on

board, the combination sat happily on QRA. BLUE STEEL’s Achilles

heel was its relatively short range.

From a historian’s point of view, it is sad that there is so little new

research material in this book. To be sure, the authors have dug up

‘what if’ archival data on a possible supersonic Vulcan (with that wing

root!). But they have largely confined themselves to reproducing other

folks’ work, such as Nigel Baldwin’s presentation on the Akrotiri

Bomber Wing delivered to the RAFHS Spring 2006 Seminar. Even

when they capture original recollections, they make limited use of

them. My old Vulcan QFI, Joe L’Estrange, talks about his time on the

Vulcan B.2 but it is a bit of ramble which includes such memorable

insights as ‘a high rate of descent….was a good way of getting down

quickly’ and Vulcan crews had ‘old fashioned dials, gauges and

switches – none of the modern computerised equipment was available

as yet.’ I think I’m right in saying that the Nav Plotter’s Ground

Position Indicator, although analogue, was an outstanding piece of

computerised equipment for its time. How I wish they had asked Joe

what qualities made a good Vulcan crew or what it was like to slow

roll the beast!

In sum, this is a bit of cut-and-paste job. There is some fascinating,

if arcane, Vulcan material and if you are one of those who argues in

cyber space about whether BLUE STEEL Vulcans were officially

designated Vulcan B Mk 2As or not, this book is for you. The

individual airframe histories also provide a good record. For those

looking for new, serious historical insights into a topic that has pretty

much been done to death over the last two decades – fear not. I

suspect there will be another Vulcan book along any time soon.

Andrew Brookes

Constant Vigilance – the RAF Regiment in the Burma Campaign

by Dr Nigel W M Warwick. Pen and Sword; 2007. £25.00.

It is unusual for the author of a Foreword to be asked to review the

125

book for which it was written. However, I trust that I shall be found

sufficiently objective!

Unlike most regimental histories, those concerning the RAF

Regiment should always be read in the context of the application of

Air Power in war and the success or otherwise of the Regiment in

defeating enemy counter-air action. With Allied Land and Tactical Air

Forces throughout the Burma campaign uniquely and totally

dependant upon the air for offensive support, troop reinforcements,

medical evacuation and logistic support, never was the RAF’s security

on the ground so essential as it was in this theatre of operations. Nigel

Warwick has grasped this principle unequivocally throughout his

painstakingly researched book, with its copious footnotes, seven

colour maps, twelve tactical sketch maps, nineteen appendices, and

two pages of bibliography, which stands now as a definitive history,

full of eternally relevant lessons for RAF (and Joint) Staffs involved

in preparing for future conflicts, let alone for members of the RAF

Regiment.

As repeatedly transpires in every major war involving a threat to

the RAF on the ground since 1939, as the Japanese advanced headlong

into Burma, the desperately-pressed Army could not spare resources

from the front line to protect the RAF, whilst every local distraction of

the RAF from its primary combat role into self-defence simply

compounded the problem. The new RAF Regiment, which in Burma

eventually amounted to over 2,500 officers and men optimised for air-

base defence, was not found wanting, as Constant Vigilance makes

clear from the cited despatches and plaudits from the Supreme Allied

Commander downwards.

This book, like other RAF Regiment histories, pinpoints many

lessons which are as applicable today as they were over sixty years

ago. Most pertinent are those concerning the paucity or inadequacy of

equipment and ill-conceived organisation. For example, units with the

20mm Hispano as their primary AA armament had no organic Control

and Reporting element and lacked self-destructing ammunition.

Between them these factors denied reaction time and limited the guns’

maximum depression against low-level attack, for fear of collateral

damage on the ground. These ineffectual AA guns were never

replaced by 40mm Bofors guns, which constituted the Regiment’s

primary (and highly effective) AA armament in all other theatres, but

126

as the Japanese Air Force dwindled, they became increasingly less

relevant.

However, the RAF Regiment’s infantry or ‘field’ squadrons

steadily grew in significance, because there was a potent threat, even

during the Japanese retreat, of determined enemy special forces raids

against our air installations, resulting in many vicious patrol-level

actions. Indeed, with a view to a long war of attrition post-Burma, a

parachute assault squadron was formed, for forward air control duties

in the planned invasion to liberate Malaya.

Undoubtedly, the RAF Regiment in Burma benefited from bitter

earlier lessons in other theatres. In particular, pre-deployment training

was taken very seriously indeed. As a result, individuals and units

were well prepared at the RAF Regiment Depot and at battle schools

to which they were assigned on arrival in India, resulting in the troops’

remarkable physical and psychological endurance once deployed.

Many marched over 1,000 miles across appalling terrain and in

dreadful climatic conditions as the battle-fronts and their associated air

forces moved. Moreover, despite wounds and disease, many refused

evacuation and some even promotion, so that they could see the war

through with their squadrons. Individuals and sub-units were

sometimes attached to Army units for experience or as reinforcements,

some winning gallantry awards whilst attached. Worst must have been

the early months of relative inactivity or at best, low-level patrol work,

whilst the Japanese were being held at the limit of their advance and

before Allied Command South East Asia (ACSEA) could turn the

tide. Yet three years later, in March 1945, when the retreating enemy’s

last desperate counter-offensive was broken in the crucial battle for

Meiktila, an intensive, sustained month-long action, involving British,

African and Indian Army units, the RAF Regiment acquitted itself

magnificently. The wing commander in command was killed and

many other officers and men were killed and wounded, but the

Japanese lost even more, whilst the vital airhead remained operational.

Meiktila was arguably the RAF Regiment’s major encounter-battle of

the entire Second World War. It certainly was the last one against the

Japanese; and it was victorious.

The Regiment’s war did not end with Japan’s surrender. Wings and

squadrons were moved via Malaya and Singapore into Thailand,

French Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies to help hold the ring in

127

these territories until their own legitimate Governments could reassert

their authority. However, considerable fighting ensued in the French

and Dutch territories as nationalist partisans, well armed and trained

by allied agents as a resistance to the Japanese, turned upon their

erstwhile liberators. An RAF Regiment wing HQ and nine squadrons

thereby found themselves fighting for a further full year post-VJ-Day,

at times alongside Japanese units co-opted as allies.

Nigel Warwick draws not only upon UK and Australian war

records, bibliography and photographs, but he has interviewed many

of the few surviving RAF Regiment veterans of the Burma campaign.

Reporting the perspectives of the individual officers and men on the

great events in which they participated, he deftly weaves a tapestry

embracing not only the high-level policies and strategies of the war,

but also the brutish reality of trench-level life in this worst-imaginable

theatre. In doing so, he allays the reader’s instinctive suspicions of the

old soldier’s propensity to exaggerate his experiences, the limited

perspectives of very young and junior participants in great happenings

and the fogging of their memories over sixty years, by validating the

more significant personal anecdotes through footnotes linking them

with the historical record. Nevertheless, the veterans’ inputs are

remarkably perceptive, frequently revealing a sound grasp of the

strategic aims. That surely is a tribute to the leadership exercised

within ACSEA at all levels, for these men clearly knew exactly what

they fought for in the grand scheme.

Air Cdre Marcus Witherow

Freedom in the Air. A Czech Flyer and His Aircrew Dog by

Hamish Ross. Pen and Sword; 2007. £19.99.

The Czech flyer here is Václav Bozd_ck who made his way to

Britain via the French Foreign Legion and the French Air Force. He

served as an air gunner and wireless operator in No 311

(Czechoslovakian) Sqn which was equipped with Wellington ICs and

was the only Czech unit to have flown with Bomber Command. The

RAF’s liaison and training officer with No 311 was Sqn Ldr Charles

‘Pick’ Pickard who went on to feature as the pilot in the film Target

for Tonight and gets a very good press here. By 1942 No 311 Sqn’s

losses could not be made good with Czech personnel and it was

transferred to Coastal Command where it incurred fewer losses and

128

flew Liberators. In 1945 Bozd_ck went with the squadron to Prague

and took up residence in his own country again. In 1948 he left for

Britain once more, this time escaping from communist persecution,

and was welcomed back into the RAF. After retirement from the

Service he became an entrepreneur in Devon, where he died in 1980.

That is an outline of the book – but what lies between the lines?

There is a mixture of interlocking themes. One of them is familiar

enough in accounts of No 311 Sqn’s actions but those accounts

embody a major theme of the whole book – that of Bozd_ck’s

relationship with his dog Antis, an Alsatian he had rescued as a puppy

during the Blitzkrieg in France. He smuggled Antis into Britain to

avoid the separation of quarantine and the dog flew with him on

bombing missions, being twice wounded by Flak and having had an

oxygen mask made for him by the squadron’s ground crew. Such

behaviour drove a cart and horses through Service regulations but

Bozd_ck got round all the obstacles placed in the dog’s path, both in

the air and on the ground. When the press got wind of what was going

on, Antis became popularised as ‘The Dog of War’, which made it

even more difficult for any Service objections to prevail. If animal

lovers become alarmed at this point, Antis was not ordered on board

by his master but made his own way there. On his first sortie, when

the Wellington was en route to its target, he emerged from a hiding

place he had selected – to the initial consternation of the crew who

subsequently found his presence on missions reassuring.

When European airmen arrived they brought courage and skills to

the Service and some political baggage. The majority of that baggage

was carried by the various politicians who had gone into exile with

them, who were concerned with the post-war politics of their nations.

The history of the complex wranglings between them and the

headaches which that gave to both HM Government and the Air

Ministry has been set out admirably in Alan Brown’s Airmen in Exile

(Stroud: 2000) which, I am pleased to see, is cited in the author’s

bibliography. At the sharp end other issues gained most of the

airmen’s immediate attention. For example, on arrival many had been

embodied in the RAFVR but morale was boosted if they could still see

themselves as members of their own national air forces, even if those

were under RAF operational control. A good example was the

emergence of a Polish Air Force in Exile. Although the Czechs were

129

less numerous in Britain than the Poles they did gain recognition for a

Czechoslovakian Air Force in Exile – consisting of one bomber and

three fighter squadrons – but all its members remained in the RAFVR.

Politics on a much broader canvas, involving British, Czechs, and

Russians, emerge here and there is quite a lot of detail, both about the

pre- and post-war political situations in Czechoslovakia. In brief here,

the post-war seizure of power by communists resulted in the kind of

persecution of Czech individuals – and by association their families –

judged to be enemies of the state which was familiar to people in the

USSR itself. Bozd_ck became an object of suspicion for reasons

which included his service with the RAF.

In 1948 he decided to escape, leaving his wife and infant son

behind but taking Antis with him. The interdependence of this man

and his dog appears again in an account of their perilous journey to

reach the US Zone of Occupation in Germany. Reliance on Antis’

intuition and courage saved Bozd_ck’s life during that journey. When

he re-enlisted the 1946 Aircrew Scheme was in force and on p134 the

author says that his initial designation as a Sig IVA was equivalent to

sergeant in the traditional scheme. I think that corporal is a better

approximation. The 1946 Scheme is an arcane episode anyway in

Service history and didn’t last for long. His post-war service saw him

instructing, flying with Transport Command, serving in Nicosia

during the Suez crisis and ending up as an air traffic controller in

1961. Antis, long dead by that time, had a well established reputation

with the British press and the PDSA, a veterinary charity, had initiated

steps which led to him being awarded the Dickin Medal – the animal

equivalent of the VC – which was presented to him by Field Marshal

The Earl Wavell in March 1949.

Hamish Ross has written an interesting story about Bozd_ck and

Antis. His book is illustrated by decent photographs, has a set of Notes

for each chapter and an appropriate bibliography. However, I think

that the degree of detail concerning political situations in

Czechoslovakia before and after the war – whilst necessary at times to

understand the lives of men like Bozd_ck – may place some strain on

a reader not primarily interested in politics. That said, the book is

worth reading for the account it gives of an extraordinary relationship

between man and dog. Hence, unless you have an informed interest in

130

Czechoslovakian affairs, you may prefer to savour that account by

asking your library for a copy of the book.

Dr Tony Mansell

The Military Airfields of Britain – a series of volumes by Ken

Delve. Crowood; 2006-07. £16.99 each.

Between 1979 and 1985 Patrick Stephens (PSL) published its ten-

volume Action Stations series in which a variety of authors

summarised the histories of most of the military airfields in the UK. In

effect, Ken Delve has set out to supersede these and, while I am not in

the habit of relying on a publisher’s publicity material, in this case

Crowood’s description is hard to beat. It says:

‘This series of books provides a fresh user-friendly look at the

military airfields of the British Isles. The series is split

geographically, each book including a number of counties on a

regional basis. Entries cover every military airfield within the

counties, from WW I to the present day and comprise: brief

history of the airfield, construction and use, including decoy

sites; comprehensive list of flying units with dates and aircraft

types; list of HQ units based at the airfield; details of

memorials; maps and plans of almost every airfield; location

details; selection of period photographs.’

I would not take issue with any of that. So has it done the trick? Is

the new series an improvement? Yes. The tabulated presentation of

user units is both comprehensive and far more accessible than PSL’s

purely narrative approach which left the reader to rummage about in

the text in the hope of finding arrival and departure dates for a unit

which, in the event, might never actually have been mentioned. That

said, there is still a narrative summary in Delve’s version which serves

to flesh out the raw dates. Similarly, while the PSL series included

some site plans, the Crowood books have lots of them. Since these are

reproductions of contemporary drawings, they are, inevitably, of

variable quality, ranging from excellent to adequate, but they all

suffice to indicate the layout on the date in question. Another useful

feature is an extract of airfield data as at December 1944 which

provides comparative information on runway construction and length,

available hangarage and accommodation capacity. Many photographs

131

are provided, although these too are of variable quality, some because

of the nature of the originals but others because they appear to have

been scanned from other publications, resulting in tell-tale interference

patterns.

To keep the cost down, this series is being produced as softbacks

and, regardless of size (the six volumes that have appeared thus far

contain between 256 and 352 pages), at a standard price of £16.99

apiece. There must be at least two more to come, as Scotland and

Northern Ireland have yet to be covered, along with the East Midlands

and its dozens of Bomber Command airfields.

To sum up, these books are useful and, as claimed, user-friendly.

The only problem is that, if you are an anorak like me, and just have to

have them all, it is going to set you back a tidy sum.

CGJ

The Daily Telegraph Book of Airmen’s Obituaries, Book Two

edited by Jay Iliff. Grub Street; 2007. Price £18.00.

Some five years ago, Grub Street published a selection of Ted

Bishop’s obituaries of aviators that had appeared in the Daily

Telegraph. As its title suggests ‘Book Two’ offers a further selection,

most of which have been written by his successor, Air Cdre Graham

Pitchfork, whose name will be familiar to members of this Society.

Since the format mirrors that of the original volume, my comments

will inevitably reflect much of what I wrote in Journal 28. As before,

this book is a substantial A5(ish) hardback, running to some 416

pages. There are no illustrations. There is an index. The entries are

grouped under convenient headings: Fighter Boys; Bomber Boys; The

Girls; Maritime; Industrialists and Engineers; Test Pilots and so on.

Among the 100 folk who feature in this edition, all of whom have died

since 2001, are Sir Kenneth Cross, Edward Crew, Sir John Grandy,

Jack Furner, Sir David Lee, Frank Carey, Dame Felicity Peake, Sir

Ivor Broom, Neville Duke, John Cunningham, Sir George Edwards,

Stanislaw Skalski, Sir Christopher Foxley-Norris, Alex Henshaw, Sir

Fredrick Page, Pierre Clostermann and Sir Lewis Hodges – to name

but a few.

The presentation generally involves an anecdote or two, focusing

on the more spectacular of the subject’s achievements, accompanied

by a summary of the rest of his/her career. Since most of the featured

132

personalities achieved a degree of prominence in one field or another,

their stories are interesting and/or entertaining and the book makes a

handy reference to some of the great and good, and to one or two of

the more colourful members, of the aviation community.

Recommended.

CGJ

133

ROYAL AIR FORCE HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The Royal Air Force has been in existence for over 80 years; the

study of its history is deepening, and continues to be the subject of

published works of consequence. Fresh attention is being given to the

strategic assumptions under which military air power was first created

and which largely determined policy and operations in both World

Wars, the inter-war period, and in the era of Cold War tension.

Material dealing with post-war history is now becoming available

under the 30-year rule. These studies are important to academic

historians and to the present and future members of the RAF.

The RAF Historical Society was formed in 1986 to provide a focus

for interest in the history of the RAF. It does so by providing a setting

for lectures and seminars in which those interested in the history of the

Service have the opportunity to meet those who participated in the

evolution and implementation of policy. The Society believes that

these events make an important contribution to the permanent record.

The Society normally holds three lectures or seminars a year in

London, with occasional events in other parts of the country.

Transcripts of lectures and seminars are published in the Journal of the

RAF Historical Society, which is distributed free of charge to

members. Individual membership is open to all with an interest in

RAF history, whether or not they were in the Service. Although the

Society has the approval of the Air Force Board, it is entirely self-

financing.

Membership of the Society costs £18 per annum and further details

may be obtained from the Membership Secretary, Dr Jack Dunham,

Silverhill House, Coombe, Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire. GLI2

7ND. (Tel 01453-843362)

134

THE TWO AIR FORCES AWARD

In 1996 the Royal Air Force Historical Society established, in

collaboration with its American sister organisation, the Air Force

Historical Foundation, the Two Air Forces Award, which was to be

presented annually on each side of the Atlantic in recognition of

outstanding academic work by a serving officer or airman. The RAF

winners have been:

1996Sqn Ldr P C Emmett PhD MSc BSc CEng MIEE

1997Wg Cdr M P Brzezicki MPhil MIL

1998Wg Cdr P J Daybell MBE MA BA

1999Sqn Ldr S P Harpum MSc BSc MILT

2000Sqn Ldr A W Riches MA

2001Sqn Ldr C H Goss MA

2002Sqn Ldr S I Richards BSc

2003Wg Cdr T M Webster MB BS MRCGP MRAeS

2004Sqn Ldr S Gardner MA MPhil

2005Wg Cdr S D Ellard MSc BSc CEng MRAeS MBCS

THE AIR LEAGUE GOLD MEDAL

On 11 February 1998 the Air League presented the Royal Air Force

Historical Society with a Gold Medal in recognition of the Society’s

achievements in recording aspects of the evolution of British air

power and thus realising one of the aims of the League. The Executive

Committee decided that the medal should be awarded periodically to a

nominal holder (it actually resides at the Royal Air Force Club, where

it is on display) who was to be an individual who had made a

particularly significant contribution to the conduct of the Society’s

affairs. Holders to date have been:

Air Marshal Sir Frederick Sowrey KCB CBE AFC

Air Commodore H A Probert MBE MA

135

SECRETARY

Gp Capt K J Dearman

1 Park Close

Middleton Stoney

Oxon

OX25 4AS

Tel: 01869 343327

MEMBERSHIP SECRETARY

(who also deals with sales of publications)

Dr J Dunham

Silverhill House

Coombe

Wotton-under-Edge

Glos

GL12 7ND

Tel: 01453 843362

TREASURER

John Boyes TD CA

5 Queen’s Close

Stansted

Essex

CM24 8EJ

Tel: 01279 814225

EDITOR and PUBLICATIONS MANAGER

Wg Cdr C G Jefford MBE BA

Walnuts

Lower Road

Postcombe

Thame

OX9 7DU

Tel: 01844 281449