1

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-Chairman			Group Captain J D Heron OBE
Secretary			Group Captain K J Dearman FRAeS
Membership Secretary		Dr Jack Dunham PhD CPsychol AMRAeS
Treasurer			J Boyes TD CA
Members				Air 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 & Publications		Wing Commander C G Jefford MBE BA
Manager
*Ex Officio
 

4



CONTENTS

EDITOR's NOTE						6
ERRATA							6
20 October 1986.  THE INTELLIGENCE WAR AND THE		7
ROYAL AIR FORCE by Professor R V Jones CB CBE FRS.

16 March 1987.  WORLD WAR II - THE BALANCE		26
SHEET by John Terraine.

14 March 1988.  THE IMPACT OF THE SANDYS		44
DEFENCE POLICY ON THE ROYAL AIR FORCE by
T C G James CMG MA.

29 June 1988.  THE POLICY, COMMAND AND			66
DIRECTION OF THE Luftwaffe IN WORLD WAR II by
Dr Horst Boog.

31 October 1988. Seminar - THE ROYAL AIR FORCE AND	86
CLANDESTINE OPERATIONS IN NORTH-WEST
EUROPE.

BOOK REVIEWS						112
 

5
SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS
ABM				Anti-Ballistic Missile
ACAS(Int)			Assistant Chief of the Air Staff (Intelligence)
ADI(K),				Assistant Directorate of Intelligence (K)
AI				Air Intelligence
ASW				Anti-Submarine Warfare
CAS				Chief of the Air Staff
CDS				Chief of the Defence Staff
CIGS				Chief of the Imperial General Staff
DD				Deputy Director(ate)
DF				Direction Finding
DCAS				Deputy Chief of the Air Staff
DZ				Drop/Dropping Zone
FEAF				Far East Air Force
FINRAE				Ferranti Inertial Rapid Alignment Equipment
HUD				Head Up Display
IFF				Identification Friend or Foe
MA				Military Intelligence
QRA				Quick Reaction Alert
SACEUR				Supreme Allied Commander Europe
SACLANT				Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic
SAM				Surface-to-Air Missile
SIS				Secret Intelligence Service
SOE				Special Operations Executive
VCAS				Vice Chief of the Air Staff
 

6


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.


7
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!'
 

8

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
 

9
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
 

10
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
 

11
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
 

12
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
 

13
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
 

14
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
 

15
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,
 

16
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
 

17
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
 

18
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
 

19
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
 

20
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
 

21
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
 

22
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
 

23
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
 

24
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
 

25
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.

26
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
 

27
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' -
 

28
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
 

29
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
 

30
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
 

31
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
 

32
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
 

33
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
 

34
- 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
 

35
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
 

36
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
 

37
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
 

38
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
 

39
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.
 

40
     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,
 

41
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
 

42
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
 

43
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'.
 

44

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.
 


45
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
 

46
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.
 

47
     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
 

48
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
 

49
     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
 

50
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,
 

51
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
 

52
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.
 

53
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
 

54
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
 

55
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
 

56
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
 

57
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
 

58
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
 

59
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
 

60
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
 

61
- 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
 

62
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
 

63
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-
 

64
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
 

65
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.
 

66
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.
 

67
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
 

68
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
 

69
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
 

70
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.
 

71
     * 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
 

72
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
 

73
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,
 

74
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
 

75
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.
 

76
     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
 

77
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.
 

78
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
 

79
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
 

80
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.
 

81
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;
 

82
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-
 

83
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
 

84
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
 

85
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.
 

86
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
 

87
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
 

88
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
 

89
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
 

90
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
 

91
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:
		Yugoslavia	16,469 tons
		France		11,333 tons
		Italy		5,907 tons
		Greece		4,205 tons
		Albania		1,205 tons
		Denmark		700 tons
		Poland		600 tons
		Rest of Europe	2,327 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.
 

92
     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-
 

93
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
 

94
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
 

95
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
 

96
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
 

97
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
 

98
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
 

99
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
 

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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,
 

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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.
 

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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:

     1996	Sqn Ldr P C Emmett PhD MSc BSc CEng MIEE
     1997	Wg Cdr M P Brzezicki MPhil MIL
     1998	Wg Cdr P J Daybell MBE MA BA
     1999	Sqn Ldr S P Harpum MSc BSc MILT
     2000	qn Ldr A W Riches MA
     2001	Sqn Ldr C H Goss MA
     2002	Sqn Ldr S I Richards BSc
     2003	Wg Cdr T M Webster MB BS MRCGP MRAeS
     2004	Sqn Ldr S Gardner MA MPhil
     2005	Wg 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
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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
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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