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The possession of an air force the size of the RAF was an affront to the peacetime mood of economy and war-weariness. Under Trenchard it had grown huge. By the end of the war it had 30,122 officers, 263,410 men and 188 combat squadrons.¹ Shortly after the Armistice a decision was taken to prune back the service to a modest force of thirty-three squadrons. The Northcliffe press and air-power enthusiasts in Parliament denounced the myopia of the policy and warned that German quiescence was only temporary. But hardship, public disgust with war and a belief in Britain’s ability to rise to the occasion in a future crisis ensured, until the rise of Hitler forced a change of mind, that a frugal attitude to air spending was maintained. In August 1925, the belief that there was no war on the horizon became official policy with the Cabinet’s adoption of the ‘ten-year rule’, which stated that, in revising defence estimates, it should be assumed that the Empire would not be involved in a major conflict for a decade.

Trenchard was put in charge of supervising the new incarnation. He was philosophical about the new restraints. In his brisk memorandum setting out the post-war organization of the RAF he compared the force to ‘the prophet Jonah’s gourd. The necessities of war created it in a night, but the economies of peace have to a large extent caused it to wither in a day, and we are now faced with the necessity of replacing it with a plant of deeper root.’²

The RAF needed roots if it was to resist the grasping hands of the army and navy, who were once again eager now that the war was over to snatch back control of air assets so they could apply them to their own particular needs. They maintained this covetous attitude throughout the inter-war period. Trenchard fought a canny and tenacious defensive campaign. As Chief of the Air Staff, he limited himself to providing ‘the vital essentials of a skeleton force while giving way on every possible detail on which he felt expense could be spared’.³ He reined in his obstreperous nature and tried to make the best use of the tiny resources available. He needed institutions that would provide the foundations of the new force and establish it as an independent reality, and to arrange the limited manpower at his disposal in the most efficient and flexible way.

In this delicate job he had the backing of Winston Churchill, Secretary of State for War and Air, who had, predictably, been enthusiastic about flying since its inception, even trying to qualify as a pilot and almost killing himself in the process. None the less Churchill’s support could be fickle and his resolve slacken when faced with the opposition of strong vested interests.

In a paper written for Churchill, Trenchard concluded that the future could be approached in two ways. The first was ‘to use the air simply as a means of conveyance, captained by chauffeurs, weighted by the navy and army personnel, to carry out reconnaissance for the navy or army, drop bombs at places specified by them…or observe for their artillery’. The other choice was ‘to really make an air service which will encourage and develop airmanship, or better still, the air spirit, like the naval spirit, and to make it a force that will profoundly alter the strategy of the future’.⁴

He argued his case for the latter in front of the prime minister, Lloyd George, and the Cabinet, who accepted, with some financial restraints, his and Churchill’s main points. The proposals were set out in a 7,000-word White Paper. The document stated that ‘the principle to be kept in mind in forming the framework of the Air Service is that in the future the main portion of it will consist of an Independent Force, together with Service personnel required in carrying out Aeronautical Research’. With that established, the RAF was saved from assimilation by its hungry older rivals, though Trenchard threw them a scrap by allowing that smaller units within it would be specially trained for cooperation work with the army and navy and would probably be absorbed into their organizations in future.

Starved of money, he planned a small versatile service. Twenty squadrons were to be deployed overseas, ready to react rapidly to local unrest. Four squadrons would be held at home in reserve. All the rest of the RAF’s resources would be concentrated on training officers and men to provide a pool of expertise which could be drawn on when a crisis arose. New training establishments would have to be set up. Trenchard had rejected the suggestion of the generals and admirals that the RAF should use existing army and navy facilities. The ‘air spirit’ could only be fostered in places the RAF could call its own.

To solve the problem posed by the youthful nature of military flying, which meant there were many junior officers and comparatively few senior ranks, he proposed a novel system. Only half the officers at any time would hold permanent commissions. Of the rest, 40 per cent would be short-service officers, serving for four or six years with another four on the reserve. The other 10 per cent would be on secondment from the army and navy.

The permanent officers were to be supplied mainly by an RAF cadet college, the air force equivalent of Sandhurst or Dartmouth, and also from the universities and the ranks. Once commissioned, they would be posted to a squadron. After five years they were required to adopt a specialization, such as navigation, engineering or wireless.

The new air force needed a steady supply of first-class mechanics, riggers and fitters. Most of the thousands of skilled tradesmen who had manned the workshops and hangars on the Western Front and at home bases during the war had returned to civilian life. Trenchard’s Jesuitical solution was to recruit ‘boys and train them ourselves’. They would serve three-year apprenticeships before joining the ranks. There were also plans for a staff college, at Andover, to train future commanders, and centres for research into aircraft development, armaments, wireless and aerial photography.

Cranwell, in Lincolnshire, was chosen for the cadet college. Halton Park, in Hertfordshire, was selected for the main apprentice school. Cranwell was flat, windy and had a large existing airfield. Trenchard liked the fact that it was a long way from London. He hoped that, ‘marooned in the wilderness, cut off from pastimes they could not organize for themselves, they would find life cheaper, healthier and more wholesome’. This, he reckoned, would give them ‘less cause to envy their contemporaries at Sandhurst or Dartmouth and acquire any kind of inferiority complex’.⁵

Halton, on the other hand, was chosen for the apprentices – ‘Trenchard brats’, as they became known – because of its proximity to the Smoke. Homesick adolescents would be in easier reach of their metropolitan parents and there were dance halls and cinemas nearby to keep them entertained when the working day was over.

Cranwell is scoured in the winter by freezing winds that race in from the Wash, sunny in the summer. It had been a training base for the Royal Naval Air Service. With the amalgamation of the RNAS and the RFC it had passed into RAF ownership. It opened as the Royal Air Force College in February 1920, the first military air academy in the world. The entrance examination was essentially the same as that for the Sandhurst and Woolwich army cadet colleges, testing applicants on a broad range of subjects, including English, history, languages ancient and modern and sciences – though you could be selected without tackling a science paper.

In the bleak late winter it was a dispiriting place. The first fifty-two cadets arrived, one of them wrote afterwards, to a ‘scene of grey corrugated iron and large open spaces whose immensity seemed limitless in the sea of damp fog which surrounded the camp’.⁶ The new boys lived in single-storey wood and iron huts, scattered on either side of the Sleaford road, linked by covered walkways to keep off the rain and snow. It was not until 1929 that money was available to start work on the main college building, which was specially designed to look old and respectable.

Despite its ramshackle origins, the college was confident from the beginning that it would be great. Writing in the first issue of the college magazine in September 1920, Churchill set the tone.

Nothing that has ever happened in the world before has offered to man such an opportunity for individual personal prowess as the air fighting of the Great War. Fiction has never portrayed such extraordinary combats, such hairbreadth escapes, such an absolute superiority to risk, such dazzling personal triumphs…It is to rival, and no doubt to excel these feats of your forerunners in the Service that you are now training yourselves and I, for one, look forward with confidence to the day when you who are not at the College will make the name of the Royal Air Force feared and respected throughout the world.⁷

The RAF thought hard about the sort of boy it was looking for. In 1919 a committee chaired by Lord Hugh Cecil, the staff officer who had waved Cecil Lewis into the RFC on the basis of his fives prowess, was set up to try and define the educational and human qualities needed for the officer corps. The architects of the new service accepted, in theory at least, that it should be open to all talents. It had been clear since the end of the previous century that social exclusivity was ultimately incompatible with the technological competence modern warfare required. The first senior military figure to understand this was Admiral Fisher, who insisted all his officers had a degree of technical understanding, a move that challenged the class structure of the Navy.⁸

The Cecil Committee decided that all officers must be able to fly, though the qualification was not so rigid as to exclude good technicians who were poor aviators. It wanted boys who exhibited ‘the quality of a gentleman’. It was careful, though, to emphasize that by this they meant ‘not a particular degree of wealth or a particular social position but a certain character’.⁹ Even so, the new cadet college must have seemed to any ambitious lower-class boy and his parents as cold and daunting as the old ones. Air Ministry officials set out to recruit people like themselves. They wrote to public-school headmasters, advertising the benefits of a service career and claiming that flying training was not the hair-raising activity it had been in the war years (though this was far from the truth and accidents at the college were frequent).¹⁰ An Old Etonian officer was dispatched to the Alma Mater to act as a liaison officer.

Unlike the public schools, few state schools had the resources to provide coaching for the entrance exam. Fees were prohibitive. Parents were expected to pay up to £75 a year plus £35 before entry and £30 at the start of the second year towards uniform and books; this at a time when a bank manager earned £500 a year. Despite the Cecil Committee’s wish that selection should be ‘free of the suspicion of partiality in favour of either individuals or classes’, most cadets in the interwar years were public schoolboys.

The curriculum at the beginning was a mix of academic and practical subjects interspersed with drill and PT. In the first year there was little flying, though much time was spent in the workshops and hangars. Cadets lived five to a hut until their fourth, senior, term, when they got their own cubicles. They received £2 15s. (£2.75) a week and each day was packed with activities from reveille at 6.45 a.m. to dinner in the mess. Sports were a fetish, particularly rugby, which Trenchard considered ‘the best game for making an officer and a gentleman out of any material’.¹¹ Keenness on boxing was admired. The life was clean, spartan, boisterous. Women were nowhere to be seen, except at the end-of-course dance, and the limited delights of Sleaford, the local town, were out of bounds. Cadets were allowed motorcycles but not cars and the lanes round about buzzed with souped-up Broughs and Rudges.

Fun was bruising. First-termers were forced to sing a song for the other cadets. Failure to perform well earned a punishment called ‘creeping to Jesus’. The victim was stripped almost naked, blindfolded and forced to sniff his way along a pepper trail that ended at an open window, where he was tipped outside and drenched in cold water.¹² The first commandant, Air Commodore C. A. H. Longcroft, was a hunting man and cadets were encouraged to ride to hounds, though a shortage of mounts meant beagling was more practical. The college had its own pack.

Intellectual activity was limited. There was encouragement from an early teacher, S. P. B. Mais, who left Tonbridge School to become Professor of English at Cranwell. He felt cadets should be treated as undergraduates and founded a play-reading circle and a debating society. The response was initially hesitant. The cadets had gone to Cranwell to fly. Yet at the outset, at the end of their two-year courses, this was something they were still not fully qualified to do. A shortage of aircraft and the demands of the curriculum meant graduates left without their wings, or even a high standard of airmanship. One cadet spent less than nine hours in an aeroplane in his first year, and then only as a passenger. The Avro trainers were equipped with a compass and a bubble indicator like a spirit level to show whether they were flying straight. Navigation was primitive and many flights consisted of simple hops to neighbouring airfields. Cranwell cadets were awarded their wings after leaving once they had satisfied their first squadron commanders that they could indeed fly.

But Cranwell succeeded from the start in generating an air force spirit. The cadets knew what was wanted. Aerial warfare, they understood, had created the need for a hybrid warrior who combined mastery of the latest technology with the mental bearing of a classical champion. It was a new military caste and Cranwell was its spiritual home.

The same aspiration to excellence was encouraged at Halton. Five thousand applicants responded when the scheme was announced. They were mostly boys from the lower middle and upper working classes who saw the RAF as a means of advancement and a gateway to the intoxicating world of aviation. The entrance exam tested applicants on mathematics, experimental science and English. To pass, boys were essentially expected to be up to school certificate level, a tough examination taken at sixteen that qualified the successful candidate for higher education. It was also the entry requirement for Cranwell. Many of those who sat for entrance to Halton and its sister technical schools therefore, had parents who were sufficiently comfortably off to keep them on past the normal school-leaving age of fourteen. Or sufficiently self-sacrificing. In January 1921 a photographer was present as 300 new recruits set off from a London terminus to begin their course. The boys are cheering. Many wear shabby suits and flat prole hats that make them seem miniature versions of their fathers. The caption notes that ‘the variety of class of boys was very striking, many of them having quite an imposing kit, whilst not the least pleased with the whole proceedings were those whose belongings were kept within bounds in brown paper parcels’.¹³

The high standard at entry meant that many of the mechanics servicing the aeroplanes would be educationally equal, and superior in mechanical skill, to the men flying them.¹⁴ RAF other ranks showed less deference to their officers than was customary in the army, where most privates and NCOs came from the uneducated working class. In the RAF, the path from the Naafi to the officers’ mess was wider and more frequently trodden than in any of the other services, and many a rigger and fitter ended up a pilot. The system was constructed to allow, if not exactly encourage, the process. The best three apprentices each year were offered a cadetship at Cranwell, with the expectation, frequently fulfilled, that this would lead to the highest reaches of the service. A new class of airman pilots was announced in late 1921 that offered flying training to outstanding candidates from the ranks. They served for five years before returning to their own trade, but kept their sergeant’s stripes gained by being in the air. The policy meant that by the time the war started about a quarter of the pilots in RAF squadrons were NCOs – a tough, skilful difficult-to-impress élite within an élite.¹⁵

There were 300 places in the first intake. The regime followed the same hardworking lines as at the cadet college, with classes and workshop sessions from Monday to Friday and Wednesday afternoons off for games. Discipline was milder than in the army or navy, but firm none the less. Only over-eighteens were allowed to smoke, and then when off-base. Trenchard was as proud of Halton as he was of Cranwell. He was aware that by engineering a new class of educated other ranks, the first in British military history, he was doing something radical, almost revolutionary.

Cranwell and Halton formed the human nucleus for the new air force, but the manpower they provided fell far short of requirements. The short-service commission scheme helped reduce the deficit. It started in 1924 when the Air Ministry advertised for 400 young officers for flying duties. It wanted British-born men of pure European descent¹⁶ who would serve up to six years and spend four more on the reserve list. Despite the lack of long-term career security, there were many takers. The universities seemed another promising recruiting ground. The idea started with RFC veterans, who went up to Cambridge after the war to study engineering, and was encouraged by Trenchard during a visit in 1925. It spread to Oxford, and later to London.

Trenchard had raised the notion of a territorial air force of weekend fliers in his 1919 proposals. Churchill rejected it. It won the backing of the subsequent air minister Sir Samuel Hoare. A bill to set up an Auxiliary Air Force (AAF) was brought in by the short-lived Labour-led government which came to power in January 1924. The first four squadrons were formed in October 1925: No. 600 (City of London), No. 601 (County of London), No. 602 (City of Glasgow) and No. 603 (City of Edinburgh). The pilots were amateurs who flew in their own time on aeroplanes supplied and maintained by the RAF, and the units were intended to have a strong local character. Trenchard considered they would be a success ‘if it was looked upon as as much of an honour to belong to one…as it is to belong to a good club or a good university’.¹⁷

This suggested a degree of social exclusivity. There was a strong snobbish tinge to some of the first formations. Flying had always been fashionable and rich amateur airmen were numerous. The Auxiliary Air Force provided an opportunity for some of them to band together in a patriotic cause, with friends from club, links and office. No. 601 Squadron was, according to its own legend, founded in White’s, the grandest address in Clubland, on the initiative of the son of the first duke of Westminster. Lord Edward Grosvenor, after Eton and a spell in the French Foreign Legion, had served as a pilot in the RNAS in the First World War. Like several forward-looking grandees he believed air power would decide future conflicts. Auxiliary squadrons, he felt, would allow men to go to war surrounded by comrades with whom they shared ties of place and friendship. Seriousness of purpose was overlaid with thick layers of upper-class fun. He recruited from his own circle. The squadron historian noted that he ‘chose his officers from among gentlemen of sufficient presence not to be overawed by him, and sufficient means not to be excluded from his favourite pastimes – eating, drinking and White’s’.¹⁸ Candidates were invited to his home in Eaton Square and sluiced large glasses of port. If they passed muster it was on to the club bar for gin and tonics. The squadron’s town headquarters were at 54 Kensington Park Road, in Notting Hill. They were furnished and equipped to cavalry regiment standards with silver, military prints on the walls, costly vintages and rich food. The gatherings echoed to the sound of broken glass. After dinner it was customary for diners to try and circumnavigate the room without touching the floor. Another game involved persuading some visiting dupe to ‘calibrate the table’. One of the company would lie on his back with his legs hanging over the edge of a large oval table while other squadron members tilted it back and made a show of measuring the angle between wood and limb. Then it was the victim’s turn. Once he was helpless, his ankles were grabbed, the table was tipped back and tankards of beer poured down his trouser legs.

Members held an annual training camp at Port Lympne on the Kent coast. It was the summer home of their patron, Sir Philip Sassoon, who combined a wild enthusiasm for flying with almost total ineptitude as a pilot. Squadron pride was nourished by manufactured rivalries with other Auxiliary Air Force units, japes designed to annoy the regular RAF, and self-conscious displays of individualism such as the wearing of bright red socks with uniform.

The snobbery was in keeping with the times and provoked indulgent smiles. But this was not what Trenchard had had in mind. At Cambridge he had emphasized that in the AAF and university squadrons, there was room for everyone: ‘the man of initiative and the man of action, the methodical man and even the crank. We open our ranks widely to all.’

Despite the gilded image, not all the auxiliary pilots were rich. Applicants to the AAF needed to be able to fly solo and hold an A licence and courses cost £100. It was a considerable investment. The Air Ministry recognized the reality, refunding tuition costs once a trainee had qualified. Altogether there were to be twenty-one auxiliary squadrons drawn from all over the country. From 1934 they were equipped with fighters instead of bombers. When the war came they made up a quarter of Fighter Command’s front-line strength.

Trenchard retired at the end of 1929. His energy and advocacy had ensured the survival and growth of the RAF, albeit slowly and painfully. The RAF was undernourished. From 1921 to 1930 the annual expenditure estimates hovered between £19 million and £18 million. In 1923 the government had promised to build a metropolitan air force of fifty-two squadrons for home defence. Six years later, there were only twenty-five home-based regular squadrons in service, augmented by eleven auxiliary and reserve units, and no official hurry to make up the shortfall.

But the service had an existence and an identity. It had a sky-blue ensign, adorned with one of the red, white and blue roundels the First World War pilots had had painted on their aircraft to shield them from ‘friendly fire’. It had its own slate-blue uniform and forage cap. It had a good motto – Per Ardua ad Astra. A system of squadron organization, evolved in the battlefields of France, had been established and an independent rank structure, painfully worked out in face of mockery from the army chiefs, that climbed from aircraftman to Marshal of the Royal Air Force. There was an apprentice school to ensure a steady flow of skilled technicians to maintain the aeroplanes and a cadet school and a short-service commission scheme to provide pilots and commanders.

Great energy and thought had gone into the work of creating the new service, comparatively little on defining its purpose. The RAF had men, machines, organization and identity. What it did not have as yet was a clear idea of its purpose. A post-war Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Slessor once wrote that ‘before 1939 we really knew nothing about air warfare’. It was a frank admission, but Slessor was in a position to know. Twenty years earlier, in May 1937, he had been promoted to the post of deputy director of plans at the Air Ministry and was appalled to discover how unfitted the RAF was to defend Britain.¹⁹

The state of the air force during most of the inter-war period was a reflection of a general unwillingness, found in every corner of society, to contemplate another bloodbath. Preparing for war seemed more likely to encourage than prevent it. There were clear political, economic and psychological reasons for Britain’s reluctance to rearm. The aversion to doing so was reinforced by confusion as to what weapons were required. Everyone agreed that air power would be crucial. No one knew exactly why or how. If there was a consensus it centred on the belief that bombers and bombing would play a predominant role. Something of the effects of aerial bombardment was already known, from the British and German experiences in the First World War and from small wars that had flared up around the world subsequently. Many military and political analysts believed that hostilities would begin in the air and the results, particularly for civilians, would be horrible.

German Zeppelin airships, then Gotha and Giant bombers, had provided a glimpse of what could be expected, from their intermittent and haphazard bombing campaign on British cities and coastal towns that began in January 1915. Altogether, in 103 raids they killed 1,413 people, all but 296 of them civilians. They wounded between 3,400 and 3,900, the vast majority of them non-combatants.

What impressed was not the quantity of the violence but the quality. In one raid carried out in daylight on 13 June 1917, fourteen Gothas, each loaded with a 500-kilogram bomb, reached the centre of London. One bomb struck a school in Poplar, killing 18 children and maiming 27. Zeppelins excited particular terror. Their destruction provoked un-British displays of glee, with crowds clapping, singing and cheering in the streets as the airships sank to earth with their sixty-strong crews roasting in the flames.

Henceforth, civilians could expect to be in the front line and neither military nor political thinking placed much faith in their ability to endure the experience. As the overture wars of the 1930s established the themes of the great symphony of violence to come, it appeared more and more certain that civilian morale would be unable to withstand the coming ordeal. As early as 1925, the Air Staff were predicting casualties of 1,700 dead and 3,300 injured in London alone in the first twenty-four hours of hostilities, resulting in ‘the moral [original italics] collapse of the personnel employed in the working of the vital public services’.²⁰ The Japanese bombing of Shanghai in 1932, the German Condor Legion’s destruction of Guernica in April 1937, the Italian bombardment of Barcelona, all reinforced notions of aerial warfare’s crucial, possibly decisive, importance.

There were two obvious approaches to countering the danger. One was to improve Britain’s defences to a point where the enemy – always Germany, apart from a brief, fantastical moment in 1922 when France was identified as the threat – would be deterred from launching an attack or would suffer severely if it did. Proponents of this view believed that the war had shown that fighters mustered to defend British airspace were, after a slow start, competent to handle raiding airships and bombers. At the same time, the experience had accelerated the development of effective anti-aircraft gunnery and searchlights. The second approach was to concentrate on building up a strong offensive bomber force. That, too, would have a deterrent effect. But if deterrence failed, it left Britain with the means of striking back.

It was the second view that took hold, both in air force and political thinking, although never to the point where alternative reasoning was suppressed. The strategic debate of the inter-war years was dominated by two phrases. They were slogans rather than expressions of profound thought. One was the idea of the ‘knock-out blow’, which could bring victory in a single action. The other was the conviction that ‘the bomber will always get through’ – a phrase popularized by Baldwin in November 1932 in a Commons speech which sent a spasm of foreboding through the country. What that meant, he continued brutally, was that ‘the only defence is offence…you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves’.²¹

The logic of this bleak conviction was that fighters would have only a secondary role to play. Despite the prevalence of these views, successive governments proved reluctant to invest in building up a bombing force that could both ‘get through’ and strike the ‘knock-out blow’. Money was one problem. But the understandable miserliness of politicians trying to manage a vulnerable economy in shaky times was informed by less easily identifiable and more complex motives. Many of the public figures of the 1920s and 1930s had served in the war and knew its horrors at first hand. They shared the ordinary citizen’s dread of a recurrence, and shrank away from consideration of the unpopular positions that a reasoned rearmament policy would have required.

The conduct of Britain’s defence in the years from 1918 to 1936 looks now to have been extraordinarily negligent and foolhardy. It seemed so to some at the time. But among the victor nations the impulse was to seek idealistic alternatives, exemplified by the great disarmament conference of 1932-4 and the foundation of the League of Nations. Until the threat from Germany was naked and unmistakable, the RAF would lack the sort of carefully planned, sensibly timed and realistically funded programme it needed to develop properly. Progress was jerky and reactive and frequently triggered by panic. The original plan to create fifty-two squadrons for home defence was provoked by alarm at the news that France had an air fleet of 300 bombers and 300 fighters. When that chimerical threat evaporated, so, too, did the will to pursue the scheme.

The arrival of Hitler in 1933, and Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations and the disarmament conference, produced another spurt of activity, resulting in what was known as expansion scheme A. It was officially announced in July 1934, the first of thirteen such schemes that appeared over the next four years, most of which never got beyond the proposal stage, as Britain tried to achieve some sort of rough parity with Germany. Scheme A was an interim measure designed to signal to Hitler that Britain was prepared to take to the starting blocks in an aerial arms race. It also created a structure to provide training, and the basis for a more ambitious expansion should the message be ignored. The planned level of home squadrons was increased from the original fifty-two to sixty-four. Scheme A also increased the proportion of fighter squadrons. There were to be twenty-five now, against thirty-nine bomber units compared to seventeen and thirty-five in the 1923 plan.

The shift was a political rather than an air force initiative. It was opposed by the Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Edward Ellington, who stuck to the view that a big bomber fleet was central to Britain’s security. The well-publicized fact that the increased range of German bombers meant they could now reach well into the industrial north-east of Britain and the Midlands undermined this approach.

The argument that there was no real defence against bombers was being invisibly eroded anyway. Out of sight and far away from the committee rooms where military planners and government ministers and officials met, scientists and engineers worked with RAF officers to develop technologies that would greatly increase the vulnerability of attacking air forces. In the search for scientific means of combating attacking aircraft, attention had been given to a ‘death ray’ which would neutralize the ignition systems of aircraft, causing them to drop from the sky. Research under the direction of R. A. Watson-Watt, superintendent of the Radio Department at the National Physics Laboratory, suggested the scheme was impractical. However, the experiments confirmed the fact that aircraft interfered with radio waves and radiated a signal back. This suggested the possibility of a detection system that could reveal their position, height and direction. The huge importance of the discovery was recognized immediately and from February 1935 there was strong official backing for the development of what became known as radar.

The RAF’s own thinking had been that if enemy aircraft were to fly at more than 200 m.p.h. at over 10,000 feet, and no warning was given of their approach before they reached the coast, it would be impossible to get aircraft airborne in time to prevent them from bombing London. Now radar could provide that warning, a development which, as one historian of the RAF observed, ‘indicated the obsolescence of the RAF’s whole existing theory of war’.²² None the less the belief that bombers provided the best security would persist until the end of 1937. The change was led by government figures who were persuaded that there was no longer any hope of equalling the numerical strength of the Luftwaffe before war broke out.

Radar complemented important breakthroughs that were being made in aircraft design. The development of military aviation in Britain had been haphazard. The Air Ministry had no designers of its own and relied on private firms to answer specifications for new types. Perennial money problems made it difficult to establish long-term relationships with private manufacturers, hindering the development of an efficient system of procurement, research and development such as existed in Germany.

There were delays of up to six years between the issue of a specification, acceptance of a design, manufacture and entry into service. The progress of the Hurricane and the Spitfire from drawing board to the skies was quicker, but far from smooth. By the end of the 1920s it was obvious the biplane era was over. The most powerful machine in the RAF’s hands, the Hawker Fury, could only manage 250 m.p.h. The 1929 Schneider Cup, a competition of speed and endurance between seaplanes, was won by the Southampton firm of Supermarine with an S6, a monoplane with a streamlined fuselage and metal wings, flying at an average of 328.63 m.p.h. In 1930 the Air Ministry issued specification F.7/30 for a new high-speed fighter, opening the competition to single wing designs. Monoplanes had been around from almost the beginning of aviation but were inferior in terms of manoeuvrability to biplanes, whose twin surfaces provided considerably more lift. Streamlining, metal airframes and new engines powerful enough to keep them airborne removed this restriction and delivered the future to the monoplane.

In August 1933 Sydney Camm, chief designer at Hawker Aircraft Limited, presented two designs to the Air Ministry for a biplane and a monoplane. Both were rejected as too orthodox – evidence of the presence of some radical and imaginative minds at important decision-making levels inside the air establishment. The board of Hawker decided to continue development anyway. When the Air Ministry issued a new specification the following year, Camm’s design was close to their requirements, and a prototype, K5083, was ordered. The RAF wanted a fighter capable of 300 m.p.h. which could fly as high as 33,000 feet. To meet these demands the aircraft needed to be streamlined with an enclosed cockpit and a retractable undercarriage. It also had to be capable of bearing a battery of machine guns. Ballistics experts calculated that at the new high speeds an intercepting fighter would have only two seconds to shoot down an incoming bomber. Eight machine guns, each firing 1,000 rounds a minute, were needed to provide the required weight of fire.

The novelty of the project and the high demands of the specification meant that fundamental problems of physics, engineering and design arose at every stage. The crucial question of power had been answered by the appearance of the Rolls-Royce PV twelve-piston engine, later known as the Merlin. It developed 1,030 horsepower, more than twice that of the best engine of the First World War. The thrust it delivered made speeds of 330 to 340 m.p.h. possible – more than enough to satisfy the RAF’s demands.

Camm’s original design had been called the Fury monoplane, a name that conceded the fact that even after 4,000 blueprints the aircraft was only half-way evolved from its biplane origins. The frame was of metal tubes and wooden formers and stringers. The skin was fabric, heavily painted with dope to reduce drag, and stressed-metal wings were only added fairly late in the development. The outlines of the old Fury were certainly discernible in its profile. But it was definitely something else. They called it a Hurricane. It was not a new name, having belonged to a short-lived aircraft of the 1920s. But it conveyed a note of confidence and aggression that was infinitely more reassuring than the placid Harts, Flycatchers and Grebes of the previous generation.

The Hurricane made its first flight on 6 November 1935 at Brooklands in Surrey. Hawker’s chief test pilot, George Bulman, a small, bald, ginger-moustached extrovert who had flown with the RFC in the war, was in the cockpit. The prototype had been developed in great secrecy. When the tarpaulins were stripped away and the hangar doors opened, there were murmurs of surprise. It was painted silver, which emphasized the sleekness of its low, humped lines and the sculptured way the rounded wings fitted beautifully flush to the fuselage below the neat, narrow cockpit. It was big, bigger than any existing fighter, and at more than 6,000 pounds very heavy. It seemed unlikely that a single engine could get it off the ground. Bulman, in overalls and flying helmet, approached the machine and vaulted into the cockpit watched by Camm and other Hawker executives, who stood at the edge of the damp field, smoking nervously. The Hurricane bumped away into the distance then turned into the wind. The rumble of the Rolls-Royce engine deepened into a roar. The machine moved forward, gathering speed, but slowly, so that some thought Bulman would not get airborne before he ran out of field. At the last moment the Hurricane left earth in an abrupt bounding movement and climbed steeply. The spectators watched the undercarriage retract and the muscular shape dwindle into the distance until it disappeared and the sound of the engine faded. Half an hour later the reassuring drone was heard again. Bulman performed a perfect three-point landing and taxied over to where Camm was waiting to report the flight had been ‘a piece of cake’.²³

The Spitfire, the first prototype of which flew in March 1936, was a more modern design, all metal with a monocoque fuselage and thin, elliptical wings, the more sophisticated offspring of the Supermarine C6. It had the same Merlin engine as the Hurricane and carried the same guns, but at 5,180 pounds it weighed 1,000 pounds less and went 30 m.p.h. faster. The name was proposed by the chairman of Vickers, Sir Robert McLean, whose company had taken over Supermarine. R. G. Mitchell, whose designs carried the machine through its various evolutions to become the most beautiful and efficient fighter of its era, was not impressed. ‘Just the sort of bloody silly name they would choose,’ he is reported to have said on hearing the decision.²⁴ But in the propaganda film of his life The First of the Few, which appeared in 1942, he is portrayed as devising the name himself: ‘A curious sort of bird…a bird that spits out death and destruction…a Spitfire bird.’

The orders came quickly, with the Air Ministry ordering 600 Hurricanes and 310 Spitfires in the summer of 1936. The accelerated pace reflected alarm that the next war might come sooner than expected. Preparations at every level speeded up as successive intelligence reports, and the Germans’ own boasts, suggested that Britain’s reluctant rearmament programme was insufficient either to deter or defend.

The sense of urgency, and the rapid twists and turns of circumstance, were evident in the brevity of the shelf-lives of the schemes that succeeded Scheme A, as both government and the Air Ministry tinkered with the plan to take account of a situation that always seemed to be changing for the worst. Only one scheme, Scheme F, approved by the cabinet in February 1936, was implemented as planned, coming to fruition in March 1939.

But the expansion was real. From 1935 forty-five new air stations were ordered to be built, most of which were finished by the time war came. Scheme C, which was approved in May 1935, envisaged 123 home squadrons as opposed to the 76 designated in Scheme A. That meant recruiting 1,500 pilots in the next two years. Altogether the RAF was to increase fivefold between 1934, when there were 31,000 officers and men, and the outbreak of war, when the service had an actual strength of 118,000 backed by about 45,000 reserves.

The Air Minister, Lord Swinton, inherited Trenchard’s system of short-service officers, who since the early 1920s had supplemented and outnumbered the cadre of permanent RAF officers. He intensified links with public schools, attracting 1,700 entrants. A further 800 pilots were found among RAF non-commissioned officers. Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa were all asked to contribute men. The number of auxiliary squadrons increased from eight to twenty in the run-up to the war. But more radical measures were needed to satisfy the new demand and, equally important, to provide a reserve.

A pool of pilots would be essential to replace the dead and wounded once the fighting started. The Director of Training at the Air Ministry, Air Commodore A. W. Tedder, a Trenchard protégé who had inherited some of his briskness of thinking, conceived the idea of a ‘Citizen Air Force’. It was to be democratic in character, and linked to a locality, but to the factories, offices and avenues and crescents of semi-detached homes in the new estates springing up around towns rather than to the shires to which the army’s territorial units attached themselves. The Air Ministry added that the new force should be ‘open…to the whole middle class in the widest sense of that term, namely the complete range of the output of the public and secondary schools’. Given its nature it was felt ‘inappropriate to grade the members on entry in as officers or airmen according to their social class’. Everyone therefore started out the same, as airmen under training, with commissions being awarded later on ability and leadership qualities.²⁵ The Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, as it was christened, started in August 1936. It gave young men of between eighteen and twenty-five the chance to learn to fly, at no cost, in their spare time. They received £25 per annum and were expected to attend an annual fifteen-day flying course at one of the training centres set up around the country. The aim had been to take on 800 a year over three years, but the potential number of recruits was much greater and by the spring of 1939 there were 2,500 RAFVR pilots in training. When war broke out, 310 had already entered Fighter Command.

The second half of the 1930s saw the RAF transformed from a small, professional élite into a mass force with the potential to fight a major war. The question of how it would go about doing that was not finally resolved until the end of 1938, when the great strategic conundrum of bombers or fighters, offence or defence, was settled, at least for the first stage of the coming war. In December that year the balance shifted decisively in favour of fighters and ‘close defence’. The change was initiated not by the air force itself but by the government. Despite radar and the advent of the Hurricane and Spitfire, the Air Ministry pressed for parity with the German bomber force. But the government decided this was no longer possible within the time available. The goal had always been unrealistic. Britain was a democracy, reacting wearily to the threat of a war it had no wish to fight. Rearmament had been late and grudgingly paid for, with the aircraft factories still operating at peacetime levels of production. Germany was a dictatorship, heading at full speed and with no concern for cost towards a conflict of its own making. Britain was not going to catch up before the war was launched. It was the minister in charge of defence coordination, Sir Thomas Inskip, who forced the air force to accept the change in strategic thinking. In a memo to Swinton of 7 December he stated the new thinking crisply:

I cannot take the view that our Air Force must necessarily correspond in numbers and types of aircraft with the German Air Force. I cannot, therefore, persuade myself that the dictum of the Chief of the Air Staff that we must give the enemy as much as he gives us is a sound principle. I do not think it is the proper measure of our strength. The German Air Force…must be designed to deliver a knock-out blow within a few weeks of the outbreak of war. The role of our Air Force is not an early knock-out blow – no one has suggested that we can accomplish that – but to prevent the Germans from knocking us out.²⁶

The inference was clear. For the time being at least the emphasis would be on defence and making any German attack on Britain too painful to sustain. Despite the strenuous opposition of the Air Ministry and RAF senior staff, the Cabinet backed Inskip’s view. The next years would belong to the fighters, and those who flew them.