- By Richard Overy, Allen Lane, 160 pages, ₤14.99
A century ago, on April 1, 1918, the world’s first independent air force was established, during a war Britain might still have lost. The Royal Air Force would of course go on to win the Battle of Britain, but at the time its creation was strongly opposed, not least by Hugh Trenchard, who later became the first Chief of the Air Staff. He warned that a service beyond the control of the Army and Navy would “be very liable to lose its sense of proportion and be drawn towards the spectacular”.
A distinguished historian, Richard Overy has published three books on air power in the Second World War — The Air War (1980), Bomber Command (1997) and The Bombing War (2013). The Birth of the RAF: 1918 is a short book, and a rather dry and dense one, but it is packed with drama, both military and political, and written with admirable directness. It will surely prove definitive.
Overy well conveys how quickly aviation developed. The first powered flight in Britain was made in 1908, five years after the Wright Brothers’ maiden flight, by AV Roe, who managed only 60 yards. That same year, the hero of HG Wells’s sci-fi novel The War in the Air reflected that “the little island in the silver seas was at the end of its immunity”. Seven years after that, the first bombs fell on Britain.
The creation of the RAF, Overy explains, was prompted by the German bombing of London in 1917, and should be “understood as a direct product of political calculation, not of military insistence”. Indeed, it was fiercely resisted by the Army and Navy, which naturally wanted to keep their own air forces.
The Royal Flying Corps had been founded in 1912, with the motto Per ardua ad astra (“Through adversity to the stars”), which remains the motto of the RAF. It also established the RAF’s basic structure: a squadron had three flights of four aircraft each; a wing had two or more squadrons; and a brigade (renamed a “group” after the war) comprised at least two wings. In 1913, as First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill insisted that the Navy should have its own air force, and in July 1914 the Royal Naval Air Service was divorced from the RFC.
The history of those two services provides the book’s most thrilling passages, illustrated with poignant photographs of the dashing and often doomed young men who served in them. In the Great War, Britain lost 35,973 aircraft through combat or accident, and 16,623 airmen. The Battle of Britain, for comparison, would entail the loss of 1,023 aircraft, and 1,644 airmen.
Each squadron had its own blacksmiths, coppersmiths, carpenters, sailmakers and riggers to fix the rudimentary aircraft. Pilots were commissioned after 12 hours’ solo flight, and information about weather conditions was at best grandmotherly. “Red at sunset... Fair weather,” advised the Field Service Book. “Red at dawn... Bad weather or wind.” There were no parachutes.
To begin with, the airmen’s chief role was reconnaissance, but by the end of 1915 dogfights had become a familiar sight in the skies above Flanders. Their third major task was the support of forces on land or sea by the destruction of communications and materiel. Churchill ordered Britain’s first strategic bombing in September 1914, when attacks were made on Zeppelin repair sheds in France.
The next year, both the RFC and the RNAS began to explore the idea of long-range raids into Germany, to hamper air attacks, and thus arose the abiding doctrine “that the best defence against air attack was an air offensive against the enemy”. The next step, first taken by the Germans, was the morally tricky one of direct attacks on civilian targets, and what soon became known as “total war”, the “struggle between entire societies, soldiers and civilians alike”.
Zeppelin raids on Britain started in 1915. They were indiscriminate, as the airships flew at great height, in the dark, and at the mercy of the weather. But they exposed the near-complete absence of defence. When they began, London was defended by one anti-aircraft gun, an old artillery piece. By 1916, the RNAS home defence, responsible for London, still had only 110 aircraft. “Against 29 raids counted from 1914 to 1916,” records Overy, “there were 166 sorties by British defending aircraft, but 145 never saw the enemy.”
Government and police opposed any warnings of the raids, on the grounds that they would create panic, but eventually relented, allowing rattles, whistles, bells, and sirens known as “sound rockets” or “sound bombs”. The game changed in February 1917, when the German High Command decided to switch from airships to aeroplanes, in the hope of triggering a crisis of morale. On June 14, Gotha bombers reached London, killing 145 and injuring 382. One bomb hit a school in Poplar, killing an entire class of 18 infants. There was another raid in July, killing 53 and injuring 182. This prompted outrage against Germany — there was rioting and looting of alien-looking premises, and newspapers demanded reprisals against “the German civil population” — and against the government’s supine response. On July 19, David Henderson, director general of military aeronautics, recommended the formation of “a complete department and a complete united service dealing with all operations in the air”, correctly warning that there would be “the most violent controversies over the petty details”.
“The great gain of a separately organised Air Service,” wrote Hugh Cecil MP in August, “would be its emancipation from the control of the Admiralty and the War Office, who are very apt to think they know more than they do.” On April Fools’ Day 1918, there was no fanfare for the birth of the RAF, just a new rubber stamp, allowing “Royal Air Force” to be affixed to reports over “Royal Flying Corps”.
A uniform of light blue, “with much gold braid”, was given royal sanction on June 21, but there was a shortage of the necessary cloth. One officer thought it “Ruritanian”, another that it “brought irresistibly to mind a vision of the gentleman who stands outside the cinema”. Officers who could not afford the new uniform were allowed to continue in khaki until it wore out.
There was much fuss about a flag. The new service wanted an ensign, of white or blue, but the First Lord insisted that it was against the Defence of the Realm Act to fly an ensign on land without Admiralty permission, which was granted. The use of a Union Jack apparently violated Board of Trade regulations. A red, white and blue roundel, set on a pale blue ensign, was eventually decided on, but the Navy dragged in the College of Heralds, which ruled that a flag containing two shades of the same colour was impermissible. The Admiralty prepared to inform George V of this, but the RAF got to him first and he approved it, after two years’ wrangling, in June 1920.
The older services continued to lobby for the RAF’s dissolution, and it was not until 1923 that Bonar Law made it permanent. It soon proved its worth as a cheap imperial policeman. Even before the end of the war, the British Viceroy in Ireland called on the RAF to “put the fear of God into these playful young Sinn Feiners”. After it, the RAF was deployed in the Third Afghan War, in Somalia against the “Mad Mullah”, and in the pacification of Iraq. “I think the Air Force,” Churchill said later, “was a great economy in maintaining order in these wild countries.”
–The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2018
