Free Bomber Command by Max Hastings Page A

RAF might also have avoided the fatal disparity between their public commitment to precision bombing – which their line aircrew would offer so much devotion and sacrifice to fulfilling when war came – and the half-articulated faith in terror bombing in the higher ranks of the service. The decisive gulf between the alleged function of Bomber Command as a precision-bombing force, and its real nature as an area-bombing one, would be revealed at the end of 1941. Harris, who then became C-in-C with a mandate to conduct a full-blooded area campaign, was far more truly Trenchard’s disciple than thosediligent staff officers at the Air Ministry who continued throughout the war to try to direct Bomber Command’s efforts to the destruction of selected key industrial targets.
    In the last five years, and most dramatically in the last two years before the outbreak of war, the face of the British and German air forces changed beyond recognition. As the political sky darkened, the Cabinet approved a succession of Royal Air Force rearmament programmes that tripped upon each other in the haste with which one was overtaken by the next. Air defence loomed larger and larger in Government priorities until by 1938 the RAF share of the combined services budget had risen to 40 per cent from its inter-war average of 17 per cent. Yet the bomber still seized the lion’s share of the available cash: under Scheme A, approved in July 1934, RAF strength in Britain would expand by April 1939 from 316 to 476 bombers, from 156 to 336 fighters. Schemes C, F, H succeeded each other in May 1935, February 1936 and February 1937 respectively. Then in December 1937 there was a sudden check: Sir Thomas Inskip, Minister for the CoOrdination of Defence, declined to accept Scheme J, by which the Air Staff proposed an increased strength of 1,442 bombers and 532 fighters by April 1941. Inskip argued that the total cost would be too great, and that the proportion of fighters was too low. After prolonged debate, in April 1938 the Cabinet finally accepted Scheme L, by which the RAF would reach a strength of 1,352 bombers and 608 first-line fighters by April 1940. Airmen argue that Inskip was an indifferent minister who forced these measures through – at the cost of severe delays in creating a four-engined bomber force – merely for financial and political reasons, because fighters are cheaper than bombers. But modern historians of the Battle of Britain are disposed to believe that it was Inskip’s insistence on higher priority for fighter production that gave Fighter Command the tiny margin of strength by which it achieved victory against the Luftwaffe in 1940. In September 1939, Britain entered the warwith 608 first-line fighters against the 1,215 of the Luftwaffe, and with 536 bombers against 2,130.
    But more important than mere numbers were the aircraft types in production and coming off the drawing board. It is impossible to overstate the significance of production policy decisions taken before the outbreak of war in both Britain and Germany, decisions that would have a decisive effect on the struggle in the air right through to 1945. Although the Luftwaffe achieved overwhelming superiority over the RAF in both quantity and quality in the mid-1930s, in the last two years before war, British designers were creating aircraft that Germany proved disastrously unable to match in 1942, 1943, even 1944. In 1936 the Air Staff issued specifications P13/36 and B/12/36 for four-engined heavy bombers and twin-engined ‘heavy-medium’ bombers that brought into being, in 1941, the Stirling, the Halifax, the Manchester and its ultimate modification, the Lancaster. Whatever debate is possible about the proportion of national resources ultimately devoted to heavy-bomber production, and about the manner in which the bomber force was employed, it is difficult to dispute the value to the British war effort of possessing heavy aircraft with capabilities no other nation in the