Free Bomber Command by Max Hastings Page B

world could match, although the best brains in German industry struggled to do so.
    The heavy bomber was the visible expression of the RAF’s determination to make a contribution to the war independent of the other two services, as was the weakness of its air–ground and air–sea coordination techniques. Germany and France, on the other hand, had throughout the 1930s devoted their resources to producing light and medium bombers primarily for army support, and both the German Army and the Luftwaffe were deeply imbued with the doctrines of mobile warfare preached by De Gaulle, Guderian and Liddell Hart. From the Stuka in 1939 to Hitler’s obsession with the jet Me262 as a fighter-bomber in 1944, German planes were preoccupied with tactical air power. Yet they would pay the price in due time for their lack of an adequate four-engined long-range bomber.
    The American Flying Fortress, designed as a strategic bomber, achieved remarkable performance and carried enormous defensive armament only at the cost of carrying a severely limited bombload. The early Flying Fortress also lacked the power-operated turrets which proved a vital advance in aircraft defence – albeit still insufficient to make the day bomber self-defending.
    But in Britain, until the new generation of ‘heavies’ began to come off the production line – and with aircraft of such radical design there were inevitable serious teething troubles – the RAF was obliged to go to war with stop-gap bombers of much less satisfactory pedigree – the twin-engined Hampden, Blenheim, Whitley and Wellington, and worst of all the single-engined Battle. The Battle was an unwanted aircraft in 1933, yet such was the pressure to increase the RAF’s numbers in the last days of peace that its production was even accelerated: 3,100 Battles were produced before the end of 1940. As the pre-war expansion schemes reached their climax with Scheme M, approved in November 1938, there was no possibility of meeting the requirements with new designs. Instead, bombers such as the Battle and the Blenheim, already known to be quite outclassed for modern warfare, continued to pour off the production lines. It seemed better to have something than to have nothing, at least in Whitehall. Those who would be flying the Battles and Blenheims in action were not consulted.
    In 1936 the old area organization of the Air Defence of Great Britain was abolished and replaced by functional commands: Bomber, Fighter, Training and Coastal. Bomber Command’s squadrons were redeployed, moving from the stations in southern England that they had occupied throughout the 1920s when the Government was looking with such alarm towards France, taking up the eastern airfields closest to Germany, from which they would fight the Second World War, and ranging southwards from 4 Group in Yorkshire to 2 and 3 Groups 5 in Norfolk.
    It is extraordinary how rapidly the nature of air war changed in the last years of peace, so much so that few airmen themselves understood what had happened. In March 1939, chafing noisily from his retirement, Trenchard deplored ‘the continuous clamouring for defence measures’ from an ignorant and optimistic public. Yet the German Me109 and the British Spitfire could now overtake bombers at interception speeds of better than 150 mph. Most important of all, the birth of radar had overnight transformed the power of the defence to plot an attacking bomber and direct fighters to intercept it. The dominance that radar was to achieve over aerial warfare between 1939 and 1945 cannot be overemphasized, nor can the contribution of Watson-Watt, its inventor, and Sir Henry Tizard, the brilliant scientific civil servant whose Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence was largely responsible for bringing Britain’s radar network into being. It was Tizard who personally presided over the critical ‘Biggin Hill Experiment’ in 1938, when the fighter station was used as a laboratory for creating