Wings (16 page)

Of the great aces of the war, very few on any side survived. The British stars, Hawker, Ball, Mannock and McCudden had all gone. The Germans had lost Boelcke, Immelmann and Richtofen, and the
French Georges Guynemer and Roland Garros. Aces would reappear in the next war, but they were fewer and their celebrity was more artificial as their personalities were moulded by the official
publicity machines to fit the demands of propaganda. The heroic age of air fighting was at an end. From its amateur, makeshift origins military aviation had, in the space of a decade, come to rival
the existing services in size and importance. The numbers involved would have seemed incredible to the pilots of the first handful of squadrons as they prepared for that first hair-raising hop
across the Channel.

By November 1918 the RAF had swollen to a force of nearly a million. Its 280 squadrons roamed the skies not only of France but of Macedonia, Mesopotamia, Palestine and East Africa. In the course
of the First World War they had destroyed 7,054 German aircraft and lost 9,378 aircrew.
The airmen’s exploits had won eleven VCs. Soon the life of this vast organization
was to be imperilled, however, not by any foreign enemy, but by the politicians who had built it up and by its brothers-in-arms.

On Armistice Day 1918 the Royal Air Force was the largest air force in the world. That did not mean that its future was assured. Despite its size it stood on shaky political
and bureaucratic foundations. It was understaffed, ill-equipped and operated in a poisonous atmosphere of suspicion and intrigue. It soon emerged that the older services regarded the consent they
had given to its creation as temporary. It had, they believed, been obtained under coercion, wrung out of them by the exigencies of war. Now peace had arrived, it was null and void. The Prime
Minister, Lloyd George, seemed to agree with them. Returning to office at the head of a Liberal-Tory coalition in the ‘Coupon’ election of December 1918, he decided not to keep the
newly formed Air Ministry as a separate department and passed it to Winston Churchill, who became joint Secretary of State for both war and air. The implication was that the Prime Minister cared
little about the fate of the new service. His Conservative successor, Andrew
Bonar Law, who took over as Prime Minister in the autumn of 1922, showed even less concern.

Churchill supported the notion of an autonomous air force and he was reluctant to see it die. However, he was fighting a wave of anti-military revulsion that swamped politicians and public alike
in the aftermath of the War to End All Wars, and the RAF with its vast array of aircraft and squadrons was an affront to this new mood. Demobilization was swift and devastating. The wartime
strength of 280 squadrons was run down to fewer than thirty, and men who had been princes of the air found themselves struggling to find work as chauffeurs and policemen.

The RAF had been as strong as a lion when the war ended. A year later it was as weak as a kitten and the predatory eyes of the army and navy were fixed upon it. They were soon agitating
respectively for the return of the RFC and the RNAS and for the RAF and the Air Ministry to be wound up. The campaign would persist through much of the decade – and the struggle against
traditional services to strangle the infant at birth would become part of the foundation myth of the RAF. There were, as an Air Ministry mandarin Sir Maurice Dean pointed out, ‘distinct
elements of truth’ in the story. ‘In the early Twenties, the Royal Air Force was indeed actively disliked by the other services,’ he wrote. ‘They considered it an upstart
and its officers for the most part socially impossible . . . [it] was an innovation and the way of innovators in Britain is hard. The first instinct is to ignore, the second is to despise, the
third is to attack.’
¹

Credit for the survival of the Royal Air Force in these treacherous years is usually awarded to Boom Trenchard. In RAF circles, wrote Dean, ‘the story is often told
in pantomime terms with the Royal Air Force as the beleaguered maiden, the army and navy as the dragon and its mate, and Trenchard as St George.’ Again, though oversimplified, this tale is
true in its essentials.
²

In January 1919 Trenchard, fresh from putting down a mutiny of disaffected soldiers, was asked by Churchill to take over again as Chief of the Air Staff, the job he had held briefly before
falling out with Rothermere. Before he did so Trenchard was asked to produce a paper on how the air force should be reorganized in the light of the mood of austerity. He came up with a plan that
made the most of the limited resources available and Churchill confirmed his appointment.

Despite his previously expressed convictions that air forces should serve the objectives of parent services, Trenchard now became the most ardent defender of an autonomous RAF. Some saw this as
evidence of his malleability, bordering on hypocrisy. Those who knew him well, like John Slessor who served under him on the Western Front and ended up Marshal of the Royal Air Force, discerned
something else. ‘Whatever Trenchard’s faults may have been,’ he wrote, ‘I class him with Churchill and Smuts as one of the three greatest men I have been privileged to
know.’

Slessor defined Trenchard’s qualities as ‘self-confidence without a trace of arrogance; a contemptuous yet not intolerant disregard for anything mean or petty; the capacity to
shuffle aside the non-essentials and put an unerring finger on the real core of a problem or the true quality of a man, a sort of instinct for the really important point; a
selfless devotion to the cause of what he believed to be true and right. Trenchard [had] all those qualities, and above all a shining sincerity.’
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Trenchard was philosophical about the difficult task he had set himself. In a 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 now we are faced with the necessity of
replacing it with a plant of deeper root.’
⁴
Always mindful of the scarcity of resources, he set about providing the vital essentials of a
skeleton force, while giving way on every possible detail where he felt expense could be spared. What was needed were 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 the paper he had written for Churchill, Trenchard had set out two choices. One was ‘to use the air simply as a means of conveyance, captained by chauffeurs, weighted by the navy and
army personnel, drop bombs at places specified by them . . . or observe for their artillery.’ The other 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.’
⁵
Throughout the war the vehement partisan of the first
approach, Trenchard was now the equally forceful champion of the second. Lloyd George accepted Trenchard’s case and
the document was expanded into a White Paper. Its adoption guaranteed the survival of the RAF, although its service rivals made periodic raids to try and reclaim lost territory.

The fact was that the argument for an autonomous air force was by no means unanswerable. Britain’s allies in the Great War did not rush to establish third services and the United States
and France continued to tie aircraft to the requirements of their armies and navies. In the years before the next war broke out, the RAF’s struggle to establish its identity took precedence
over the needs of the other services. As it was, the fact that most of the work done between 1914 and 1918 was in conjunction with the army meant that, after the RAF’s conception, it was
military genes that predominated. The result was that naval aviation was badly neglected. This error was only corrected when the Fleet Air Arm (FAA) was belatedly handed to the Admiralty in May
1939, leaving it pitifully unprepared for the new realities of war at sea.

In the early 1920s, when the thought of another major war was too unbearable to contemplate, the natural reaction was to flinch from consideration of long-term strategic possibilities. Trenchard
busied himself with stretching the limited bricks and mortar in his barrow to build something that would last.

He was concerned initially with humans rather than machines, concentrating on training officers and men to provide a wealth of expertise, that could be drawn on to instruct others and to be
brought into play when a crisis arose. Flying
was a young man’s game – a fact which posed an immediate problem. It meant that at any time there would be a large
number of junior officers and comparatively few senior ranks. Trenchard invented a new 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 in the reserve. The other 10 per cent would be seconded from the army and navy. The permanent officers would come from an RAF
cadet college, the air-force equivalent of Dartmouth or Sandhurst, and also from universities and the ranks. Once commissioned, they would be posted to a squadron. After five years they were
required to adopt a specialist area like engineering, navigation or wireless.

Flying was also highly technical. The new air force would need a steady supply of skilled riggers and fitters. Like the pilots, the mechanics who had kept the aeroplanes in the air had returned
to civilian life. Trenchard’s solution was to bring in ‘boys and train them ourselves’. They would start off with a three-year apprenticeship, before entering the ranks. To carry
out the research and development necessary to keep abreast of rapidly changing technologies there would be specialist centres for aeronautics, armaments, wireless and photography.

The army and navy had offered the use of their facilities to train up volunteers. Trenchard spurned them. The RAF would have its own colleges in which to inculcate the ‘air spirit’:
Cranwell in Lincolnshire for the officer cadets; Halton in Buckinghamshire for the apprentices. Cranwell had been an RNAS station during the war and it was plonked on
flat,
wind-scoured lands in the middle of nowhere. This, in Trenchard’s eyes, was one of its main attractions. He told his biographer that 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 hoped, would give them ‘less cause to envy their
contemporaries at Sandhurst or Dartmouth and acquire any kind of inferiority complex’.
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Halton, on the other hand, was chosen for its proximity to London. ‘Trenchard brats’ – as the apprentices became known – were thought to be more
prone to homesickness and boredom. Halton Hall and the surrounding estate, bought from Lionel de Rothschild for £112,000, was within easy reach of dance halls and cinemas and the railway
stations of the metropolis for parental visits.

In February 1920 RAF Cranwell was transformed into the Royal Air Force College. It was a grand name for a dismal, utilitarian cantonment. One of the first intake of fifty-two cadets described a
‘scene of grey corrugated iron and large open spaces whose immensity seemed limitless in the sea of damp fog which surrounded the camp’.
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They lived in single-storey huts, scattered on either side of the Sleaford Road, connected by covered walkways to keep out the rain and snow borne in on the east wind. It was
not until 1929 that a proper edifice was in place. The design was inspired by Sir Christopher Wren’s Royal Hospital in Chelsea, and the brick and stone and classical proportions helped create
an instant sense of tradition.

The likes of Hawker, Ball, Mannock and McCudden had provided a cohort of paladins around whom a glorious narrative could be constructed. Churchill set the tone in the first
issue of the college magazine.

‘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,’ he wrote.
‘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 training and I . . . look forward with confidence to the day when you will make the name of the Royal Air Force feared and respected
throughout the world.’
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The likes of Mannock and McCudden, though, would have been out of place socially at Cranwell. The overwhelming ethos and atmosphere was muscular and public school, and fun was boisterous and
painful. First-termers were forced to sing a song for the other cadets and 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.
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