Wings (18 page)

In other ways life could be trying. The remoteness of the location meant that the RAF squadrons on the North-West
Frontier were under army control and funded from the
Government of India budget. Many of those in authority had spent the war years in India and had only the dimmest idea of the developments in the air. According to Slessor, ‘it was inevitable
that among the senior advisers of the Viceroy the combination of ignorance about air matters, ingrained tradition and the Englishman’s natural suspicion of anything new, should have had the
result that when cuts in military expenditure were required, they should fall upon this new service which no one understood.’ At one point a blunder in the accounting department meant that
there was an embargo on stores and spare parts being shipped out from Britain. The result was that while the RAF had a theoretical strength of six squadrons in India, each with an establishment of
twelve aircraft, ‘I doubt whether we could have put a dozen aircraft into the air on any one day.’
¹⁹

Arthur Harris, who in January took command of 31 Squadron, equipped with Bristol Fighters, felt keenly the consequences of the neglect. ‘We lacked everything in the way of necessary
accommodation and spares and materials for keeping our aircraft serviceable,’ he wrote. ‘The only thing there was never any shortage of was demands for our services when the trouble
blew up on the frontier.’ That autumn the squadron was based at Peshawar and busy with bombing and strafing raids against tribesmen, who launched periodic attacks on border posts. ‘It
was not unknown for aircraft to take off on operations on wheels with naked rims, because there were no tyres, and with axles lashed on with doubtful, country-made
rope,
because there was no rubber shock-absorber rope. We flew on single-ignition engines which the Air Force at home had long discarded as un-airworthy.’ It was, he concluded, ‘no joke to
fly over the mountains on the frontier with worn-out and out-of-date equipment, where a forced landing meant probably being killed outright in the crash, or if you survived this, a still less
pleasant death on the ground.’
²⁰

Harris felt angry enough about the situation to offer his resignation, though he was persuaded to withdraw it and moved on to Iraq for a further stint of showing the natives who was boss. Anger
at Britain’s failure to grant the independence the tribes had been promised when inveigled onto the allied side during the First World War had boiled over into sporadic rebellions. In Iraq
the RAF was free of army control. Indeed the senior RAF officer in the country, Sir John Salmond, commanded not just the air force but also the small number of ground forces. In March 1921 Winston
Churchill, whose clutch of portfolios included the Colonial Office, had called a conference to sort out how Britain would administer Iraq and Transjordan, which, thanks to a League of Nations
mandate, it now governed. Trenchard had persuaded Churchill that control could be imposed from the air and the Air Ministry was given responsibility for maintaining law and order.

Harris was to command 45 Squadron, with which he had flown over the Western Front. His flight commanders were Flight Lieutenants the Hon. Ralph Cochrane and Robert Saundby, both of whom became
trusted lieutenants in Bomber Command, twenty years later. The squadron was equipped
with Vickers Vernons and engaged in transport duties. The aeroplanes lumbered rather than
flew – they could manage only 68 mph. But they were strong, capable of carrying one ton of freight and staying airborne for seven hours. Harris soon persuaded Salmond to allow him to convert
them for bombing. Rather than consult London and get bogged down in a bureaucratic process, they would do the job themselves. ‘By sawing a sighting hole in the nose of our troop carriers and
making our own bomb racks we converted them into what were really the first of the post-war, long-range heavy bombers,’ he wrote.
²¹

He then set about devising an accurate means of dropping 20, 50 and 100 lb bombs, and incendiaries using a home-made bomb-sight made of a length of shock absorber and a trigger-release
mechanism. If Harris is to be believed, in practice sorties it was able to achieve an average accuracy of 26 yards from 2,000 to 3,000 feet – a far better result than would be achieved in the
early years of the coming war.
²²
They first went into action against the Turkish army, which had crossed the border and was threatening Kirkuk.
The appearance of the bombers forced the Turks to withdraw. Salmond was delighted. Much of the work amounted to aerial intimidation of tribes that rejected the rulers imposed on them by the
British.

Harris recalled the period with characteristic rough candour. ‘When a tribe started open revolt we gave warning to all its most important villages by loud speaker from low-flying aircraft
and by dropping messages that air action would be taken after forty-eight hours. Then, if the rebellion continued,
we destroyed the villages and by air patrols kept the
insurgents away from their homes for as long as necessary until they decided to give up, which they invariably did.’ It was, he claimed, ‘a far less costly method of controlling
rebellion than by military action and the casualties on both sides were infinitely less than they would have been in the pitched battles on the ground which would otherwise have been the only
alternative.’
²³
Dropping bombs on mud huts and cowing primitive warriors was effective and, for Harris at least, fun. It was no preparation
for the confrontation that was looming against a modern enemy armed with more than just rifles.

At the end of January 1932 Japanese naval aircraft bombed the Chapei district of Shanghai, a thickly populated area on the north bank of the Suchow river. A few days later film
of the event appeared in newsreels in cinemas all over the world. The images were shocking. They showed mushrooming explosions, rolling clouds of black smoke and tottering buildings. More sinister
to the men and women watching were the scenes of folk like themselves, trundling barrows loaded with their household goods, rushing in a blind panic for the open countryside, leaving pavements
littered with bodies. ‘The marksmanship of the fliers is uncanny!’ raved the American commentator on the Universal Newspaper Newsreel report. ‘Streets that were once a hive of
activity are clammy with the shadow of death, and things that were once human beings lying where they fell.’

In London the Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin watched and was sickened. ‘Shanghai is a nightmare,’ he declared.
The attack took place a few days before the
opening of the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva. The vast outflow of pious declarations about world peace did nothing to allay a general feeling that another cataclysm might be on the way,
one in which civilians – like the poor, fear-maddened flocks of Shanghai – would be the principal victims.

In Britain the Government admitted as much. In November, during a disarmament debate in the House of Commons, Baldwin made a prediction that would haunt the years to come. ‘I think it is
as well for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that prevents him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through.’ He went on
to spell out the logical consequences of that reality. ‘The only defence is offence, which means that you will have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to
save yourselves.’
¹

Baldwin was stating – with appalling eloquence and clarity – the essential strategic thinking of the RAF at that time. It stemmed – inevitably – from Trenchard and was
the result of the second of his great about-turns. Once, he had set his face against the idea of an autonomous air service. He had retired as Chief of the Air Staff in 1929, applauded as the
‘Father of the RAF’. He had vigorously asserted that bombing should only be carried out in alliance with the objectives of the ground forces. Now he was an equally energetic proponent
of ‘strategic’ bombing, based on the theory that air power could deliver a ‘knockout blow’ against the enemy, and that
aeroplanes rather than armies
could decide the outcome of a conflict.

In the 1920s it was unclear who Britain’s enemy was likely to be. Germany was crippled by reparations payments and neutered militarily by the punitive restrictions forced on her by the
Versailles Treaty (1919). The absence of an obvious foe and the peaceable, often pacifist mood pervading European electorates allowed a sort of relieved complacency to settle upon decision-making
whenever military spending was considered. However, when Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933 everything changed. Within a few months Germany had withdrawn from the Disarmament Conference and
then from the League of Nations. The only recently defeated enemy was stirring once again. Despite periodic bouts of appeasement, only the suicidally naive could kid themselves that while
grovellingly pursuing peace there was no need to prepare for war.

It was going to cost. The RAF’s reliance on struts and wires and canvas had inured it to the price of the modern, metal-skinned monoplanes that were now skimming the skies of the world as
civil aviation took aircraft on their next great evolutionary step. It was with horror that the Air Ministry learned that a new generation of fighters might cost £20,000 each, and a bomber
five times that sum.
²
New aircraft would require proper runways, not the 1,000 x 800 yard grass strips that sufficed for the lightly loaded likes of
the Gloucester Gladiator; a fine, lively aeroplane much loved by those who flew it, but as a war machine hopelessly anachronistic. In 1934 this biplane, which had the antique lines of a bygone era,
was
billed as the RAF’s new generation front-line fighter. The bombers were no better. The Handley Page Heyford, which came into service in late 1933, was another
biplane. It looked like an airborne lorry, slab-sided and trailing enormous underslung wheels.

This mood of parsimony penetrated all aspects of procurement. The Air Staff were reluctant to test the patience of the politicians and officials holding the purse strings. Junior officers
pointed out that the existing warning system of sound locators and observer posts was inadequate to deal with modern bombers zooming in at 200 mph and more. Perhaps a better telephone system would
help communications between the headquarters and the squadrons. Reluctantly, a grant of £2,000 was made. ‘So,’ wrote Philip Joubert, then commandant of the RAF Staff College that
Trenchard had established at Andover, ‘the administrative machine creaked and groaned and its slaves winced under the fear of the Treasury lash.’
³

At least the young officers had aeroplanes to fly and anterooms to repair to for a drink before a good dinner. The NCOs and skilled tradesmen also lived in decent comfort. At the lower levels,
however, existence was grim, as T. E. Lawrence, enlisted as an aircraftman under the pseudonym ‘John Hume Ross’, discovered. Describing life in the Uxbridge Depot in the early 1920s, he
wrote: ‘Our hut is a fair microcosm of unemployed England, not of unemployable England, for the strict RAF standards refuse the last levels of the social structure.’
⁴
The standard of living seems to have been little better than that endured by men in the dole queues. The food was horrible,
the uniform
misshapen and scratchy, and the haircut he was given would have embarrassed a convict. Lawrence of Arabia, upon whose words princes and prime ministers had once hung, was put to work in the kitchen
of the officers’ mess. The gap between those with commissions and those who served them was oceanic. ‘Through the swing doors came an officer’s head . . . sherry and bitters, gin
and bitters, martinis, vergins, vermouths. Three whisky sodas
quickly
. . . the bartender splashed full his glasses and hurried to and fro.’
⁵

With much energy and persistence it was possible to cross the great divide. George Unwin was a clever Yorkshire miner’s son who had passed the Northern Universities Matriculation exam aged
sixteen. But there was no money to put him through college and the only job available was to follow his father down the pit. Just before he was due to leave school his headmaster showed him an RAF
recruiting poster. Unwin joined as an administrative apprentice at the training centre at Ruislip and in 1931 passed out as a leading aircraftman. The sights and sounds of the aerodrome excited his
ambition to join the aviators. He soon discovered flying was regarded very much as the preserve of officers and of those who applied from the ranks ‘only 1 per cent per six months was
taken’.

Unwin persisted. ‘I was getting a bit fed up at not being accepted,’ he remembered. ‘I had everything else. I was playing for the RAF at soccer and that was one of the things
you had to be, to be very good at sport. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t being selected.’ Eventually he reached the final stage of
the interviewing
process and, determined to succeed, mugged up on the interests of the senior officer who would decide his fate. He discovered that he ‘loved polo and kept his own polo ponies’. At the
interview, the inevitable question was raised about Unwin’s hobbies. ‘I said “horse riding”. He pricked up his ears and said, “Really?” I said “Of course I
can’t afford it down here, but the local farmer at home has a pony and lets me ride it.” The only time I’d ridden a pony or anything on four legs was in the General Strike when
the pit ponies were brought up and put in the fields.’ It worked. Unwin was in and in 1936 would be posted to 19 Squadron at Duxford as a sergeant pilot.
⁶