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'Only the Air Force Can Win It': the British Commonwealth Air Training Schemes

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'Only the Air Force Can Win It': the British Commonwealth Air Training Schemes PART II ‘Only the Air Force Can Win It’: The British Commonwealth Air Training Schemes INTRODUCTiON The Second World War was true to its name, with the Allied and Axis forces engaged in a truly global struggle.1 With warfare occurring on an unprecedented scale, air power too was exploited to new and terrifying degrees. Air power, in the twentieth-century sense,2 was a relatively new form of combat; it first became a relevant factor for strategists during the Great War. Coming just 11 years after the first recorded flight, the use of aeroplanes to wage war was still extremely novel between 1914 and 1918. British cities were initially on the receiving end of Germany’s Zeppelin raids, but future technological advancements in aircraft and weaponry seemed to promise a new era of warfare in which air power would be decisive.3 Progression in technology was steady in the interwar period, although the balance of air strength among the European powers changed radically during this time. In 1918 the UK had the world’s largest air force, the Royal Air Force (RAF).4 The British policy of disarmament, as well as the prohibitive costs of maintaining huge military forces with diminished financial resources in the interwar period, however, meant that for the time being, the RAF took on a role that largely centred on imperial policing, like the UK’s other armed services. Conversely, the announcement of a German air force, the Luftwaffe, in March 1935, bolstering Hitler’s claims of air parity with the UK, signalled the beginning of a major shift of balance in air power to the European mainland. British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was troubled by night- mares of an indefensible London reduced to rubble as early as 1932, and 92 ‘ONLY THE AIR FORCE CAN WIN IT’: THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH... the news of the Luftwaffe’s deadly contribution over Iberian skies in the Spanish Civil War did not bode well for British security in the future. Air travel was proliferating and capturing the British Empire’s imagination,5 while Baldwin’s successor Neville Chamberlain provided an iconic—and darkly ironic—moment in 1938 when he stepped from the very machine that provided the greatest threat to the UK’s island sanctuary to celebrate ‘peace for our time’.6 If ‘the bomber could always get through’ as politi- cians feared, the UK would no longer be safe behind its traditional Royal Navy shield; another major war would necessarily take on a very differ- ent complexion from the horrors that occurred in the trenches on the European mainland during the Great War.7 As peace became increasingly tenuous and the UK faced the possibility of its own territory being seri- ously menaced by the renewed German threat, Whitehall looked to the Dominions to provide relief in an arms race in which the enemy already had a significant head start. The Commonwealth contribution was essential to what the UK hoped to achieve. Men poured out of the Dominions to bolster British air strength all over the world. The sheer diversity in geographical range of operational theatres that the British air forces participated in during the war, from the South Pacific to West Africa, and north-west Europe to the Middle East, was phenomenal. The RAF had 487 squadrons by 1945, and the Dominions provided 100 of them.8 Yet this impressive statistic neither tells the full story of Dominion involvement nor fairly reflects the importance of the Commonwealth role in the air war. The operational extent of the Dominions’ efforts, while significant, had to negotiate both the Dominions’ insistence on the concentration of national forces and their reliance on the UK for aircraft, technical support and ground personnel. Nevertheless it was sprinkled with supreme successes, from the individual—such as South Africa’s Adolph ‘Sailor’ Malan, who by the end of 1940 was deemed the most successful fighter pilot in the war to date for single-handedly taking down a confirmed 35 enemy aircraft9—to the collective, as highlighted by the effort of Canada’s 6th Bomber Group, which operated with acclaim in the most deadly field for the airman, the skies of the Reich.10 Two factors, however, were a necessary prerequisite for the diminished interwar RAF to become a major war-altering force between 1939 and 1945: the first was the production of an adequate number of sufficiently advanced machines to cope with the strength of the Luftwaffe; the second was to find and train the necessary aircrews to utilise the potential of this vast mecha- nised force.11 For the former, the UK itself, increasingly alongside North ‘ONLY THE AIR FORCE CAN WIN IT’: THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH... 93 American production as the war progressed, was the centre of the effort. In the latter category, it was the Dominions that ensured the UK could meet its global commitments and transform the RAF from its desperate defence during the Battle of Britain into an aggressive weapon capable of influencing a multitude of theatres and inflicting widespread damage on Germany.12 A tremendous and well-trained air force was fundamental to British efforts: for protecting British territory and supply lines; for striking a blow on enemy soil before Allied armies could return to the European mainland; for pav- ing the way for a successful Allied landing force; and for gradually draining German resolve on the home front and supporting British offensives wher- ever they took place. In facilitating this, the Commonwealth’s air effort was indispensable to the UK and has been aptly described as ‘the most strik- ing, if not the greatest concerted effort which the nations of the British Commonwealth have ever made’.13 In this section, I first detail British air strategy in the Second World War. This demonstrates how the Dominion contribution fitted into London’s strategy, thereby contextualising the importance of this involvement. Next, I describe the inauspicious air power the Dominions possessed in 1939, and establish why, upon the outbreak of war, the Dominions emphasised air training, which they could develop even with limited resources. In the following chapter, I chart the negotiations over the major air train- ing scheme, the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP), highlighting the point that, despite its eventual success, the participat- ing parties—the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand—had individual interests to promote when devising the scheme, divergent concerns that briefly threatened the cooperative aspects of the project. After mapping the whole global network of British air training, I focus on the BCATP and the statistics that show its success in producing aircrews, before ana- lysing in Chap. 9 the complications involved in employing these aircrews, namely the issue of national identity for Dominion personnel serving with the RAF. Finally, in Chap. 10, I complete this section by considering the anomalous position of South Africa, outside the main Commonwealth scheme but training RAF aircrews nonetheless. 94 ‘ONLY THE AIR FORCE CAN WIN IT’: THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH... NOTES 1. Part II is derived, in part, from an article published in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History on 18 December 2014, avail- able online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/10.1080/03086534.2 014.982416. 2. For a brief but detailed review of the development of air power up to the Great War see S.F. Wise, Official History of the Royal Canadian Air Force, Volume I: Canadian Airmen and the First World War (Toronto, 1980), pp. 3–10. 3. R. Titmuss, History of the Second World War, United Kingdom Civil Series: Problems of Social Policy (London, 1950), pp. 3–4. 4. Air Ministry, Second World War, 1939–1945: RAF Flying Training, Policy and Planning (London, 1952), AIR 10/551, p. 2. 5. The 1920s saw the first flight from the UK to Australia take place. Developments in Africa, such as the Cairo to Cape route, were also significant in arousing public interest during this period. J.A. Brown, South African Forces in World War II, A Gathering of Eagles: The Campaigns of the South African Air Force in Italian East Africa: June 1940–November 1941: With an Introduction 1912–1939 (Cape Town, 1970), p. 7. 6. Chamberlain delivered the ‘Peace for our time’ phrase on 30 September 1938, having returned from Germany with Hitler’s signa- ture on the Munich Agreement. 7. See Stanley Baldwin’s November 1932 speech, ‘A Fear for the Future’; and, 30 July 1934, Parliamentary Debates (Hansard) (House of Commons), vol. 292, c. 2336. 8. A. Jackson, The British Empire and the Second World War (London, 2006), pp. 38–9. 9. A. Gavshon, Flight for Freedom: The Story of the S.A.A.F. and its Aces (Johannesburg, 1941), p. 103; Opening speech by the South African representative, AIR 2/8181. 10. W. Carter, Anglo-Canadian Wartime Relations, 1939–1945: RAF Bomber Command and No. 6 (Canadian) Group (New York, 1991); S. Dunmore and W. Carter, Reap the Whirlwind: The Untold Story of 6 Group, Canada’s Bomber Force of World War Two (Toronto, 1991); B. Greenhouse et al., The Official History of the Canadian Royal Air Force, Volume III: The Crucible of War, 1939–1945 (Toronto, 1994). 11. Air Ministry, RAF Flying Training, AIR 10/551, p. 1. ‘ONLY THE AIR FORCE CAN WIN IT’: THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH... 95 12. For the impact on Germany, see T. Childers, ‘Facilis descensus overri est: The Allied bombing of Germany and the Issue of German Suffering’, Central European History, 38, 1 (2005), 75–105; M. Nolan, ‘Germans as Victims During the Second World War: Air Wars, Memory Wars’, Central European History, 38, 1 (2005), 7–40.
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