Royal Air Force Historical Society Journal 41
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1 ROYAL AIR FORCE HISTORICAL SOCIETY JOURNAL 41 2 The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the contributors concerned and are not necessarily those held by the Royal Air Force Historical Society. First published in the UK in 2008 by the Royal Air Force Historical Society All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission from the Publisher in writing. ISSN 1361 4231 Printed by Advance Book Printing Unit 9 Northmoor Park Church Road Northmoor OX29 5UH 3 ROYAL AIR FORCE HISTORICAL SOCIETY President Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Michael Beetham GCB CBE DFC AFC Vice-President Air Marshal Sir Frederick Sowrey KCB CBE AFC Committee Chairman Air Vice-Marshal N B Baldwin CB CBE FRAeS Vice-Chairman Group Captain J D Heron OBE Secretary Group Captain K J Dearman FRAeS Membership Secretary Dr Jack Dunham PhD CPsychol AMRAeS Treasurer J Boyes TD CA Members Air Commodore H A Probert MBE MA *J S Cox Esq BA MA *Dr M A Fopp MA FMA FIMgt *Group Captain N Parton BSc (Hons) MA MDA MPhil CEng FRAeS RAF *Wing Commander A J C Walters BSc MA FRAeS RAF Wing Commander C Cummings Editor & Publications Wing Commander C G Jefford MBE BA Manager *Ex Officio 4 CONTENTS EDITOR’s NOTE 6 ERRATA 6 20 October 1986. THE INTELLIGENCE WAR AND THE 7 ROYAL AIR FORCE by Professor R V Jones CB CBE FRS. 16 March 1987. WORLD WAR II – THE BALANCE 26 SHEET by John Terraine. 14 March 1988. THE IMPACT OF THE SANDYS 44 DEFENCE POLICY ON THE ROYAL AIR FORCE by T C G James CMG MA. 29 June 1988. THE POLICY, COMMAND AND 66 DIRECTION OF THE LUFTWAFFE IN WORLD WAR II by Dr Horst Boog. 31 October 1988. Seminar – THE ROYAL AIR FORCE AND 86 CLANDESTINE OPERATIONS IN NORTH-WEST EUROPE. BOOK REVIEWS 112 5 SELECTED ABBREVIATIONS ABM Anti-Ballistic Missile ACAS(Int) Assistant Chief of the Air Staff (Intelligence) ADI(K), Assistant Directorate of Intelligence (K) AI Air Intelligence ASW Anti-Submarine Warfare CAS Chief of the Air Staff CDS Chief of the Defence Staff CIGS Chief of the Imperial General Staff DD Deputy Director(ate) DF Direction Finding DCAS Deputy Chief of the Air Staff DZ Drop/Dropping Zone FEAF Far East Air Force FINRAE Ferranti Inertial Rapid Alignment Equipment HUD Head Up Display IFF Identification Friend or Foe MA Military Intelligence QRA Quick Reaction Alert SACEUR Supreme Allied Commander Europe SACLANT Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic SAM Surface-to-Air Missile SIS Secret Intelligence Service SOE Special Operations Executive VCAS Vice Chief of the Air Staff 6 EDITOR’S NOTE The established cycle that determines the content of our Journals means that the edition which appears in or about January of each year reflects the proceedings of the event held in the previous spring which it does by publishing the papers read on that occasion. In 2007, however, we interrupted the usual sequence by sponsoring, instead of the usual seminar, a visit to the recently opened National Cold War Exhibition at the RAF Museum’s Cosford site. While those who attended were treated to some presentations, they were to do with the design and operation of the splendid new building and the preparation of the displays. In other words, while interesting in their own right, they were not to do with RAF history per se. That created something of a problem as we would either have to skip an edition or find something else to print. Your Committee decided that we could usefully fill the gap by reprinting some of the more significant papers that were read to the Society in its early days and which appeared in publications that are no longer readily available. ERRATA Anthony Furse has pointed out an error on page 11 of Journal 40 where it says that Newall was CAS in December 1940. Newall had, of course, been succeeded by Portal in October. Tim Wingham has noted an error in the caption to the photograph of HSL 2550 on page 57 of Journal 40. He points out that those are not ‘twin Lewis guns on pillar mountings’ as stated; they are Vickers 0.303 inch Gas Operated Mk 1, No 1s aka Vickers Class Ks, or VGOs for short. As Tim says, when ‘presented with a picture of a drum-fed machine-gun in an RAF setting, the immediate assumption is – Lewis gun.’ I plead guilty as charged. That was my caption, so mea culpa. Ed. 7 RAF HISTORICAL SOCIETY INAUGURAL LECTURE 20 OCTOBER 1986 The Society’s inaugural lecture was given by Professor R V Jones, CB, CBE, FRS, author of Most Secret War, the account of British Scientific Intelligence during the 1939-1945 war, published in 1978, serialised in the Sunday Telegraph and used as the basis for the television series The Secret War. Introducing Professor Jones, Air Commodore Probert said: ‘In introducing this evening’s lecturer I’d like to take your minds back to the middle 1930s, the time when – according to some – the RAF was doing so little to prepare to meet the German threat. The facts are rather different for, as John Terraine has recently reminded us in The Right of the Line, those years witnessed a silent, almost unseen, transformation. It was Professor Blackett, in his 1960 Tizard Memorial Lecture, who pointed out so clearly that one aspect of this transformation was the growing intimacy between senior officers of the armed forces and the scientists in the government research establishments. It stemmed primarily, of course, from the formation in 1935 of the Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Defence, and R V Jones was one of the young scientists who came to work for the Air Ministry at that time. Incredible as it now seems, by 1940 his field of research led to his being summoned to attend a meeting of the Cabinet on the subject of the German beams – at the tender age of twenty-eight! Throughout the rest of the war he was closely involved in almost every aspect of intelligence, including Ultra, and nobody is now better placed to talk to us from personal experience about the RAF and the intelligence war. Moreover, ‘RV’ addresses us this evening, not as a guest, but as a fully paid-up founder member of our Society!’ 8 THE INTELLIGENCE WAR ANDTHE ROYAL AIR FORCE by Professor R V Jones CB CBE FRS In the frantic decade of the thirties, when some of us were doing all we could to tackle the problems of air defence, Professor Lindemann once told me that he had written to the Air Ministry accusing it of taking so much time to do anything that it must be attempting to emulate the Deity to whom we sang ‘A thousand ages in thy sight are as an evening gone’. On that scale the sixty-eight years since the creation of the Royal Air Force would seem as a minute or less in the long cavalcade of human history; but they have seen more spectacular advances in knowledge and technology than had occurred in the entire preceding span of historical time. Jet engines, supersonic flight, radar, television, computers, guided missiles, atomic bombs, artificial satellites and interplanetary probes have all come into being since the Royal Air Force was formed; and it has had to evolve with them through the most intense period of technological development the world has yet known. So whatever the history of the Royal Air Force may lack in duration is much more than compensated by the range and scale of its activities, both technological and operational, and by its vital part in the momentous battles of the Second World War. It is, therefore, entirely opportune that this history is now to be recognised by the formation of the Royal Air Force Historical Society, and it will be gratifying to all of us who served in Intelligence that the Society has chosen for the subject of its first lecture the relations between the Royal Air Force and Intelligence. The title of the lecture incorporates more than one ambiguity when it refers to ‘the intelligence war’, even if we confine the context to World War II. Does it mean the war between the British and German intelligence services? Or might it refer to the struggle that sometimes occurred between the intelligence branches of the three Services; for example, in getting the highest priority in the cryptographic effort at Bletchley? Or to that other war that broke out from time to time between the intelligence and operational branches, when the operators found intelligence assessments of their success too low to be palatable? If that were not enough, we in Intelligence occasionally found 9 ourselves in dispute with some of the leading experts in the country regarding the interpretation of evidence concerning new German weapons; for example, in the weight of the V2, of which an American witness, Professor W W Rostow, wrote ‘Although I was at that time relatively young (27), I had acquired some experience with both academic and governmental bureaucratic structures and their capacity for bloodless tribal warfare. But I had never been present at, let alone presided over, a meeting charged with more emotional tension than that centred on the weight of the V2 warhead’. A further interpretation of our title might point to the part played by the Royal Air Force, not in using intelligence, but in gathering information which was to be collated with that obtained from other sources to build up the intelligence assessments of our opponents’ intentions.