With Wings Like Eagles (3 page)

The dispute on rearmament between Baldwin and Churchill became so bitter that when, later, during the war, Churchill was told that the Baldwin family’s ironworks had been bombed by the Germans he remarked grumpily, “How ungrateful of them,” and after being congratulated by Harold Nicolson on his eulogy for Neville Chamberlain in the House of Commons, he replied, “That was not an insuperable task, since I admired many of Neville’s great qualities, but I pray to God in his infinite mercy that I shall not have to deliver a similar oration on Baldwin—that would indeed be difficult to do.”
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But their disagreement was misleading in the sense that both of them were talking about the
number
of aircraft available to the RAF and the
Luftwaffe
, rather than about type and quality, which were harder to define.

The argument was further muddled in most people’s minds by an artificial distinction between “frontline aircraft” and those “in reserve,” and the confusion was made worse by the Germans’ habit of exaggerating their air strength when they wanted to frighten people, and playing it down when they wanted to claim that they sought no more than “parity” with the United Kingdom and France. That the Germans were building military aircraft faster than the British was obvious enough to most people, though Baldwin and his supporters in the House of Commons continued to deny it soothingly, despite ample evidence to the contrary. But were they building fighters or bombers, and in what proportion, and how effective were the latter? These were the critical questions, and for the most part they remained unanswered, or even unasked.

The truth is that despite Göring’s bombast, the one task the
Luftwaffe
was
not
prepared for in 1936, or even in 1939, was bombing London, let alone destroying the city in the kind of surprise raid that Churchill had described and that so many people feared, particularly those who had seen
Things to Come
. Between 1933 and 1936 the Germans, like the British, were infatuated with the idea of the
Schnellbomber
(“fast bomber”)—faster than the fighters that would be available to intercept it. In England the eccentric millionaire Lord Rothermere, owner of the newspaper the
Daily Mail
, and an aviation enthusiast, ordered for himself from the Bristol Aircraft Company the fastest private transport plane in the world—a twin-engine all-metal monoplane, called, a typical Rothermere touch,
Britain First
, which would carry six passengers and a crew of two at the then unheard of speed of almost 300 miles per hour. When it was delivered to him in 1935 he gave both the aircraft and the blueprints of the design to the Air Ministry as a patriotic gesture; the ministry then modified the plane to create the Bristol Blenheim Mark I bomber.

The Blenheim was faster than any fighter then existing, as were its rivals the Dornier (Do) 17, the Heinkel (He) 111, and the Junkers (Ju) 88 in Germany.
*
The problem with all these aircraft, however, was that they carried a relatively light bomb load, made up of fairly small bombs; even the largest of them, the He 111, could carry only eight 500-pound (250-kilogram) bombs, held nose upward in a modular rack like eggs in an egg container. This seemed like a reasonable bomb load in the mid 1930s, but to put the matter in perspective, only six years later RAF Bomber Command would be sending deep into Germany at night hundreds of four-engine Avro Lancasters that were able to carry a “Blockbuster” bomb of up to 12,000 pounds, and eventually, with some modifications, the enormous 22,000-pound “Grand Slam” bomb.

By one of those curious strokes of good fortune for their enemies, the Germans started the mass production of bombers too early, and stuck with the idea of the
Schnellbomber
. Also, since Göring was above all interested in quantity rather than in efficiency—when those around him pointed this out, he replied that the Führer would ask him only how many bombers he had, not how big they were or how far they could fly—the Germans continued to produce the same types to the end, whereas the British Air Ministry took a hugely expensive leap in the dark, quietly abandoned the “fast bomber,” and instead set about drawing up ambitious plans to design and produce, on a huge scale, a whole family of big, four-engine bombers, intended to carry heavy bomb loads over very long distances—to Berlin, for example.

In any case, by 1938, as we shall see, the leap in the performance and armament of the new generation of fighters, represented in Britain by the Hurricane and the Spitfire, and in Germany by the Bf 109, abruptly invalidated the whole idea of “fast bombers.” These new fighters would easily fly 100 or even 200 miles per hour faster than the fastest bomber, and could reach much higher altitudes. The Germans faced another problem, too—since the more a bomb load weighs, the less can be spared for fuel, their “fast bombers” designed in the 1930s had a fairly limited combat radius. Reaching targets in England from airfields in Germany would put them at the extreme limit of their range, and well beyond the ability of German fighters to accompany them. Of course in the 1930s neither the Germans nor the British anticipated that the
Luftwaffe
would be attacking Britain from airfields in the Netherlands, Belgium, or northern France, much closer to British targets, making possible an aerial campaign that would have been unimaginable before June 1940.

Thus, although the Germans were certainly producing military aircraft at an alarming rate in 1935, the situation was in fact less critical than Baldwin’s detractors, led by Churchill, liked to make it out. The solution was not simply for the British government to build more aircraft than the Germans—least of all bombers, which then had neither the range nor the bomb capacity to deter Hitler from war—but to start thinking rationally about the possibility of defending the United Kingdom against aerial attack, and investing in the advanced technology and complex ground organization that would be needed to detect and destroy enemy bombers.

Baldwin, who did not share Churchill’s enthusiasm for military matters, seems to have stumbled on the idea of defense rather than deterrence by some mysterious thought process of his own. It may be that threatening to bomb German civilians—or, worse still, actually having to
do
it—in order to keep the peace struck him as morally indefensible, and as a blind alley, since the Germans under Hitler would very likely retaliate. It may also have been a dose of realism on his part, since by the mid-1930s, despite the firm belief of the Air Ministry in the principle of deterrence as the keystone of British strategy, there was still no sign to the layman that RAF Bomber Command would be able to make good on any such threat in the near future. The majority opinion of the “bloody air marshals,” as Lord Beaverbrook would later take to calling them, was that every fighter built meant further delay in creating the all-important bomber force on which the safety of Britain really depended. Another factor in Baldwin’s mind was that fighters were easier to sell to the House of Commons than bombers. Even the Labour members—who were, in general, against increased armaments of any kind, in favor of “collective security,” and strong believers in the League of Nations as the equivalent of labor-management negotiations between nations—were less offended by spending money on fighters than by spending it on a bomber force. At least fighters were by definition for defense, not attack, and it was hard even for Labour’s pacifist fringe to argue that having the ability to defend oneself if attacked was morally wrong. Baldwin seems to have been moved by the same idea. As a businessman, he saw fighters as a kind of insurance policy against the failure of diplomacy or the remote possibility that Hitler might actually mean what he said, or worse still what he had written in
Mein Kampf
. Bombers offended Baldwin’s moral scruples; fighters did not.

He spoke movingly of his belief that “since the day of the air, the old frontiers are gone. When you think of the defense of England you no longer think of the chalk cliffs of Dover, you think of the Rhine.” What appeared to horrify him was the idea that England could defend itself only by dropping bombs on the men, women, and children of the Rhineland (since this was the only major target in Germany that the current generation of RAF bombers could reach). Whether the victims were British, French, or German, the prime minister rejected the notion that “two thousand years after Our Lord was crucified, [we] should be spending our time thinking how we can get the mangled bodies of children to the hospitals and how we can keep poison gas from the throats of the people,” and worried (prophetically) about the future, when “the bomb no bigger than a walnut”
⁴
might blow up whole cities. (Can he have been imagining nuclear weapons, or reading H. G. Wells instead of Trollope?) Sincere and sympathetic as this kind of speech was, it was hardly a rousing call to arms.

Baldwin had other, more practical concerns about the cost of rearming the RAF. The projected cost of building a single modern fighter plane was estimated at between £5,000 and £10,000 each, whereas one big four-engine bomber was expected to cost more than £50,000, and perhaps twice that. In addition, fighters could fly from grass strips at what were then still called aerodromes, whereas bombers, because of their heavier weight, required long, expensive concrete runways and hardstands, much bigger hangars, and of course bigger aircrews, all of which would cost enormous sums of money. In the war of numbers that was going on between Baldwin and Churchill, it seemed possible that the latter might be silenced at much less expense by building fighters rather than bombers.

The argument about numbers was in any case complicated by the fact that both men counted “frontline airplanes” and reserves separately. What most politicians, including those in France, Italy, and the Soviet Union, meant was that “frontline airplanes” would be of the latest type, whereas the “reserves” would consist of older but still usable machines. What the air marshals meant, but did not always say, was that
all
their airplanes must be of the latest type, the “frontline” planes being those delivered to combat-ready squadrons, the “reserves” held back to supply new squadrons as they were formed or to replace machines that had been lost in combat or in accidents. As war would prove, when it finally arrived, only the latest and most up-to-date aircraft were useful in combat. Each side would work incessantly to improve the performance and armament of its aircraft and to bring in new types at a dizzying rate, so that the machines with which Britain and Germany began the war in 1939 were already rendered obsolete by 1940 (those of the French were, unfortunately for them, already obsolete in 1939). This was a hard point to get across—the majority of the Royal Navy’s battleships had either served during World War I or been completed and updated shortly after it ended; the British Army, like the German, was still using a slightly modified version of the same rifle its soldiers had carried in World War I
*
; and most of the field artillery in both armies would have been familiar to a veteran of the 1914–1918 war. In the air, however, obsolescence was such a rapid process that it was hard to avoid—once war broke out ground crews would be struggling night after night to carry out the latest “modifications” from the Air Ministry, changes and additions to their aircraft that arrived in the form of endless mimeographed pages and diagrams. Aircraft that were not “frontline” would be swept out of the air by those that were. Counting older aircraft as part of a nation’s air strength, as the French (and the Russians) did, was like including old, lame horses in the fighting strength of a cavalry corps.

In the end, Baldwin’s long political career would eventually fall victim to the numbers in which he took so little interest. As long ago as 1933, already under pressure from those who wanted Britain to rearm, he had announced to the House of Commons that in the event no agreement could be reached between the European nations on restricting the size of air forces or, better yet, abolishing them, Britain would accept “No inferiority to any country within striking distance.”
⁵
In 1934 he had announced that German air strength was “not fifty per cent of our strength,”
⁶
although many people suspected that the truth was otherwise. In 1935, he unwisely repeated this pledge, only to have Hitler reveal that Germany had already reached parity with the United Kingdom, and was approaching parity with France—which would, of course, mean that the
Luftwaffe
’s strength would soon exceed that of France and Britain combined.

If Baldwin had been reading the intelligence analyses produced for him by the Air Ministry and MI6 he would have seen that the famous pledge he had given in 1933 to allow “no inferiority to any power within striking distance” had already been swept aside by the rapid increase in German aircraft production since then, and even his devoted friend and biographer, Young, complains of “his indolence”
⁷
in this respect. In any case, in 1935 Baldwin had the unpleasant task of explaining to an uneasy House of Commons that he had been wrong. Being Baldwin, he did not attempt to justify himself by complaining that he had been duped by Hitler, or by explaining to the House that Britain was already developing a sophisticated air defense system—he took full responsibility for his mistake, but this did him very little good.

His proposal to speed up the program for rearming the RAF so that the target for aircraft strength planned for 1939 would be reached in 1937 brought down on his head both the objections of Labour members, who wanted no increases in armaments, and those of Conservatives who supported Churchill and thought that Baldwin was proposing to produce too little, too late, as well as an outcry from industrial leaders, businessmen, and the chiefs of the army and navy, who argued that attempting to produce so many aircraft so quickly would disrupt British industrial production.