Bomber Command by Max Hastings Read Free Book Online Page B

offensive in the Second World War.
    Somewhere in the midst of his rather cursory investigation, Smuts became captivated by the vision of air power. He was fascinated by the concept of a New Force in warfare – this, at a moment when in France the Old Forces were achieving the most spectacular and ghastly débâcle in their history. His report, completed on 17 August 1917, formed the foundation on which British airmen would build a complete theory of warfare in the next twenty years:
An air service [Smuts wrote to the War Cabinet] can be used as an independent means of war operations. Nobody that witnessed the attack on London on 11 July could have any doubt on that point . . . As far as can at present be foreseen there is absolutely no limit to the scale of its future independent war use. And the day may not be far off when aerial operations with their devastation of enemy lands and destruction of industrial and populous centres on a vast scale may become the principal operations of war, to which the older forms of military and naval operations may become secondary and subordinate.
The magnitude and significance of the transformation now in progress are not easily recognized. It requires some imagination to realize that next summer, while our Western Front may still be moving forward at a snail’s pace in Belgium and France, the air battle front will be far behind on the Rhine, and that its continuous and intense pressure against the chief industrial centres of the enemy as well as on his lines of communication may form an important factor in bringing about peace.
     
    Here indeed was a vision, and one which sent as great a shock of anger and scorn through the ranks of the generals and admirals as of excitement and enthusiasm through those of the airmen. At another time, the combined hostility of the War Office and the Admiralty would have been enough to kill the Smuts Report without notice. But in the autumn of 1917 the political stock of the leaders of the two established services had sunk to a very low ebb indeed in the eyes of the British Government. Service objections to Smuts’s recommendations were interpreted as rearguard actions to prevent any transfer of forces from their own commands. Lloyd George overruled them. He approved the creation of an ‘Independent Air Force’ to begin bombing operations against Germany at the earliest possible moment. He authorized the buildup of a powerful fighter force in England to meet the German bomber threat. He decreed the union of the Royal Flying Corps andthe Royal Naval Air Service to form the new Royal Air Force from 1 April 1918. The RFC’s commander, Sir Hugh Trenchard, was brought back from France to become the first Chief of Air Staff.
    To the Government’s satisfaction, this extraordinary wave of activity produced results. The Germans abandoned daylight bombing in the face of stiffening opposition, and for the rest of the war troubled England with only desultory night attacks by Gothas and Zeppelins. Although the merger of the RFC and the RNAS provoked such heat at high level, on the squadrons themselves it was accomplished without excessive ill will. Trenchard, who had earlier opposed the creation of a Royal Air Force as an independent service, now surprised and confused everybody by the fierce single-mindedness with which he nurtured the fledgling against the army and navy’s rapacious designs. His initial tenure as Chief of Air Staff was short-lived, for he quarrelled with the Air Minister and returned to France to command the Independent Air Force – the Allies’ embryo strategic bombing force – for the remaining months of the war, The 543 tons of explosives his aircraft dropped on Germany before the armistice made only a pinprick impact on the enemy, but enormously enlarged Trenchard’s vision of air power. At the end of the war, after a change of Air Minister, Trenchard returned to England not only as Chief of Air Staff, but as the messiah of the new form