• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1111 0

German planes would have to fly to reach England, interposing Allied-held territory between German bases and their bombers’ English targets, and providing the RFC with airfields closer to German industrial centers. Meanwhile, the RFC and the French air corps should do all they could to strike German air bases behind the front. This would help Allied soldiers fighting in the trenches— Trenchard’s first concern—and might also destroy airplanes that could be used to attack London. Flying protective patrols over the English Channel would not, Trenchard thought, do much good, since the number of planes and crews available for such patrols was far fewer than needed to find and stop the Gothas. Lloyd George wanted to bomb the industrial city of Mannheim. Trenchard thought this impossible under current circumstances, though he had no moral objection to attacking such targets. As for raids against undefended cities that were not manufacturing centers, Trenchard declared these ‘repugnant’, but thought they might ultimately be necessary should other means of reprisal fail. If the government decided to bomb German towns, it must anticipate that the Germans would respond in kind, and, ‘unless we are determined and prepared to go one better than the Germans, whatever they may do and whether their reply is in the air or against our prisoners or otherwise, it will be infinitely better not to attempt reprisals at all’. Here was common sense. Here also was an invitation to unlimited escalation and total war against civilian populations. If the government chose to open the door to attacks on German towns, it must not hesitate but rush through with its guns blazing.22

The Gothas struck London again just three weeks later, once more by the light of day. Members of the British Air Board watched, shocked, from the balconies of the Hotel Cecil as the bombers unleashed their terror. The capital succumbed once more to an apoplexy of fear, anger, and recrimination. Channel air patrols increased, despite Trenchard’s doubts, the Cabinet ordered more war planes, and Lloyd George renewed his demand for the bombing of Mannheim (it went unmet). Trenchard was dismayed that the Germans had again bombed London, but he continued to believe that air support of the army was the most efficient use of limited resources. Lloyd George appointed the South African statesman and War Cabinet member Jan Smuts to investigate the problem. Very quickly Smuts produced two reports, the first an unhappy account of London’s air defenses, the second, more significant, a call for the development of a separate Air Ministry. Smuts implied here that air power might have a future distinct from that of the army and navy that it had heretofore served. ‘Air power’, he wrote, ‘can be used as an independent means of war operations ...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 centers on a vast scale may become the principal operations of war, to which older forms of military operations may become secondary and subordinate.’ By such advocacy, and prophecy, would Smuts earn his title as father of the Royal Air Force.23

Smuts had other careers in front of him; he established his paternity of the Air Force and moved on. It was Hugh Trenchard who became Britain’s pre-eminent air strategist in the years between the wars. Trenchard, nicknamed ‘Boom’ for the volume and authority of his voice, began his military career during the Boer War. In the Transvaal in October 1900, he was ambushed and shot through the left side of his chest. The bullet creased his lung and then his spine, leaving him susceptible to respiratory problems and temporarily unable to walk without crutches. (He recovered his ability to walk unaided, incredibly, following a toboggan accident in Switzerland early the following year.) Drawn to the air, he learned to fly in 1912. When the war began two years later, Trenchard was