By Group Captain Jim Beldon
Biography: Group Captain Jim Beldon is a navigator, whose service has principally been in the Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance field. He has served at various grades at the UK Ministry of Defence, the Permanent Joint Headquarters and the Joint Services Command and Staff College as well as having commanded No. 8 Squadron (AWACS). He currently serves as the RAF’s Director of Defence Studies.
Abstract: In the lead up to the anniversary of the formation of the Royal Air Force and the planned RAF 100 centenary celebrations, it is apposite that we examine the events which led to the ‘creation’ of the RAF in 1918. When exploring past events it is important to situate them within their own historical contexts. In this short article Group Captain Jim Beldon, the current director of Defence Studies, explores the political and military arguments espoused a century ago which were to provide the catalyst which eventually resulted, on 1 April 1918, in the formation of the world’s first independent air force, the Royal Air Force.
This article is the very first that appears on the Royal Air Force Centre for Air Power Studies’ Medium channel, and appears at a moment when the Royal Air Force is approaching the centenary of its formation, a milestone in air power’s history that will be reached on 1 April 2018. The Royal Air Force was the first independent air force to be formed, and it is, therefore, now the oldest. But whilst it would be tempting at this point for the Royal Air Force simply to reflect on its tough but magnificent history, it continues to focus unerringly on the future — after all, it was the potential that air power held for the future that led to its creation in the first place. And it is that spirit that should be borne in mind in this article, which looks at how this bold, innovative and ultimately permanent development in this country’s fighting services came about.
And where else to begin than at the beginning? Or, perhaps even more pertinently, before the beginning. It would be appropriate, I think, to consider the RAF’s coming into being in terms of ‘creation’ rather than merely ‘formation’, because the word ‘creation’ conveys an appropriate sense of innovation, imagination and vitality — indeed, of an entity that was conceived to live — whereas the rather utilitarian term ‘formation’ suggests a rather bureaucratic process of assembling disparate parts and putting them together somewhat functionally — as a machine might be. The RAF was indeed created as a daring idea — the idea that, even in its infancy, air power had the enduring potential (and, indeed, was required) to conduct offensive and defensive operations that were independent of the ties that had hitherto bound air power to the Royal Flying Corps’ (RFC) and Royal Naval Air Service’s (RNAS) parent Services’ parochial — albeit vital — spheres of operation.
Through the Zeppelin and Gotha raids on England, the German Luftstreitskräfte had demonstrated the potential for independent air operations for strategic effect, and it is well known that the commissioning of General Jan Smuts and his reports of summer 1917, which were so influential in the story of the RAF’s creation, resulted largely from the clamour to find a way of neutralising the threat posed by German bombers, which had shaken public confidence and morale and provoked a political crisis.
It was not lost on Smuts (or, just as importantly, his seconded expert witness, Lieutenant General Sir David Henderson) that Britain could in theory also do to the Germans what they had been doing to Britain. Moreover, the potential of such operations provided the clinching rationale for an independent air service. And not only did the motive exist, but, so Smuts’ believed, the means were also in the process of being realised, without adversely affecting air support to land and maritime operations. According to his analysis:
‘Next spring and summer the position will be that the Army and Navy will have all the Air Service required in connection with their operations; and over and above that there will be a great surplus available for independent operations. Who is to look after and direct the activities of this available surplus? Neither the Army nor the Navy is especially competent to do so; and for that reason the creation of an Air Staff for planning and directing independent air operations will soon be pressing.’
In advocating for the initiation, effectively, of a new ‘air-battle front’ in the skies over Germany aimed at the destruction of the enemy’s industrial centres and the dislocation of its lines of communication from the air above Germany, Smuts warned that ‘The enemy is no doubt making vast plans to deal with us in London if we do not succeed in beating him in the air and carrying the war into the heart of his country’. And so the seed of strategic bombing, which would become the core raison d’être of the Royal Air Force for much of its existence, was sown, and with it the notion that air operations might not only be independent, but strategically decisive too.
The rationale for creating an independent Air Service had been persuasively laid out by Lieutenant General Henderson in July 1917 and, despite its obvious agenda to promote the creation of an independent air service, Henderson’s staffwork was sufficiently moderate, balanced and absent of inflammatory zealotry, that it succeeded in persuading policymakers (helped by the Gotha raids) that an independent air force was not only desirable, but inevitable. The principal point of moderation in his argument had been on the issue of timing.
And here it is perhaps necessary to switch from the imaginative term ‘creation’ to the rather more prosaic term ‘formation’. Henderson had accepted that the practicalities of forming an independent air service would reduce — temporarily — the efficiency of the fighting air services, and that the judgement of whether to proceed with the amalgamation of the RFC and RNAS would need to be based on the Government’s assessment of how long the war would last. Henderson posited that if it considered that the war would end around the turn of the year, it would be most efficient to wait to form an independent air force until after the cessation of hostilities; on the other hand, if it was considered that the war would endure until June 1918, then any temporary loss of efficiency caused by the creation of a new service would be outweighed by the relentless gains that would be achieved in terms of organisation, equipment and procurement.
The question of efficiency was one that exercised the field commanders too — not least Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, Commander-in-Chief of the British Expeditionary Force on the Continent. Despite categorical evidence of Haig’s and Trenchard’s close professional relationship, Haig has often been dubbed as antagonistic towards air power, not least owing to Sir Frederick Sykes’ un-corroborated recollection that Haig had stated in 1914 that the idea of using aeroplanes for reconnaissance in war was ‘foolish’ and that cavalry would remain supreme for such purposes. But Haig was the man in the hot seat, and unsurprisingly saw the threat to the efficiency of the delivery of air support to his command as being of critical importance, setting out in a letter to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff in September 1917 that his concerns were limited to the successful conclusion of the present war, and that future considerations would need to wait until after victory — a conclusion which, incidentally, seemed not to be in doubt in Haig’s correspondence, although the failure of the Allies’ 1917 offensives and Russia’s subsequent withdrawal from the war following the October revolution, must soon afterwards have cast doubt on his optimism. Military pragmatism underpinned Haig’s assessment, which in contrast to his alleged lack of air-mindedness, seems to be highly conversant with the practicalities of air operations — one wonders how close to the pen Major General Hugh Trenchard, Commander of the RFC in France, had been? Haig’s attachment to air support for land operations was matched by his aversion to the use of air power as a strategic method of attack, based partly on pragmatic operational factors such as weather, payload and, significantly, the long transits over enemy-occupied territory that our own bombers would need to endure — factors that were, incidentally, to play so strongly against the RAF during its bomber offensive in the Second World War. Interestingly — and perhaps surprisingly, given his reputation for sending hundreds of thousands of men to their slaughter — Haig also opposed the strategic use of air power on grounds of morality and public opinion. But, above all, Haig opposed the creation of an independent air service on the basis that air support would no longer be subordinate to his command.
To expect that the relationship between ‘attached’ air units and the Army commander could, according to Haig’s analysis, ‘…ever be quite the same as if these units belonged to the Army, and looked to the other arms as their comrades and the Army authorities as their true masters and the ultimate judges on whom their prospects depend, would be contrary to all experience.’
Trenchard, the father of the Royal Air Force, went further, stating that the establishment of a separate air force would be ‘the successful culmination of a German plot aimed at dislocating the RFC in the field’.
Despite Haig’s and Trenchard’s misgivings, the logical desirability of creating a unified air service capable of conducting independent operations was largely agreed — not least because the creation of an independent air force was seen by many in Government as being the only obstacle preventing widespread popular insurrection. But the practical obstacles to its formation were formidable — the RFC and RNAS lacked all of the higher level staff, logistical and procurement competences needed, or even to discharge the disciplinary functions required of a new Service. An Air Ministry would have to be formed; a general service staff would be required; technical, infrastructure, armament and financial functions would need to be developed too — and none of this was easy in a war of national survival where men, resources and staff horsepower were already desperately stretched. But despite these crippling impediments, the supreme need for strategic efficiency outweighed the immediate tactical efficiency deficit that was predicted for the RFC in France, and the path for the RAF’s formation was laid, marked by the subsequent passing of the Royal Assent in November 1917, the convening of the first Air Council on 3 January 1918, and the RAF’s birth three months later.
It is worth noting, incidentally, that not only did the nascent Royal Air Force overcome the obstacles ranged against its formation, but the loss of efficiency which had been predicted by even its most ardent supporters, failed to materialise. This was just as well, because by the time the RAF was born on 1 April 1918, the war hung in the balance, with the Germans’ long-anticipated but grossly underestimated spring offensive which aimed to bring the war to a swift and decisive conclusion before American might could be brought to bear, had yet to reach its high watermark. If Haig was concerned about the diversion of air resources away from the land battle, the Royal Air Force was immediately to prove him wrong: on 12 April 1918–11 days after its formation — the Royal Air Force was to fly more missions and drop more bombs on the enemy than on any other day of the war. The ability of the RAF to integrate with its sister Services as well as securing what Smuts had described as ‘Air Supremacy’ and independent offensive air operations had been confirmed, and with it the final push for victory later that year.
