BOOKS OF THE DAY
Not the Full Story
Ir was not until a few months ago that even Douhet's twenty-five- year-old work on Air Power was published in this country, such is the unpopularity of this all-important subject with British publishers. Any work, therefore, that purports to be The Rise of British Air Power, 1911-1939, places considerable responsibility on the shoulders of author and publisher. Mr. Saunders has done invaluable service in the past by placing before the public, in palatable form, the official contemporary accounts of the exploits of the R.A.F. in this war. His task when writing Coastal Command, Bomber Command and The Battle of Britain made no demands on him as an historian or as an authority on the complex and debatable subject of air power ; but in his latest book he does assume the role of historian, a role for which, unfortunately, he does not appear to be qualified.
The first duty of an historian is to consider, with great con- scientiousness, the relative importance of events. Before he can do this he must have, as a basis, a deep knowledge of his subject and of the varying interpretations put on events by contemporary writers, as well as familiarity with the more matured views of succeeding authorities. Put in its simplest terms the outcome of reflection by Mr. Saunders on the rise of British air power, 1911-1939, is his book of 326 pages of which a mere 45 deal with the subject as it developed between the two wars. What is mainly a digest of the official War in the Air (1914-1918) takes him 249 pages (comment on this material would be redundant and so is not made in this review), and of the 45 pages which purport to cover the period 1918 to 1939 no Jess than 13 are devoted to a description of the R.A.F.'s policing duties and the squabble between the Admiralty and the Air Ministry (described with altruistic decorum) for the control of the Fleet Air Arm.
Mr. Saunders, like many members of the public, thinks of air power in terms of aeroplanes and air crews alone. He makes a passing reference to industry by mentioning the shadow factories, but that is all: Although acknowledging the need for overseas bases he makes no reference to the huge subject of ground services and never mentions our failure to provide the R.A.F. with aerodromes from which they could fly in all weathers. It was not until just before the war that the first R.A.F. aerodrome was fitted with blind approach equipment, though the Luftwaffe aerodromes had had it or years. It was not until 1940 that the Air Ministry overcame the prejudice against runways. Unserviceable aerodromes ground an Air Force, as we found out to our cost. Except for the briefest reference to Imperial Airways, the author makes no effort to relate civil aviation to air power and shows that he almost wholly ignorant of that relationship. The story of British civil aviation goes practically
unrecorded, including the fact that we had less thari 4o transport Onus for the whole of our Empire and Continental communications at the outbreak of war. The indispensable stimulus of private enter- prise in this respect finds no recognition. We owe the Mosquito to
the England-Australia race in 1934. British air transport would have been more moribund than it was had it not been for Hillman Airways, Railway Air Services., and others, acting as goad to Imperial Airways. The great record flights by civilians, which drew atten- tion to the latent possibilities of Empire air communication, are not even touched on. Mollison and Amy Johnson find no place in these pages, nor does Sir Sefton Brancker, except for a record that he was killed in the Rio, ; and Sir Alan Cobham, perhaps the most impor- tant of all Empire air pioneers, is denied a place in this history.
How invaluable militarily would have been an air route.between Africa and Australia via the Seychelles when Singapore fell ; but the efforts of Taylor go unrecorded. Nor is Sir Kingsley Wood men- tioned, nor Lord Swinton, except for the " defence " made for him by Chamberlain when he (Swinton) was forced to resign ; yet both these Air Ministers in the fatal years did great work. Mr. Saunders seems never to have heard of the Civil Air Guard nor of the Air Defence Cadet Corps created by the Air League to form subsequently the indispensable Air Training Corps. He once mentions, in passing, the word " radiolocation," but makes no attempt to record its tremendous•influence on air power, nor does he credit Sir Watson Watt with its magic development. He mentions the Air Staff decision to concentrate on heavy bombers but gives only one reason, a sub- sidiary one, for that vital step. He unwittingly does the R.A.F., and this country, a disservice in his description of the policing of Iraq, Somaliland and the frontiers of India by the R.A.F. Instead of stressing the fact that bombing operations were preceded by a warning to the recalcitrant tribes to get out of the villages to be bombed, he writes in such a manner that the reader must think that this only happened on one specific occasion.
This book appears under impressive colours. It is published by the Oxford University Press, it is written by Hilary St. George Saunders —a name deservedly known to millions as a successful writer on the R.A.F. in this war—and the preface records indebtedness to one Marshal of the Royal Air Force, one Air Chief Marshal, an Assis- tant Under-Secretary of State and the librarian of the Air Ministry himself. With regret, this reviewer trusts that this imposing array of names will not lead librarians to believe that in this book they will have an authoritative survey of the rise of British air power.
NIGEL TANGYE.
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