The Importance of Bombers
When the Service Estimates were published, earlier in the year, gloom was thick. Their story of reduced expenditure was accom- panied by tales of waste and frustration in the forces, of a dead low ebb in naval effectiveness, and the sickening news of the Communist coup in Czechoslovakia. The sole ray of hope was found in a memorandum accompanying the Air Estimates, in which it was sai4 that close attention was being paid to the building up of a mobile bomber force. That hope is said to have received a damaging blow last week when the bombers which went out to attack the fleet at the end of the exercises in the North Atlantic for the most part failed to find their target. This story will need a great deal of further examination. In the first place faith in the bomber is to a great extent influenced by the part it played in the closing stages of the last war. To carry that faith uncriticised to the unknown
situations of the next war would be to make the most common of strategic errors. In the second place the lessons of the recent exercise have still to be thoroughly assessed by the Naval and Air Staffs. It may be decided, in confirmation of what Lord Tedder has already asserted, that the weather in the Atlantic was so bad that the odds against the bombers were impossible. As to the news that many bombers scheduled to take part in the exercise never took off owing to defects in the ground organisation, that holds a lesson which is not peculiar to the R.A.F.—the lesson of the failure of recruiting and conscription since the war.
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