Boom!
Trenchard. By Andrew Boyle. (Collins, 45s.) THIS book has many defects. In the first place, it is far too long (734 pages of text) and is written in a sloppy, breezy style which is meant to be readable, but which, with its endless clichés and its journalistic strivings for effect, becomes almost the opposite. Then there are no statistical charts, an essential, one would have thought, when writing about the creation and re-creation of the RFC, the RAF and the reorganisation of the Metropolitan Police. The few maps are quite inadequate. There are no appendices, though these would have absorbed much of the detail that so distends the text. The documenta- tion is defective, so that it is not always possible to say whether a statement is based on a con- temporary source or on Lord Trenchard's memory when he enlightened his biographer in conversation at the end of his long life. The material is clumsily assembled, and there is considerable repetition. The book thus bears a closer resemblance to a huge pile of building material, rather than to the monument intended.
The author is strongly partisan: Trenchard, in his struggles with the politicians, the civil servants, the sailors and the soldiers to create, defend and enlarge the RAF, was invariably inspired by the highest motives of patriotism, loyalty and vision. This may well be true. But the point is not well made by ascribing less re- spectable motives to all his opponents. We are presented with the spectacle of Trenchard fight- ing, almost single-handed, a long succession of fools and knaves which included all the admirals, almost all the generals, a very high proportion of the politicians and bureaucrats and a sur- prisingly large number of senior Air Force officers. Only George V, Haig and Weir were entirely trustworthy. Sykes, Dowding, Rother- mere, Wilson, Beatty, Cavan, Chatfield, Bonar Law, Northcliffe, Beaverbrook, at times Lloyd George, Churchill, Geddes, Balfour, Baldwin and many more—Trenchard had to bang sense into all these dissimilar heads, when he could not get them sacked. The greater part of the biography is devoted to these inter- and intra- ministerial squabbles. Important as they doubt- less were, they make for wearisome reading.
Andrew Boyle's thesis may be summed up as follows : Trenchard's endless battle to save the RAF was fully justified by the outcome. 'There would,' he says, 'have been no possibility of fighting the Battle of Britain in 1940 had Trenchard lost the Battle of Whitehall in the Twenties.' And the author repeatedly claims that the Battle of Britain was the decisive battle of the Second World War.
This axiom is both self-evident and question- able. Obviously, had there been no RAF, the RAF could not have won the battle. It is equally obvious that had Britain possessed no fighter planes, no radar network and no ground-air con- trol apparatus in 1940, the war would almost certainly have been enormously protracted and possibly lost. It is, on the other hand, arguable that a large Army Air Corps and a large Fleet Air Arm might well have served Britain better, in too, than an RAF which was primarily created, by Trenchard's explicit, will and com- mand, about a strategic bombing force.
As early as 1917, Trenchard, in a paper pre- pared for Haig, had laid down what his biographer calls 'the first summary of the basic principles of air strategy [that] has remained valid for nearly half a century, and is unlikely to be superseded.' In this paper we read: 'The aeroplane is not a defence against the aeroplane. But the opinion of those most competent to judge is that the aeroplane, as a weapon of attack, cannot be too .highly estimated.' And twenty years later he was still maintaining that the strategic bomber programme must take pre- cedence over the fighter programme. But it was not bombers that won, or even helped to win, the Battle of Britain. Trenchard retired as CAS in 1929. It is highly questionable whether, had he held the job through the Thirties, there would have been enough fighter planes and fighter squadrons to defeat the Luftwaffe in 1940.
Three great strategic bomber forces have existed, and we may take it that there will be no more. The first was created and commanded by Trenchard in 1918: since it was not ready by the end of the war, its contribution to vic- tory was nugatory. The third is the US Strategic Air Command, plus our V-bombers, which has perhaps exercised a decisive effect as a deterrent. (Though this we shall not know for sure unless and until we can read the Soviet State papers: its military effect in the Korean War appears to have been trifling.) And then there was RAF Bomber Command, plus, later, the US Eighth Air Force, 1942-45, which was really Trenchard's Independent Bombing Force of 1918 writ large. There is and will continue to be much con- troversy as to whether the vast effort and treasure put into this produced commensurate results.
The Germans built their Luftwaffe to support their ground troops, and, used it with spectacular success to help their armoured divisions forward (they never had a strategic bombing force). It was only when the sheer vastness of Anglo- American aircraft production enabled us to give our ground troops at least an equal measure of tactical air support, as well as to bomb strategi- cally, that we stopped losing battles to the Ger- mans. Similarly, the Royal Navy never enjoyed the support of a large air arm of its own. Its major defeats—Norway, Crete, Malaya —can be in large part directly attributed to this : its victories—Matapan, Taranto, Normandy and the U-boats—to local air superiority. It is thus by no means self-evident, as his biographer seems to think, that Trenchard's views were in- variably correct nor his influence on future events wholly beneficial. What is self-evident is that his great administrative talents created, in the RAF, a superb fighting service.
Finally, there is the question of Trenchard's personality. This biography is something of a hagiology, but as is not infrequently the case with books of this sort it almost defeats its own ob- ject. Painting in the warts is one thing : asking us to love them, another. Trenchard, we are told with evident approval, was an impenitent philistine.' He was exceedingly rude, to women, priests (he seems to have loathed Christianity) and his inferiors in rank. At his own wedding he deliberately kicked over a squatting photo- grapher who was attempting to snap the happy pair. He was inarticulate (a conversation with Haig was described by one who was there as 'instinctive telepathy . . . gestures and agricul- tural grunts rather than words') and almost illiterate, as many quotations show. He was an old-fashioned snob who believed that the 'officer- gentleman class' had a prescribed right to com- mand the Air Force, the police and pretty well everybody else. He was so arrogant that in 1940 he refused to serve under Churchill unless be were made generalissimo of all the services, re- sponsible to no one. He had a very loud voice and his nickname was Boom.
A more moderate tone on the part of his biographer might, all the same, have revealed him for the great man that he probably was.
CONSTANTINE FITZGIBBON
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