Case Studies in the Achievement of Air Superiority - Air Force ...

AIR SUPERIORITY
was a tight community. The Secretary of State for Air had been the Prime
Minister’s adjutant in the First World War, and the Under-Secretary had
been a flight commander in the Deputy Chief of the Air Staff’s squadron in
1917. Above all there was the intense personal interest displayed by the
Prime Minister in the battle, once he had been persuaded not to give all the
Fighter Command aircraft to France. If it is essential to see that the commander
in chief, as any senior commander, is neither understaffed nor overburdened,
then it is equally important to make sure that he or she is not
isolated. If not the AOC, then someone has to question both assumptions
and data.
The Battle of Britain showed that the normal establishment for antiaircraft
units simply was inadequate and had to be doubled when they were
placed in continuous action as at Dover. The same could be argued for
fighter squadrons. In the Battle of Britain neither their pilots nor their
repair echelons were sufficient to maintain the units at operational efficiency
under the stress of four and five sorties a day. The statistics available
also suggest that the pilot shortage of the Battle of Britain may be as
controversial as the supposed shell shortuge of 1915: was there or was
there not one? Part of the difficulty of answering this question is that there
was a gap in the statistics from July 1939 to September 1940. This suggests
that no organization should be without its statistical section, but at the
same time the RAF case also raises the specter that an analyst may not see
the figures that are there because of a preconception. It is possible that
when asked about pilots, the responsible authority at the Air Ministry only
listed officers. This seems plausible since unrepaired aircraft also simply
got lost in the system. As Justice Singleton’s inquiry into the RAF’s estimates
of the Luftwaffe made evident, an independent outside audit is an
essential tool from time to time.
The changes in technology that so abruptly shifted the RAF in 1936-38
from the wood and canvas biplane era into the metal monoplane threw off
mobilization schedules and forecasts. On the one hand, it meant that much
of the mobilization of RAF manpower shot ahead of the availability of aeroplanes,
while on the other it resulted in the senior commanders’ being
overly cautious about the amount of training fledglings needed before being
allowed to take the precious new weapons into combat.
In one sense the Battle of Britain may have been atypical in that it
occurred in the midst of a major advance in technology when much had not
yet been assimilated. Yet perhaps the same could also be said of the First
World War in the air. If so, then those who fought the 1939-45 war failed to
heed that experience of their youth which so much influenced them as
mature commanders.
In another way the Battle of Britain in the summer of 1940 is a very
useful lesson, for it emphasizes not only so many of the subtler human
ingredients of victory or defeat while at the same time being a classic
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