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

BATTLE OF BRITAIN
67. Michael J. F. Sawyer, 2 Group, RAF: A Complete History, 1936-1945 (London,
1974). pp 106-22.
68. Mason, The Battle Over Britain, p 270.
69. Orange, Park, p 115.
70. Dowding acted on the lesson of the Gallipoli inquiry, which had stressed that it was
the duty of the military commander or adviser to speak out to the Cabinet if he disagreed
with his political superior on a matter of vital national policy. (For the background and reasons
for this, see returns on personnel [AIR 20/2037] and production [AIR 22/293.64819].
Combat reports are in AIR 50/2. Richards and Saunders, The Royal Air Force, and Winston
Churchill, Their Finest Hour (Boston, 1949) contain statistics and comments on production
and pilots, as does also Sir Maurice Dean’s The Royal Air Force and Two World Wars.
71. Group Captain Winterbotham’s sensational 1974 revelations in The Ultra Secret
(New York) have to be read very carefully as to time and place, as does Ronald Lewin’s
Ultra Goes to War (New York, 1980) and similar volumes. The best is Hinsley’s British
Zntelligence in the Second World War, a balanced treatment.
72. See note 11 above.
73. Collier, Defence of the United Kingdom, p 490, and General Sir Frederick Pile, Ack-
Ack (London, 1956).
74. For the wave theory of increases and decreases in production and training, see Robin
Higham, Air Power: A Concise History (Manhattan, Kans., 1984), p 3.
Bibliographical Essay
It is difficult to understand the role of the Royal Air Force in the Battle of
Britain without knowing something of the service’s history. Unfortunately, there is
no reliable one- volume study to provide a general background. The two most recent
volumes that attempt this are both rather thin on text: Chaz Bowyer, History of the
RAF (New York: Crescent Books, 1977); and Michael Donne and Squadron Leader
Cynthia Fowler, Per Ardua ad Astra: Seventy Years of the RFC and the RAF (London:
Muller, 1982). Ranking really as a memoir by one who spent most of his life as
an Air Ministry civil servant, Sir Maurice Dean’s The Royal Air Force and Two
World Wars (London: Cassell, 1979) has to be read with care. An older view of the
interwar years is provided in Robin Higham’s Armed Forces in Peacetime: Britain,
1918-1939 (London: Foulis, 1963), and a detailed examination of the development
of bombing doctrine appears in Higham, The Military Intellectuals in Britain, 1918-
1940 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1966). For a more
detailed examination of part of the subject, see H. Montgomery Hyde, British Air
Policy between the Wars, 1918-1939 (London: Heinemann, 1976); Hyde had the
advantage of being able to use the documents in the Public Records Office opened
up at the end of the sixties.
The most useful and provocative new work to appear in some time is John
Terraine’s study of the RAF in the European War, 1939-45. Written by an author
with a strong background in the 1914-18 struggle, it provides a large base wedged
upon the records and narrative official histories from which to proceed. In Britain it
is entitled The Right ofthe Line and in the United States, A Time for Courage (New
York: Macmillan, 1985).
The Air Ministry history, The Rise and Fall of the German Air Force, 1933-
1945, first published in 1948, shows what the RAF thought it knew of the Germans.
On more particular topics the RAF has been well served by the so-called Putnam
series of books on British aircraft companies, which includes also the much revised
and expanded Owen Thetford volume Aircraft of the Royal Air Force Since 1918
(London: Putnam, seventh revised edition, 1979). The Royal Observer Corps is the
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