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

AIR SUPERIORITY
subject of air correspondent Derek Wood’s Attack Warning Red (London: Macdonald’s
and Jane’s, 19761, a work which gives a pretty fair idea of the workings of the
warning system during the Battle of Britain as well as details of its formation and
subsequent career.
A good share of the burden in the fighting was undertaken by the Royal Auxiliary
Air Force squadrons, almost entirely filled with officer pilots, and their story is
covered by Leslie Hunt in Twenty-one Squadrons: The History of the Royal Auxiliary
Air Force, 1925-1957 (London: Garnstone Press, 1972). Operational Research
was just beginning in the RAF, and Fighter Command was the leader in accepting it.
The story is told in an official history published in 1963, Operational Research in
the R.A.E
The story of Fighter Command itself has been told by Air Vice Marshal Peter
Wykeham in Fighter Command: A Study in Air Defence, 1914-1960 (London: Putnam,
1960). Ronald W. Clark made his name originally with The Rise of the Boffins
(London: Phoenix House, 1962) and followed that with the official biography of Sir
Henry Tizard, Tizard (London: Methuen, 1965), which gives one side of the long,
behind-the-scenes quarrel with Professor Lindemann (Lord Cherwell), whose biography
is The Prof in Two Worlds, by Lord Birkenhead (London: Collins, 1961).
Against this must be read C. I? Snow’s Science and Government (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1962, in the revised edition). R. V. Jones, himself one of the
pioneer scientists, has written The Wizard War (New York: Coward, McCann,
1978), which provides the sound technical story, but is perhaps less easy to follow
than Brian Johnson’s The Secret War (London: Methuen, 1978), developed by a
BBC producer to help his audience understand the scientific side of the war. Two
other aspects of the backroom can be traced in two books by Group Captain E W.
Winterbotham, who served in RAF intelligence and then at the cypher operation at
Bletchley: The Nazi Connection (New York: Dell, 1978), which tells part of what
the RAF knew or could have known about the Luftwaffe, and his 1974 lid-blower,
The Ultra Secret (New York: Harper and Row), which for the first time revealed the
existence of the British codebreakers’ ultimate success. But in the latter book, as
well as in Ronald Lewin’s Ultra Goes to War (New York: Pocket Books, 1980), the
reader must be wary of statements for the early years of the war.
A few other works that provide background deserve mention. The first of these
is a fresh study of the 1914-18 war, Denis Winter’s The First of the Few: Fighter
Pilots of the First World War (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1983), because
of the insights it gives into several of the dramatis personae, especially Goering,
Park, Douglas, and Harold Balfour, the British Under Secretary of State for Air.
And if the whole point of piloting a fighter within range of an enemy aircraft is to
knock the enemy down, armament is essential. Here three books tell various sides
of that story. H. E King in Armaments of British Aircraft, 1909-1939 (London: Putnam,
1971) combines accurate research with the recollections of a former Flight
correspondent. G. F. Wallace’s The Guns of the Royal Air Force, 1929-1934 (London:
Kimber, 1972) was written by an armaments practitioner who was involved in
the development of the Hispano 20-mm cannon so that it could be manufactured for
British fighters. And the official history of the Birmingham Small Arms Company,
usually known simply as BSA, The Other Battle (Birmingham, 1946), by Donovan
Ward, tells the story of the importation and modification of the Colt Browning .303
machineguns.
A general introduction to the war economy and aircraft production can be found
in R. J. Overy’s recent The Air War, 1939-1945 (New York: Stein and Day, 1981).
Aspects of the subject are treated in the British official histories other than those
specifically mentioned below, and they can be found either in Robin Higham’s A
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