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

AIR SUPERIORITY
Force commitment to the continent by 1939 did not fundamentally change
this integrity. The AASF followed the pattern of multifunctional overseas
commands, though its primary mission was to bombard German industrial
targets in the Ruhr as part of general air support for the Anglo-French
ground forces.7o
Low aircraft production levels before 1938 added a note of both urgency
and unreality to all RAF doctrinal planning. The Munich crisis found
the RAF unable to field more than 666 aircraft, only 93 of which were the
new eight-gun Hawker Hurricane fighter planes. Civilian members of the
defense community increasingly questioned the RAF’s principal commitment
to bombardment in the face of low production figures and the evident
threat of Nazi air attack. They sought to strengthen Great Britain’s home
island capacity to prevent the knock-out blow by Luftwaffe bombers. More
and more people embraced Brigadier Groves’s notion that no inland city in
Great Britain lay any more than 20 or 30 minutes from the coast, which
meant that German bombers could sweep in from the English Channel
against London or from the North Sea against the Midland industrial cities,
cross the coastline, and strike their targets beofore RAF interceptors could
stop them. Traditional air patrols and ground spotters were neither economical
or efficient. Therefore British authorities applied science and technology
to the problem and developed Radio Direction Finding or RDF
equipment (what the Americans later styled Radar), as well as fast fighter
or pursuit planes to destroy enemy aircraft in the air (rather than on the
ground as envisioned by Bomber Command). Thus emerged a tactical
defensive air superiority force and doctrine, beyond the capabilities of
most other air forces of the world at that time.71
A secret research program begun in 1934, produced by 1939 a chain of
twenty RDF stations in Great Britain and three overseas locations to detect
incoming aircraft before the planes had left the continent. Douhet, Trenchard,
and Mitchell had not anticipated this scientific breakthrough for the
defense in their claims earlier that the bomber would always get through to
the target. Technology could now help neutralize the offensive power of
military aviation. With a sound ground communication system and antiaircraft
artillery, as well as two superior fighter aircraft-the Hawker
Hurricane (8 machineguns, 325-342 mile-per-hour speed, and 34,000-
35,000-foot ceiling) and the Supermarine Spitfire (8 machineguns, 355-370
mile-per-hour speed, 34,000-35,000-foot ceiling)-the British had a formidable
force for defending the home
Perhaps the RAF’s greatest weakness in the late 1930s was quantitative
in nature. Despite 5-year expansion programs, first-line aircraft had
increased only from 732 in 1934 to 1,911 by 1939. Personnel expansion had
accompanied the technical improvements from a base of 41,000 in 1934 to
176,000 by 1939. But, whereas the RAF increase could be counted in multiples
of 3 or 4, her primary enemy, the Luftwaffe, had jumped 10-fold in
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