air-forces

"While the buildup of men and machines continued, BF.I was taking an active part in the conflict. Observer/gunners were readily available, these were men who had never flown before but were well experienced in guerrilla warfare, some being veterans of the 1916 Rising. Russell was partnered by a former member of Collins' elite Active Service Unit, when he took off on the first sortie to support ground troops in Wicklow. The aircraft was armed solely with a standard infantry Lewis gun with which the observer engaged the Irregulars, firing it from his hip while dangerously balanced in his cockpit. The lack of armament on this and a second aircraft obtained from the RAF, perhaps underlined the original peaceful plans for the Air Service: its founders had refused guns, ammunition and bombs, which somewhat puzzled the donors. However, after the first sortie, warlike stores were accepted, once it became apparent that a real war was brewing up."

"The second British advantage was in the air, though here the advantage was much smaller. Served up to the House of Commons on August 20,1940, Churchill's tribute to Fighter Command - 'Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few' - remains one his most memorable utterances. At the time, however, pilots joked that it was an allusion to the size of their unpaid mess bills. Churchill's own private secretaries felt the speech 'seemed to drag' because it contained 'less oratory than usual'. His phrase 'the few' implied that the Royal Air Force was outnumbered by the Luftwaffe; and indeed that was what British intelligence believed at the time. In reality, the RAF had a narrow edge. On August 9, just before the Germans launched their crucial offensive against Britain's air defences, the RAF had 1,032 fighters. The German fighters available for the attack numbered 1,011. Moreover, the RAF had 1,400 trained pilots, several hundred more than the Luftwaffe, and they proved more than a match for the Germans in skill and courage."

"Britain was at last out-producing Germany when it came to aircraft. During the crucial months from June until September, 1,900 new fighters were churned out by British factories, compared with 775 in Germany. Just as they had in the years of appeasement, the British overestimated the Germans - by a factor of around seven in the case of pilot strength. The Germans also overestimated themselves. Goring was sure that half of all British fighters had been destroyed by the end of August; in fact Fighter Command's operational strength at that point was only slightly less than it had been when the battle had commenced. By broadening the scope of their targets to include ports and industrial centres, the Germans threw away their chance of inflicting a decisive blow on RAF command and control capabilities. As late as December, Goebbels could still gloat that the war was 'militarily as good as won'. In reality the technical advantage conferred by radar, combined with the judicious leadership of Air Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, meant that total German losses (including bombers) were nearly twice the British (1,733 to 915). Every week until October 9 the RAF consistently shot down more German planes than they lost in combat (see Figure 11.1)."

"The British air estimates for 1938 included considerable expenditure in the Singapore area. The strength of the Royal Air Force Car East Command, which has headquarters in Singapore, is to be doubled by the end of the year. New airdromes have been completed not only on Singapore island but in Sarawak and Borneo, and others are planned for Malaya above the strait."

"The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."

"In 1958, Bomber Command's emergency war plan called for the destruction of 44 Soviet cities. Such an attack would kill about 38 million people. One hydrogen bomb would be dropped on the centre of each city, but Moscow would be hit by four and Leningrad by two. Had Britain gone to war alongside the US in the early 1960s, Bomber Command would have been asked to destroy an additional 25 Soviet cities. As air defences improved in the Soviet Union, the number of urban areas that Britain planned to destroy unilaterally was reduced. By the late 1960s, the missiles carried by Polaris submarines served as the British strategic deterrent, and they were aimed at fewer than a dozen Soviet cities. Until the end of the cold war, the complete destruction of the Soviet Union's capital – known as the "Moscow criterion" – was the UK's main objective."