Royal Air Force

The RAF was our major defence. At one stage it was, in the shape of Fighter Command almost our only defence. If the Luftwaffe had not been held over South East England we could have had the Wehrmacht landing. But that was then and this is now. The Spitfire was a good aircraft in its day. Now front line fighters cost humungous amounts and there is the issue of whether they are needed. Major wars look less and less likely, American hooliganism notwithstanding. Guerrilla wars are very much more effective in their way. So is political subversion. That is the enemy that the RAF has to fear and so has England or should. England sleeps however while our institutions are being destroyed by Marxist disciples, the ones who control Her Majesty's Government and Her Allegedly Loyal Opposition.

They ask whether we need fighters and bombers while starving the RAF. They have plenty of money to encourage illegal immigrants and employ free loaders, time servers and place men. Government employees know full well that most of them are useless but they get well paid for doing make work and have to fear being cast into the outer darkness to find real work. They vote Labour for that reason if no other.

Meanwhile bomber stations close. There are more shut than open. Ditto for fighter stations. Manston is gone. Biggin Hill is civilian only. We probably have more air marshals than air fields. The Long March Through The Institutions is taking its toll and Marxists are laughing at us. Read more of the ugly truth in:-
Lions, Donkeys and Dinosaurs
By Lewis Page is a first rate book and also a strategic review. He tells us that the men are over worked and under paid while hundreds of very senior officers do little or nothing except demand more expensive and useless toys for their old regiments.

It is fair to say that Fighter Command was a great success; it was there when it mattered. Men died holding off the Luftwaffe, preventing Operation Sea Lion, a sea borne invasion by the Kriegsmarine, the Nazi's navy and the rest of the Wehrmacht. They won. But Bomber Command didn't do so well. They killed a lot of men, over 55,000 aircrew but their effectiveness against factories, against military targets was mediocre. It was somewhat better later on. But finding the DZs for men who jumped on D Day in June 1944 left a lot to be desired.

The Butt Report was damning and a nasty shock to the RAF High Command. It tells us something important about the unwarranted optimism of senior commanders in that war and others.

Bomber Command ex Wiki [ 1936 - 1968 ]
RAF Bomber Command controlled the Royal Air Force's bomber forces from 1936 to 1968. Along with the United States Army Air Forces, it played the central role in the strategic bombing of Germany in World War II. From 1942 onward, the British bombing campaign against Germany became less restrictive and increasingly targeted industrial sites and the civilian manpower base essential for German war production. In total 364,514 operational sorties were flown, 1,030,500 tons of bombs were dropped and 8,325 aircraft lost in action. Bomber Command crews also suffered a high casualty rate: 55,573 were killed out of a total of 125,000 aircrew, a 44.4% death rate. A further 8,403 men were wounded in action, and 9,838 became prisoners of war.

Bomber Command stood at the peak of its post-war military power in the 1960s, the V bombers holding the United Kingdom's nuclear deterrent and a supplemental force of Canberra light bombers. In August 2006, a memorial was unveiled at Lincoln Cathedral.^[2] A memorial in Green Park in London was unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 June 2012 to highlight the price paid by the aircrews.^[3]

 

Butt Report ex Wiki
The Butt Report, released on 18 August 1941, was a report prepared during World War II, revealing the widespread failure of RAF Bomber Command aircraft to hit their targets.

At the start of the war, Bomber Command had no real means of determining the success of its operations. Crews would return with only their word as to the amount of damage caused or even if they had bombed the target. The Air Ministry demanded that a method of verifying these claims be developed and by 1941 cameras mounted under bombers, triggered by the bomb release, were being fitted.

Contents
The report was initiated by Lord Cherwell, a friend of Churchill and chief scientific advisor to the Cabinet. David Bensusan-Butt, a civil servant in the War Cabinet Secretariat and an assistant of Cherwell, was given the task of assessing 633 target photos and comparing them with crews' claims.^[1][2] The results, first circulated on 18 August 1941, were a shock to many, though not necessarily to those within the RAF, who knew the difficulty of night navigation and target finding.^[3]

Any examination of night photographs taken during night bombing in June and July points to the following conclusions:

1. Of those aircraft recorded as attacking their target, only one in three got within 5 mi (8.0 km).
2. Over the French ports, the proportion was two in three; over Germany as a whole, the proportion was one in four; over the Ruhr it was only one in ten.
3. In the full moon, the proportion was two in five; in the new moon it was only one in fifteen. ...
4. All these figures relate only to aircraft recorded as attacking the target; the proportion of the total sorties which reached within 5 miles is less than one-third. ...

The conclusion seems to follow that only about one-third of aircraft claiming to reach their target actually reached it.^[4]

Postwar studies confirmed Butt's assessment, showing that 49% of Bomber Command bombs dropped between May 1940 and May 1941 fell in open country.^[5] As Butt did not include those aircraft that did not bomb because of equipment failure, enemy action, weather or which failed to find the target, only about 5% of bombers setting out bombed within 5 mi (8.0 km) of the target.

Contemporary debate, dehousing and Singleton Report
The truth about the failure of Bomber Command shook everyone. Senior RAF commanders argued that the Butt report's statistics were faulty and commissioned another report, which was delivered by the Directorate of Bombing Operations on 22 September 1941; extrapolating from an analysis of the bomb damage inflicted on British cities, it calculated that the RAF could destroy the forty-three German towns with a population of more than 100,000 using a force of 4,000 bombers. The Chief of the Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, argued that with such a force Bomber Command could win the war in six months. Not all were convinced and when Churchill expressed his doubts, the Air Staff retrenched and said that even if it did not knock Germany out of the war, it would weaken them sufficiently to allow British armed forces back into Europe. With this compromise between the armed services, Bomber Command was allowed to keep its planned allocation of materiel. This did not stop those outside the Chiefs of Staff questioning the strategic bombing policy.^[7]

A particularly damning speech had been delivered in the House of Commons by the Member of Parliament for the University of Cambridge, Professor A. V. Hill—the noted research scientist and previously a member of the committee that had sponsored research into radar. His speech pointed out that

The total [British] casualties in air-raids – in killed – since the beginning of the war are only two-thirds of those we lost as prisoners of war at Singapore.... The loss of production in the worst month of the Blitz was about equal to that due to the Easter holidays.... The Air Ministry have been ... too optimistic.... We know most of the bombs we drop hit nothing of importance. ...^[8][9]

In response to the concerns raised by the Butt report, Cherwell produced his dehousing paper (first circulated on 30 March 1942), which proposed that by area bombing instead of futile attempts at precision bombing the deficiencies of the RAF could be mitigated. The Secretary of State for Air, Sir Archibald Sinclair and Sir Charles Portal were delighted by the paper as it offered support to them in their battle to save the strategic bomber offensive, which had been under attack from others in the high command who thought that the resources put into bomber command were damaging the other branches of the armed services, with little to show for it.^[10]

On reading the dehousing paper, Professor Patrick Blackett, the chief scientist to the Royal Navy, said that the paper's estimate of what could be achieved was 600 percent too high. The principal advocate for the reduction of Bomber Command in favour of other options was Sir Henry Tizard. He argued that the only benefit to strategic bombing was that it tied up enemy resources defending Germany but that those forces could be tied up with a far smaller bombing offensive. He wrote to Cherwell on 15 April querying the figures in the paper and warning that the War Cabinet could reach the wrong decision if they based their decision on it. His criticism of the paper was that experience suggested that only 7,000 bombers would be delivered rather than the 10,000 in the paper, and since only 25 percent of the bombs were likely to land on target the total dropped would be no more than 50,000, so the strategy would not work with the resources available.^[11]

Mr. Justice Singleton, a High Court Judge, was asked by the Cabinet to look into the competing points of view. In his report delivered on 20 May 1942, he concluded that

If Russia can hold Germany on land I doubt whether Germany will stand 12 or 18 months' continuous, intensified and increased bombing, affecting, as it must, her war production, her power of resistance, her industries and her will to resist (by which I mean morale).^[12]

In the end, thanks in part to the dehousing paper, it was this view which prevailed but C. P. Snow (later Lord Snow) wrote that the debate became quite vitriolic with Tizard being called a defeatist.^[13][14] It was while this debate about bombing was raging inside the British military establishment that the area bombing directive of 14 February 1942 was issued; eight days later Arthur "Bomber" Harris took up the post of Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief (AOC-in-C) of Bomber Command.

 

Fighter Command ex Wiki  [ 1936 -  ]
RAF Fighter Command was one of the commands of the Royal Air Force. It was formed in 1936 to allow more specialised control of fighter aircraft. It served throughout the Second World War. It earned near-immortal fame during the Battle of Britain in 1940, when the Few held off the Luftwaffe attack on Britain. The Command continued until 17 November 1943, when it was disbanded and the RAF fighter force was split into two categories; defence and attack. The defensive force became Air Defence of Great Britain (ADGB) and the offensive force became the RAF Second Tactical Air Force. Air Defence of Great Britain was renamed back to Fighter Command in October 1944 and continued to provide defensive patrols around Great Britain.^[2] It was disbanded for the second time in 1968, when it was subsumed into the new Strike Command.

 

Strike Command ex Wiki
The Royal Air Force's Strike Command was the military formation which controlled the majority of the United Kingdom's bomber and fighter aircraft from 1968 until 2007 when it merged with Personnel and Training Command to form the single Air Command. It latterly consisted of two formations – No. 1 Group RAF and No. 2 Group RAF. The last Commander-in-Chief was Air Chief Marshal Sir Joe French.

 

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Updated on Friday, 02 June 2023 10:57:29