Peden G.S. Arms, Economics and British Strategy From Dreadnoughts to Hydrogen Bombs

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encouraged ofﬁcials in the defence departments to engag e more in

policymaking than hitherto.

The Treasury also took advantage of CID

membership to ﬁnd out more about defence expenditure than had been

possible by interdepartmental correspondence, and two chancellors,

Churchill (1924–9) and Neville Chamberlain (1931–7), played an active

role in formulating defence policy.

Lloyd George’s principal concern as prime minister after the war was

to secure economies that would make it possible to ﬁnance social reform

within a balanced budget. His successor, Bonar Law, was in ofﬁce for

only eight months before ill health forced him to retire in May 1923. For

the next fourteen years the premiership alternated between two men:

Baldwin, the leader of the Conservative Party, and James Ramsay

MacDonald, the leader of the Labour Party down to August 1931,

and thereafter National Labour prime minister in the Conservative-

dominated National Government until June 1935. Baldwin, as prime

minister in 1923–4, 1924–9 and 1935–7, and as lord president of the

council in 1931–5, took a much more active interest in defence than his

somewhat relaxed styl e of leadership suggested, but much of his time in

the crucial years 1936 and 1937 was taken up with the abdication of

Edward VIII. MacDonald’s principal interest in defence was disarma-

ment. His failing health from 1934, and Baldwin’s constitutional pre-

occupations, gave Chamberlain, as heir apparent to the leadership of the

Conservative Party, the opportunity to take the le ad in discussions on

defence policy, a tendency that became even more marked once he

became prime minister in May 1937.

Churchill was still exceptional among ministers in regarding himself

as an expert on strategy. As secretary of state both for war and air from

January 1919 to February 1921, and as colonial secretary thereafter

until October 1922, he promoted the idea of using aircraft for imperial

policing. His efforts as chancellor of the exchequer in the second

Baldwin governme nt to curb the Admiralty estimat es were backed by

references to his own experience as ﬁrst lord. From the backbenches he

was the most prominent critic of the government’s air rearmament from

1934, yet he was invited in 1935 to serve on the CID’s Air Defence

Research Sub-Committee. Former Cabinet colleagues tended to see

him as a disruptive inﬂuence and he was not recalled to ofﬁce when the

post of minister for co-ordination of defence was created in March 1936.

The functions of the new minister, Sir Thomas Inskip, were to reduce

the pressure of work on the prime minister by acting as his deputy as

See, for example, C. I. Hamilton, ‘British naval policy, policy-makers and ﬁnancial

control, 1860–1945’, War in History, 12 (2005), 371–95.

Retrenchment and rearmament 105

chairman of the CID, and thus having an oversight of strategy, while

also taking over from the president of the Board of Trade as chairman of

the Principal Supply Ofﬁcers Committee, the main sub-committee co-

ordinating the allocation of industrial capacity. Chamberlain thought

that the minister should not himself be a strategist but should ‘see that

strategical problems are fairly and thoroughly worked out by the stra-

tegists’.

Inskip, a lawyer, seems to have had a similar conception of his

role; he lacked a department of his own and relied a lot on the Cabinet

Secretary, Hankey, for advice.

Inskip was replaced in January 1939 by

Lord Chatﬁeld, who had recen tly retired as ﬁrst sea lord, but who knew

nothing of politics and found that his new post lacked any authority

independent of the prime minister.

In theory, and to some extent in practice, strategy was co-ordinated

by the CID and its sub-committees, advised by the Chiefs of Staff, who

had their own sub-committees: the Deputy Chiefs of Staff Committee,

the Joint Planning Sub-Committee and the Joint Intelligence Sub-

Committee. However, there was a tendency for the Chiefs of Staff to

add up the requirements of the three defence departments rather than to

propose changes that would alter their shares of the chanc ellor’s budget.

The CID, with a permanent membership of about twelve m inisters, plus

the Chiefs of Staff, the permanent secretary of the Treasury and the

permanent under-secretary of the Foreign Ofﬁce, was on the large side

to be an effective body, and detailed work was done in sub-committees.

Hankey, who was in charge of the Cabinet secretariat until his retire-

ment at the end of July 1938, was praised for his wisdom and monu-

mental memory.

He certainly needed the latter: by the end of 1937 the

CID had over ﬁfty sub-committees dealing with operational, adminis-

trative and industrial questions on an interdepartmental basis. The CID

system was a great improvement on the often uncoordinated plans of the

Admiralty and the War Ofﬁce before 1914. However, as one Treasury

ofﬁcial observed: ‘No doubt there are many things for which committees

are essential; nevertheless, they are not the means to speed and decision

in action and are apt to relax the individual’s sense of responsibility.’

Plans approved b y the CID would proceed only as funds became

available, and departments had to take decisions on priorities when

Keith Feiling, The Life of Neville Chamberlain (London: Macmillan, 1946), pp. 314–15.

See Sean Greenwood, ‘Sir Thomas Inskip as minister for co-ordination of defence,

1936–39’, in Paul Smith (ed.), Government and the Armed Forces in Britain 1850–1990

(London: Hambledon Press, 1996), pp. 155–89.

Lord Chatﬁeld, It Might Happen Again (London: Heinemann, 1947), pp. 160, 179–82.

Roskill, Hankey, vol. III, p. 364.

Sir Richard Hopkins (second secretary of the Treasury) to Edmund Compton

(Treasury), 15 Dec. 1937, T 161/932/S.42750, TNA.

Arms, economics and British strategy106

preparing their annual estimates for submission to the Treasury.

Chatﬁeld, who had served in the Admiralty for a total of ten years in the

1920s and 1930s, noted in his memoirs that the services were emas-

culated not so much by the Treasury as by successive governments

acting through the Treasury and its powerful organisation, and that in

the 1920s (and, one might add, the early 1930s) the Treasury ’s quest for

economy was backed by public opinion.

In the later 1930s ﬁnancial

restraint was relaxed, but, as we shall see, the Treasury was still suc-

cessful in 1937 and 1938 in having strategy related to economic stability.

Strategy had also to be related to the intentions and capabilities of

potential enemies. The Industrial Intelligence Centre (IIC) did pio-

neering work in assessing German output, current and potential but, in

the opinion of its head, Desmond Morton, the CID and government

departments failed to take on board the full implications of his reports.

More generally, the intelligence services failed to provide a balanced

analysis of German strengths and weaknesses, being slow to appreciate

the pace of German rearmament; then over-estimating the striking

power of the Luftwaffe in 1937–8; and ﬁnally being over-conﬁdent in

1938–9 (after the Munich crisis) about what the effects of blocka de on

the German economy would be.

The fact that prior to 1936 there was no single minister responsible

for all aspects of defence (apart from the prime minister and, from a

ﬁnancial point of view, the chancellor of the exchequer) meant that

strategy tended to be worked out on departmental lines. Thus, the

RAF’s primary concern was an air war with Germany; the navy was

much more concerned tha n the other services with the Japanese m enace;

and the army tended to give priority to its expeditionary force rather

than to air defence. Relations between the service chiefs were not

improved by competition for scarce resources. To some extent the mark

of an outstanding chief of staff was his ability to defend his department’s

interests. In particular, Beatty, the ﬁrst sea lord from 1919 to 1927,

could draw on his war-time prestige as a naval commander

when resisting Treasury pressure for eco nomy. Trenchard’s vision of

strategic bombing was crucial in the successful outcome of his Whitehall

battle for the independence of the RAF while he was CAS from 1918 to

1930.

Chatﬁeld, It Might Happen Again, pp. 13, 164–5, 198.

Gill Bennett, Churchill’s Man of Mystery: Desmond Morton and the World of Intelligence

(London: Routledge, 2006); Wesley Wark, The Ultimate Enemy: British Intelligence and

Nazi Germany (London: I. B. Tauris, 1985).

Retrenchment and rearmament 107

Air weapons

Few statements in Parliament have had more impact than that by

Baldwin on 10 November 1932 that ‘the bomber will always get

through’. He added: ‘t he only defence is in offence, which means that

you will have to kill more women and children more quickly than the

enemy.’

At that date Baldwin did not expec t another great war in his

lifetime but, with the rise of the German air force under Hitler, fear of

air attack cast a shadow over British politics and strategic planning.

Total civilian deaths due to air attacks on Britain between 1915 and

1918 had been 1,414, and the Germans had abandoned strategic

bombing after May 1918. Yet in May 1932 a CID sub-committee,

chaired by Baldwin, concluded that the high speed and power of

modern aircraft would enable a potential enemy to bomb London on a

scale that would result in 6,375 deaths and 12,375 wounded in one

week, even after the existing scheme for defence by aircraft, anti-aircraft

guns and air raid precautions had been completed.

What had hap-

pened to make the bomber seem so much more formidable a weapon?

At ﬁrst sight, British bombers in 1932 looked very much like their

predecessors in 1918. All were biplanes. Some were twin-engined ‘night’

bombers but most were single -engined ‘day’ bombers. Night bombers

were slow and the same darkness that gave them some protection

against interception also made it difﬁcult to navigate or bomb accu-

rately. Day bombers relied on speed to evade ﬁghters, but had ineffec-

tual bomb loads. The standard British night bomber in 1932, the

Vickers Virginia, had been in service for eight years and offered no

improvement over the war-time Handley Page 0/400 as regards speed or

bomb load, although it had greater range. Progress was more apparent

with day bombers: the Hawker Hart of 1930 was faster than any ﬁghter

then in service, but its maximum bomb load was only 520 pounds

(compared with the Virginia’s 3,000 pounds), and its range was only

470 miles (compared with the Virginia’s 985 miles). The RAF was not

equipped for strategic bombing in 1932. The development of new types

of long-range bombers had been held up by the prospect that the

Geneva Disarmament Conference, due to begin that year, might agree

to abolish big bombing aircraft. Indeed the Air Staff’s prime concern

was to avoid an international agreement that would prohibit strategic

270 HC Deb., 5s, 1931–2, c. 632.

See Uri Bialer, The Shadow of the Bomber: The Fear of Air Attack and British Politics

1932–1939 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1980).

‘Inquiry into air disarmament policy, report’, CP 152 (32), 9 May 1932, CAB 16/106,

TNA.

Arms, economics and British strategy108

bombing, the Air Staff arguing successfully that no reliance could be

placed on the observance of ‘artiﬁcial laws of war’.

One problem with banning bombers would have been that civil air-

liners could be converted to military purposes. Indeed, in 1921 Tren-

chard had pointed out to ministers that aircraft then used by French civil

aviation companies were drawn from war stocks of bombers.

Germany

was able to produce formidable aircraft by subsidising its aircraft

industry an d the national airline, Lufthansa. The latest German airliner

in 1932 was a tri-motor monoplane, the Junkers Ju 52, which was later

used as a bomber/transport by the Luftwaffe and was rated by the Air

Ministry as superior in speed, range and bomb load to the RAF’s ﬁrst

monoplane heavy bomber, the Fairey Hendon. German civil mono-

planes visiting British airports were sometimes faster than British

biplane ﬁghters, causing concern to British ministers discussing defence

requirements in 1935.

Policymakers faced uncertainty, not least in what form air attacks

might take. The Air Staff in 1921 warned that, in addition to high-

explosive and incendiary bom bs, gas or even bacteriological weapons

might be used.

The use of poisonous gas was prohibited by article V of

the Washington Convention, and the Treasury repres entative on the

CID enquired in 1922 whether it was necessary to maintain the gas

experimental station at Porton in the light of that prohibition. Churchill,

then secretary of state for the colonies, thought that it would be most

unwise to abandon research into gas warfare, especially as neither

Germany nor the Soviet Union had signed the Washington Convention,

and the CIGS, the Earl of Cavan, pointed out that the research was

required not only for military and naval warfare but also for protecting

civilians who might be attacked from the air. It was agreed that research

at Porton should continue.

Air raid precaut ions against gas attack were

a major concern; for example, gas-masks were prepared for the civil

population and techniques were develope d for decontaminating areas

over which mustard gas had been sprayed. By 1939 defensive measures

CP 152 (32). For delays to new heavy bombers, see remarks by the CAS, Sir Edward

Ellington, as recorded in minutes of Ministerial Committee on Defence Requirements,

10 May 1935, CAB 27/508, TNA. For Britain’s successful defence of the bomber at

Geneva, see Phillip Meilinger, ‘Clipping the bomber’s wings: the Geneva disarmament

conference and the Royal Air Force, 1932–1934’, War in History, 6 (1999), 306–30.

‘Vulnerability of British Isles to air attack’, CID paper 102-A, 8 Nov. 1921, CAB 3/3,

TNA.

‘Interim report by Ministerial Sub-committee on Air Parity’, DCM (32) 41, 8 May

1935, CAB 27/518; Ministerial Committee on Defence Requirements minutes, 10 May

1935, CAB 27/508, TNA.

CID paper 102-A, CAB 3/3, TNA.

CID minutes, 28 July 1922, CAB 2/3, TNA.

Retrenchment and rearmament 109

against gas had progressed more than the offensive use of gas, and

public concern switched to lack of provision of shelters against

high-explosive bombs.

Another uncertainty concerned the future rate of technical progress

in different aspects of air warfare. The Haldane Committee on Anti-

Aircraft Research concluded in 1925 that, although there would be

developments from time to time in the engine power, speed, climb and

manoeuvrability of ﬁghters, it was reasonable to assume that similar

progress would occur in the design and performance of bombers , and

that no relative improvement could be anticipated in defensive aircraft.

That conclusion also applied to unmanned aircraft controlled by wire-

less, which were then the subject of research. Similarly, improvements in

anti-aircraft guns were likely to be matched by corresponding

improvements in attacking aircraft.

The relative performance of bombers and ﬁghters varied over time.

For example, in 1926 the French began large-scale production of the

Bre

guet 19 day bomber with a maximum speed of 149 m .p.h., almost as

fast as contemporary British ﬁghters. However, British ﬁght er design

drew ahead with the Bristol Bulldog, which entered service in 1929, with

a maximum speed of 174 m.p.h., followed in 1931 by the Hawker Fury

with a maximum speed of 207 m.p.h. Both types were biplanes and their

improved performance mainly reﬂected the increased power of engines

developed by the Bristol and Rolls-Royce companies respectively. A

revolution in aircraft design occurred in the 1930s because, as the power

of engines increased, wind resistance became more important in deter-

mining performance, and monoplanes with retractable undercarriages

began to displace biplanes with ﬁxed undercarriages. In Janu ary 1933 the

American army ord ered Martin B-10 twin-engined monoplane bombers

with retractable undercarriages, and the Germans followed in 1935 with

the Heinkel He 111 and other machines capable of carrying 3,000

pounds of bombs at spe eds that gave them a good chance of eluding the

RAF’s biplane ﬁghters. By February 1936 the Air Staff wanted to order

monoplane ﬁghters as soon as the Hawker Hurricane and Supermarine

Spitﬁre had been tested.

Fighter Command replaced most of its

biplanes with monoplanes in 1938–9, retaining only the obsolescent

Gloster Gladiator at the outbreak of war. The combination of the

monoplane airframes and the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine made the RAF

machines capable of intercepting the fastest German bombers. The

Terence H. O’Brien, Civil Defence (London: HMSO, 1955).

‘Anti-aircraft research committee: interim report’, 23 Dec. 1925, CAB 16/67, TNA.

Secretary of State’s progress meeting, 6 Feb. 1936, AIR 6/24, TNA.

Arms, economics and British strategy110

British were slowe r than the French and Germans to adopt cannon ﬁring

explosive shells, which were more destructive and had longer ran ge than

riﬂe-calibre machine guns. Even so, Hurricanes and Spitﬁres were ade-

quately armed with eight machine guns, compared with the two carried

by pre-1937 ﬁghters or the Gladiator’s four.

The chances of successful interception depended upon locating the

enemy. In 1924 a joint Air Ministry and War Ofﬁce committee under

Major-General C. F. Romer recommended a system of observation

posts, those on the coast being provided with sound-detectors to locate

the approach of aircraft before they could be seen from land. However,

the speed of sound is a constant, whereas the speed of aircraft was

increasing, shortening the period of warning given by sound-detectors.

The ﬁrst successful experiments with what was then known as radio

direction ﬁnding, and which became known as radar, were conducted in

1935 and between the autumn of 1936 and the spring of 1939 a chain of

radar stations was constructed from the Isle of Wight to Dundee. Britain

was a world leader in this aspect of air defence but the effectiveness of

the new technolo gy depended on an efﬁcient system of air raid report-

ing. Such a system had already been set up following a report of the

CID’s Home Defence Committee in 1929, which recommended that all

relevant intelligence should be reported to the RAF’s headquarters for

the air defence of Great Brit ain, where, as in the First World War, it was

set out on a single plotting table. Command and control was improved

by the development of radio communication between ground and air.

Anti-aircraft guns, searchlights and balloon barrages again formed ﬁxed

defences but, although the anti-aircraft guns of the late 1930s had better

range than their predecessors, accuracy was not improved dramatically

until radar directional control was introduced during the Second World

War. The United Kingdom’s air defence system was the best in the

world in the early 1930s, but crucial improvements occurred in the last

twelve months of peace. Only ﬁve out of thirty ﬁghter squadrons had

completed conversion to Hurricanes by the Munich crisis in September

1938, an d they had problems ﬁring their guns at the temperatures

encountered above 15,000 feet, and no Spitﬁres were yet in service.

Radar cover was then limited to the coast between Dungeness and the

Wash. By the summer of 1939, however, the technology of air war had

moved decisively in favour of defence.

Note by Sir R. Sorley, reproduced in M. M. Postan, D. Hay and J. D. Scott, Design and

Development of Weapons: Studies in Government and Industrial Organisation (London:

HMSO, 1964), pp. 537–42.

John Ferris, ‘Fighter defence before Fighter Command: the rise of strategic air

defence in Great Britain, 1917–1934’, Journal of Military History, 63 (1999), 845–84;

Retrenchment and rearmament 111

Even earlier, notwithstanding Baldwin’s rhetoric in 1932, the Air Staff

never thought that every bomber would always get through. However,

the Air Staff believed in what the Baldwin Committee called the ‘well-

established principle that attack is the best form of defence’, including

counter-attack against air bases and other objectives in enemy territory.

The number of ﬁghter aircraft was kept at the minimum believed to be

necessary for defence, a number that rose from 1935 as the range of

aircraft increased and more of the country became vulnerable to air

attack.

In February 1935 there was some discussion in the CID about

whether the power of air forces to deliver a ‘knock-out blow’ had been

exaggerated (the CIGS, Montgomery-Massingberd, thought it had).

The CAS, Sir Edward Ellington, said that if by knock-out blow one

meant a period of 24 hours, then it would not be possible at present to

paralyse a country. On the other hand, a nation that seized the initiative

might deal a blow from wh ich its victim m ight be unable to reco ver.

October 1936 the CID agreed that the basic assumption for anti-aircraft

defence should be that Germany might attempt a knock-out blow and

that air attacks would be delivered with the maximum intensity at the

outbreak of war.

The Air Staff accepted the implication that the scale

of operations of ﬁghter squadrons would be dictated by the enemy and

that consequently these squadrons must be able to operate continuously

with 100 per cent reserves, whatever economies might be made else-

where.

By July 1937 progress with radar was already regarded in the

Air Ministry as satisfactory and two months later Hankey was advising

Inskip that reports of the CID Sub-Committee on Air Warfare in Spain

did not bear out ‘the tendency to think that the bomber will always get

through’ and that the combination of ﬁghters, guns and searchlights

‘might prove very much more effective than we have hitherto

assumed’.

Nevertheless, the Air Staff never abandoned its faith that strategic

bombing was the best way to employ air power. The Air Staff argued

T. C. C. James, The Growth of Fighter Command 1936–1940, ed. Sebastian Cox

(London: Frank Cass, 2002), pp. 41–51; Alexander Rose, ‘Radar and air defence in the

1930s’, Twentieth Century British History, 9 (1998), 219–45; David Zimmerman,

Britain’s Shield: Radar and the Defeat of the Luftwaffe (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2001),

pp. 83–7, 89–90, 156–72.

‘Inquiry into disarmament policy’, CP 152 (32), CAB 16/106, TNA; James, Growth of

Fighter Command, pp. 1–3, 12–13, 19, 25, 31.

CID minutes, 25 Feb. 1935, CAB 2/6(1), TNA.

CID minutes, 29 Oct. 1936, CAB 2/6(1), TNA.

Minutes of Inskip’s review of defence, 2 Nov. 1937, T 161/855/S.48431/04, TNA.

Lord Swinton (secretary of state for air) to Sir John Simon (chancellor of the

exchequer), 12 July 1937, T 161/855/S.46431/01/2; Hankey to Inskip, 27 Sep. 1937,

CAB 64/3, TNA.

Arms, economics and British strategy112

that long-range air attack by bombers could by-pass the enemy’s

defences and destroy his productive capacity and his morale, preparing

the way for the defeat of the enemy’s armed forces, or even making their

defeat unnecessary if the enemy’s morale gave way ﬁrst. RAF thought

appears to have owed little or nothing to the theoretical study The

Command of the Air, by Giulio Douhet, whose arguments in favour of

strategic bombing were considered to be important by the US Army Air

Corps as well as by the Regia Aeronautica of his native Italy. The British

had plenty of experience of air war of their own to draw on. Moreover,

strategic bombing provided the rationale both for the creation of the

RAF in 1918 and for its continued existence as a separate service,

whereas an emphasis on tactical bombing or anti-submarine patrols

would have pointed towards a de-merger into a restored RFC and

RNAS.

Trenchard and his successors as CAS emphasised the deter-

rent power, and therefore defensive value, of strategic bombing. How-

ever, funds were short, and it was cheaper to equip squadrons with day

bombers like the Hart. Moreover, until the German air force was

recreated there was no long-distance target for which a strategic

bombing force could have been prepared. The introduction into service

of the RAF’s ﬁrst monoplane heavy bomber, the Hendon , was delayed

until 1936, ﬁve years after its ﬁrst ﬂight, on account of the Geneva

Disarmament Conference, and with its ﬁxed undercarriage the Hendon

was obsolescent, its sole modern feature being the power-operated turret

in its nose. This form of armament had been pioneered by the French,

and the Air Staff had hopes that well-armed bombers would be able to

defend themselves against ﬁghters. Certainly the turrets brought a great

improvement in gunnery target strikes compared to earlier hand-held

machine guns, especially as the slipstream increased with highe r aircraft

speeds. Unfortunately the turrets ﬁtted on RAF bombers in the 1930s

and for almost all of the war had riﬂe-calibre machine guns that were

outranged by the cannon ﬁtted to German ﬁghters from 1938.

On the

other hand, German bombers, which relied mainly on speed to evade

ﬁghters, were just as vulnerable to British ﬁghters as British bombers

were to German ﬁghters.

The lack of a suitable strategic bomber led the Air Ministry to short-

circuit no rmal testing of prototypes before placing orders. The Arm-

strong Whitworth Whitley, the Handley Page Hampden and the Vickers

Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air (Washington: Ofﬁce of the Air Force History,

1983), p. ix; John Buckley, Air Power in the Age of Total War (London: UCL Press,

1999), pp. 74–8; Malcolm Smith, British Air Strategy between the Wars (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 53–75.

Postan, Hay and Scott, Design and Development, pp. 112–13.

Retrenchment and rearmament 113

Wellington did no t ﬂy until 1936, but were introduced into service in

1937–8. Inevitably there were teething problems, and produc tion was

often held up by the need to make modiﬁcations. Nevertheless, the

speed with which biplanes disappeared from squadron service was

remarkable. In June 1937 only four out of ﬁfty-seven bomber squadrons

were completely equipped with monoplanes, although another eleven

had begun to convert to monoplanes; by September 1939 all of the

biplanes had been replaced.

On the other hand, this rapid moder-

nisation was brought about by producing large numbers of machines

that could not, in terms of range or striking power, properly be called

strategic bombers. The Bristol Blenheim and the Fairey Battle, both

introduced into service in 1937, had too limited a range to reach

the Ruhr from England. The Battle was really an unsuccessful experi-

ment in producing what was then termed a medium bomber with one

engine rather than two. However, the need for political reasons to

attempt to maintain numerical parity led to it being ordered in large

numbers even although it was, in the words of the ofﬁcial history of

design and development, ‘an aircraft that nobody much want ed’.

Indeed, it continued in production until December 1940, althoug h the

Air Staff had known in 1936 that it was unsuitable for its purpose. As

late as September 1939 only twenty-eight out of ﬁfty-ﬁve bomber

squadrons had Whitleys, Hampdens or Wellingtons. All other machines,

including all in service prior to 1937 and the majority down to 1939,

were pseudo-strategic bombers that could not fulﬁl the Air Staff’s

ambitions.

The use of RAF aircraft in the imperial policing role might have been

expected to encourage the development of tactical bombers and doc-

trine, but this was not the case. Imperial policing was generally carried

out by slow, general purpose machines that had to be rugged and reli-

able for operations over deserts and mountains, although the Hart,

designed as a fast day bomber for Europe, proved to be suitable for

India.

The Hart in its day would have been an excellent tactical

bomber, as would its intended successor, the Merlin-powered mono-

plane Hawker Henley light bomber of 1937. However, the Henley,

although faster an d more agile than the similarly powered but lumbering

Battle, was relegated to the modest role of target-tu g for training anti-

aircraft gunners. Air Staff doctrine was based on strategic bombing,

and therefore the machine with the larger bomb load was preferred.

Chris Ashworth, Bomber Command 1936–1968 (Yeovil: Patrick Stephens, 1995), pp. 21,

205–8.

Postan, Hay and Scott, Design and Development, p. 11.

Omissi, Air Power, pp. 138–49.

Arms, economics and British strategy114