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

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Richard Overy has argued, victory was not pre-ordained in 1942. The

Axis powers occupied most of continental Europe and much of the Far

East. Unity of purpose on the part of the Allies could not be assumed.

The Allies’ early defeats pointed to the need to improve the qualitative

performance of their armed forces as well as of their equipment.

Mobilisation of national economies depended upon a will to win on the

part of the people. Only after Germany had surrendered on 8 May 1945

did a decisive weapon appear in the shape of the atomic bom b.

The scholarship embodied in the British ofﬁcial civil and military

histories of the Second World War has endured the test of time and the

opening of the archives. However, the division between civil and military

series makes it harder to see the war as a single process, especially

as weapons design and production, and blocka de and economic warfare,

were covered in the civil series.

This chapter discusses whether Britain

was able to produce weapons of the same standard as the Germans’;

whether her economic resources were fully utilised; and whether grand

strategy made the most of her advantages. For the purposes of analysis,

the war can be divided into three phases: ﬁrst, the perio d of the Anglo-

French alliance, ending in June 1940; second, the period when Britain

and, from 1941, the Soviet Union and the United States were largely on

the defensive, down to the autumn of 1942; and third, the period

thereafter when the Allied powers were able to go over to the offensive.

Policymakers

Although Chamberlain had taken a leading part in shaping defence policy

since 1934, he was not cut out to be a war leader. Aged 70 in 1939, he

died of cancer in November 1940, six months after his resignation as

prime minister. He brought back Churchill into government as ﬁrst lord

of the Admiralty at the outbreak of war, and gradually conﬁdence and

goodwill developed between the two men. From 4 April 1940 Churchill

chaired meetings of the Military Co-ordination Committee when the

Prime Minister did not attend. The Military Co-ordination Committee

brought together the Chiefs of Staff and ministers, and its reports were

discussed by the Defe nce Committee of the War Cabinet, which met

almost daily, and conclusions or disagreements were referred to frequent

meetings of the War Cabinet. Churchill understandably felt that the

prolonged process of explanation and re-explanation was inappropriate

Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won (London: Jonathan Cape, 1995).

History of the Second World War, UK Civil Series, ed. W. K. Hancock and UK Military

Series, ed. J. R. M. Butler (London: HMSO, 1949–76).

The Second World War 165

when the pace of events increased after the invasion of Norway on 9

April, and was able to secure more authority for himself on 1 May even

before he became head of the coalition government nine days later.

Churchill brought zeal and enthusiasm to the task of winning the war

and was undaunted in the face of defeat. He added the title of minister

of defence to that of prime minister, but there was no ministry of

defence. Instead interdepartmental sub-committe es reported to the

Chiefs of Staff Committee and the Defence Commi ttee of the War

Cabinet. He dealt directly with the Chiefs of Staff, summoning them to

conferences at all hours. He created the Defence Ofﬁce under Major-

General Hastings Ismay, whom Chamberlain had placed in charge of

the central staff servicing the Chiefs of Staff Committee, and who acted

as Churchill’s personal representative on that committee.

The Chiefs of

Staff might also be in attendance at the War Cabinet or its Defence

Committee, but meetings of the latter became rare as Churchill pre-

ferred staff conferences, where few or no other ministers were present.

The service ministers were left to run their departments while he and the

Chiefs of Staff ran the war. Churchill tended to think in terms of battles,

of which he had personal experience, rather than strategy, which

requires a steady, disciplined outlook on the overall situation. He fre-

quently badgered the Chiefs of Staff to produce plans for erratic stra-

tegies of his own devising an d was reluctant to accept the limitations

imposed by what was logistically possible. His commitment to victory at

any cost assumed that the United States would pick up the bill and he

was reluctant to accept that Britain’s manpower could not sustain the

size of army and air force that he wished to create.

His speeches

inspired the nation, but he could be deceived by his own rhetoric. No

one in authority but he referred to the Singa pore naval base as a ‘for-

tress’, and he was surprised when it did not withstand a long siege. He

was constantly attracted to the potential of new weapons. He needed

strong men to stand up to him and fortunately the Chiefs of Staff

generally came into that category. Sir Alan Brooke (CIGS, 1941–6), Sir

Andrew Cunningham (ﬁrst sea lord, 1943–6) and Sir Charles Portal

(CAS, 1940–6) were not men who could be easily diverted from agreed

Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, 6 vols. (London: Cassell, 1949–54), vol. I:

The Gathering Storm, pp. 406, 528–30, 576–8.

The Memoirs of General the Lord Ismay (London: Heinemann, 1960), ch. 6.

See War Diaries 1939–1945: Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke, ed., Alex Danchev and

Daniel Todman (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2001), pp. 187, 189–91, 261, 263,

279, 321, 323–5, 410, 427–8, 430, 515, for Churchill’s obsession with invading Norway,

despite lack of air cover and shipping, his reluctance to reduce the size of the army, and

his opportunism as opposed to long-term strategy.

Arms, economics and British strategy166

strategy by the ﬂow of minutes from the Prime Minister. On the other

hand, Sir John Dill, an able CIGS in 1940–1, found Churchill’s con-

frontational style almost unbearable. Sir Dudley Pound, the ﬁrst sea lord

from 1939 to 1943, who also acted as chairman of the Chiefs of Staff

Committee, suffered from poor health and his colleagues thought that

he was too tolerant of Churchill’s interference in detail. His succes sor as

chairman, Brooke, admired Churchill’s achievements but felt in August

1944 that the Prime Minister, by then in his seventieth year, ought to

retire.

The way in which the war economy was organised changed drama-

tically under Churchill. While Chamberlain was prime minister

the Treasury had been the central department of government. The

Chancellor of the Exchequer, Simon, chaired the War Cabinet’s

Ministerial Committee on Econo mic Policy, which co-ordinated the

work of a range of ministerial and ofﬁcial committees. Chamberlain

refused to appoint a minister for war economy, on the grounds that his

own authority and that of the Treasury would be undermined thereby.

He worked closely with the Per manent Secretary of the Treasury, Sir

Horace Wilson, who had been his conﬁdential adviser since 1937 and

who was associated by many, including Churchill, with the policy of

appeasement. In contrast, Churchill’s War Cabinet did not include the

new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Kingsley Wood, until 3 October

1940 and Wilson was banished perman ently from 10 Downing Street.

Churchill, like Lloyd George in the First World War, rejected ﬁnancial

prudence. The allocation of physical resources, especially labour,

replaced ﬁnancial budgeting as the means of allocating priorities. Co-

ordination of economic and social policy now became the responsibility

of the Lord President’s Committee, initially chaired by Chamberlain

but from 3 October 1940 by Sir John Anderson. Anderson was ideal

for the job, having a form idable intellect and vast experience as a

public servant in the Home Civil Service and in India. He was backed by

a staff of professional economists, the Central Economi c Inform ation

Service, wh ich was divided into the Economic Section of the War

Cabinet Ofﬁce and the Central Statistical Ofﬁce in December 1940.

Economists had skills that enabled them to offer advice that was inde-

pendent of the Treasury and other Whitehall departments. Churchill’s

Michael Carver, ‘Churchill and the defence chiefs’, in Blake and Louis (eds.), Churchill ,

pp. 353–74; Alanbrooke, War Diaries 1939–1945, pp. 450–1, 580–1.

‘Economic co-ordination’, 7 Dec. 1939, T 175/117, TNA; Peden, Treasury and British

Public Policy, pp. 250, 301–2, 306–8.

The Second World War 167

Prime Minister’s Statistical Section, although chaired by a scientist,

Professor F. A. Lindemann, also included economists.

The other major change in the War Cabinet on 3 October 1940 was

the inclusion of Ernest Bevin, a le ading trade unionist, who had been

appointed minister for labour and national service on 13 May. Bevin

and Churchill had been on opposite sides during the General Strike of

1926, and workers accepted controls from Bevin that his Conservative

predecessor, Ernest Brown, had not dared to impo se. Admittedly cir-

cumstances had altered: the danger of invasion in the summer and

autumn of 1940 made exceptional measures politically possible. How-

ever, a willingness to accept the transferability of labour between

industries and occupations was crucial to manpower planning long after

fear of the invasion had vanished.

Churchill was alone among ministers in devising strategy, but the

War Cabinet included men of sound judgement who could criticise his

ideas. The Labou r Party leader, Clement Attlee, was the most

important. He was, after all, Major Attlee, who had served at Gallipoli,

in Mesopotamia and on the Western Front, being twice wounded.

He was successively lord privy seal, dominions secretary and, from

September 1943, lord president of the council, in succession to

Anderson, who had beco me chancellor of the exchequer.

Sir Stafford

Cripps, when lord privy seal in 1942, engaged in a critique of

Churchill’s highly personal direction of the war, before leaving the War

Cabinet to serve as an able minister of aircraft production. Policy-

making in war-time was much more of a team effort than Churchill’s

popular image, carefully cultivated in his memoirs, as the man who

won the war, would suggest.

The nation needed an inspirational

leader and Whitehall badly needed prodding in 1940, but Chu rchill

needed antitheses to his theses to ensure that there would not be

another Gallipoli.

John Wheeler-Bennett, John Anderson, Viscount Waverley (London and New York:

Macmillan, 1962), pp. 258–71, 275, 315–16; Alec Cairncross and Nita Watts, The

Economic Section 1939–1961: A Study in Economic Advising (London: Routledge, 1989),

pp. 28–69; D. N. Chester, ‘The central machinery for economic policy’, in D. N.

Chester (ed.), Lessons of the British War Economy (Cambridge University Press, 1951),

pp. 5–33; Thomas Wilson, Churchill and the Prof (London: Cassell, 1995).

Alan Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1960–

67), vol. II: Minister of Labour 1940–1945; W. K. Hancock and M. M. Gowing, British

War Economy (London: HMSO, 1949), pp. 148–50, 301–3, 452–5.

Kenneth Harris, Attlee (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982).

David Reynolds, In Command of History: Churchill Fighting and Writing the Second World

War (London: Allen Lane, 2004).

Arms, economics and British strategy168

Air weapons and tactics

Controversy over the strategic air offensive against Germany in the

Second World War shows no sign of abating. In particular, the

destruction of Dresden in February 1945 aroused condemnation that

has persisted for over half a century. Sir Arthur Harris, the air ofﬁcer

commanding-in-chief, Bomber Command, from February 1942 until

the end of the war, saw the main target of his force as the morale of the

enemy civil population, and in particular of the industrial workers. The

targeting of civilians through Bomber Command’s tactic of area bomb-

ing has since been criticised on tactical, strategic and moral grounds.

The pros and cons of area bombing have to be considered in relation to

the technology available, as well as to the strategic alternatives.

As noted in the last chapter, Bomber Command had expanded so

rapidly that it was not ready for war in 1939, either in terms of having

enough trained crews or of having aircraft that could have made a reality

of its doctrine of strategic bombing. The larger bombers, the Hampden,

Wellington and Whitley, could reach any part of Germany except the

extreme east, but only the Hampden and the Wellington were designed

for day as well as night bombing, the slower Whitley being considered ﬁt

only for night operations. The loss of twelve of twenty-two Wellingtons

to German ﬁghters during a reconnaissance of the Heligoland Bight in

December 1939 was an early warn ing that even the best-armed British

bomber was vulnerable by day. Accurate bombing by night was to prove

to be an elusive skill. The Butt Report of August 1941 used photo-

reconnaissance material to show that only one-third of aircraft reported

to have attacked their targets had been within ﬁve miles of them, many

of the bombs falling in open countryside. Clearly there was a great waste

of effort involved. A policy of widespread bombing of civilian areas was

Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany

1939–1945, 4 vols. (London: HMSO, 1961) was the most controversial of all the British

ofﬁcial histories of the Second World War. It drew upon the Report of the British

Bombing Survey, which was drafted by Solly Zuckerman and approved by the post-war

CAS, Sir Arthur Tedder, both of whom had pressed for bombing of transport systems

rather than area bombing during the war – see Sebastian Cox’s introduction to the

published edition of the Report, The Strategic Air War Against Germany 1939–1945

(London: Frank Cass, 1998). Malcolm Smith, ‘The Allied air offensive’, in John Gooch

(ed.), Decisive Campaigns of the Second World War (London: Frank Cass, 1990), pp. 67–

83, is a useful short summary of the main issues from the point of view of the

implications of new technology. Denis Richards, The Hardest Victory: RAF Bomber

Command in the Second World War (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1994), like

Webster and Frankland, challenged the effectiveness of area bombing, but denied that

the aim was to kill civilians. The debate on Dresden is placed in the context of Allied

bombing policy in Paul Addison and Jeremy Crang (eds.), Firestorm: The Bombing of

Dresden, 1945 (London: Pimlico, 2006).

The Second World War 169

adopted from the autumn of 1941, with a view to breaking German

morale. However, as better radar aids and bombsights became available,

and after a specialist Pathﬁnder Force was formed to guide the mass of

bombers, accuracy improved. By early 1944 area bombing was no

longer a technic al necessity, and it had always been the Air Staff’s

intention to return to precision bombing of targets selected on strategic

grounds as soon as the tactical capabilities of the bomber force allowed.

Harris, however, preferred to continue with area bombing.

The ofﬁcial

historians raised the question of why the CAS, Portal, did not impose

the Air Staff’s views or replace Harris, and concluded that Harris was

too pop ular with his command and with the Prime Minister for Portal to

do either.

It was not until 1943 that Bomber Command had large numbers of

the kind of aircraft required for a strat egic air offensive. The Mark V

Whitley, which had just entered production at the outbreak of war, had

a maximum bomb load of 8,000 pounds and was, by the standards of

the time, a true heavy bomber, but the maximum bomb loads of the

Hampden and the Wellington (4,500 pounds), and older Whitleys, were

much the same as the contemporary German medium bomber, the

Heinkel He 111. Moreover, only seventeen of Bomber Command’s

thirty-three operational squadrons in September 1939 had Whitleys,

Hampdens or Wellingtons. The rest had ‘medium’ bombers, Blenheims

or Battles, with maximum loads of 1,000 pounds, and the ten squadrons

equipped with Battles had to be based in France on account of their

short range. As a new generation of heavy bombers began to appear in

1940, the Battle and Blenheim were reclassiﬁed as light bombers. The

four-engined Stirling (maximum bomb load 14,000 pounds) and

Halifax (13,000 pounds), and the twin-engined Manchester (10,350

pounds) represented a huge technological advance, but development of

these aircraft and their introduction into service, took longer than

expected. The ﬁrst sorties by the new bombers did not take place until

February 1941, and both the Stirling and the Manchester were plagued

with technical problems. The Lancaster, a four-engined version of the

Manchester, on the other hand, proved to be a great success from its

entry into service in the spring of 1942. With a maximum bomb load of

14,000 pounds, the Lancaster formed the backbone of Bomber Com-

mand from 1943. By February 1943 Bomber Command had grown

Sir Arthur Harris, Despatch on War Operations 23rd February, 1942, to 8th May, 1945,18

Dec. 1945, with Air Staff memorandum on the despatch, March 1948, ed. Sebastian

Cox (London: Frank Cass, 1995), esp. pp. 30, 205; Webster and Frankland, Strategic

Air Offensive, vol. I, pp. 178–83, 323; vol. III, p. 124; vol. IV, pp. 3–17, 37–8.

Webster and Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive, vol. III, pp. 77–80.

Arms, economics and British strategy170

from the thirty-three squadrons of September 1939 to sixty-two squa-

drons and in 1944 and 1945 there was a daily average of over 1,000

bombers available.

Before the war the Air Staff had tended to rate the effectiveness of

bombers in terms of the size of their bomb loads. However, in 1938 the

de Havilland Company began designing a revolutionary high-speed

bomber, built of wood to economise on strategic metals and to facilitate

manufacture by sub-contractors. Air Ministry interest was aroused only

after the outbre ak of war, but the resulting aircraft, the Mosquito, had

an outstanding performance, being able to evade German ﬁghters by

day yet able to carry a 2,000-pound bomb load (5,000 pounds in later

versions). From 1942 it carried out frequent nuisance raids on Berlin

and from 1943 played an important role in the Oboe system for guiding

heavy bombers to their targets. It was a versatile aircraft, with photo-

reconnaissance, night-ﬁghter and long-range ﬁghter variants. In its

bomber version it had the best performance of any British aircraft in

terms of weight of bombs dropped per man-hour employed in its con-

struction, and was to that extent a better investment than any of the

heavy bombers.

Was there an alternative to the night-bombing tactics employed by

Bomber Command? The United States Army Air Force (USAAF) was

likewise a believer in the strategic air offensive but preferred to at tempt

precision bombing by day.

American heavy bombers carried heavier

defensive guns than their British counterparts (0.5-inch calibre com-

pared with 0.303-inch) but encountered heavy losses when they oper-

ated beyond the range of ﬁghter escorts. Until the summer of 1943

American ﬁghters could not operate much beyond the French coast but

the introduction of dispo sable (drop) fuel tanks allowed them to escort

bombers across Germany. At ﬁrst, the supply of drop tanks was limited

but by the beginning of 1944 the Americans were able to take the

offensive against German ﬁghters. It could be argued that the British

should have followed the American example. However, to be as well

able to defend themselves as the Americans, Brit ish bombers would

have had to be re-equipped with 0.5-inch guns. Harris ordered such

guns but they were delivered only in limited quantities towards the end

Ibid., vol. III, p. 124n; vol. IV, pp. 400–2, 407, 450–1.

Postan, Hay and Scott, Design and Development, pp. 84–6, 131–2; Webster and

Frankland, Strategic Air Offensive, vol. II, pp. 111–12, 199–201; vol. IV, pp. 7–8.

For a comparison of the development of doctrine on bombing in Britain and the United

States, see Tami Davis Biddle, ‘British and American approaches to strategic bombing:

their origins and implementation in the World War II combined bomber offensive’,

Journal of Strategic Studies, 18 (1995), no. 1, 91–144.

The Second World War 171

of the war. Moreover, a change of tactics would have required retraining

of aircrew. Bomber Command had evolved as a night bombing force

and its continued resort to area bombing was an example of path

dependency.

In any case, as W. Hays Park has pointed out, Bomber

Command attacks, when directed at a speciﬁc target, were often more

accurate than those carried out by day, but in cloudy conditions, by the

USAAF. Much depended upon the level of enemy opposition, and the

difference in bombing accuracy between the two air forces was not as

great as is often believed.

In contrast to the long-drawn out problems in making strat egic

bombing effective, the RAF had a model air defence system in place by

the outbreak of war, with a comprehensive radar early warning system,

underground operations rooms to direct ﬁghters, and high-speed

monoplanes, as well as the older technology of anti-aircraft guns,

searchlights and, as part of London’s defences, a balloon barrage. Well-

directed ﬁghter interceptions of German bombers were decisive in pre-

venting the Germans achieving air superiority. It was fortunate that radar

was so new in 1940 that no one had yet worked out how to jam it or how

to evade detection by low-level ﬂight. The Germans were also pioneers of

radar, but their efforts to guide bombers to targets by radio beams were

quickly frustrated by British signals and scientiﬁc intelligence.

The Spitﬁre was the only opera tional aircraft in the world that was the

equal of the German Messerschmitt Bf 109 in 1939–40, but British

ﬁghter development was not without its problems. Britain was the only

country to design ﬁghters with a powered turret that allowed four

machine guns to be brought to bear in a broadside, but the experi ment

was not a success. The performance of these single-engined aircraft, the

Deﬁant for the RAF and the Roc for the FAA, suffered from the weight

and drag of the turret, and the Roc was withdra wn from service shortly

after being issued in small numbers to squadrons. German ﬁghters

quickly discovered how to evade the Deﬁant’s guns, which could only ﬁre

to the rear or side, and it was withdrawn from daylight operations in the

summer of 1940, even though Fighter Command was then desperately

short of aircraft. However, the Deﬁant found its niche as a night-ﬁghter.

Most night-ﬁghters pressed into service in the winter of 1940–1 were

A familiar concept to economic historians: for example, the standard gauge for railways

adopted in the nineteenth century and still used in Britain today was originally that

adopted for horse-drawn wagons. Once a particular course of action has been taken the

costs of changing it may exceed the short-term (although not necessarily the long-term)

beneﬁts.

W. Hays Park, ‘ ‘‘Precision’’ and ‘‘area’’ bombing: who did which, and when’, Journal of

Strategic Studies, 18 (1995), no. 1, 145–74.

R. V. Jones, Most Secret War (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1978), esp. pp. 135–80.

Arms, economics and British strategy172

converted twin-engined light bombers. The most successful improvisa-

tion was the Bristol Beauﬁghter, which was a redesign of the Beaufort

torpedo-bomber with more powerful engines and armament, an d whic h

later also served in the ﬁghter-bomber and anti-shipping roles.

In early 1940 an Air Staff assessment of German aircraft production

led to concern that the RAF might be seriously outnumbered. Conse-

quently, on 15 May the Minister of Aircraft Production, Lord Beaver-

brook, and the Air Staff agreed that all aircraft development that could

not be directly related to immediate needs should be held back, to allow

a concentration of output on ﬁve types: the Hurricane, Spitﬁre, Blen-

heim, Wellington and Whitley. The new heavy bombers were not

affected by this decision, and important developments took place with

ﬁghter aircraft, such as the ﬁtting of cannon to the Hurricane and

Spitﬁre, and radar to night-ﬁghters. However, work on more advanced

types was suspended for about nine months, the aircraft affected

including the Typhoon, Hawker’s intended successor for the Hurricane.

Thereafter, the Air Staff’s wish to introduce the Typhoon into service as

quickly as possible resulted in squadrons receiving an inadequately

developed aircraft, with some unpleasant ﬂying characteristics. It

eventually proved to be a successful ﬁghter-bomber, although a failure

as an interceptor. Both the Typhoon and its successor, the Tempest,

suffered from the long-drawn-out developme nt of the Sabre engine

led to the enforced transfer of the work to the English Electric Com-

pany. Fortunately the basic Spitﬁre proved to be capable of develop-

ment through twenty-two marks and two different types of Rolls-Royce

engines, the maximum speed of the 1945 mark being 454 miles per

hour, about 90 miles per hour faster that the one in service in 1940. The

Spitﬁre always had the edge over the Messerschmitt Bf 109, although it

too was developed throughout the war. However, the Focke-Wulf Fw

190 gave the Luftwaffe a margin of ascendancy in ﬁghter-versus-ﬁghter

combats when it appeare d in large numbers in 1942.

Germany was ahead of Britain in the development of jet aircraft. The

turbo-jet engine was inve nted independently in each country, the ﬁrst

experimental aircraft ﬂying in 1939 in Germany and in 1941 in Britain,

and the ﬁrst ﬁghter prototypes following in 1941 and 1943 respectively.

Fortunately the Germans, like the British, for a time gave priority to

developments for immediate needs rather than long-term projects, and

William Green, War Planes of the Second World War, 10 vols. (London: MacDonald,

1960–68), vol. II, pp. 4–5, 11–25.

Postan, Scott and Hay, Design and Development, pp. 6–8, 26.

The Second World War 173

then Hitler insisted that the Messerschmitt Me 262 be used to carry

bombs rather than be employed as an interceptor. The ﬁrst British jet

ﬁghter, the Gloster Meteor, entered service in the sam e year as the Me

262, 1944, but by then the only serious air threats to Britain were the

German Vergeltungswaffe (reprisal) weapons, the V1 jet-propelled ﬂying

bomb, which could be shot down by ﬁghters or by anti-aircraft ﬁre, and

the rocket-powered V2 missile, which could not. The deployment of the

V1 and V2 was delayed by bombing their launch sites, an example

of successful employment of bombing as a defensive measure, and

incidentally of Bomber Command’s ability to hit very small and well-

concealed targets by 1944.

Britain was also slow to develop tactical air warfare, reﬂecting the Air

Staff’s long-standing wish to be independent of the other services. Sir

John Slessor, the director of plans from 1937 to 1940, had delivered a

series of lectures at the Staff College at Camberley between 1931 and

1934 in which he used experience from the First World War to

demonstrate how bombers could isolate an army from its supplies and

delay its concentration.

Nevertheless, Air Staff doctrine in 1940 held

that supply lines would be hard to hit and that battleﬁeld targets were

better attacked by artillery. Consequently, when the RAF was called

upon to intervene directly in support of the BEF in Belgium and France

in May and June 1940, air crews lacked the necessary training and there

was no system in place for communication between ground and air

forces, so that hours might pass before aircraft would attack a target

identiﬁed by the army.

The USAAF, in contrast, combined a belief in

strategic bombing with effective preparation for the employment of

tactical air power. The American attack planes, ﬁrst designated as such

in 1922, corresponded in size to British light bombers, but were

designed for immediate support of ground troops, while medium

bombers were developed to attack targets such as depots and commu-

nications.

When the RAF at last made effective use of tactical air

power, checking the ﬂow of supplies to the enemy’s front-line troops

prior to the battle of El Alamein in 1942, it made extensive use of

American aircraft.

By 1944 the RAF had created a workable system of

Harris, Despatch on War Operations, p. 30.

Slessor, Air Power and Armies.

Richard Overy, Air Power, Armies, and the War in the West, 1940, Harmon Memorial

Lectures, no. 32, United States Air Force Academy, Colorado, 1989.

Wesley F. Craven and James L. Cate (eds.), The Army Air Forces in World War II, 7 vols.

(University of Chicago Press, 1948–58), vol. VI, pp. 197–201.

Sir Arthur Tedder, With Prejudice (London: Cassell, 1966), pp. 205–7, 342, 347–8,

354–61.

Arms, economics and British strategy174