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

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close air support which, although imperfect, was greatly in advance of

anything tha t the British army had enjoyed earlier in the war.

The Air Staff also neglected the development of aircraft and weapons

for Coastal Command, which was charged with co-operating with the

navy in coastal patrols and anti-submarine operations. The four-engined

Sunderland ﬂying boat was one of the best in the world, but the twin-

engined Saunders-Roe Lerwick was underpowered and saw service only

brieﬂy. The land-based Anson was too small to undertake long-range

anti-submarine patrols and was regarded even in 1937 as ﬁt only to be a

trainer. The ﬁrst American combat aircraft ordered for the RAF (in

1938) was the Hudson, which was originally thought of as a stop-gap

until the Blackburn Botha replaced the Anson, but the Botha was not an

operational success, leaving Coastal Command short of modern aircraft

in what proved to be a crucial period of the Battle of the Atlantic in

1940–1. Signiﬁcantly, the development of the Lerwick and the Botha

had been allocated to two of the wea kest aircraft ﬁrms, suggesting a low

priority. The shortfall in modern aircraft could have been ﬁlled with

Wellingtons and Whitleys, which were later successfully adapted for

anti-submarine warfare, but higher priority was given to the strategic air

offensive against Germany than to the needs of Coastal Command. The

most spectacular failure of the Air Ministry in relation to anti-submarine

warfare, however, was the anti-submarine bomb, which was ordered off

the drawing board in 1934 and never tested against a submarine before

the war. The bomb proved to be ineffective and had to be replaced by a

modiﬁed naval depth-charge in the late summer of 1940. It was not until

late 1941 that really effective, purpose-built aerial depth-charges were

produced in quantity. Coastal Com mand aircraft also relied upon visual

sighting of U-boats until aircrew were trained to use air-to-surface

radar in 1941. Unsurprisingly, the ﬁrst successful attack by a Coastal

Command aircraft on a U-boat was not until November 1941. Even in

1939–41, however, aircraft could give some protection to a convoy, as in

the First World War, by spotting submarines and reporting them to

escort vessels. Coastal Command did not begin to come into its own

until 1942, by which time it was beginning to receive American aircraft

with sufﬁcient range to operate far out over the Atlantic. German

admirals identiﬁed aircraft as the chief enemy of the U-boat by 1943.

Ian Gooderson, Air Power at the Battlefront: Allied Close Air Support in Europe 1943–45

(London: Frank Cass, 1998).

John Buckley, The RAF and Trade Defence 1919–45: Constant Endeavour (Keele

University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 97, 101–6, 128–30, 166–8; John Buckley, ‘Air power

and the Battle of the Atlantic’, Journal of Contemporary History, 28 (1993), 141–61;

The Second World War 175

Naval weapons and tactics

The Admiralty was inclined to blame Air Ministry administration of the

FAA down to 1937 for the lack of modern aircraft for the ﬁve aircraft

carriers launched between 1937 and 1940.

Nevertheless, the Admir-

alty bore some responsibility. E ven under the pre-1937 arrangements it

drew up speciﬁcations for naval aircraft and provided the funds for the

numbers it requ ired. Almost all aircraft ordered for the FAA before the

war carried a crew of two or three, partly because machines capable of

bombing and reconnaissance as well as ﬁghting maximised the limited

capacity of an aircraft carrier, but also because the Admiralty believed

that naval aircraft required a navigator. It was only after the develop-

ment of electronic homing beacons and radar-equipped command and

control in 1941–2 that single-engined ﬁghters were widely used at sea.

Until then carriers relied upon anti-aircraft guns for their defence. Of

the 189 aircraft aboard operational carriers in 1939 only 12 were single-

seat ﬁghters (and these were obsolescent Gladiator biplanes), whereas

147 were Fairey Swordﬁsh or Albacore torpedo-bombers that were slow

enough to carry out spotting duties for the big guns of battleships. The

only monoplanes in service were the Skua dive-bomber and its unsuc-

cessful turret-ﬁghter variant, the Roc. A further source of FAA weakness

lay in the nature of the two ﬁrms that specialised in designing and

producing naval aircraft: Blackburn and Fairey. Although Fairey had

been a successful designer of aircraft in the 1920s, both it and Blackburn

encountered technical problems with their more advanced designs in the

1930s. Both ﬁrms received orders for a number of different types –

probably more than their design staffs could cope with. At all events, the

ofﬁcial historians commented that the ﬁeld of aircraft development in

which ‘failures occurred and hopes were deferred most frequently’ was

that of naval types developed by Blackburn an d Fairey.

Consequently

the FAA came to rely heavily during the war on American types.

Pre-war ﬁghting instructions for the FAA required it to locate the

enemy ﬂeet at sea and to slow it down with a torpedo attack so as to

enable British surface forces to bring it to battle. The Fairey biplanes

may have been obsolescent but they achieved all that they were intended

to do, and more. Carrier-borne torpedo-bombers sank three Italian

battleships at their moorings at their base at Tara nto in November 1940;

G. H. Bennett and R. Bennett, Hitler’s Admirals (Annapolis, Md: Naval Institute Press,

2004), pp. 138, 146, 177, 179.

For example, First Sea Lord, Sir Roger Backhouse, to First Lord, the Earl of Stanhope,

24 Mar. 1939, ADM 205/3, TNA.

Postan, Hay and Scott, Design and Development, p. 133.

Arms, economics and British strategy176

successfully damaged Italian warships off Cape Matapan in March

1941, enabling British surface ships to overtake and sink three 8-inch

gun cruisers and two destroyers; and during the hunting of the German

battleship Bismarck in May 1941 damaged its steering gear, preventing it

from making good its escape from the British ﬂeet.

British aircraft carrier design compared favourably in some respects

with other navies. Whereas the hangar for aircraft on American and

Japanese carriers was part of a large, vulnerable superstructure, the

hangar in British ships was an integral part of the main structure, pro-

tected by ﬂash-proof lobbies, so that no British-built carrier was lost as a

result of a fuel explosion or hangar ﬁre like the brand-new Japanese

carrier Taiho in 1944.

British carriers sacriﬁced aircraft complement

for armoured protection, and whereas both American and Japanese

carriers proved to be vulnerable to air strikes, only the old, small British

carrier Hermes was lost in this way. New construction kept up with

losses: ﬁve carriers were sunk, but six ﬂeet carriers and four light ﬂeet

carriers had been completed by the end of the war. One omission was

the failure to foresee the part that escort carriers could play in protecting

convoys from air and submarine attack. Escort carriers could be con-

verted from merchant hulls and could be ﬁtted out to lower standards

than ﬂeet carriers, by havi ng wooden decks, for example. The ﬁrst such

carrier did not see service before September 1941. The Ministry of War

Transport was reluctant to release the large, fast ships required for

conversion, not realising that the long-term reduction in shipping losses

resulting from the operations of escort carriers would have justiﬁed the

immediate sacriﬁce of freight-carrying capacity. Consequently, most of

the Royal Navy’s escort carriers were built in the United States.

The war is generally seen as the twilight of the capital ship. Stephen

Roskill, in his ofﬁcial history, conclu ded that the navy had not achieved

a proper balance in 1939 between capital ships and aircraft carriers.

However, no major navy abandoned the construction of capital ships

before the war, and international comparison of capital ships and air-

craft carriers launched between 1936 and 1945 (table 4.1) does not

suggest that the Royal Navy was unusually conservative. The German

navy’s ‘Z Plan’ of January 1939 aimed at having a ﬂeet of six battleships

and two battle-cruisers, but only two aircraft carriers, by 1944.

David Hobbs, ‘Naval aviation, 1930–2000’, in Richard Harding (ed.), The Royal Navy,

1930–2000 (London: Frank Cass, 2005), pp. 69–88, at pp. 73–4.

Stephen Roskill, The War at Sea 1939–1945, 3 vols. (London: HMSO, 1954–61), vol.

III, part 2, p. 396.

Maiolo, Royal Navy and Nazi Germany, p. 74.

The Second World War 177

the event, four of the battleships and both the aircraft carriers were

cancelled after the outbreak of war, to allow construction to be con-

centrated on U-boats. In 1940 the Royal Navy cancelled four out of ﬁve

of the capital ships that could not be ready by 1942. However, it con-

tinued aircraft carrier construction on a large scale. The ﬁve ‘King

George V’-class capital ships completed during the war, were not an

over-insurance against the four capital ships completed by the Germans

from 1939 (including the pre-war ‘Scharnhorst’-class battle-cruisers), or

the thre e capital ships completed by the Italians from 1940. Indeed,

because the ‘King George V’ class were designed within the Washington

treaty limit of 35,000 tons, they were inferior to the 42,000-ton Bismarck

and Tirpitz, and British capital ships had to go in pairs when they were

liable to meet these German leviathans. The increasing range of aircraft

and radar progressi vely restricted the ability of large surface vessels to

operate without air cover, but capital ships could still pose a threat in

distant waters, par ticularly to the Arctic convoys to Russia prior to the

sinking of the Scharnhorst by surface warships of the Home Fl eet off the

North Cape on 26 December 1943, and the destruction of the Tirpitz by

RAF bombers on 12 November 1944.

Roskill’s criticism was also directed at the cost of maintaining and

modernising the older battleships. Priority had been given between the

wars to modernising the ﬁve vessels of the ‘Queen Elizabeth’ class, on

account of their high speed. Anti-aircraft guns were added, the elevation

of the main guns increased and in four cases new engines were ﬁtted.

The modernisation prog ramme was incomplete when war broke out,

but the three ships of this class that were wholly or partially rebuilt

(Queen Elizabeth, Valiant and Warspite) played a prominent part in the

war, particularly in the Mediterranean. On the other hand, the ﬁve

vessels of the ‘Royal Sovereign’ class proved to be an example of false

economy. To save money, they had been designed to be slower and

smaller than the earlier ‘Queen Elizabeth’ cl ass, and proved to be less

adaptable to modern requirements. They were little altered by 1939,

apart from the addition of anti-aircraft guns. During the ﬁrst twelve

months of the war Churchill pressed from time to time for them to be

Table 4.1. Capital ships and aircraft carriers launched or converted, 1936–45

Britain France Germany Italy Japan United States

Capital ships 6 3 4 4 3 13

Fleet aircraft carriers 24 0 1 1 16 41

Source: Chesneau (ed.), Conway’s All the World’s Fighting Ships 1922–1946.

Arms, economics and British strategy178

reconstructed for coastal bombardme nt purposes, but the Admiralty

refused.

On balance there does not seem to be much substance in

Roskill’s complaint abou t expenditure on the older battleships; indeed

completion of the rebuilding programme for the ‘Queen Elizabeth’ class

would have been money well spent.

The well-known sinking of the modern battleship Prince of Wales and

the old battle-cruiser Repulse off the coast of Malaya by Japanese aircraft

on 10 December 1941 might be taken as justifying the RAF’s position

in the bomber versu s the battleship controversy between the wars.

However, British battleships survived many air attacks in the Medi-

terranean, from the Luftwaffe as well as the Regia Aeronautica, and one

must conclude that the Japanese aircrews had better training than their

Axis partners. Nor was air attack the only hazard: of the three other

British capital ships lost during the war, two were sunk by U-boats and

one, the battle-cruiser Hood, was sunk by the Bismarck’s gunﬁre on

24 May 1941. The proportions for aircraft carrier losses were similar:

three to U-boats, one to gunﬁre, and one to Japanese air attack. The

overshadowing of capital ships by aircraft carriers by the end of the war

was not so much evidence of the vulnerability of the former as at 1939,

as of the growing utility of the latter, as the range and performance of

aircraft and radar improved.

As regards trade pro tection, cruisers played less of a role than the navy

expected, particularly once improvements in aircraft and radar had

made it harder for surface raiders to evade detection after 1941.

Contrary to the inter-war Admiralty’s expectations, the chief threat to

merchant shipping came from submarines. The Admiralt y had great

expectations of Asdic, which relied upon sound waves being sent

through water. However, Asdic was practically useless if a U-boat

remained on the surface. At ﬁrst the Germans were unaware of this

characteristic, and the system worked well, especially if Asdic-equipped

ships were assisted by aircraft that could spot submarines when they

surfaced. However, from September 1940 U-boats regularly used the

tactic of attacking on the surface by night, when they were able to evade

detection.

The numbers of escort vessels required consequently far

exceeded pre-war estimates. The difﬁculties of trade defence were also

greater than expected because no one in Whitehall had anticip ated that

the Germans would be able to operate from ports in western France,

Churchill, Second World War, vol. II: Their Finest Hour (1949), pp. 393, 583, 591.

Bennett and Bennett, Hitler’s Admirals, pp. 100–1.

Roskill, War at Sea, vol. I, pp. 34, 56, 68, 130, 355.

The Second World War 179

spending more time in the Atlantic than would otherwise have been

possible.

What Churchill called the Battle of the Atlantic proved to be a long

struggle that was won by the Allies only because of improved techniques

for detecting and attacking submarines, and signals intelligence. The

breaking of the German navy’s Enigma code by June 1941, partly as a

result of the work of cryptanalysts and partly as a result of the capture of

signal books aboard U110 in May, made it possible to read quickly all

orders to ‘wolf packs’ of U-boats. Convoys could then be re-routed and

the U-boats attacked. Shipping losses in July 1941 were only a third of

those in the previous month. However, in September 1941 the Germans

broke the British naval code, enabling them to locate convoys, and in

February 1942 made their own code indecipherable. Then, from

December 1942, British cryptanalysts were once more able to break the

German U-boat code, to the point that by May 1943 German orders

could once more be read quickly enough for action to be taken by con-

voys and anti-submarine forces.

However, Jock Gardner has warned

against any monocausal explanation of victo ry: signals intelligence was of

tactical value only when U-boats operated in groups, which they did only

in 1941 and from mid-1942 to May 1943. Other factors included more

convoy escorts with better means of detecting submarines, and long-

range aircraft equipped with radar that could locate U-boats by day and

night.

The technology of submarine warfare moved in favour of the

Germans later in the war, ﬁrst with the ﬁtting of schnorkel to U-boats in

1943–4, enabling them to recharge batteries under wat er, and then with

the introduction in 1945 of new types of U-boats capable of high speed

under water. The Admiralty anticipated heavy shipping losses in 1945

but victory on land ended the U-boat threat.

Army weapons and tactics

The performance of the British army in the Second World War has been

criticised on two broad grounds: ﬁrst, its tactical doctrine; second, its

equipment. According to Elizabeth Kier, defeat by the Germans in 1940

was the result of the British army’s ‘defensive’ doctrine, whereby

superior ﬁrepower was a pre-condition of manoeuvre, the purpose of

tanks was to support the infantry, and the mobile or armoured division

F. H. Hinsley, British Intelligence in the Second World War, 3 vols. (London: HMSO,

1979–88), vol. II, pp. 163, 170–9, 547–53, 570–2.

Gardner, W. J. R., Decoding History: The Battle of the Atlantic and Ultra (Basingstoke:

Macmillan, 1999).

Roskill, War at Sea, vol. III, part 1, p. 18; part 2, pp. 285–6, 289–91.

Arms, economics and British strategy180

was ‘more a reconnaissance unit than an independent striking force’.

She attributes defensive doctrine not only to the lack of a continental

commitment before 1939, but also to ‘civilian fear of a professional army’,

and the continuation of a military culture based on ‘the gentleman-ofﬁcer

over the professional soldier’.

However, there was little evidence of

defensive doctrine in December 1940 when General Sir Archibald

Wavell launched an audacious offensive in Egypt with one armoured

division and an Indian infantry division and defeated an Italian army of

seven divisions, taking 130,000 prisoners.

The evidence for a lack

of professionalism on the part of Regular Army ofﬁcers is likewise

unconvincing, being largely an impression created by Liddell Hart and

historians inﬂuenced by him or by tank radicals like Percy Hobart.

Reliance on ﬁrepower, such as the artillery bombardment that preceded

the battle of El Alamein in October 1942, was not in itself unsound.

Indeed British tanks, for all their mechanical deﬁciencies, might have

fared a good deal better earlier if their efforts had been more closely co-

ordinated with the artillery. J. P. Harris has convincingly argued that the

trouble with British tank tactics was not that the army had ignored the

ideas of tank radicals, but rather that men like Hobart, who believed that

tanks should act independently of other arms, had had too much

inﬂuence.

David French has recently studied the question of British army doc-

trine afresh. He ﬁnds that the lesson drawn from the experience of

1914–18 was that success required the proper combination of all arms.

Overwhelming ﬁrepower to suppress enemy ﬁre was seen as the means

to restore movement across the battleﬁeld, and there was nothing

inherently defensive about such doct rine, even if it was designed to

minimise casualties. Unfortunately, until late 1942, the army lacked the

weapons to make its doctrine effective. French also attributes short-

comings in the practice of the army’s doctrine to a decentralised system

of training rather than to lack of professionalism among ofﬁcers. The

rapid expansion of the army after 1939 compounded difﬁculties in

training. However, he notes that at El Alamein artillery, infantry, sap-

pers and tanks were able to combine effectively in a night attack, and

Elizabeth Kier, Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine between the Wars

(Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 89–90, 93, 109.

I. S. O. Playfair and others, The Mediterranean and the Middle East, 6 vols. (London:

HMSO, 1954–88), vol. I, pp. 258–98, 351–64.

Kier cites Liddell Hart in support of her thesis four times (Imagining War, pp. 91, 100–

1, 119–20, 195n.). She also relies upon Kenneth Macksey’s Armoured Crusader: A

Biography of Major General Sir Percy Hobart (London: Hutchinson, 1967), which is less

than even handed in its criticism of those who had to deal with Hobart.

Harris, Men, Ideas and Tanks, pp. 289–90, 306–7, 316–19.

The Second World War 181

that by 1943 British ground–air co-operation and artillery support were

far in advance of German techniques. The British army’s highly cen-

tralised command and control system lacked the ﬂexibility of German

practice, but was operating more expeditiously by 1944 than previously.

After a difﬁcult learning curve in 1940–2, the British army became

skilful enough to contribute effectively to Allied offensives in 1942–5.

Of all the weapons in which the British army was deﬁcient, none

attracted more attention than tanks. Defeats in the Western Desert in

the ﬁrst six months of 1942 were attributed by the British commander,

General Sir Claude Auchinleck, to the inferiority of British tanks

compared with those of the Germans.

As noted in chapter 3, the pre-

war development of British tanks had been far from smooth. Never-

theless, they were inferior to their German counterparts in 1940 only in

mechanical reliability. The Germans tested British tanks captured after

Dunkirk and fou nd that the Infantry Mark II (Matilda) was immune at

longer ranges to all of their guns except the 88-mm Flak gun. They

decided to replace the 37-mm gun on their Panzerkampfwagen (Pzkw)

III light medium tank with a 50-mm weapon and to increase the armour

on it and the Pzkw IV medium tank, with the result that in 1941 the

British found that the 2-pounder tank and anti-tank gun were ineffective

except at the closest ranges. Further improvements in the guns and

armour of German tanks were made in 1942. Unfortunately, the British

had taken a decision in 1940 to go for quantity in tank and anti-tank

guns at the expense of further development, in order to replace weapons

lost at Dunkirk as quickly as possible. Production of the 2-pounder tank

and anti-tank gun was continued and the introduction of the 6-pounder

into service delayed. It was not until May 1942 that the standard cruiser

tank, the Mark VI Crusader, was ﬁtted with the heavier weapon. The

Crusader was so mechanically unreliable that in the spring of 1942 it

was the subject of a special enquiry under Attlee, which concluded that

it had been placed into production too quickly before the pilot model

had been adequately tested. The same might have been said of other

British tanks, including the Cruiser Mark V Covenanter, which was

never used in battle, although 1,771 were produced, and early models of

the Infantry Mark IV Churchill. The only moderately successful British

tank in production in 1941–2 was the Infantry Mark III Valentine,

which was faster than the Matilda, which it replaced, and more reliable

than the Crusader. Even so, as with the Crusader, it had only the

French, Raising Churchill’s Army.

Sir Claude Auchinleck, despatch on ‘Operations in the Middle East from 1st

November, 1941, to 15th August, 1942’, London Gazette, no. 38177, 15 Jan. 1948.

Arms, economics and British strategy182

2-pounder gun until models arme d with 6-pounders were shipped out to

Egypt in time for the battle of El Alamein.

Fortunately, the E ighth Army was able to use American medium

tanks in 1942, the Grant from May and the Sherman from October.

Both carried 75-mm guns, the Grant in a sponson with a limited arc of

ﬁre, and the Sherman in its turret. The Sherman was rated by its crews

as superior to the contemporary German Mark III and IV tanks. The

only British-designed cruiser tanks that were better than the Sherman

were the Cromwell, when ﬁtted with a 75-mm gun, with which it ﬁrst

went into action in June 1944, and the Comet, with a 77-mm gun and

new gun-laying devices, about six months later. The belated improve-

ment in British tanks followed tacit recognition that the decision in 1936

to divide development into ‘infantry’ and ‘cruiser’ types had been a

mistake. Following Anglo-American discussions in the late summer of

1942, both countries agreed that the main requirement was for an all-

purpose tank, and later British tanks combined the best features of the

infantry and cruiser types, being adequately armed and fast, and having

a longer range than German tanks. Even so, British tank crew s faced a

formidable challenge when they encountered the latest German tanks in

the latter stages of the war. The Panther (42 tons) and the Tiger (54

tons) were much larger and more heavily armoured , and the Tiger more

heavily armed, than the Cromwell (28 tons) or the Churchill (40 tons).

To make matters worse, experience in North Africa of enemy anti-tank

guns, which had to be attacked with high-explosive rather than armour-

piercing shells, had led the British to adopt an American-designed, dual-

purpose 75-mm gun, which proved to be inadequate against the Panther

and Tiger. Although the problem had been anticipated and harder-

hitting 17-pounder guns ﬁtted to about a quarter of the tanks employed

by the British army in Normandy, the Germans enjoyed an advantage in

tank-to-tank combat, especially given the combustibility of the Sherman

when hit by an armour-piercing shell. On the other hand, the lack of

range of the Panther and Tiger made them vulnerable when their fuel

supplies were severed, and many were abandoned or destroyed by their

own crews in the later stages of the Normandy campaign.

Ironically, in view of the charge that British army doctrine was

defensive in nature, the deﬁciencies of its infantry weapons could be

linked to the priority given to mobility at the expense of ﬁrepower.

Playfair, Mediterranean and the Middle East, vol. II, pp. 173–5, 341–5; vol. III, pp. 214,

434–43; Postan, Hay and Scott, Design and Development, pp. 334–9.

John Buckley, British Armour in the Normandy Campaign 1944 (London: Frank Cass,

2004); French, Raising Churchill’s Army, pp. 100–5; Postan, Hay and Scott, Design and

Development, pp. 329–30, 341.

The Second World War 183

British infantry were outgunned by German infantry with heavier

machine guns and mortars, which led to a natural reluctance to advance

unless artillery support was available to suppress the enemy ﬁre.

Fortunately, the British artillery had a reliable and robust weapon in the

25-pounder ﬁeld gun, which had been ordered in 1938. On the other

hand, the medium and heavy guns available in 1939–40 were moder-

nised First World War weapons and it was only in 1942 that the pro-

duction of new models enabled the British to achieve artillery

superiority, and even then the range of their howitzers was often too

short for effective counter-battery work.

The disadvantage of earlier

reliance upon older medium and heavy guns was, of course, com-

pounded by the RAF’s lack of interest in tactical air power before 1942.

War economy and ﬁnance

As will have been apparent from the survey of armaments and tactics,

war was more than simply an industrial undertaking. Its outcome,

nevertheless, depended upon mobilising economic resources to secure

the output of munitions, all the more so if inferior quality of weapons

had to be compensated for by quant ity. However, the Second World

War, even more than the First, also made immense demands on the

nation’s scie ntiﬁc resources. The technology of war, particularly but not

only with regard to electronics, was constantly changing. Britain was

fortunate in being able to draw upon both the scientiﬁc and industrial

resources of the United States. However, transatlantic links were no t all

one way. Radar was invented ﬁrst by the British, although its subsequent

development in the United States was impressive. The best American

ﬁghter aircraft, the P-51 Mustang, used the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine,

and the ﬁrst American jet ﬁghter was designed around an imported de

Havilland engine.

David Edgerton sees the dominant feature of the war economy as the

expansion of a greatly enlarged military-industrial complex. Although

overtaken by the United States during the war, Britain was the world’s

leading producer of aircraft and warships in 1940. Yet in the summer of

1939 Britain had set about creating industrial capacity to supply an

army much larger than had been planned earlier – hence the creation of

French, Raising Churchill’s Army, pp. 86–9.

J. B. A. Bailey, Field Artillery and Firepower (Annapolis, Md: Naval Institute Press,

2004), pp. 290, 303–21.

Craven and Cate (eds.), Army Air Forces, vol. VI, pp. 218–19, 328; H. Duncan Hall,

C. C. Wrigley and J. D. Scott, Studies of Overseas Supply (London: HMSO, 1956),

pp. 386–413.

Arms, economics and British strategy184