From Peace to War
Royal Air Force Rearmament Programme, 1934-1940
Part 1
British rearmament in the period preceding the World War II began and grew with the rising danger of war with Germany. This account details the chronology and turns of the rearmament of the Royal Air Force in the years prior to World War II and the fateful Battle of Britain. Much has been written previously about the tremendous technical development in British and German aviation industry of the late 1930s. In the aviation literature dealing with World War II period, the problems of production and organizational built-up of the RAF are discussed much less frequently, maybe with an exception of a few spectacular delays in the introduction of modern and later successful aircraft such as the Supermarine Spitfire. Yet it is important to understand the magnitude of industrial mobilisation which was necessary to equip and prepare the RAF for the approaching war with Germany. This has to be done in broader perspective than that of a single manufacturer or air arm. The expansion was characterised by tremendous speed and many difficulties, both of which would have caused equally severe headaches to today's decision makers as they did to those of over 70 years ago. Indeed, speculations can be raised if British rearmament could have taken alternative directions, and such action might have changed the odds during the first year of World War II - either to Britain's favour or otherwise.
Political Situation in the Early 1930s
By early 1930s, the comfortable sense of security and the expectations of undisturbed peace which characterised the twenties were rapidly disappearing. The first rumblings of the storm came from the Far East when the Japanese military aggression in Manchuria, then into China, soon flamed into a regular war. The shock of the Japanese action was still echoing in the British press when, in July 1932, the Nazi party achieved their biggest election success, becoming the largest political force in the Reichstag and thus an obvious influential component of consecutive German governments. In only six months, on 30th January 1933, Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor. The successive establishment of a system of dictatorship and totalitarian control in Germany, and the violence of the events could not escape attention of broad political spheres in Britain. Through 1934 and 1935 the political configuration of the Axis was taking shape. At the end of 1934 the Japanese Government gave notice of intention to terminate the Washington Naval Treaty. In 1935 Italy embarked upon her adventure in Abyssinia and in a short time the danger of conflict over the enforcement of sanctions appeared very serious. Also in March 1935 Germany repudiated the Treaty of Versailles, at the same time declaring openly the intention to re-arm. The Luftwaffe was officially formed and the existence of the new service made public by Hermann Goering in an interview with a British journalist on 10th March.
During these years the need for rearmament was far from self-evident. In March 1934, British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin proposed an Air Disarmament Conference as means of preventing the air armament race among major world powers. However, the general World Disarmament Conference, which fruitlessly continued in Geneva for 27 months, dissolved in May 1934 without any agreement being reached. As time would show, this was the last international disarmament conference for over a decade.
The Rations of the RAF
The overall assessment of the rearmament programme must take into account the low level of military equipment in the hands of the Forces in the early thirties. In dealing with the pace of RAF rearmament it is, therefore, important to get the true measure of the deficiency which the rearmament sought to remedy.
The manner in which the deficiency arose is clear enough. In the twenties, war seemed remote, and the hopes of prolonged peace ran very high. It is, therefore, no wonder that throughout most of the inter-war period the programmes of the Services were governed by the assumption that no major was to be expected. The peace hypothesis since its first formulation in August 1919 had taken a somewhat different form from year to year and from Service to Service, but from July 1928 until March 1932 the approved formula, as agreed by the Committee of Imperial Defence, was 'that it should be assumed for the purpose of framing the estimates of the fighting services that at any given date there will be no major war for ten years'. Acting on this somewhat naive assumption the Government of the day allowed the establishment and the material equipment of the Forces to run down.
The level of equipment at the starting point of rearmament was thus very low. In most of respects the materiel situation in the RAF was worse than the Royal Navy and yet somewhat better than the Army.
In theory, RAF was expanding all through the late twenties and early thirties. By a Government decision in 1923 the Royal Air Force, then greatly reduced by demobilisation and economy campaigns, was to be raised to and maintained at a level of 52 squadrons for home defence with a first-line strength of 594 machines. This decision, however, was not back by sufficient financial appropriations and remained largely a dead letter. Aircraft for new formations were coming forward very slowly, sometimes not at all as shown in the following table. The discrepancy between numbers of programmed and actually delivered aircraft is obvious. No wonder that by the beginning of 1934 the Home Force was still only 42 squadrons strong, ten squadrons short of its minimum objective.
| Programmed | Delivered | |
| 1928 | 495 | 70 |
| 1929 | 573 | 49 |
| 1930 | 855 | 63 |
| 1931 | 728 | 83 |
| 1932 | 445 | 0 |
| 1933 | 633 | 0 |
Number of new aircraft programmed and delivered respectively, 1928 - 1933
Aircraft production at this level was devoted more to the re-equipment of some of the existing squadrons than to the building up of an air force to the minimum laid down in 1923. Yet even the re-equipment was little more than nominal. The types available for replacement, although more recent, were not only few in number, but as a rule were below the technical and operational standards of the day. As late as 1935 the principal new fighter coming into services was the Gloster Gauntlet with a speed of 230 mph, and the 'new' bombers were the Hawker Hind and Handley-Page Hendon with a load-carrying capacity of 500 lb and 1,500 lb at a range of 430 miles and 920 miles respectively. The general impression is that throughout these years the quality of RAF equipment was falling below the standards which were being established in foreign countries such as Italy and the United States.
With financial provisions and new output at a very low level, the Air Ministry had great difficulty in maintaining its industrial reserves. The aircraft firms, including the principal engine manufacturers, found themselves in a position of chronic penury and sometimes on the very verge of bankruptcy. Westland Aircraft Company at one time tried to keep alive by making stainless steel beer barrels. Not all the firms were in straits quite so desperate or were compelled to adopt expedients equally unusual, but very could have survived without the tutelage of the Air Ministry.
In order to maintain a nucleus of an aircraft industry and to keep in existence facilities for aircraft design, the Air Ministry had to ration out all new work among some sixteen substantial aircraft companies. The system helped to consolidate the so-called 'family' of aircraft firms and to establish links between the Air Ministry and the aircraft industry which were to prove most valuable in future years.
The diet, though just sufficient to keep the bulk of the firms alive, was too meagre to enable them to keep pace with the aircraft industry abroad, especially in the United States, and to acquire the equipment and technique for quantity production. The Air Council and the Air Staff had thus every reason for thinking that their Service was being starved out.
Expansion Scheme A of 1934
In March 1932 the hypothesis of ten-year peace was revoked and the Government called upon the Committee of Imperial Defence to reconsider the fundamental conceptions of Empire defence. By the middle of 1933 Germany for the first time reappeared in official discussions as a potential enemy, and in the autumn of the following year the Cabinet decided to correct in the course of the next five years the accumulated armament deficiencies, thus by implication halving the 'safe' period within which no war was expected.
By 1934 the first expansion programme deserving that name began to be discussed by the Services and by the Government. In the course of the following year the Committee of Imperial Defence reviewed the condition of the armed forces and recommended enlarged scales of equipment for three Services.
In the spring of 1934 Prime Minister Baldwin announced in Parliament that the Government had decided to establish parity with Germany in the air. Consequently, the first Royal Air Force Expansion Scheme, Scheme A, was approved by the Cabinet on 18th July. The scheme provided for the growth of the Royal Air Force to a strength of 111 front-line squadrons at home and overseas to a total number of 1,252 aircraft, together with sixteen Fleet Air Arm squadrons counting 213 aircraft. These objectives were to be achieved by March 1939. Sizeable in numbers, this force was devised mainly as a 'shop window' strength to deter Germany. The objective was merely a visible first-line capable of producing the maximum political effect both at home and abroad: to reassure the public about the Prime Minister's promises and as far as possible to impress the Italians and Germans with a show of strength. As a consequence, little attention was paid to modernisation of aircraft types or provision for reserves.
From that time onwards the history of British rearmament would be one of continually mounting requirements and of a progressively growing output of munitions industry, but the initial progress was very slow, for a number of reasons. To begin with, the diplomatic and strategic assumptions which until the end of 1938 underlay rearmament were not those of an eventual war. The more or less acute crises over Manchuria and Abyssinia did not prompt war plans in the Government and the thoughts of the nation. Until 1935 international disarmament was still a popular hope and still the object of British foreign policy. Until late 1936, the object of the successive rearmament programmes was not so much preparation for war as the reinforcement of peace. Their purpose was to back up diplomatic efforts with a show of force and thereby to impress the would-be aggressors and to reassure public opinion at home. The early stages of rearmament were therefore dominated by the need for a 'deterrent': display-a first-line strength impressive on paper but not necessarily backed by sufficient establishments or by industrial reserves.
Even more inhibiting were the fundamental financial difficulties. No significant financial measures were undertaken to cover the increased military spending during 1934. In 1935, allocations for the rearmament appeared for the first time in the budget, improving for the first time from the level established back in the 1920s. At the same time these proved to be inadequate in relation to their objects. Neither the Cabinet nor presumably the country was as yet prepared to shoulder the financial weight of Scheme A and other contemporary armament proposals. Even in May 1935, after Mr. Eden and Sir John Simon had travelled to the Continent and come back convinced that Hitler meant business, an additional vote of £1 million for the time being measured the financial response to the situation.
It is possible to argue that finance was not the only limit to the expansion of the RAF before 1936. It is probable that in 1934 and 1935 purely technical considerations stood in the way of immediate 'all-out' reequipment. Technical progress in the mid-thirties was on the verge of new and important developments: high-speed monoplanes, all-metal construction, new powerful engines. The Air Staff began to visualise the expanded air force in terms of aircraft which in those years had not emerged from the drawing boards. And while the advanced types - the Vickers Wellington, the Supermarine Spitfire and others like them - were not yet available, the Air Staff were not at all anxious to encumber the squadrons with large supplies of obsolescent types.
So what with the financial stringency and the absence of new types, the early stages of reequipment were slow and tentative. The Air Ministry did not ask for a fully balanced modern air force and the Government was not very anxious to supply it. Needless to say, this stage of the programme was merely the first measure of expansion and others were to follow.