Air Power and Imperial Defence 1880-1919

Abstract

At the end of the first world war, the British Royal Air Force undoubtedly had the most powerful air fleet in the world and, unlike other nations, it was independent of other arms. This happy state, however, could not be expected to last for, as Malcolm Smith has pointed out, official policy stated that Britain would not be involved in a conflict for at least ten years and this belief, together with the antipathy of the older services, meant that the very survival of the RAF was in question.1 If the service was to maintain its autonomy, a new role, vital to government interests, had to be found. That this independence was preserved was, in RAF hagiography, mainly due to Sir Hugh Trenchard, Chief of the Air Staff from February 1919. Trenchard argued that colonial law and order and Imperial security could be maintained more efficiently by a highly mobile air service (and at a fraction of the cost) than by traditional garrisons. Even as late as 1957, Viscount Templewood (Samuel Hoare), Secretary of State for Air in 1922, could write that Trenchard's policy was so 'novel' that hardly anyone at the time knew what it really meant.2 Without becoming involved in a Trenchard debate, we should point out that the idea of 'air control' was far less original in the post-war period than Templewood believed. The concept had been widely discussed since at least the end of the nineteenth century in both popular fiction and theoretical works; and in the immediate years before 1914 there had been, in North Africa, at least two attempts to subdue native forces by the use of air power. Thus in the early 1920s, when Trenchard deployed the major part of his force in the Middle East and on the North-West Frontier of India, he was merely putting into effect a practice which had long been suggested was one of the primary functions of an air service. From the end of the nineteenth century, the airship was a practical reality. The first man-carrying, navigable airship had flown as early