Planning and Building the British Bomber Force, 1934–1939

Abstract

Students of planning may profitably ponder the myriad difficulties faced by the British aircraft industry in the decade before the outbreak of World War II. On a small civilian aircraft industry, provided with hardly any opportunity to gain military aircraft experience between World War I and the early 1930s, the Air Ministry tried to impose a nearly anarchic system of strategic military planning in which the very philosophy of the use of aircraft in war was at issue. Forced to work under conditions that included a “shadow industry” of civilian plant space that was theoretically capable of quick conversion to military aircraft production and that in the meantime turned out automobiles, the aircraft industry somehow ended up with two superb heavy bombers, the Halifax and the Lancaster, and a highly dependable prime contractor, A. V. Roe. Basing his narrative on both government and industry sources, Dr. Smith concludes that this was an outstanding example of British wartime “muddling through.”