The Royal Air Force, Air Power and British Foreign Policy, 1932-37

Abstract

For a considerable period the progress of the rearmament of the Royal Air Force played a pivotal part in British policy towards Germany. The Royal Navy could only act in a defensive capacity in the event of a European war, by the very nature of sea warfare. In its offensive capacity, as a blockade weapon, sea power could only have a long term effect. Moreoever, the Royal Navy was a non-variable factor. Germany had no real chance of outbuilding the British at sea although the Admiralty did also have to bear in mind in its numerical calculations the Japanese threat in the Far East and, from 1935, the Italian threat in the Mediterranean. The British Army, meanwhile, had been run down almost to a care and maintenance position since the end of the Great War. If it again became involved in a major continental war it would be many years before a decisive victory could be won in the field. To a generation which considered the slaughter of the Somme and Passchendaele battles the inevitable outcome of a major land commitment the prospect of a repeated Western Front was fearsome. To the air enthusiasts, on the other hand, air power seemed to offer the only decisive answer to the problem of British involvement in continental war. A superficial glance at the amount of time and money spent on the rearmament of the RAF strike force might lead one to conclude that the politicians held the same view. Yet when war broke out only the Royal Navy considered itself anywhere near ready to fight a major war. Basically, the reason for this was that the British government never accepted the radical change in traditional British diplomacy implied by