Slessor: Bomber Champion

The Life of Marshal of the RAF Sir John Slessor, GCB, DSO, MC

Vincent Orange

• Publisher: Grub Street Publishing
• Year: 2006
• Print ISBN: 9781904943570
• eBook ISBN: 9781908117595
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

The acclaimed author of Dowding of Fighter Command details the life of one of the great strategic minds of the Royal Air Force. Born in India into a family of soldiers and diplomats, John Slessor made the first aerial attack on a Zeppelin. He went on to serve in the Middle East over the Western Front in World War I, and postwar on the North-West Frontier in India. In the inter-war years, under the influence of Sir Hugh Trenchard, he became a devout proponent of strategic bombing and a strong advocate of the importance of air support for ground forces. Through his writing and teaching he gained a reputation as a deep thinker, and as Director of Plans in the Air Ministry from 1937, was closely concerned with rearmament. As World War II began, he became a major cog in the policy machine. Serving variously as Head of 5 Group Bomber Command (1941), with Portal throughout 1942 and at Casablanca in 1943, his high point came as Head of Coastal Command in 1943 with the defeat of the U-Boats, and then in August 1944 with the tragedy of the Warsaw uprising. Post-WWII, he continued to influence thinking as an ardent opponent of the Soviet Union. His Global Strategy Paper in 1952 was arguably the basis of all strategic thinking until the end of the Cold War. Vincent Orange was given full access to Slessor's diaries, letters, papers, and all relevant official documentation. As he shows us in this biography, although Slessor had numerous shortcomings, he was able to overcome these difficulties and rise to the top of his service.

CHAPTER 1

EARLY DAYS

Oxford

John Cotesworth Slessor was born on June 3rd 1897 in Ranikhet, India: a military base in the Himalayan foothills, about 160 miles north-east of Delhi. Jack, as he was usually known, was the eldest of three sons and a daughter of Major Arthur Kerr Slessor (Sherwood Foresters) and his wife, Adelaide Constance Cotesworth¹. The family was full of soldiers, sailors, clerics and diplomats with strong Indian connections. A long tradition of service to church and state shaped Jack’s whole life. His grandfather, the Reverend John Henry Slessor, formerly a fellow of University College, Oxford, and rector for 45 years of Headbourne Worthy, near Winchester, had been born in 1821, only six years after the battle of Waterloo, in which his father (Major-General John Slessor, who died in 1850) commanded a battalion. When the reverend died it was said that his passing severed a link ‘with a bygone generation and with manners and customs fast fading into the dim past.’ He was a ‘ripe scholar, in politics a determined Tory, in his younger days a keen sportsman and athlete, a man of culivated artistic tastes, zealous for his church.’ If the last word were replaced by ‘the Royal Air Force’, these words apply precisely to Jack.

Major Slessor retired from the army in 1903 and settled his branch of the family in Oxford, where he had taken a second class degree in Classical Moderations at Christ Church in 1886 and a third in ‘Greats’ the following year. He was employed as steward by his old college for the next 25 years, responsible for catering, accommodation and porterage; akin to the manager of a grand hotel. His appointment reflected a tendency in public schools and colleges to appoint military men, in the hope of disciplining large staffs and rooting out such sins as stealing produce and taking bribes from local tradesmen. At the same time, he had to keep the fellows and young gentlemen happy, men who were inclined to complain long, loud and eloquently whenever dinner or the wines were less than perfect. He had a sharp temper, was on top of his job, and stood no nonsense from anyone.

According to Jack, the Major was ‘a good classical scholar, in addition to being a good soldier, an excellent gardener and a sound judge of vintage port.’ When the lease fell in of the buildings which then occupied the site on St. Aldate’s owned by Christ Church, it was the Major’s own idea to clear the site and keep it permanently free from further obstruction. ‘The result’, recorded The Times in a warm obituary, ‘has fully justified his foresight and tenacity, though even he, as were certainly his critics, must have been surprised at the full beauty of the aspect revealed by the clearance. Coming into Oxford over Folly Bridge, the visitor now has on his right a clear view of the Meadows across an agreeable walled garden and a collonnade; nearer at hand is a fine memorial gateway; and confronting him is the unbroken southern face of Christ Church, one of the best examples of Tudor architecture in the country.’ A memorial service in his honour at Christ Church Cathedral was attended by an impressive gathering of eminent Oxford persons.

According to cousin Priscilla, Jack was ‘an enchanting, fiendish little boy with curly hair and round blue eyes, a nanny’s terror.’ At three, he caught a bad cold. ‘I can’t do nothing with him’, his nanny complained a few days later, ‘he’s naughtier than ever. Every time I stand him up to dress him, he just falls down.’ He had in fact contracted poliomyelitis, which caused him to limp for the rest of his life.

Educated first at the Dragon School, Oxford, and then at a public school – Haileybury, near Hertford, north of London – Jack was ‘an idle boy’, in his own opinion, ‘with a capacity for making friends and getting a good deal out of life, but with a marked distaste for hard work.’ He had an uncommon talent for drawing and learned to love cricket, rugby and such rural pleasures as hunting, shooting, fishing, polo, camping and messing about in boats, although ‘two gammy legs’ (the result of polio as a child) meant ‘I could not spare a hand for a spear’ in order to enjoy pigsticking in India, nor could he manage all the strokes needed in polo. He had the happiest memories of being taken out ‘to listen to the nightjar on the heath or watch snipe and reed-warblers on the Lea Marshes.’²

The Slessors lived in Iffley Road, Oxford, and their garden ran down to the Christ Church cricket ground. ‘We looked out onto an expanse of smooth turf and beyond to the trees of Christ Church Meadows – hardly another building in sight.’ One summer afternoon, to mark a visit by Australian cricketers, Jack’s parents hosted a garden party: ‘the ladies with tight waists in long sweeping dresses and floppy picture hats and the men in flannels with straw boaters or panamas.’

Young Jack had vivid memories of the Oxford of his childhood. He recalled that ‘a Mr Morris kept a little bicycle shop somewhere near Magdalen… Horse trams still clanked down the High and hansom cabs waited for fares in St Aldate’s, their horses wore straw hats in high summer and tossed their nose-bags, scattering grain on the cobbles of the cabstand to the delight of the Oxford sparrows… Winter was fun. There was skating on the flooded meadows downstream of the Barges… members of the Bullingdon [an exclusive dining and sporting club] in mud-splashed pink coats cracking hunting whips in Tom Quad to the disgust of Mr Sidney Owen [an eminent Classical don]; and everywhere young men in shorts and sweaters with great scarfs round their necks walked or bicycled between their colleges and the innumerable playing fields.’ Sadly and unlike his father, Slessor would never be among their number. Quite apart from missing the social delights of student life at Oxford, his active mind and ready pen would have benefitted greatly from the discipline of writing numerous essays for dons who (presumably) placed a higher value on chronology and concise argument than Jack ever did.

Haileybury

The child, they say, is father to the man, so we see already four aspects of Slessor’s personality that would never change. Firstly, he was devoted to a vast, influential network of family and friends, a network he kept in good repair. Secondly, that network inspired in him a lasting devotion to imperial service, particularly in British India. Thirdly, he admired the masters and boys – past, present, future – of public schools, his own Haileybury above all. Such schools, he believed, produced leaders and fostered a ‘selective and controlled nepotism’ of which he had good reason to approve. And fourthly, he loved outdoor activities despite his physical handicap, which he stubbornly ignored until near the end of his life.

While camping with a friend near the Thames at Lechlade in Gloucestershire on August 6th 1914, Slessor learned that Great Britain was at war with Imperial Germany: ‘I suppose we must have seen something in the papers some weeks before about some unknown potentate who had been murdered at some place of which we had never heard; but the idea of war had never entered our heads… I was foolishly, though perhaps naturally, elated. Born with the army in India of a family with a tradition of military and naval service, educated at a school that had started as the nursery of the men who made British India, I had always taken it for granted – in an age when Kipling was writing Recessional and Elgar his Land of Hope and Glory – that wider still and wider would our bounds be set. As for war, well, that was something that did happen sometimes; was not my father away fighting a war on the North-West Frontier when I was a baby?’ And there was a rousing leaving song to help Jack on his way:

‘I’m one of the fellows that’s leaving –

I can’t stay at school any more;

But I’ve hardly a moment for grieving,

For there’s work to be done for the corps.

I pity the chaps – they can’t help it perhaps –

Who’ve never yet shouldered a gun;

It gives you a taste of things to be faced

When schooldays are over and done.’³

Like many other boys of his generation, Slessor had a ‘boon companion’ who was killed during the Great War. Of the 46 boys in his house at Haileybury in 1913, 20 were dead within five years – he knew all their names – but that terrible statistic is easily matched in schools throughout Britain (and elsewhere in Europe). Nowhere else in the countless words Slessor has left us does he write with anything approaching the same passion or clarity as when he describes his friendship with Revere Osler – so named in honour of his direct ancestor, Paul Revere, but always known as Tom or Tommy.

As we know from all the books published about the world wars of the 20th century, two generations of young men lost friends 50 years before their due time, friends who would never grow merely ordinary, let alone old, fat and boring. ‘I often think it strange’, Slessor wrote in 1968 (when he was 71), ‘that the one above all to whose loss I have never been able to reconcile myself is the boy who was my boon companion in the years before the Kaiser’s War. I still have only to close my eyes to see him and hear his voice as clearly as if he was in the room with me, though he has been gone these 50 years, killed as a gunner subaltern in the Ypres Salient.’⁴ So many boys of Slessor’s generation would grow old with a similar ache in the heart, a memory frozen and unfading for an intensity of emotion rarely matched in later life.

CHAPTER 2

THE GREAT WAR

Zeppelin hunter

One day in May 1915, not yet 18 years old, Jack Slessor visited a room in the War Office, Whitehall, London, seeking a commission in the Royal Flying Corps. His relatives and family friends had unsuccessfully heaved on strings for him and he had himself failed dismally to grasp the workings of a petrol engine in Mr Morris’s new garage in Longwall. Undaunted, however, he persisted and was now about to be ‘squeezed in through the back door’, despite a medical report declaring him permanently unfit – because of his lameness – for any form of military service. One of the officers in the room, Lieutenant-Colonel Willie Warner, happened to be a brother officer of Slessor’s uncle. Of this, Slessor later remarked, ‘Perhaps that is why ever since I have been convinced that judicious and controlled nepotism is the best method of selection of officers.’

Some five months later, in October 1915, having learned to fly – ‘the most glorious sensation I know’⁵ – he was a proud young pilot ‘sitting at the end of a telephone beside my BE 2c in a canvas hangar on a stubble field at Sutton’s Farm [Romford, Essex, later to be Hornchurch, one of the RAF’s most famous fighter stations], while a couple of Zeppelins bumbled through the murky darkness overhead.’ Warner rang Slessor from the same room where nepotism had triumphed, ordering him to take off and look for those Zeppelins. ‘It was pitch black and there was a fog like a blanket’, he later wrote to his mother. ‘At 9.30 pm, the fog was a bit clearer and I decided to go up. I was carrying four eight-pound powder bombs in a rack under the machine with a patent releasing gear, and six inflammable bombs… I had not been up ten minutes and was about 3, 000 feet high, still climbing, when I saw a Zep over Thamesworth somewhere, with the searchlights on him. He looked like the underside of a salmon and I judged he was about 8-9, 000 feet up. I climbed up as fast as I could, but lost him after about three minutes and searchlights got off him and I never saw him again.’

This was ‘the most ambitious raid yet launched against London, and the costliest in casualties’: five Zeppelins took part and between them killed 71 Londoners and injured a further 128. The Zeppelin spotted by Slessor was L.15, commanded by Kapitänleutnant Joachim Breithaupt, who ‘achieved the most competent performance of the night.’ He reached central London at 9.25 pm, dropped 30 bombs between the Strand and Limehouse, and flew safely home. But five months later, during another raid on March 31st 1916, L.15 was damaged by ground fire, forced to ditch off Margate, and the crew saved from drowning by a British destroyer. In November, no fewer than 353 gunners were each awarded a gold medal for their joint effort in bringing down the first Zeppelin destroyed over the British Isles.

Having lost his ‘salmon’ and with it the prospect of his own gold medal and certainly a decoration, Slessor cruised about until 11 pm looking for another target, when he was signalled to land after 90 freezing minutes, mostly at 10, 000 feet. He found the mist thicker than ever when he got down to a hundred feet, and all he could see of the flares was an orange haze and the searchlight dazzled him, ‘so I landed sort of sideways’ and broke the undercarriage. Glad to be alive and undamaged, he ended a letter to his mother on a chirpy note: ‘Did you see in the paper this morning that only one aeroplane saw a Zep, but could not overhaul it? Well, that only one was me. Wow! Wow!’ Some 40 years later, no longer chirpy, he harshly described his brave and determined effort as ‘a very amateur and wholly ineffectual encounter.’ True enough, but given his inexperience as a pilot in broad daylight, let alone in a London fog at night, flying a poorly-designed aircraft equipped with inadequate weapons, not even Biggles could have done any better.

On the evening after his ‘sideways’ landing, Slessor was driven from Farnborough through the East End of London, where several bombs had fallen, in a lorry carrying spares to repair the damage to his aircraft. ‘I and my little party were mobbed’, he wrote in 1966, ‘and had to get a policeman to stand on each running board of the tender to get us through a crowd which it is no exaggeration to describe as panic-stricken.’ If so, the crowd had good reason: nearly two hundred Londoners were killed or injured that night; the defences – ground and air – achieved precisely nothing; and Londoners could expect suffering and destruction of property on a similar or greater scale from that night on. In 1939 he recalled Hastings Ismay (Assistant Secretary, Committee of Imperial Defence) saying to him: ‘You know, Jack, I really shudder to think of the effect on our easy-going, peaceable people of being subjected to this sort of thing.’ Slessor agreed. This ‘boyhood experience’, as he described it, helped to shape his subsequent enthusiasm for the bomber as a decisive weapon in war.

The Western Front

A few weeks later, young Jack was sent to Egypt and on to Darfur where he was wounded and shipped home. He made a good recovery during July 1916 and was then employed at Northolt, in north-west London, as an instructor. In January 1917 he was awarded a Military Cross for his deeds in Darfur and appointed a Flight Commander in 58 Squadron, forming at Cramlington in Northumberland, but broken up to allow reinforcement of squadrons currently being hammered in France. He recalled ‘a riotous farewell guest-night, in which I was impelled backwards through a window by Commander Max Horton from the submarine depot at Blyth.’ Horton became head of Western Approaches when Slessor was head of Coastal Command in the next war: ‘one of the great figures in naval history, he was enormously powerful and a terrific chap in a guest-night rag in his younger days.’ Was there something of Shakespeare’s Justice Shallow in Slessor when he reached middle age and wrote his memoirs? He usually sees those acquaintances who later became famous – at least in military circles – as larger-than-life characters, and perhaps places himself closer to them than he actually was.

Lieutenant Slessor joined 5 Squadron at Acq (near Arras) on the First Army front as a Flight Commander in May 1917. During that time, he flew a two-seater biplane: the RE 8, popularly known as the ‘Harry Tate’, in honour of a famous comedian of the day. ‘This ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Plates
• Foreword
• Prologue Bomber Pilot, May 1916
• Chapter 1 Early Days
• Chapter 2 The Great War
• Chapter 3 Flying a Desk in Whitehall
• Chapter 4 The Next War Looms
• Chapter 5 Planning for War
• Chapter 6 Waging War
• Chapter 7 Reality Breaking In
• Chapter 8 Bomber Commander
• Chapter 9 Back to Whitehall
• Chapter 10 Coastal Command and the Appalling Gap
• Chapter 11 The Gap Closed
• Chapter 12 Reluctant Commanders: Eaker and Slessor in the Mediterranean
• Chapter 13 Grinding Towards Victory
• Chapter 14 Troubles Come in Threes: Yugoslavia, Poland, Greece
• Chapter 15 Slessor’s Next Appointment
• Chapter 16 The Succession
• Chapter 17 Chief of the Air Staff
• Chapter 18 Sage of Yeovil, 1953-1956
• Chapter 19 Disaster at Suez
• Chapter 20 Cassandra of Yeovil, 1956-1968
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements
• Sources
• Notes