Official History of the Royal Air Force 1935-1945 — Vol. II —Fight Avails [Illustrated Edition]

Denis Richards, Hilary Saunders

• Publisher: Lucknow Books
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781782893424
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Includes, 20 maps/diagrams and 23 Illustrations/photos
The Royal Air Force is the oldest independent air force in the world, having gained its spurs over the trenches of Flanders in the First World War it was officially established in 1918. However it was during the Second World War that it would achieve its greatest successes yet, from an inauspicious start following post war budget cuts it would rise to become a decisive factor in the campaign to remove the Nazis from Europe and the Japanese from mainland Asia. The three volume Official History gives a sound and broad narrative of all of the campaigns, actions and engagements that the Royal Air Force was party to across Europe, Asia, Africa and Australasia. The text was set out in manageable chapters, each dealing with a particular episode of the struggle against Fascism; and is written in an easy and accessible style free from the specialised vocabulary of flying or aerial combat.
This second volume covers the period - 1941-1944, including
The Fall of Burma
The Capitulation
The Continuing struggle during the Battle of the Atlantic
The Victory in the North African Campaign
The Capture of Sicily
The Battle of Monte Cassino and the Fall of Rome
The Bombing campaign against Germany gains momentum

CHAPTER I — Japan Strikes

On a bright morning in the early summer of 1925 three men, each of them at the head of his branch of the profession of arms, were sitting in conference in Whitehall Gardens. The subject of their discussion was the defence of an island, about the size of the Isle of Wight, situated more than eight thousand miles from the United Kingdom near the eastern entrance of the Strait of Malacca. Upon its southern shore lay a large, humid, opulent city, upon its northern the beginning of a naval base which in course of years was to be variously described as ‘the Gibraltar of the Far East’, ‘the Greatest Arsenal of Democracy in South Eastern Asia’, and ‘an impregnable fortress’. When completed at a cost of £60,000,000 it was stocked with naval equipment of every kind from a cap-band to a 15-inch shell and off it granite and concrete quays floated a dry-dock, 1,000 feet long and 132 feet wide, able to hold the largest battleship. In February, 1942, the base, the city and the island endured a siege of fifteen days. At the end of it, 70,000 exhausted defenders surrendered to 100,000 Japanese and passed into a captivity, so rigorous and brutal, as to bring about the death of more than half of them. The fall of Singapore was as great a disaster as British arms had ever sustained.

All this was seventeen years in the future when the three men sat at their deliberations that May morning in London. As they proceeded it became evident that they were not in full agreement. The subject of their discussion was how best to provide for the defence of the slowly growing docks and arsenals of the new base. It had been decided in 1921 to remove the main naval base in the Far East from its remote and exposed position at Hong King, and the Committee of Imperial Defence had had under scrutiny for two years the strategic problem provided by the greatly enlarged and continually expanding navy of Japan. Should Great Britain and that country fall to war, a more central and safer spot for the Far Eastern naval base was essential. The Committee thought that they had found it on the island of Singapore and their choice was confirmed by the Imperial island of Singapore and their choice was confirmed by the Imperial Conference of 1932. Two years passed and still the experts debated the best methods of defending it. The First Sea Lord and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff favoured that form of defence which a heavy fixed armament of 15-inch guns, accompanied by cannon of smaller calibre, could provide. It was well tried. In one form or another it had stood the test of many wars. Sir Hugh Trenchard, Chief of the Air Staff, preferred a more mobile and far-ranging scheme. To the guns, the submarines, the light surface craft, should be added a squadron of fighter aircraft, two of torpedo bombers and a flight of seaplanes. The installation of immovable 15-inch guns in a fortress where they could have no effect beyond their own range and ‘where, in many wars, they would exercise no effect whatsoever’ was, he maintained, a mistake if they were to be the only, or the principal, form of defence. Why not use the air force to strike at the enemy long before he came within their range? Torpedo bombers could do so far out to sea, 150 to 200 miles from Singapore and the great guns.

Such revolutionary notions provoked much discussion. A compromise was eventually adopted, and it was agreed that the first stage of defence should be represented by three 15-inch guns and a complement of ordnance of smaller calibre, and that the second stage should make provision for torpedo aircraft.

For ten years from 1927, the pendulum swing uneasily between guns and aircraft, economy and lavishness. By 1929 the floating dock was in position, and more guns had been added to the defence, and No. 205 Squadron, equipped with Southampton and later with Singapore flying boats, was stationed at Seletar near the still uncompleted naval base. In 1930, when large economies in expenditure on armaments had become necessary, it was reinforced by No. 36 (Torpedo Bomber) Squadron. The completion of the defence scheme as a whole, however, was postponed for five years. Then in 1931 the outbreak of what amounted to war between China and Japan gave rise to apprehensions which two years later led to the despatch of a second Torpedo Bomber Squadron, No. 100, to Singapore, and the leisurely construction of two airfields. At that time the Air Staff was probably alone in believing that Singapore might be assaulted from some other direction than from the sea. The enemy’s fleet—and it was obvious to all that the potential enemy was Japan—was expected to attack the base supported by carrier-borne aircraft. To combat this form of assault reconnaissance squadrons were necessary, backed by squadrons capable of a sustained offensive against shipping. They would be provided.

With Singapore primarily in mind, a dual-purpose torpedo bomber aircraft had been developed capable of employment both in frontier warfare and coastal defence. In time of peace squadrons equipped with this new type would form the air garrisons of Iraq and the northwest frontier of India, but should danger threaten in the Pacific, they could be transferred at short notice along the great strategic air route linking Baghdad and Singapore.

These then were the plans, drawn up and carried through by a succession of Chiefs of Staff over a period of twenty years, which, it was hoped, would be enough to guarantee the safety and fighting efficiency of this very important base. By the autumn of 1939 a total of three 15-inch (soon to be increased to five), six 9·2-inch and fourteen 6-inch guns were in position to defend the fortress, their arcs of fire covering a wide area of sea to the south-east, south and south-west of the island. To aid them, four bomber squadrons of the Royal Air Force, of which two were torpedo bomber, were ready with two flying boat squadrons to conduct that long range and flexible defence which Trenchard had so long and so strongly urged.

This situation endured through the opening months of the Second World War. In the last week of June, 140, however, the surrender of France caused a violent quickening of the tempo and events moved in a direction very detrimental to Great Britain and the Commonwealth, who found themselves carrying on the war unaided and with resources strained to the uttermost. It was in those melancholy circumstances that the Chiefs of Staff met in July and upon the last day of that month gave it as their considered opinion that the defence of Singapore must, in the absence of a fleet urgently needed elsewhere, depend primarily upon air power.

Germany controlled every European port and naval base from Narvik to Bordeaux. With the entry of Italy into the war, the position in the Mediterranean was precarious and the resources of the Royal Navy, great though they were, had been stretched almost to breaking point. This bastion of the Far East lay many miles outside the immediate area of hostilities and was designed to stand against a foe who had not yet declared his intentions and might, if fortune so will, never do so. Nevertheless, in planning every possibility must be considered, provision made for every contingency. To enable Singapore to be a firm base to be a firm base from which a fleet could operate, aircraft must, if possible, be provided for its defence. The Chiefs of Staff laid the Far East should consist of 336 modern first-line aircraft, supported by adequate reserves and the necessary administrative units. They must be ready to operate from Hong Kong to Calcutta and also from Ceylon. They were to assure the protection of all our interests in the Far East.

This appreciation was considered by the authorities on the spot and judged by them to be insufficient. On 16th October, 1940, a conference at which all Commands in the Far East were represented, urged that the recommended establishment of 336 aircraft should be increased to 566. This in its view was the minimum first-line strength required to meet our Far Eastern commitments. With an increase in air strength in Malaya, a corresponding increase in the army, largely to provide for the defence of the many new airfields it would be necessary to build, was also needed.

To put down requirements on paper, however, was one thing; to translate them into fightings, bombers and reconnaissance aircraft was another. The translation was never made. By 8th December, 1941, the day on which war with Japan broke out, only 362 aircraft belonging to the Royal Air Force had been gathered together. Of these 233 were serviceable.

This weakness in the air, due first and last to the neglect of the Royal Air Force in years of peace, was a reason, perhaps the main reason, why the Japanese were able to achieve complete and overwhelming victory in a campaign which lasted but seventy days. Throughout that brief space of time the squadrons of the Royal Air Force and the Royal Australian Air Force charged with the defence of Malaya were at no moment capable of dealing adequately with those opposed to them or with the naval and military forces of the invader. They had no modern aircraft with which to perform this task. That is the bald truth.

It may seem strange that so vital a bastion of the Empire as Singapore, keystone of our Far Eastern defences, should have been left to defend itself with outmoded weapons in an outmoded manner against the assault of an enemy fully alive to the implications of modern warfare and eager to translate theory into practice. That Singapore was in this lamentable condition was due in the last resort not to any failure in London to appreciate the significance of the air weapon but to the inexorable pressure of events. It had always been understood that, if Singapore were attacked, its defence from the air was to be secured by a prompt use of that most valuable quality of an air force, its flexibility. A chain of airfields, stretching from England to the Far East through the Mediterranean and India had been constructed, so that reinforcements of fighters and bombers could be sent in a matter of days to the fortress. That the chain might be interrupted or that the Royal Air Force might be fully occupied elsewhere had either not been contemplated, or it had been decided, quite rightly, to construct the chain while it was still possible to do so, in the hope that one day enough aircraft to make proper use of it would be forthcoming. When the crisis came, they were not; and the loss of Singapore was part of the price paid for the incurable habit of the English of allowing their armed forces in times of peace to fall far below the lowest level of safety.

This was clear enough, among others, to Duff Cooper, the energetic Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster who had been despatched by the Prime Minister of Singapore and the Far East three months before the war with Japan broke out. His orders were to report on the general situation in those territories of the British and Dutch Empires likely to be attacked, were Japan to join Germany. An extensive tour showed him the inadequacy of the defence and the difficulties facing the commanders on the spot. He did what he could by making strong representations, some of them direct to the Prime Minister, to remedy a state of affairs for which there was, in fact, no remedy.

On 18th November, 1940, Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham, a veteran of the First World War, took up his duties as Commander-in-Chief, Far East. Placed in operational control of the army and air forces, his instructions were on two points very definite. He was to do all that was possible to prevent war with Japan—’Avoidance of war with Japan is the basis of Far East policy and provocation must be rigidly avoided’, telegraphed the Chiefs of Staff in March 1941, and repeated this instruction in September—and to rely for the maintenance of the defence of the Empire in the Far East, ‘primarily on air power’.

A brief study of the area covered by his Command, which included Hong Kong, Borneo, Malaya, Burma, Ceylon and the Indian Ocean as far as Durban and Mombasa, convinced Brooke-Popham that the problem was, fundamentally, a naval one. Although the army and air force together might be able to defend many important bases and to repel an enemy, his ultimate defeat could not be brought about unless control of communications by sea was continuous and assured. To achieve this, air superiority over inshore waters was a necessity, and it was here that, knowing the weakness of his air forces, the Commander-in-Chief found himself in so grave a difficulty. Shortage of aircraft, though the principal, was not the only cause of his embarrassment. Problems connected with the attitude of the Services towards each other, with the Intelligence Service, with airfields, with the warning system, with air raid precautions, with co-operation with the Dutch in Sumatra and Java, jostled each other in his office. Compared with these, the fact that the headquarters of the army were five miles distant from those of the air force, that the Governor and other civil authorities were established in Singapore itself and the Naval Headquarters were thirty-five miles by road from the city, was of minor importance.

Brooke-Popham set himself grimly to his grim task. It took him very little time to discover that relations between the army and the air force were by no means happy; there was mutual jealousy and a mutual determination to avoid co-operation. It was not until the command of both Services had been placed in new hands and their headquarters provided with a Combined Operations Room that these troubles began to disappear. Relations on the other hand between the navy and the air force were goo. The fact was that all three Services had yet to learn, or rather to remember, that success in the conduct of a war, in which all three are involved, depends on co-operation, mutual and unrestrained.

There was, too, an almost entire lack of what is known broadly as Intelligence. In November, 1940, the Far Eastern Combined Bureau, established with the object of supplying information to all three Services, was in the charge of the Navy and located at Naval Headquarters. The information it produced had, not unnaturally, a degree of naval bias.

The most important weapon in the defence of Malaya and Singapore, the Royal Air Force, was in the hands of Air Vice-Marshal C. W. H. Pulford, destined a few months later to die tragically of exhaustion and malaria, a fugitive from a disaster he had been powerless to prevent. His duties were taken over on 11th February, 1942, four days before the end of the siege, by Air Vice-Marshal P. C. Maltby, who had been his assistant for some weeks, and who, together with so many of his officers and men, was to spend the rest of the war in a Japanese prison camp. Upon these two men fell the responsibility of conducting the war in the air above the tangled jungles of Malaya and the sultry sea that was her coasts. One had already almost reached breaking point, brought thither by nine months of unremitting labour rendered even more arduous by a severe shortage of trained staff; the other was a newcomer constrained to assume command in the midst of a campaign already lost.

Apart from a grave lack of suitable aircraft, Pulford was continually faced with the difficulty of constructing and maintaining suitable airfields. For this, the topography of Malaya was largely responsible. A rugged, heavily-forested mountain range runs down the centre of the peninsula, dividing the eastern from the western coastal belt and ending at Johore, opposite Singapore Island. The coastal belts themselves are cut up by many broken hills, the plains in between them covered by plantations of rubber or paddy-fields. Rainfall is heavy throughout the year and persistent cloud formations, clinging to the central range of mountains, are a severe handicap to the flight of aircraft from one side of Malaya to the other. Many airfields had thus to be built on the exposed east coast and several were sited in spots where their defence proved difficult, if not impossible. In particular, the landing grounds at Kota Bharu and Kuantan had been placed next to long and excellent sea beaches, a fact of which the Japanese were to take full advantage.

Despite unceasing efforts the construction of airfields progressed but slowly. There were eleven separate provincial government authorities in Malaya, with all of whom negotiations for the acquisition of land had to be conducted. Only when emergency powers had been invoked, were the delays thus caused brought to an end. Other and even more exasperating obstacles were a shortage of mechanical plant and of operators to drive and maintain a the few machines available, and a great lack of coolies. All labour was voluntary, and though a permanent labour committee existed to check expensive and wasteful competition between the Services and the Government departments, it could exercise no control over civilian firms which paid higher rates and showed little concern with problems of defence and little desire to co-operate. It had been dinned into ears, perhaps not as deaf as they seemed to be, that the production of rubber and tin was of the first and last importance and the inevitable conclusion had been drawn.

With such an attitude it is scarcely surprising that the Royal Air Force should have found the difficulties of airfield construction so numerous and so great. Nevertheless, by the outbreak of war, nine airfields were more or less fit for use in the north-west, three in the north-east, one in eastern, three in central and six in southern Malaya, though most of them still lacked facilities which in any other theatre of war would have been regarded as indispensable. There were in addition four on the island of Singapore itself, of which the most important was Seletar, close to the naval base. That at Tengah was completed on the day war broke out by the united efforts of officers and men stationed there. They laid 400 yards of metal paving in twenty-four hours.

Of the airfields so built, fifteen possessed no concrete runways but were surfaced with grass, a serious matter in a country where tropical rainfalls are frequent a...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• CHAPTER I - Japan Strikes
• CHAPTER II - The Fall of Singapore
• CHAPTER III - Sumatra and Java
• CHAPTER IV - Burma Falls
• CHAPTER V - Coastal Command and the Struggle at Sea:
• CHAPTER VI - Coastal Command and the Struggle at Sea:
• CHAPTER VII - Bomber Command and the Assault on Germany
• CHAPTER VIII - The Pressure Grows
• CHAPTER IX - Middle East: Crusader
• CHAPTER X - Middle East: The Crisis of 1942
• CHAPTER XI - Middle East: The Alamein Line and Decisive Victory
• CHAPTER XII - TORCH and Tunisia
• CHAPTER XIII - Casablanca and the Ruhr
• CHAPTER XIV - Now These Things Befell In Sicily
• CHAPTER XV - The Fight at Salerno
• CHAPTER XVI - The Path to Rome
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER
• APPENDIX I - Members of the Air Council, 1942-43
• APPENDIX II - Principal Air Commanders, 1942-43
• APPENDIX III - Royal Air Force Command Organization March, 1943
• APPENDIX IV - First-line Aircraft-British, German and Italian Air Forces
• APPENDIX V - Principal Operational Aircraft of the Royal Air Force, 1942-43
• APPENDIX VI - Principal Operational Aircraft of the German Air Force, 1942-43
• APPENDIX VII - Principal Operational Aircraft of the Japanese Air Force, 1942-1943
• APPENDIX VIII - Order of Battle, Coastal Command, 15th February, 1943
• APPENDIX IX - Order of Battle, Bomber Command, 4th March, 1943
• APPENDIX X - Order of Battle, Middle East Command, 11th November, 1941
• APPENDIX XI - Order of Battle, Middle East Command, 27th October, 1942
• APPENDIX XII - Order of Battle, Mediterranean Air Command, 10th July, 1943
• APPENDIX XIII - Glossary of Code Names & Abbreviations