RobertSnozers wrote:his betrayal of Bomber Command etc etc.
I happen to have been re-reading, for the first time in ages, Max Hasting's 1970s history of RAF Bomber Command. Hastings says something that I think is also true about Cameron, Osborne, Johnson et al.
In 1939 RAF Bomber Command was supposed and expected to be highly efficient at three things. Shipping strikes and precision bombing by day and accurate navigation and area (by which was meant able to hit a big factory) at night. Everyone knew it was excellent at those things because from pilots and navigators to senior command it was packed with "the right sort of chaps". Public school educated men who would be good at and succeed at whatever they chose to do because chaps like them always succeeded because they were the kind of chaps who always succeeded. Very bad form to show you'd actually put any effort in of course, success had to be seen to come naturally and inevitably. That they were in the posts they were in proved they were good at their jobs, otherwise other public school chaps wouldn't have given them the jobs in the first place.
1939/40 revealed the truth. Bomber Command was next to useless in daylight and took heavy casualties. The aircraft they had simply weren't up to the job nor were the tactics. As for night bombing, the Germans seriously wondered at one point why the RAF seemed to be indiscriminately scattering bombs all over western German towns, fields and woodlands pretty much at random. Bomber Command's night navigation was so poor the Luftwaffe often couldn't even guess what the intended target had been after the raid.
Fighter Command, another flying club for public schoolboys, also took completely unexpected heavy losses due to ineffective and counter-productive tactics at the start of the war.
Confident, successful and obviously good at their jobs public school chaps undone by encountering reality. Sound familiar?
As for 1940, the greatest Churchill myth of all is that "Britain stood alone". Of course it did, so long as you ignore Canada, New Zealand, Australia, India and a huge chunk of Africa from Egypt in the north to South Africa. Between 1939 and 1945 India recruited the largest entirely volunteer army the world has ever seen, something like a couple of million volunteers. Plus the Poles and Czechs who joined the RAF and army to continue fighting the Nazis, of course.
Yet there are people, including some who were alive at the time, who insist that the "non-white" Commonwealth and Empire "did nothing at all" in either world war. Even when, like my mother, they have letters from their father, who served in the Mesopotamia campaign, praising the Indian and African troops that made up over 2/3 of the army he was part of.
I'm getting tired of calming down....
