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Elite opinion and defence policy: air power advocacy and British rearmament during the 1930s

Much has been written about the deep fear of aerial bombardment in inter-war Britain. Particular attention has been paid to the Government awareness of that danger during the late 1930s, when the threat of war advanced from the realm of military and academic speculation to the sphere of an immediate political concern. “Air power” and the concomitant possibility of aerial bombardment, to quote Correlli Barnett, then became an “obsession”; it pervaded Cabinet debates and dominated all discussions of rearmament at every level of the British decision-making process.2 Why this should have been so, is not always made clear. The Government's sensitivity to the air danger is more often assumed than explained, and comparatively few attempts have been made to analyse the root causes which were responsible for this fear in official circles. Particularly neglected, in this context, is the impact of public opinion. Broadly speaking, public opinion is considered to have played a generally negative role, retarding the process of rearmament when not obstructing it altogether. The interplay between the public's view of the “air peril” and that of the Government is thereby minimized. This article is designed to redress that balance. It aims to examine the degree to which the British public was itself sensitive to the air danger and the extent to which its fears were communicated to the men who formulated the country's defence policy. In so doing, it will argue that public opinion acted as a catalyst, affecting official views on defence policy and — in general terms — influencing the choice of the form which rearmament was to take.