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Identity, Politics and Technology in the RAF's History

DOI: 10.1080/03071840802670130 The ninetieth anniversary of the Royal Air Force gives an opportunity to stop and reflect on the nature of the forces that have shaped its development and evolution. The early years of the force, but to an extent its surviving sense of independent identity, owe a good deal to Viscount Trenchard and his work as Chief of Air Staff in the 1920s. Trenchard himself, even after his retirement in 1929, continued to take an active interest in the way air power was developing. In October 1943 he drafted a privately circulated pamphlet titled The Effect of the Rise of Air Power upon War which explored what air forces had already achieved and speculated on what they might achieve in the future. He concluded, not altogether surprisingly, that air power had already demonstrated its value. In the future, he wrote, ‘The Air will dictate strategy and therefore dominate all wars because of its over-all influence.’ It is interesting to reflect how confident air leaders were, half-way through the ninety years of RAF history, that air power above all was the strategic route of the future. Its development has in reality been subject to a number of factors that have acted to inhibit as well as promote the development of the force that Trenchard led in the 1920s. The first factor has been the role of politics and political decisionmaking; the second factor the relationship with the other two major services, army and navy; and third, the often unstable links between strategy and scientific and technological development. All of these elements in the RAF’s history have helped to create a specific sense of historical identity which has not always matched the optimistic prognosis presented by Trenchard in 1943. First, politics. It is a striking coincidence that the RAF was founded in 1918, just a few months before the coming of (almost) full democracy to Britain with the introduction of full male suffrage and suffrage for women over twenty-five. The history of Britain as a genuine parliamentary democracy covers the same historical period as the history of the RAF. Moreover, the RAF was founded in 1918 precisely as the service designed to protect the wider civil population from the impact of enemy air attack. Throughout the inter-war years, but more especially during the escalating international crisis of the 1930s, and again in the classical era of the Cold War in the 1940s and 1950s, the role of the RAF was to protect the home population either through effective air defence or by developing a powerful deterrent to discourage an enemy from contemplating attacks on the home front for fear of immediate reprisal.