Chapter CXLIX: The Consequences of a Failed Death Ray Part II.
Chapter CXLIX: The Consequences of a Failed Death Ray Part II.
One of the first tangible actions to come out of Air Minister Churchill's focus on radar and Bomber Command was the establishment of a Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Offence, a body intended as a counter-part to the existing scientific air defence committee (the Tizard Committee) which had done such sterling work on Chain Home. Given the RAF prided itself on being the most modern and 'high tech' of the services, and given the Air Staff's well known obsession with the bomber offensive and the power of bombing, it is often seen as surprising that they had not established such a body themselves. The nearest they had comes was the long standing Bombing Committee comprised of a fair mix of scientists and RAF technical officers and which had been working on various technical issues for a number of years, but the name of the committee is instructive on it's intent and it's many limitations. The Bombing Committee had done a great deal of work on what to do when an aircraft attacked a target (looking at bomb sights and similar) but nothing on how you got to the location or identified the actual target once there, let alone consider the possibility that the enemy may try and stop you. They had stretched themselves to note that aircraft were getting faster and flying higher and that this could cause problems, but identifying this issue was as far as they had got, or perhaps as far as they had been allowed to get by the Air Staff. The new committee had the brief to not only investigate issues such as target identification, navigation and possible enemy air defences, but then to develop solutions to the problems encountered, backed up by the Air Council and indeed the personal interest of the Air Minister himself. The Air Staff were particularly alarmed about this, worrying that the solutions that were proposed may not be compatible with their carefully determined ideal bombing doctrine, of course for the civil servants in the Air Ministry the fact that said doctrine was such a 'matter of faith' that should not be challenged by new evidence or analysis was just another reason to support the new committee.
The key figure on any government committee was the chair and not just because the body was typically named after them (the actual committee names were generally too long and unwieldy). A competent chair could direct what the committee did, or did not, look into and heavily influence any reports or recommendations produced; their assumptions would typically become those that the wider body worked under. There were strong arguments for appointing Tizard to the role given his success at chairing the Air Defence committee and the significant overlap in the relevant technologies, it would help ensure a minimum of duplication and that ideas and developments flowed freely between the two groups. Instead the Air Ministry chose a different chair, purportedly to avoid over-burdening the already very busy Tizard and to get a different perspective on the matter, ensuring that all avenues were investigated and that the committee did not just copy over the assumptions made by the air defence group. While there was weight to these arguments it must also be admitted that the choice also solved an ongoing civil service headache that had defied repeated efforts to resolve and that this undoubtedly played a role in the civil service recommendation, one which they were well aware the Air Minister would leap at. The recommendation was Professor Lindemann who had the qualifications and strong personality required so was a legitimate choice, however from the civil service perspective it was hoped it would also keep him too busy to interfere with the Air Council, reassure Churchill that his friend had an important role and keep 'The Prof' away from Tizard and so reduce the number of heated arguments considerably. The Air Staff were initially relieved to have a chair who they assumed would not probe too deeply into their strategic assumptions about bombing and so it proved, under Lindemann the committee would enthusiastically embrace the importance of strategic bombing. Their relief soon soured when it became clear that he would instead challenge them on almost every single other aspect of bombing and aerial operations, embracing a very expansive definition of 'scientific' to justify inquiring about everything from grand strategy to tactics and training. While it is likely he would have done an equally thorough job in other circumstances, it is undoubted that his rivalry with Tizard added a certain piquancy to the task, one he defined as pushing Bomber Command into embracing scientific and technical ways to ensure that that the bomber would once again 'always get through', even against a Chain Home type air defence network.
The Radar, Gun Laying, Mark I fully deployed with all aerials extended. The GL Mark I had been developed to provide ranging information to anti-aircraft guns, as range was considered the hardest input to estimate visually. The British Army could claim to have been the first of the services to properly investigate radar, the Army's Signals Experimental Establishment having constructed a lab bench prototype coastal defence radar as early as 1931. The War Office tended not to make this claim as it involved admitting that they then showed zero interest in the concept and reassigned the team, doing nothing further on radar until becoming aware of what the Air Ministry was doing. The scientists responsible for the abortive coastal defence radar were re-assembled as the 'Army Cell' and sent to the Bawdsey Research Station to investigate Chain Home and possible opportunities for the War Office from this 'new' technology. The GL Mark I would be the first tangible result of this and, despite the unfortunate start, the Army Cell and the other Army research establishments would make many valuable contribution to British radar research and development.
The Air Staff were not without bureaucratic countermeasures to this 'interference' as they saw it, there were countless ways they could have obstructed the committee and delayed it's progress all while appearing to work with it. In the event they would generally co-operate even with the more awkward questions and potentially embarrassing problems that emerged, making trial aircraft available and even encouraging internal debate on the issues discovered. This was not a result of any persuasive argument from Lindemann or pressure from Churchill, but due to the crisis of confidence that was afflicting Bomber Command and the bomber leaning members of the Air Staff. The Bomber Barons were well aware their preferred method of warfare was unpopular both with politicans and the general public, they were long practised at euphemistic descriptions to obscure the brutal reality of the way of war they proposed. But they had always believed that the cold calculus of war was in their favour, that when faced with the prospect of massive casualties the politicians would turn to the bombers and the 'knock out blow' that could end the war without a bloody land campaign or a slow and expensive naval blockade. The Abyssinian War had therefore come as a nasty shock, a quick and relatively low casualty victory for Britain without the use of airpower (or without the correct use of the right sort of airpower) was not in the plan. The situation in Spain was in some ways worse as that was in a bloody, high casualty stalemate, yet the Monarchists consistently refused to start strategic bombing and the Republicans hadn't either, both sides instead demanding fighters to protect themselves against the threat and tactical bombers to assist over the battlefields. It was becoming apparent that the political threshold for unleashing the bombers was far higher than the Air Staff had believed. To this existing concern had been added growing doubts about whether the RAF even could win the sort of war it wanted to fight. Air Staff planning assumed that once strategic bombing started the enemy would strike back in kind, so it would be a race to see which side could destroy civilian morale faster. In such a race size and composition of force was key, the more bomber aircraft you had the more bombs you could drop, which made the material situation concerning. In a European context the Luftwaffe was expanding massively and was building a large bomber force, one which the Air Staff automatically assumed could be turned to strategic purposes because that is what they would do in that situation. In contrast the post-Abyssinia defence review had seen RAF expansion focus on fighters and tactical aircraft for Strike Command leaving the RAF badly outnumbered in terms of 'useful' bombers , at least as far as the Bomber Barons defined 'useful'. Looking to the Far East things were worse, while there was no realistic possibility of Japan bombing Britain, there was also no real chance of the RAF being able to meaningfully bomb Japan. Quite aside from the logistical challenges of equipping and supply a bomber force there were a lack of bases and a lack of any bomber with the range, even if aerial refuelling worked as promised that was no panacea and vastly increased the logistical problems by multiplying the number of aircraft and amount of fuel required. Radar and the prospect of the enemy having effective air defence just made theses problem worse, at best radar could be expected to substantially increase losses and even that best case was a serious issue; the Air Staff already thought the bomber force was too small to do the job and that was assuming minimal losses.
HMS Saltburn, a Great War-era Hunt-class minesweeper which spent most of the 1930s serving as one of the tenders attached to the Royal Navy Signal School in Portsmouth. Her sole claim to fame came in December 1936 when the Admiralty Experimental Department used her as the trials ship for their new Type 79 radar, the first British radar set to go to sea and detect anything while afloat. Despite being something of a lash up the radar operators detected a Fleet Air Arm trainer at almost 20 miles and the light cruiser HMS Dunedin at five miles. The Admiralty had something of an 'inside track' on radar development, due to it's pioneering work in radio transmission the RN Signal School had developed silica valves which were capable of much higher power outputs than the then standard glass ones. As Chain Home depended upon existing technology (lacking the time and budget to develop their own) a relationships had been formed between Bawdsey and the Signal School, an exchange of ideas, equipment and technique. This had made the Signal School, and it's experimental department, the home of British naval radar. While naval radar would see rapid developments in power and range, the greatest contribution would not be any specific radar set but the Signal Schools work to solve very specific naval concerns about radar, as we shall see in later chapters.
The RAF response to all of this was very much in keeping with one of the oldest traditions of the service, which is to say it involved panicking about being broken up and abolished. The founding mission of the RAF was strategic bombing, the "independent means of war operation" that Smuts had described in his 1917 report that had led to the creation of the RAF and Air Ministry. If there was no political desire for the heavy bombing missions, and they would not be successful even if launched, and if radar and modern fighters could provide a defence against enemy bombers and so negate the deterrence role of the heavy bomber, then what was the rationale for the continued independent existence of the RAF? In the context of the time these fears were not completely unreasonable, the RAF had already 'lost' the Fleet Air Arm back to the Admiralty, had been over-ruled to see Strike Command formed and work worryingly closely with the Army and were involved in a long running fight with the Navy about Coastal Command and flying boats. If strategic bombing was disavowed by the government then it was not out of the question that Coastal Command would be moved to the Admiralty, Strike Command become a reformed Royal Flying Corps under the Army and the RAF reduced to a rump fighter defence organisation with a few transport aircraft. Indeed there was even an argument that as the Army already ran the Anti-Aircraft and Searchlight organisation that the fighters could be moved under their control as well and might as well have the transport aircraft as they only existed to move troops around anyway. That there were no serious proposals to carry out such a re-organisation, beyond the usual inter-service bickering and jostling, did not stop the Air Staff from worrying about it. Their default approach when feeling threatened was fear mongering about the terrible damage that bombing could do and arguing that only fear of British bombers striking back would deter a future enemy, but they had finally learnt this was counter-productive and just meant more money for Fighter Command and even less chance of politicians agreeing to such an "uncivilised" form of warfare. What the Air Staff realised was that they needed was a new string to their bow, a new 'independent mission' that was politically acceptable and could be carried out by the bomber force they had, not the one they wished for. The choice fell on industrial targets, specifically the key points of the enemy's economy that could cause maximum disruption by destroying the minimum number of sites, the very strategy in fact that Lord Trenchard had argued strongly against when setting the new service on it's path to area bombing and targetting civilian morale. As the staff worked to identify targets, develop requirements and understand the practicalities of this new strategy it soon became apparent this approach would require careful target selection, accurate navigation and precision bombing, and these were not exactly the skills that the Bomber squadrons had been rigorously and diligently practising up to this point.
Desmond Morton, former army officer, intelligence officer and confidant of Winston Churchill. After an appropriately murky and vague career as an intelligence officer in both SIS and the War Office by 1929 he had been appointed head of the Board of Trade’s Department of Overseas Trade. This entirely banal sounding organisation was in fact a front for another intelligence body, the Industrial Intelligence Centre (IIC) attached to the Committee of Imperial Defence. The IIC was responsible for the gathering and interpretation of intelligence about ’the state of industrial and economic preparedness of foreign countries to make war’ and soon picked up the role of planning offensive economic strategy in any future conflict, their plans for 'economic warfare' against Italy would have formed the basis of the British strategy against Abyssinia had Mussolini not sought terms. While the RAF had somewhat ignored the IIC previously, expecting to win any war long before blockade or economic pressure could be a factor, those planning the new precision campaign found their reports invaluable for highlighting the weak points and critical nodes of potential enemies. For the Air Staff the additional advantage of using IIC reports as a basis for their plans was that it tied the RAF into the wider Imperial defence strategy as agreed by the CID, hopefully making it harder for the other services to argue against the 'vital' role of heavy bombers.
The committee began by ordering a series of more realistic practice exercises with results measured by instrument and photo not crew or umpire 'judgement', while training bombs were used the bombers were flying at combat speed and operational altitudes. It should be explained that high altitude level bombing was not an easy task, not least because bombs do not actually drop vertically onto their target but followed a parabolic arc; a Whitely Bomber flying at 20,000ft and cruising at 160mph would have to release it's bombs almost 2 miles from the target to ensure a hit, even small errors in estimated height or speed would result in a large miss. The Air Staff had been vaguely aware of this issue but had long subscribed to the 'near miss' theory, the idea that even if the bomb missed the specific target it would still hit something and as the important enemy target was actually 'morale' it didn't particularly matter what that was, so it had not been considered it a serious concern. To this end they had a rather relaxed definition of 'on target', defining it as somewhere within 300 yards of the target, and even then planned on the basis of 90% of bombs missing this fairly large target. While the exercises proved that the bomber squadrons were mostly achieving this, it became apparent there was a considerable variation between the crack crews who achieved tolerable accuracy and the average crew who missed quite badly, indeed a worryingly high percentage missed the target range entirely. The committee also looked at the bombs being used and noted that the standard GP Mk.IV 500lb bomb had a structural blast radius of barely 30 yards, essentially any structure outside that range would experience little to no damage. On this basis they concluded that the 300 yard figure was fairly meaningless, a bomb that did no damage could not be considered 'on target', and worked out what the average accuracy actually was in terms of bombs that would actually do damage. Instead of the already very low 10% that the Air Staff had been assuming the real figure was estimated at nearer 1%, and that was for daylight bombing, with no enemy AA fire and clear weather conditions. Things were bad but not disastrous, there were certain targets so huge that even that level of accuracy was sufficient; the Krupp Factory Works in Essen covered over half a square mile, the wider steel and iron works another two, at that scale the "near miss" theory still applied. However the IIC reports had highlighted that many of the crucial points in German industry were fairly small facilities, the examples given was that the actual crucial parts of an oil refinery were a handful of key pieces of equipment, the rest was off the shelf items or easily replaced pipework. To damage a target such as that would require either greater accuracy or a very large number of bombers over the target.
As mentioned the Air Staff were lucky to get Lindemann as chair, his response to these revelations was not to reconsider if strategic bombing was actually a good idea but to hurl himself into improving the bomber force. As an immediate measure the RAF started looking at tactics, the Bombing Committee had been asking for a Bombing Development Flight since 1934 but had never been able to secure the funds required, this unit was finally activated and given a squadron of Whitley bombers to work with. While intelligence work was underway to determine if any 'future enemy' (code for Germany or Japan, with France also investigated as a general precaution) had radar or any air defence system, planning proceeded on the basis as if they did. The Bombing Development Flight would operate closely with the Bawdsey Research Station and the still officially experimental Chain Home stations, the bombers providing the 'test targets' the stations needed and the stations acting as the 'enemy defence network' for the bombers to try to penetrate, a friendly rivalry soon developed as both sides tried to outwit the 'enemy' with new tactics and tweaks to their technology. Work on new larger bombs was ordered, area attack had favoured large numbers of smaller bombs, industrial and logistical targets (machine tools and bridges) required larger bombs to destroy and for other targets larger bombs were more forgiving of 'near misses' due to the larger blast radius. A new modern bombsight was prioritised, the technical branch had known stabilisation offered the promise of perhaps double the accuracy of existing sights, but the Bombing Committee had prioritised incremental improvements on the existing models not a wholesale redesign. While work started on this in the hope it would be a relatively quick fix, the principles of stabilisation were well known, it would unfortunately prove far harder and slower to develop than anyone hoped. As this was still the Air Ministry a portfolio approach was implemented for the question of how to bypass any enemy air defences, while tactics might help in the short term a more permanent solution was sought through a twin track approach, one electronic and one about the aircraft themselves. On the electronic side work on what would become jamming and counter-measures was started, the teams having to start from the basic question of could an RDF type system even be deliberately fooled and if so how? The aircraft side was perhaps were the Air Staff felt more comfortable as the idea was to produce a bomber that could fly fast enough or high enough that even if the enemy could detect it, they couldn't do anything about it. Speed was a matter for a specification and engine design, and looking at it's engine portfolio the Air Ministry felt they had that in hand, operations at very high altitude were felt to need more research and this was continued.
Squadron Leader Francis Swain in his high altitude pressure suit at RAE Farnborough, in the background the Bristol Type 138A that he would take up to a hair under 50,000ft to reclaim the world altitude record for Britain. As should be clear one of the biggest challenges of high altitude operation was keeping the pilot alive, the aircraft themselves were comparatively simple to get up such heights whereas Swain's suit suffered a minor failure, which soon became a major one, during his record breaking flight, forcing him to rapidly descend earlier than planned. With minor modifications to the aircraft, and considerable changes to the suit, the record would be taken to 54,000ft by the spring of 1938 and pushed further up from there. Recognising that the suit was impractical, and not especially reliable, the work of the High Altitude Flight began focusing on pressurising the aircraft itself, an endeavour the wider Air Ministry keenly supported as they could see great advantage in high flying pressurised civilian passenger aircraft.
Lindemann had saved his most controversial suggestion for last, perhaps deliberately or perhaps because it was a logical outcome of the work described above. The future bombers were shaping up to be fast, flying at very high altitude, possibly equipped with a notional anti-radar device and with a highly trained crew well practised in precision bombing. All of that was likely to be expensive to procure and maintain, to say nothing of the costs in crew training and practice, making a massed bomber force a very significant expenditure when there were other big items in the defence budget. It was also noted that only a small number of crack crews were capable of actual pin point accuracy, it required not only great skill but also great co-operation and understanding between pilot and bombardier and that combination was rare. Therefore one possible solution was to have a small but exceptionally capable bombing force, the best possible crews in the best aircraft and just remove the 90% of bombers who would struggle to even hit the target range. This was an anathema to the Air Staff who had long believed tonnage was king and that a large mass of aircraft was required to both deliver that tonnage and to cover for losses. Lindemann however had marshalled his evidence well; the bombing exercise evidence, the hoped for changes in tactics to high altitude/high speed and the growing evidence from exercises that the "massed concentrated defensive fire" from bombers did not, in fact, stop enemy fighters from massacring bombers once detected on radar. The Air Ministry did not leap onto this idea, partly because it relied on several 'hoped for' technologies working and they were too cautious for that, but mostly because if the Treasury got wind of the scheme then the potential cost savings of a smaller force would doubtless be used as a stick with which to beat them. Instead it was accepted as an option, something worthy of investigation and future discussion, but definitely a longer term possibility worthy of a place in the development portfolio. In the short term however attention shifted to the existing specifications and design under consideration, many of these were reaching decision points and there was work to be done determining if the designs emerging were still suitable for the new direction of Bomber Command.
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Notes:
This one has taken a little while to wrestle into shape, but overall I am quite pleased with it. Onto the notes.
There was a committee of air offence in OTL, but Tizard got the chair and it achieved very little before war broke out. The Air Staff resented the intrusion, Tizard was far too busy on other things and the Air Ministry never pushed it, so it drifted. Obviously Lindemann was nowhere near the frame in OTL, but here he is a fairly obvious choice as for all his faults he is going to at least shake things up, which was frankly long over-due. Bombing accuracy figures are hand wave accurate, in part because the pre-war RAF didn't really bother that hard to measure, though the assumed 90% within 300 yards figure is correct, though even the official history doesn't quite know where that came from. The pre-war USAAC assumed 1% accuracy based on some actual measured exercises so that seems a reasonable benchmark for what the RAF could achieve in daylight when no-one is shooting back, though probably somewhat on the generous side because accurate bombing from 3.5miles up in the air with 1930s tech is really hard.
On the wider point the consequences of not only radar, but also the Abyssinian War and a very different Spain have all come together and the heavy bomber is looking a bad idea. The RAF is prone to occasional bouts of existential dread and paranoia that the other services are out to abolish it (which the leadership of the other services generally aren't, though the Treasury probably would in heartbeat just to save on senior officer costs) and without their prized "independent mission" they are feeling vulnerable.
Desmond Morton probably belong in a Le Jones AAR as he is a wonderfully shadowy figure with links to MI6/SIS, Churchill and a few front organisations that never existed. The IIC was real because the Civil Service took the idea of Economic Warfare very seriously, doubtless in part because they really wanted to avoid a repeat of WW1 and it seemed to offer a way of doing that.
Most of the proposed fixes for the bombers are either OTL proposals (bombing development flight only happened in 1941!) or things that did happen pre-war (new larger bombs, etc). Training bombers against Chain Home I don't think happened, but if seems bloody obvious and benefits both sides so I'm going with it. The High Altitude flight is delightfully mad, the very spindly Bristol Type 138 almost made it as photo but the suit was too good not to include. High altitude, and high speed, are definitely seen as the future.
Finally the brief hints of Army and RN radar work are OTL device which will crop up again, but this was getting a bit long so a photo and caption seemed enough. We might look at British AA and radar later, it is mostly OTL at the moment so not much to say, we absolutely will be looking at RN radar again as that is already diverging massively from OTL thanks to the hero of the Abyssinian War Admiral Fisher who is giving the programme the Admiralty support and resources it lacked in OTL.
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