Britain’s Air Marshals in W. W. II

This is a collection of thirty short biographies of Royal Air Force leaders – two-star air marshals and above – that held their rank in the Second World War. The author has written six previous biographies – individual or collective – of British military leaders from this period.

Rather than treating the RAF’s air marshals as a collective subject, the author has instead selected his thirty to include some of the marquee names that have already received stand-alone biographies or published memoirs, along with others that had significant service but may not have had much coverage in print, aside from obituaries. “Bomber” Harris, commander-in-chief of Bomber Command for most of the war, has been the subject of revisionist and re-revisionist treatments, perhaps second only to Marshal Haig of the Great War in the scope and duration of the biographic battling over his command. Some of the author’s subjects have not fared as well at the hands of historians, such as Leigh-Mallory. Some major figures did not get included, such as Air Chief Marshal Brooke-Popham, thoroughly defeated by the Japanese as Commander-in-Chief Far East. Others have received thorough treatment from biographers, including Dowding, Park, and Freeman. Some wrote memoirs that remain worth reading, such as Bennett and Embry, or are available in archives, unpublished, like that of Elmhirst (who did not make it into the author’s thirty).

Together, these biographies aim to present the story of the Royal Air Force from its beginnings through the Second World War and, through the inclusion of those that continued serving post-war, during the first decades of the Cold War. The biographies follow an introductory section with a short (31 page) narrative summarizing older published sources. There are no footnotes or other sources other than a short two-page bibliography that includes a limited selection of the extensive published literature and includes no journal articles, obituaries, primary sources or personal papers of any of the 30.

Churchill, who had fought with sword and lance as a cavalry officer at the start of his career, thought he understood the war in the air. He was the only major national leader to wear uniforms with a pilot’s wings. Churchill significantly interacted with airpower throughout his career, organizing the Royal Naval Air Service before the Great War, making the air threat central to his 1930s warnings about Hitler’s Germany and, in the end, depended on the success of RAF Fighter Command in the Battle of Britain to make his resolution to fight on until final victory a reality.

Churchill was nothing if not hands-on in his dealing with this group of airmen. He never forgave Dowding for being right, when he was wrong, over committing reinforcements to France in May 1940. With instincts honed by a lifetime devoted to history and politics, Churchill chose to appear in person to watch Park, in his 11 Group operations room, fight the decisive day of the Battle of Britain. It was Churchill who insisted that the RAF take the offensive in daylight over France in 1941-42, even though the combat results were invariably in the German’s favor. Churchill brought in a barrister – who knew much more about assessing evidence than navigating bombers – to conduct an assessment that demonstrated that the first year of the strategic bomber offensive had been largely wasted. It was Churchill to whom Harris promised, of the 1943-44 Battle of Berlin, “It will cost us 800 bombers. It will cost Germany the war”.

Yet Churchill only peripherally enters these thirty biographies. Each is presented as a stand-alone chapter, rather than Churchill providing a unifying thread. If any of these 30 airmen found Churchill insufferable or brilliant or, as General Alan Brooke found, both, you will not find it out here. Insights from diaries, letters or personal papers only appear at second-hand. So, despite the title, the reader is left unclear to what extent these thirty airmen were really “Churchill’s Eagles” and how Churchill’s interactions with them differed from those he had with British generals and admirals.

If you lead-off with Churchill in the title, you must not keep him off-stage, in the shadows, in your narrative. But Churchill is not the focus here. Instead, the author looks to summarize thirty careers. While the writing is generally clear and understandable, the author appears reluctant to use any direct quotations by or about his subjects. Even a short biography would benefit from more insights, even if there is not the scope for a full 360-degree assessment or a stand-alone treatment, especially for the more controversial figures, such as Harris or Leigh-Mallory.

At the same time, the author does not attempt to look for patterns, draw conclusions or generalize about the service of these thirty airmen he selected or about all the RAF’s wartime air marshals. This negates one of the advantages of collective biography. Nor is there an attempt to characterize their relationships with each other, before and during the war. He does not characterize their alignments and shared experiences. The majority were committed to maintaining the RAF’s independence from the other services and convinced that only strategic bombing would prevent future war from looking like the battles of 1916 on steroids. When one of this book’s subjects, Harry Broadhurst, a wartime fighter ace, took over Bomber Command at the height of the Cold War, it was a revolutionary event, commencing the twilight of the RAF’s bomber barons (a decade before their US counterparts followed them into the sunset). But as to what made this event possible, there is little insight presented.

Even though he does not have a lot of space to present thirty stories, the author attempts to show the context of each of them rather than present an in-depth picture. To cite one example out of many, when one of his subjects, upon completing pilot training in the Royal Naval Air Service in 1917, is fortunate in not being sent to the Western Front but rather to the aircraft carrier HMS Furious, we get a paragraph on that ship: interesting, but not really the subject at hand. Because each chapter is presented as a stand-alone essay, there is a lot of repetition when more than one of the thirty airmen are involved with the same events. This becomes counterproductive rather than simply tedious when contradictory information is presented in repeated reiterations of the same events.

The author has been poorly served by editing that includes multiple retellings of anecdotes, misspellings, inconsistent aircraft designations, and similar annoyances that should have fallen to a red pen before seeing print. The lack of an index makes it difficult for readers to track places and events across the thirty biographies. The 16 black and white photographs means that some of the thirty go unillustrated.

The misleading title aside – and these are usually beyond the author’s control – this is not a bad book, but, given the author’s experience, it could have been much better and used the insights afforded by a collective biography to give the reader information and insights on the events and institutions involved beyond career summaries. Books about airpower tend to focus on the airplanes rather than the airmen, so a chance to look at a broader picture is always welcome.

Military organizations have relied on hierarchical structures of command and authority for centuries. Throughout the shortened (1914-91) twentieth century, this has been challenged by rapid change, including the rise of airpower, which meant that technology – and competence in its use – and command authority often proved difficult to reconcile.

---///---

Note: Churchill's Eagles is also available in e-editions.

StrategyPage reviews are published in cooperation with The New York Military Affairs Symposium

www.nymas.org