Soldier at Bomber Command

SOLDIER AT BOMBER COMMAND

By the same author

A Subaltern’s War

(under the pen-name of Charles Edmonds)

A History of England

(with J. Hampden Jackson)

The British Overseas

Life and Work of Rudyard Kipling

Soldier from the Wars Returning

SOLDIER AT

BOMBER COMMAND

by

Charles Carrington

with an introduction by

John Terraine

Acknowledgments

My thanks are due chiefly to my senior and junior colleagues, many of them now dead, whose names appear in this book, and who supplied so much of the information it contains. I now record my particular debt to those who have helped me to put it into shape: especially (the late) Viscount Amory KG, Mr Brian Bond, Mr Cecil Gough, Major N. Hall, Mr Michael Horniman, Major-General J. M. McNeill, (the late) Sir J. C. Masterman, (the late) Brigadier B. C. Molony, (the late) Sir Archibald Nye, the Rev. Father (formerly Brigadier) E. B. Smith, (the late) Brigadier John Stephenson, Mr John Terraine, Group Captain W. Urmston, Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham, and the staff of the Imperial War Museum. I also thank Mrs H. Anderson and Mrs Julia Small for secretarial help. And, last but not least, special thanks to my neighbour and friend, Mrs M. Cave, for her continual advice and encouragement.

Finally, apologies to my RAF friends if a mere soldier has misunderstood their technicalities or misused their private language.

C. E. Carrington

October, 1985

Leo Cooper is an independent imprint of

the Heinemann Group of Publishers,

10 Upper Grosvenor Street, London W1X 9PA

LONDON  MELBOURNE  JOHANNESBURG  AUCKLAND

First published in Great Britain 1987

Copyright © Charles Carrington 1987

ISBN 0 850 52081 9

Printed and bound in Great Britain by

Mackays of Chatham Ltd

Chatham, Kent

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

by John Terraine

Charles Carrington ‘went for a soldier’ at the age of seventeen, in 1914; he saw the Somme in 1916, a piece of Passchendaele in 1917 and a somewhat unappealing piece of England in 1918. Afterwards, under the pseudonym of Charles Edmonds, he wrote one of the classics of that war, A Subaltern’s War. In 1965 he returned to the subject with Soldier From The Wars Returning. The First World War became, as for so many men of his generation, the central matter of his life; they were all, as he said, ‘united by a secret bond and separated by a mental barrier from their fellows who were too old or too young to fight in the Great War.’

What Carrington had to say about the war was, both for the Thirties and the Sixties, somewhat electrifying material; it was strikingly at odds with what was in the first period known as the ‘Disenchantment School’, and whose later manifestations have earned it the title of ‘The Boo-hoo Brigade’. In A Subaltern’s War he wrote:

In this story of the war there will be no disenchantment. No corrupt sergeant-majors stole my rations or accepted my bribes. No incompetent colonels failed to give me food and lodging. No casual staff officers ordered me to certain death, indifferent to my fate.

In Soldier From The Wars Returning he added:

I speak of the Somme Battle as I saw it, and as it affected the soldiers I knew. … We were not intimidated by the war of attrition.

Such sentiments appalled those whom another regimental officer called ‘the marrow-freezing agents of peace for all time’ whose favoured style was ‘piling corpse on corpse, heaping horror on futility’.¹ To me, however, what Carrington had to say seemed to make perfect sense, and to explain what would otherwise be inexplicable – how such large numbers of men were able to endure what they did endure and ultimately win the great victories which crowned their achievement. Charles Carrington became a most valued mentor in all that I wrote about the First World War; he also became a valued friend.

A second war came, and once more he ‘went for a soldier’; now, however, the subaltern of 1914 was a Field Officer, a lieutenant-colonel. And the fortunes of war dictated that he, like so many others, would spend most of his war in England. They dictated also that he would spend the bulk of it as a liaison officer with the Royal Air Force, and be much concerned with a subject which, in 1939, was not at all favourite with the RAF: Army Cooperation (or ‘Air Support’). In the First World War, Army Cooperation was what the Royal Flying Corps and the bulk of the infant Royal Air Force had been all about. In an artillery war, the assistance that the flying arm could bring to the gunners became crucial; days when the weather prevented flying were bad days for the guns, and bad days for the guns were very bad days for the infantry. When the war was over, however, all three Services made haste to brush it under the carpet, to dismiss it as an aberration, and forget the lessons it had taught; part of this process, as Sir Maurice Dean has said, was that ‘Between 1918 and 1939 the RAF forgot how to support the Army.’²

It was fundamental doctrine, between the wars, that the RAF’s true function was not to provide powerful and effective support for the other two Services, but an alternative to them. Instead of the long-drawn-out perils and discomforts of war at sea, and the squalid, costly battering of ‘the trenches’, air warfare, properly practised, offered a means of striking straight at the vitals of an enemy nation, bypassing its armed forces to destroy its war economy. Bombing became the be-all and end-all; even fighters to oppose enemy bombing were regarded by the air purists as a waste of precious resources. Those RAF officers (very few) who thought Army Cooperation worth specializing in did not win favour or reward.

The war itself, however, had other lessons to teach. The first of these, very quickly in 1939, was that Bomber Command’s operational plans were quite impracticable; with its existing equipment and methods, it was simply not able to perform what it had intended and promised. The second lesson was not long delayed: first, with maximum humiliation, in Norway, and then, with not much less, in France, it became apparent that an air force which was not capable of playing a major rôle in a decisive land battle was, quite simply, not much use to the war. As I said in my book on the RAF in the European war, at the moment when the course of the war and the fate of the world were being decided,

years of penury and false doctrine (both political and strategic) had reduced the RAF to a condition of virtual irrelevance.³

The truth, which is now so much easier to perceive than it was in the hurly-burly of the times, is that only fighters in large numbers could have affected the issue of the Battle of France, and only fighters (in barely adequate numbers) succeeded in averting defeat in the equally decisive Battle of Britain. They, not the bombers, proved to be the true be-all and end-all. What, however, did become clear at once was that, in some fashion, the RAF had better be studying Army Cooperation once more. The distaste for the whole activity lingered on, despite all the very obvious teachings of Norway and France, and the triumphant example of the Luftwaffe not only in those theatres but earlier, in Poland. So the RAF’s solution was to tuck the matter away, rather as governments tuck awkward subjects away by appointing Royal Commissions; with the cordial support of the equally bewildered Army, the RAF set up a special Command to handle the tiresome business: Army Cooperation Command.

Charles Carrington’s liaison rôle had begun at the Army Cooperation School at Old Sarum; he returned to Army Cooperation after Dunkirk, but did not continue along this promising line. By the time the new Command came into existence, he had taken up his liaison duties at Bomber Command, which could be described as its very antithesis. How he fared there, and how he continued to promote the art and science of Army Cooperation in that unlikely capacity, it is best for him to relate. It is an absorbing story.

With some sorrow, I find myself (most unusually) disagreeing with him on two points. First, he roundly asserts that the reorganization of Army Cooperation ‘took place in Britain, not in Africa’, as is generally supposed. I do not for a moment dispute the value of the work that was done in Britain in 1940 and afterwards or the progress made towards a proper system. But in war there is no teacher like war itself, and the vicissitudes of the war in the North African Desert lost no time at all in rubbing both the RAF’s and the Army’s noses in the realities. The most instantly perceived reality was the one already amply demonstrated in Norway and France: that the sanction of all effective air action, including Army Cooperation, is air supremacy – which always means fighters. Only in Africa, for a change, it was at first the British who obtained it; in Operation Compass (December, 1940 – February, 1941), Army and RAF headquarters were side by side, their cooperation was complete, the RAF’s ascendancy over the Italians was absolute, and General O’Connor was thus able to win the most brilliant British victory of the war.

Thereafter, as always, there were fluctuations; in East Africa cooperation was excellent; in Greece it was virtually non-existent; in the Desert an admirable system (very closely resembling what was being evolved in Britain) was worked out at an inter-Service conference and embodied in a firm Directive in September 1941 – but no cooperation can be effective if one party to it collapses, which is what the Eighth Army too frequently did in the face of the Afrika Korps. However, the school of battle was strict and compelling; every breakdown had to be repaired, and by late 1942 there was a definite and fruitful fusion of UK and Middle East experience which laid down the lines for future progress in Sicily, Italy and North-west Europe. In every theatre, the sine qua non of success was air supremacy.

My second disagreement with Charles concerns Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, who was AOC-in-C, Middle East, during the critical period. ‘It does not appear that he took much part in the long struggle over Army/Air requirements, or in the work of reorganization,’ says Charles. I think the opposite is true; I can think of no RAF officer who did more to promote effective Army Cooperation. Three vital perceptions stemmed from Tedder, at times when they escaped the notice of many important men. First, as early as June, 1941, he perceived that the whole Middle East campaign was a combined operation calling for the utmost inter-Service cooperation – and this, of course, proved to be true of the war itself. Secondly, in the crises of the Middle East war, he perceived what was withheld from the RAF at home until the very eve of OVERLORD: that a critical military operation requires the cooperation, not of a special part of an air force, but of the whole available force, every type and every function. It is not possible to exaggerate the importance of this insight. And finally, he was one of very few to appreciate the disciplines of coalition war, which call for cooperation not merely with another Service, but with the Services of other nations. It is an impressive contribution.

However, the day is not yet, nor ever likely, when historians agree upon all matters. We make our own contribution as best we can, and the special quality of this one is the sharp close-up view it offers of unfamiliar territory – and also the recapture of an atmosphere which is almost inexpressible, the atmosphere of a country in deeper peril than it ever knew, trying to unravel the mysteries which entangled it. Because these were so alive for Charles, they live again for us. And in that connection I would urge the reader – this is my last word – by no means to ignore the brilliant Appendix in which he recounts his nineteen days at the ‘sharp end’ of his war.

John Terraine

¹Sidney Rogerson, Twelve Days, Arthur Barker, 1933.

²Sir Maurice Dean, The Royal Air Force And Two World Wars, Cassell, 1979.

³John Terraine, The Right Of The Line: The Royal Air Force in the European War, 1938–1945, Hodder & Stoughton, 1985.

Preface

In a former book, Soldier from the Wars Returning, I wrote about a young volunteer of 1914 who passed through a typical experience ‘in the trenches’ with no distinction other than survival, unhurt, for a longer term than most. He knew no secrets and had no friends in high places. The unique feature of that war was its dreadful monotony; millions of men endured repeated bouts of danger and discomfort ‘in the line’, relieved by spells of camp life ‘out in rest’, and punctuated by bloody battles, each of them very much like the last, with little difference in style whether you were British, French or German. For us the emotional development was uniform, from the sincere enthusiasm of 1914 (untainted by propaganda since there had been none), through the dogged resolution of the middle years, to the sudden unexpected victory and the hysterical reaction of the armistice season. The consequence of this ordeal was that the soldiers drew together as initiates, possessing a secret that could never be fully communicated to outsiders. Fifty years after the War, their reunions were private parties with much joking and laughing; they rather resented the doleful image in which they were displayed by young historians who had not been born in 1914.

None of these phenomena reappeared in the Second World War, into which we drifted unwillingly and out of which we slowly emerged to face an unpromising future; but the process of the War had been highly dramatic with sudden changes of scene and tempo. Except on the Russian Front, of which we in Britain knew little, there was no massed slaughter in ‘cannon-fodder’ battles. The War was fought, mostly, by bands of highly trained technicians in air crews, gun crews, tank crews, small-boat crews. I do not imply that there was less opening for simple valour. I rather think there was more, but there was no sharp division between the soldiers and the stay-at-homes, and accordingly no psychological cleavage in the nation. The man in uniform might be ‘chairborne’ (like me), living in safe country quarters, while that civilian sitting at the next table might be a hero, or heroine, of the Resistance or the Blitz. In the First War, it seemed, only one soldier, T. E. Lawrence, had escaped from the trap in which we were all caught, high and low alike, with the result that he became a national myth, whereas in the Second War there were hundreds of ‘Lawrences’, some of whom crossed my path, and were all different.

These technicians and élites mostly had secrets to guard, though few had an extended knowledge of other men’s secrets. The First War had been explicit, its contours and tones having been obvious and dreadful. The only vital secret was always the same: when and where would be the next battle? In the Second War, beneath the clash of combat there proliferated an underworld of activities conducted by private armies, resistance fighters, spies and double-crossers, scientific inventors – often competing with one another – groups of amateur saboteurs, some of them overpowering in effect and others impotent or futile. Each of the Allies, each of the Services, promoted its own undercover plans in jealous privacy. The secret struggle that I attempt to describe in this book was political, not conspiratorial, an inter-service rivalry about the way in which the War should be won, each group of masterful leaders being supported by a powerful bureaucracy. No doubt the Royal Navy was, as ever in our past history, the Senior Service; but who came second? The Army, which had borne such loads, won such victories, encountered such criticism in 1914–18, or the new young RAF, determined that any Second World War should be theirs? Let the Army be the Junior Service this time. The following schedule of the Second World War, from the standpoint at which I observed it, has little to say of the Navy. There it was, still the Senior Service, while the other two competed for second place.

The weakness of our military effort in the first half of the Second World War and the measures taken to set things right in the second half of the War may be summarized as follows:

1

From September, 1939, to August, 1942, the Army rarely won a battle and was defeated in every campaign: in Norway, in France, in Crete, in Malaya, in Burma, even in North Africa (after initial successes), always for lack of adequate air support. And why? Because the RAF, trained and equipped for another type of battle (which it won), could not give much support to the Army and grudged what it gave. The RAF was two years ahead of the Army in its production programme and the Army never made up the leeway.

2

The Chiefs of Staffs’ papers from April, 1941, to April, 1942, record a direct confrontation on Army/Air Requirements between the CIGS (after November, 1941, Sir Alan Brooke), and the CAS, Sir Charles Portal. Was the RAF to divert a large part of its effort to Army Support or not? Brooke failed to get his requirement, with the consequence that in the summer of 1942 the Army reached rock-bottom and was stalled off with a handful of obsolescent aircraft. The lack of true cooperation was one of the causes of the disaster at Dieppe.

3

The reorganization and re-equipment of Army/Air Support took place in Britain, not in Africa as the few historians who even allude to these critical changes suggest. During the two years of reconstruction a new style of Air Force designed for ‘Army Co-op’, that is to say reconnaissance by high-performance aircraft, close-support bombing, airborne troops and Air Observation Posts for the artillery, was formed and trained in Britain by Army Co-op Command, which was ably led by Sir Arthur Barratt (a forgotten man) and his staff of RAF and Army officers, in spite of the low priority given to it by the Air Ministry. The local defence of airfields was also entrusted to the new RAF Regiment. The new system only became effective when the Army turned away from the stonewalling of Bomber Command, which was fully committed to its own campaign, towards the more amenable Fighter Command and to the Americans. The new concept of a ‘Tactical Air Force’ was invented, formed and trained in Britain, and was largely equipped with American aircraft. Like all military structures its anatomy was based upon a highly developed system of staff-and-signals. Late in 1942 the TAF system was sent out to North Africa and was adopted in toto by the Americans.

4

The war historians and the writers of memoirs mostly ascribe this achievement, if they mention it at all, to Air Marshal Tedder, the AOC-in-C Middle East, a close associate of Portal throughout the War. It does not appear that he took much part in the long struggle over Army/Air requirements, or in the work of reorganization. In his own book he makes it plain that he had little sympathy with the soldiery and actively disliked General Montgomery.

5

The result of two years’ training and preparation in Britain, strengthened by battle experience in Africa, was that from August, 1942, to August, 1945, the Army never lost a campaign and rarely lost a battle. The Normandy campaign was the largest combined operation in military history and the best planned. In the victorious Burma campaign Army/Air worked admirably. The problem of Army Co-op had been solved. Towards the end of the War one setback occurred at Arnhem, where, because of faulty and hasty planning, the TAF organization broke down for a few days. In warfare you can’t win every time.

Many of these failures and successes I was able to observe from the inside, but I do not claim that, at my level, I could do more than influence policy on three or four occasions by a discreet (or even an indiscreet) nudge.

Throughout the War I was a liaison officer between the Army and the RAF and in that capacity took part in the Battle of France. In the middle period of the War I was the Army Liaison Officer at Bomber Command Headquarters and was involved in all the controversy, the frustration and the final planning, from the early improvization to the eventual formation of the Tactical Air Force (TAF). In 1943, as we moved into the constructive period, I was posted to the War Office where my main task was to prepare the new Staff manuals for cooperation in the Second Front. When D Day approached I was sent back to Bomber Command for liaison duty during the Normandy invasion. I visited the beachheads several times. In the last months of the War I was at the link between the headquarters of SHAEF and the ‘Strategic’ Air Forces in Britain. While awaiting demobilization in 1945, I was employed at the War Office in writing a confidential report on Army/Air relations with access to the Chiefs of Staffs’ papers. It is further discussed in the final chapter of my book.

I have seen no account of these proceedings in the official histories and nothing more than a few casual allusions in the published memoirs of the war leaders. Even the histories of the Tactical Air Force and of No. 2 Group (Light Bombers) have little to say of policy or organization, or of the ferocious wrangles they aroused, but restrict themselves to narratives of exploits, heroic indeed, of the air crews. I make an honourable exception in the case of my old friend, Sir John Slessor, who discussed the Army/Air Requirements struggle in his book, The Central Blue, as an important side-issue in his distinguished career.

Historians of warfare deal mostly with the achievement of famous commanders or with the conduct of the soldiery, and little has been written of the mechanics of staffwork, except in technical studies. I take the standpoint of the officers whose duty it was to convert the broad directives and compromises, issued in general terms, into the detailed instructions that enabled the fighting men to get to work. My difficulty has been to keep this diverse material under control and it would have been easier to write at twice the length. I have, reluctantly, compressed my preparatory year into a few paragraphs, omitting my narrative of the Battle of France as no more than tangential to the main theme. I have also alluded to my private life only when it altered the course of my official duties. If there appear to be too many anecdotes, too much name-dropping, my defence is that these features explain how I came to keep such exalted company. I like to think that my peephole into the Higher Direction of War was like that of Stendhal or Samuel Pepys.

Throughout my service as a liaison officer I was mostly isolated, with no immediate superior at hand, keeping my own office with its secret files, especially the journal of my activities, sometimes a mere logbook but expanded with comments and decriptions when time permitted. As soon as this book is published, I intend to deposit my papers in the Imperial War Museum, including my confidential report on Army/Air Relations which is further described in my final chapter.

Abbreviations

CHAPTER ONE

The First Year – RAF in the

Battle of France

At the time of the Munich surrender I was in Africa studying the market for educational books in the Colonies, as Assistant Manager of the Cambridge University Press. I was one of the first commercial travellers, I believe, to use the new airlines which were then spreading over the continent and, besides visiting the larger British centres, I stopped off at such outlandish places as Fort Lamy, near Lake Chad, which two years later was found to have strategic importance. We flew mostly in Ju53s, the three-engined aircraft that the Germans were developing for future use as troop-carriers; but I knew nothing of such matters. At the end of the year I returned to London up the French side of Africa, by way of Dakar and, rather to my surprise, through Barcelona which was then under siege. Though the sensational Press assured us that it had been laid flat by Franco’s bombers I could see normal traffic in the streets as we flew low over the city centre and not a single bombhole. I began to wonder whether the scaremongers were right in warning us that war in Europe meant the instant destruction of London. War was coming, I was certain, and Chamberlain’s smug pronouncements added to my dismay.

When I resumed my place at the Cambridge Press, at our fine new office in the Euston Road, my colleagues were talking gloomily of its position near the obvious bombing target of Euston Station, and hopefully of our spacious concrete basement, which would make a splendid air-raid shelter. Everyone was preparing for war without a shred of that exhilaration in the face of danger and duty that had been universal in 1914. War was not something that called us to action but something that was going to be done to us, so that our reaction was passive. What could we do in the way of self-defence? We prepared a plan for evacuating half the men and all the women we employed to Cambridge; we strengthened the basement and sandbagged the windows on professional advice from the ex-soldiers in our ranks; we organized fire-watchers months before the Government called for it; we qualified as Air Raid Wardens and took charge of adjacent streets, bullying the inhabitants about their blackouts and their gasmasks; and we rigged up a dormitory in the canteen for a roster of night-duty wardens, who had fun, all lads together. But I did not think that one or two raids would break the hearts or the backs of the Londoners.

My senior colleague R. J. L. Kingsford,¹ a year or two younger than I, had just missed the First World War which had made so large a hole in my life. I had also been a keen territorial in the ‘twenties, until I retired with the rank of Major into the Territorial Army Reserve of Officers (TARO), which I supposed to be no more than a list of names in a dusty file at the War Office. If either of us was to go soldiering in middle life it obviously must be I. I wrote in to inquire what obligation I was under as a reservist and got back a demand for a birth certificate; no elderly person need apply. Then nothing happened and after a time I began to hunt for back entrances to the Army. When War broke out I was corresponding with a soldier friend, Major Eric Smith,² who was actually a Staff Officer in the Operations branch, M07, which dealt with Air Cooperation. Would I like to be a Liaison Officer and, if so, would I attend a course of instruction at RAF, Old Sarum, the School of Army Cooperation? Yes, I would; but, before starting work there on 24 September, 1939, I have a word to say about the War Office and the Army in this crisis.

The Secretary of State for War, Mr Hore-Belisha, was surely the most incompetent to hold that office in wartime since the Crimea, a caricature of a War Minister. As he and all middle-aged persons could recall, Kitchener in 1914, after despatching an Expeditionary Force that became the admiration of the military world, had improvised out of nothing a volunteer army of thirty new divisions that took the field, fully trained and equipped, two years later. At the same time he mobilized and brought to Europe armies from India and the Dominions, and doubled the Territorial Force. This stupendous achievement could not have been done without error, and everyone knew that his mistake had been the mishandling of the Territorials. Hore-Belisha’s plan, so far as it can be understood, was to repeat Kitchener’s errors and to add some new ones in the same style. He doubled the Territorial Force in such a way that neither its old nor its new units were ready to fight in 1939; he introduced conscription without regard to the needs of industry for skilled young men, and robbed the Regular Army of officers and sergeants to find instructors for his conscripts, who were formed into training not fighting units. The first nine months had to be spent in unscrambling these useless arrangements. Meanwhile, he made no provision for tanks, anti-aircraft guns or supporting aircraft; and I would not say so now if I had not said much of it in a letter to The Times in 1939.

He fixed the upper age limit for his various formations at 38, which neatly excluded the younger survivors of the First World War, the men he should have cherished as instructors, administrators and auxiliaries, thus freeing young officers and NCOS for fighting duty. At the same time the civil authorities called for men over 45 to be Air Raid Wardens and such, with the consequence that you could see in any saloon bar, in 1939–40, well-set-up, red-faced, blimpish men of round about forty, protesting over their drinks that they were too young to be Air Raid Wardens but not too old to be soldiers, dammit, if they were only given the chance; and of these I had been one, thinking myself, like most men of forty-two, remarkably well-preserved for my age. Many of us were members of the Regular or Territorial Army Reserve (RARO or TARO) and nicknamed ourselves the ‘Raro-Taros’ (to rhyme with pharaohs).

But I escaped to the School of Army Cooperation, in a moth-eaten old uniform with the medals on my chest that we used to call ‘Mutt and Jeff’, the evidence that I was past forty. Throughout the War I lived safely and comfortably in the country on ample Army rations, while Kingsford stayed in London through the Blitz, doing my work as well as his own, fire-watching at night and parading with the Home Guard on Sundays. He also provided for my wife and child with his own family in his mother’s country house. We had no difficulty in disposing of our London home. Which of us was the War Hero?

The RAF Station at Old Sarum was a red-brick building beside a grass airfield, looking down one way to Salisbury spire and the other way up to the Stone Age camp; it had long been the home of ‘Army Co-op’, once the most active branch of the RAF and now in low repute. The main duty of the RFC in the First World War had been to fly for the infantry and the artillery, and it was only in the last year that the establishment of the RAF has led to the theory of an independent Air War, planned by ‘Boom’ Trenchard,³ the Father of the Air Force, but not then put into operation. Among British theorists on modern war, one of the most effective writers was J. C. Slessor⁴ whom I had known as a dashing young pilot in the 1920s. A determined supporter of ‘Boom’ Trenchard, he was also a student of Combined Operations and had analysed the experimental Battle of Cambrai, 1917, a defeat but of great tactical importance because tanks, infantry and aircraft worked together. Slessor had written the Army/Air manual, Employment of Air Forces in the Field (EAF), in collaboration with Lieutenant-Colonel A. Nye⁵ whom I also happened to know in private life.

The School at Old Sarum was run as a sideline by No.22 Group RAF, which controlled a number of miscellaneous branches of Fighter Command at Farnborough. They had an Army officer on their staff, Major Essame,⁶ who was a good friend to me and got me over the nursery slopes of the Army Co-op mystery. He used to say: ‘The essential difference is that an army officer exists for one purpose only, to get his men to the battle, while the airmen in the RAF exist for one purpose only, to get their officer to the battle’, which I found a helpful notion. ‘Peter’ Essame and Eric Smith from the War Office constituted the Army element in the School, of which the Commandant was Group Captain J. B. Cole-Hamilton⁷ (afterwards Air Vice-Marshal) under whom I was to serve in the Battle of France.

The School held courses for junior officers who were to be trained for liaison duties with the four Lysander squadrons and the six Blenheim squadrons that were allotted to the Army in France as an ‘Air Component’. These were slow and obsolescent monoplanes, suitable only for performing the functions of tactical reconnaissance for the infantry