Sailor' Malan—Freedom Fighter: The Inspirational Story of a Spitfire Ace

Introduction

It was as a schoolboy growing up in the 1960s that I first encountered the name of ‘Sailor’ Malan, the great Spitfire and Battle of Britain ace, probably in one of the warlike boys’ comics of the period. The name and photograph of Group Captain A.G. Malan, of course, appears in countless books and articles on the Battle of Britain period, and therefore anyone studying the aerial conflict to any degree will be familiar with this legendary South African.

The wartime story, of aerial derring-do, is inspirational and exciting enough alone, but, I was to discover the further I looked into the Malan story, there was much more to this flying sailor. This was a man as brave as a lion, of the highest professional standards and integrity, the best shot in the RAF, but there is much more. I believe that we do not entirely become aware of the extent of Sailor Malan’s dedication and commitment to freedom and democracy until he returned to apartheid-riven and nationalist-controlled South Africa after the war. What happened then is a story every bit as fascinating as his wartime years – if not more so.

And yet, in his native South Africa, for reasons we will explore, the name of Sailor Malan is largely unknown. This book will explain why – and hopefully raise awareness of this champion of freedom and human rights.

For some years, my South African friend Desmond Naidoo has been determined to produce a television documentary about Sailor Malan for broadcasting in South Africa. It has been a struggle to achieve funding, for reasons I never fully appreciated until the last few days of writing this book. Knowing what I do now about the situation in South Africa, I can fully understand, and am unsurprised. Like this book, Desmond’s film is vitally important to raising awareness and maintaining the currency of Sailor Malan’s story. It must, one day, be made.

Of all the books I have written, this is possibly the most important. The reasons why will become evident to the reader.

Dilip Sarkar MBE FRHistS

Chapter One

The Botha Boy

The Malans are a proud and ancient family. Originating in Italy and later settling in the Franco-Italian Alps during the thirteenth century, Louis IX of France honoured the Malans for their contribution to his Crusades. Firm Protestants, eleven Malans were martyred between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries, preferring death to Catholicism; the family motto Deus Arx Mea translates to ‘God is my Citadel’. It is not in Europe, however, that our story begins – but in faraway South Africa.

As the name suggests, South Africa is the southernmost state of the African continent, a country with a turbulent past, for centuries home to a volatile mix of races, cultures – and colours. In 1485 the Portuguese explorer Bartolomeu Dias led the first European expedition to land in southern Africa. This was at the start of what became known as the ‘Age of Discovery’, as European maritime powers increasingly explored the world, expanding trade and taking the first steps towards globalisation. Numerous lands previously unknown to Europeans were found – which, although already inhabited by indigenous peoples, were claimed by the explorers’ countries and colonised. So began the age of empires. By the early seventeenth century, however, Portugal’s maritime empire was waning, and by 1652 the Dutch East India Company had established a station at the Cape of Good Hope, which in time became Cape Town, and the Dutch became the dominant European settlers. Between 1688 and 1700, protestant refugees – persecuted Huguenots – also arrived in South Africa from Catholic France, some via the Netherlands, following the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. The Dutch settlers accommodated the Huguenot refugees, the French knowledge of viticulture over time advancing the prosperity of the Cape of Good Hope. Certainly the French knew how to select perfect locations for farms and vineyards, finding refuge from religious oppression and prejudice.

So it was that French place-names became commonplace as farms, one of the first Huguenot settlers, Pierre Joubert, calling his farm ‘La Provence’ in 1694. Significantly, amongst the Frenchmen was one Jacques Malan, the family having first sought refuge in Leiden, Netherlands, before arriving in South Africa and settling in Wellington, calling his farm ‘Versailles’ as a reminder of the old country. The French settlers lived side-by-side with the more numerous Dutch, over time intermarriage blending the two races, and ultimately, while English became the language of education and administration, a simplified form of Dutch, known as ‘Afrikaans’, became the common tongue of frontier farmers like the Malans – collectively known as ‘Boers’ (being the Dutch word for farmer) – and all the Dutch, French, and indeed German settlers recognised themselves as the ‘Afrikaner’ community. For agricultural labour the Afrikaner farmers exploited enslaved people from such countries as Madagascar and Malaysia, and even themselves enslaved certain local tribes such as the Khoikoi and San peoples. Without question the white settlers from more technologically advanced and educated European societies considered themselves naturally superior to the indigenous people of South Africa; one Frenchman, Guy Tachard, wrote:

‘They lead a miserable existence. They are dirty to excess and it seems they take pleasure in making themselves hideous. When they want to adorn themselves they rub their heads, faces and hands with the soot from their cauldrons… Barbarism such as theirs, however, has not so completely effaced all traces of civilisation so that no vestige of virtue remains. They are faithful to their masters.’

As Vernon February wrote, ‘The French refugees who fled France in order to escape oppression and who found their terrestrial Elysium at the Cape, did so on the basis of a society based on slave labour and exploitation.’ Robert Ross rightly argued that ‘a mild slave regime is impossible, everything touched by slavery is brutalised,’ emphasising that the white Boer farming class ‘had human beings plucked away from their homes and shipped off from all the ports of the Indian Ocean to the Cape. Then they were worked in the fields until they died.’ Clearly there was no parity between the white and non-white populations – and it was abundantly clear which was the undisputed master of the other.

The British occupied the Cape from 1795 onwards, and following victory in the Napoleonic Wars, which concluded in 1815, South Africa was ceded to the burgeoning British Empire. From the early 1800s, many Boers left the British-ruled Cape, angered by the British freeing their slave-workers. The enforced cessation of the practice of enslavement, coupled with increasing skirmishes with native tribes, and need for more fertile farming country, led to 10,000 Afrikaner ‘Voortrekkers’ beginning the ‘Great Trek’ from the Cape Colony, between 1836 and 1840, into the north and east interior of South Africa, leading to the creation of what are now the states of Natal, Orange Free State and Transvaal. There, in the new ‘Boer Republics’, the Afrikaners found lands laden with rich natural resources, discovering substantial gold deposits in the late nineteenth century. If the aim of the ‘Great Trek’ was to achieve freedom for the Afrikaner people and escape British hegemony, it appeared to have been achieved. The Trek, however, led to conflict with African tribes and division within the Afrikaner community, between those whose ancestors made the arduous journey, and those like the Malans who remained in the Cape, with less of a frontier outlook and fear of the ‘Black Peril’.

The British coveted the resource-rich lands claimed by the Boers, and inevitably war broke out. In the First Boer War, 1880-81, the Boers successfully resisted British encroachment, but were eventually defeated in the Second Boer War (1899-1902), during which over 27,000 Boer women and children perished in British ‘concentration camps’, and both Transvaal and the Orange Free State were annexed by the British. The Afrikaner Boers had not just been defeated by the British – they had also been humiliated, leaving a bitter and lasting legacy. During the wars, opinion within the Malan family was divided: some supported the Boer cause while others sympathised with the British. Amongst the latter was Willem Adolph ‘Willie’ Malan; as South African historian Professor Bill Nasson wrote, ‘With an ample place for their French-Huguenot ancestral bloodline, the decent civilities of the Wellington Malans encompassed instinctive loyalty to the British Crown.’

A Boer unit led by General Smuts adopted guerrilla tactics in their forays against British patrols, exploiting the element of surprise before fading away. During one of these skirmishes at Twenty-four Rivers, near Porterville, Willie Malan – who was not a combatant – was somehow hit by two bullets while on horseback. One went through both thighs, exposing his right femur, the other ripped open his right arm. While recovering in Wellington hospital, the shattered leg became infected, but it was not amputated. With one leg two inches shorter than the other and in constant pain, Willie was on crutches until 1908, which he then discarded and resumed riding and farming at Versailles, the smaller part of which had been bequeathed to him upon his father’s death. The following year, Willie married Evelyn Forde Jordan, an Englishwoman from Leicester and kindergarten teacher, at Andrew Murray’s Dutch Reformed Church in Bradgate. That year, the British South Africa Act granted the country nominal independence, the Union of South Africa becoming an entity on 31 May 1910. Consequently the Malans’ eldest child, Adolph Gysbert Malan – later known universally as ‘Sailor’, which is how we will refer to him here – born in Wellington on 3 October 1910, was a South African by birth. In time it would become clear that young Sailor Malan possessed his father’s courage and grit. Interestingly, throughout the period of Dutch and British rule, racial segregation between whites and non-whites was informal, an assumed position, although the settlement and movement of native peoples was controlled by the Native Location Act of 1879. The Natives’ Land Act of 1913 would severely restrict black land ownership, and it was against this backdrop of white supremacy that the young Malan grew up.

At this time, Willie Malan was managing a Rhodes Fruit Farm in the Drakenstein Valley, Groenfontein Farm, looking towards the impressive Klein Drakenstein mountains. It was there, at the Groenfontein home built by his great-grandfather, that Sailor had been born, and in due course his younger brother, Ralph. After a couple of years the family moved to another ‘RFF’ at Klipvlei, just north-east of Wellington, beneath the Groenberg. In 1915, Willie bought his own farm, Slent, on the Paardeberg’s slopes, sixteen miles south of Wellington, to which the family moved. There, within sight of the iconic Table Mountain, the Malan brothers found a wild and exotic place, with baboons in Slent’s rocky upper reaches, and a fearsome old boar which wandered around the farmyard at will. Baiting the poor creature became an active pursuit for the two young boys. One day, Sailor ‘exploded a clod of earth right on his snout’ – the angry pig chased the brothers a mile before wounding the elder Malan’s arm, scarring him for life. It was, however, an idyllic childhood, full of adventure in this unspoilt environment.

When Sailor was about seven or eight years old, apparently a small boy for his age, one Sunday afternoon his father gave him a double-barrelled shotgun and ammunition, to shoot something for the pot: ‘I went outside and scored a bull’s eye on a watering can, which got me into trouble later. Then I tried creeping up behind a turtle-dove. How I was able to get the gun to my shoulder and fire I don’t know, but I did. Unfortunately I fired off both barrels at once and the recoil knocked me flat and bruised my shoulder for days after. Then, when I reloaded the gun I got the rim of one of the cartridges jammed in the breech. I struggled very hard to break the gun open, but hadn’t the strength. In the end I took it back under my arm, and ran into the lounge to my mother, still wrestling with the triggers and pointing the barrels towards her. She was terribly angry and snatched the gun from me. I was scolded and so was my father for letting me have the gun. I wasn’t allowed to handle a shotgun for a long time after that.’ This was, though, the start of a lifelong fascination with firearms and gunnery. Like the RAF’s ultimately top-scoring fighter pilot, Air Vice-Marshal Johnnie Johnson, Sailor learned to shoot at a young age, birds on the wing being his target of choice. Consequently, Sailor learned very early on the art of deflection shooting, which is to say, anticipating where a moving target and bullets will converge – a crucial skill in aerial combat.

Children in the area attended farm schools, each educating up to twenty pupils. Sailor attended one such, and had this to say of a particular teacher, a ‘Miss M from the Transvaal, who remained very bitter about the British Tommies in the Boer War. What she had to say about them – and the English generally, didn’t make sense to me. I knew my mother was English-born, and I knew all her family, and played with her brothers Clifford and Edwin. Miss M wanted us to believe that the rooibaatjes not only behaved like devils but looked something like them – all pock-marked, with red necks and purple morals. It left a nasty impression on my mind, all that hatred. Perhaps she had some family reason for being so fanatical. But it didn’t work on me the way she obviously wished it to.’

After completing education to Standard IV, Sailor went on to Standard V schooling in Stellenbosch, where he experienced linguistic segregation, English-speaking pupils on one side of the classroom, Afrikaans the other. As he later said, ‘A thing like that makes a very bad impact on a child’s mind. It did on mine. I had friends both sides of the class. Among ourselves there was no question of language dividing us, we talked English or Afrikaans impartially.’ Already, then, the young Sailor was baulking at two things he would later actively campaign against: racial prejudice and oppression.

Unfortunately Slent was not as prosperous as Willie had hoped, and he eventually sold the farm during what were depressed years for farming following the First World War, for a quarter of its value in better years. First, the family returned to Stellenbosch, thence to Malherbe Street, Wellington. Willie had a breakdown over the Slent disappointment, responsibility for bringing up their family of now five children now largely falling on Evelyn’s shoulders. Sailor – who was already perceived to be both stubborn and independent – completed Standard VI of his education in late 1923 at Wellington Boys’ High School. Then, aged 13 (and below the minimum age for admission), largely for financial reasons Sailor became a cadet aboard the training ship General Botha, permanently anchored off Simon’s Town. Sailor later commented, ‘I don’t know how I got my mind fixed on the General Botha. I’d never seen the ship and nobody knew much about it in Wellington. It had been established two or three years as a training ship for South Africans, and I think I was first to go from our district.’ Aboard the General Botha, Sailor – and hence the nickname – found a harsh culture of violent discipline at the rope’s end, and institutionalised bullying by older cadets. Sailor became well-known for his ‘impish’ sense of humour – often at an instructor’s expense – but the experience of the General Botha was far from easy. As Yvonne Malan says, ‘He developed a stoic indifference, but it had a profound effect on him. Not only because it made him tough, but because it solidified his fierce sense of justice and intense hatred of bullies.’ This would prove a significant factor throughout Sailor’s life.

Simon’s Town was the base of Britain’s South Atlantic Fleet, and General Botha was initially HMS Thames. The new South Africa had neither navy nor merchant fleet, and General Botha was the first step towards addressing this deficiency. The ship had been purchased by a Durban millionaire, Mr T.B.F. Davis, and was his gift to his country in memory of his son, killed in the First World War and who had been a cadet aboard HMS Worcester. General Botha was to be a training ship accommodating up to 150 cadets aged between 14 and 16, modelled on the Royal Navy’s traditions and eighteen similar training ships. The two-year curriculum was overseen and delivered by the captain and his officers – all ex-RN. General subjects were included in addition to seamanship, gunnery, signalling and drill, which were all much more to Sailor’s liking than the mathematics he struggled with – and mathematics are key to navigation, so vitally important to a seafarer.

Life aboard General Botha was far from easy, but undoubtedly shaped Sailor into the man and officer he became. The discipline and bullying by the ‘Old Salts’, the more senior cadets, was barbaric. The ship’s official code permitted eight punishments, the severity dependent upon the offence’s gravity, with up to twelve strikes of the cane. Cadets, wearing only shorts, were first passed as fit and able to sustain the punishment, then bound to a table and thrashed. Sailor’s first biographer, Oliver Walker, wrote in 1953 that ‘In talks with Sailor during which he described incidents infinitely more dramatic and perilous than anything occurring aboard the Botha, I never saw him more emotionally stirred than when recalling the ceremony of being tied down and thrashed. The memory of it had stayed with him vividly as a deed of outrage, an invasion of pride and privacy that helped fashion a kind of stoicism that became an armour-plating for more strenuous days to come. Its immediate effect was to check in him any desire, when he in turn became an Old Salt, to take advantage of his seniority, and it had much to do with this reluctance, in later years, to join in the horseplay of RAF initiatory customs.’

Sailor achieved an ordinary pass upon completion of the General Botha course, but being younger than his peers and still underage to serve at sea, had to spend another six months aboard: ‘I had only one urge by that time, and that was to go to sea… I was trained for the sea, and that was the home I wanted. It wasn’t an easy time for my parents… I thought that by going away, being completely independent, I would be saving them some anxiety, financial and otherwise. We were a very big family by then, two sisters and four brothers – the youngest, Peter, only a baby and all of them younger than me. Slent had been sold at a bad loss, as I told you. My father’s health was in ribbons. When he was well enough to think of work he was offered the managership of a large fruit farm at Riverside in the Golden Valley Citrus Estates, not far from Cookhouse. That happened before I went to sea, so there was a complete uprooting of the family from all the old scenes. I can imagine what a wrench it was. For myself, by that time, I was concentrated on one thing – getting away to sea.’

At last, eight months after Sailor eventually left General Botha, he became an officer cadet with the Union-Castle Company, and first went to sea in the Sandown Castle, steaming from Port Elizabeth to New York. For nine years this would be his life, largely voyages to New York and Philadelphia. Of his time on the ocean waves, Sailor commented, ‘I’d say it bred in me a kind of fatalism. Long voyages get you into a certain frame of mind. You’re signed on. You know your destination weeks ahead. In the meantime you jog along in a routine which seldom varies. You get too a feeling of not belonging anywhere in particular.’ This was not, however, the life he envisaged long-term. Eventually Sailor wanted more stability than a life at sea provided, and a family – and in 1930, aged 20, he met Lynda Fraser, then 16, at her parents’ home in Ruislip, Middlesex, England. Although they would not meet again for another three years, it would eventually be with Lynda that Sailor would carve out the life his heart desired.

That year, 1930, saw the start of a new decade, one described by the British social historian Charles Loch Mowat as ‘gloomy’. This was mainly a consequence of the London Stock Exchange crashing in September 1929, with top investors being jailed for fraud, greatly reducing optimism in American and overseas markets. A month later, share prices on the New York Stock Exchange collapsed. The effect of this, the greatest financial crisis of the twentieth century, reverberated around the world, bringing the halcyon ‘Roaring Twenties’ to an abrupt end and generating the ‘Great Depression’. Naturally this had enormous negative implications for global trade, directly affecting merchant shipping – not least Sailor and the Union-Castle Line, trading between South Africa, Britain and America. While apprentices were suspended, the company retained the services of its officers, so Sailor remained gainfully employed and successfully sat for his Second Mate’s Certificate in 1930. With such reduced trading however, over a million tonnes of merchant shipping lay at anchor around Britain, Sailor finding himself not navigating oceans, although there were occasional trips to the Continent, but instead a glorified watchman aboard a ship marooned in Southampton. With unemployment and inflation spiralling out of control on a global basis, Sailor’s primary concern, naturally, was the effect of this long-term on his career at sea. Would years of study to gain various maritime qualifications and promotions actually be worthwhile, or even possible?

This was clearly a difficult time, with a seafaring life appearing one with little prospect. As an outlet for his natural positivity and enthusiasm, however, Sailor enlisted in the Royal Naval Reserve and was commissioned as a sub-lieutenant. Although the six-week gunnery course at Devonport also involved certain mundane subjects, Sailor later considered the course to have been a ‘first-class, intensive, course… Our final tests were at sea when we were given ten salvoes to play with and had to hit a moving target being towed anything between five and ten miles away at high speed. I managed to straddle it four or five times, which gave me extra high marks.’ Yet again, Sailor’s exceptional ability at deflection shooting, first learned as a young boy on the farm, was obvious. Mowat also described the 1930s as the ‘devil’s decade’ – and by 1933 the devil was abroad in Germany, something, following trips to Hamburg, Sailor had become acutely aware of. Beyond doubt the prospect of another world war was casting a dark shadow across the world.

Between 1914 and 1918, Europe had experienced its first head-on collision with industrial warfare, which left over twenty million dead and at least as many wounded. German forces had ended the war on foreign soil, only a year before expecting victory, and Germany assumed that the Armistice of November 1918 was the prelude to a negotiated peace settlement. In the event it was not. Understandably, victorious Allied leaders wanted to ensure that such a devastating conflict never occurred again, and laid out the foundations for this new post-war world at the Paris Peace Conference, held at the palace of Versailles and signed on 28 June 1919. Known as the ‘Treaty of Versailles’, this laid out strict terms between the Allies and Germany – which was held entirely responsible for starting the war. Considering the destructive performance of German armed forces, the Allies dictated that the German army would number no more than 100,000 volunteers, there would be no air force, and the navy would be restricted to a coastal defence flotilla. Amongst other things, Germany was stripped of her overseas colonies, Alsace-Lorraine was restored to France, the Rhineland demilitarised, German unification with Austria was forbidden, and the ‘Danzig Corridor’ was created, ceding German land to Poland and providing the Poles access to the Baltic. To ensure that Germany’s recovery from the war was slower than that of victorious France, Germany was expected to pay substantial reparations in compensation to the Allied victors. Germany was humiliated, the people regarding the Treaty an Allied ‘Diktat’, too eagerly accepted by the democratic Weimer Republic imposed upon them by the victors. The German people felt betrayed by the leaders who had signed the Treaty. Politically Germany became a fertile breeding ground for extremist politics. Then came the Great Depression, the resulting economic chaos and reparation payments threatening to reduce Germany to poverty, completely destabilising the Weimer government and paving the way for the rise of the fascist Adolf Hitler and his National Socialist Workers’ Party, better known as the ‘Nazis’.

Hitler had seen action during the First World War as an infantry soldier and, like countless other servicemen, was embittered regarding Germany’s defeat. Hitler loathed the Versailles Treaty and criticised it in many speeches, although the effect of this rhetoric on the German people was arguably negligible. Indeed, his supporters were largely concerned with internal domestic issues. But the territorial problems caused by the Versailles treaty and especially the impositions on the German armed forces would ultimately be key to an expanding and economically rebuilt Germany under Hitler, who eventually came to power in 1933. Hitler believed Germans to be racially superior with a God-given right to expropriate the lands and resources of those states he saw as racially inferior – not least the Jews. He was, of course, rabidly anti-Semitic, blaming Germany’s ills on a supposed ‘International Jewish Conspiracy’, which had stabbed Germany in the back at home while her troops fought bravely at the front. On assuming power, Hitler’s immediate priority was to feed the nation, which was in economic turmoil, and create jobs to substantially reduce the figure of six million unemployed. Once this recovery had taken place, Hitler believed that the German people were destined for a cataclysmic confrontation with Communism – which he believed was the ultimate manifestation of the Jewish threat to Germany. Believing that in Russia military power was increasing with this same Armageddon in mind, Hitler embarked on his policy of rearmament, the piecemeal dismantling of Versailles, and violent territorial expansion based upon a racist world view. The countdown to the Second World War had begun. Of his trips to Hamburg after Hitler’s takeover, Sailor wrote, ‘I spent a lot of time talking to German harbour officials, sailors and civilians, and their attitude made me realise that war was inevitable.’ There can be no doubt that this, coupled with mediocre prospects at sea, heavily influenced the next leg of Sailor Malan’s life-journey.

Chapter Two

‘The RAF liked chaps from the Empire’

While the clouds of war gathered over Mowat’s ‘Devil’s decade’, it was obvious that after the First World War warfare in future would be fought very differently, mainly because of one thing: air power.

On Christmas Eve 1914, the first German bomb had been dropped on England – albeit exploding harmlessly in a Dover garden. From that point on, Britain’s island nation could no longer rely exclusively upon the Royal Navy for security of base – and from then on, the Home Front was also a front line. These primitive air attacks soon intensified and became more effective: by the Armistice, over 100 raids had killed 1,413 people. For the first time in history, London’s underground had provided shelter for terrified civilians, the bombing provoking ‘mass panics and near riots’. This developed into a disproportionate fear of air attack – but the air power doctrine emerging between the wars confirmed the bomber as supreme. Britain, close to the continent, although surrounded by a moat, was clearly vulnerable to air attack. Early British military aviation was delivered by the Royal Flying Corps, modelled on the Army, and Royal Naval Air Service. 1 April 1918 saw a significant event: the RFC morphed into the Royal Air Force, the world’s first independent air force. Now Major General ‘Boom’ Trenchard, the first Chief of the Air Staff, was responsible for building an air force with aerodromes and logistics, absorbing both RFC and RNAS squadrons.

In November 1919, Trenchard submitted a White Paper outlining his plan for the peacetime air force. The junior service was to remain independent, and include a substantial proportion of commissioned short-term pilots, a cadet training college for permanent officers, an auxiliary facility, and, among other things, a school for aero-engineering apprentices. In 1922 the Lloyd George government became conscious of the fact that while the French air force included a striking force of 600 machines, the RAF Home Defence capacity was just three squadrons. Consequently it was decided to increase the RAF’s establishment to 500 aircraft at a cost of £1.1m annually. The RAF was actually, though, fighting a battle for survival in the corridors of Whitehall and Westminster, owing to the more senior services being resentful of having lost their air arms – and because of the determination of many to disarm completely. Against the odds, in 1923 the Salisbury Committee, appointed to review and decide on the air force’s fate, decreed a new and enlarged expansion programme for the RAF. Although this involved increasing establishment to fifty-two Home Defence squadrons, to be complete by 1928, given that war with France was unimaginable, and with no other enemy threatening Britain’s shores, this ambitious and early expansion plan soon lost momentum. Indeed, peace, not war, was very much in the air following the Western powers signing the Locarno Treaty in 1925, binding each other to preserve peace and unite against any would-be aggressor.

The first half of the 1930s saw Britain and other nations ‘hell-bent’, according to Sir Maurice Dean, ‘for collective security and prepared to accept incalculable risks in that cause’. In 1932, Britain abandoned what had been a miniscule RAF expansion programme; the following year, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, changing everything. The Führer immediately set about contravening and reversing what were seen as injustices arising from the Versailles Peace Treaty of 1919, namely restrictions on the German military and territorial concessions. Already, in fact, Weimar Germany had begun secretly rebuilding its prohibited Luftwaffe, far away from prying western eyes, deep in Soviet Russia. The Great Depression, caused by the stock-market crash of 1929, had not helped those supporting rearmament, the British government consequently having serious domestic socio-economic issues to address at home. Hitler, however, saw rearmament as a way out of Germany’s economic distress and an essential means of enabling his territorial ambitions – hence Germany prioritised remilitarisation. Conversely, Churchill would later write that for British defence spending, the years 1931-35 were those of the ‘locust’. Be that as it may, the complete lack of substantial rearmament and deficiencies on doctrinal thinking were caused by three things: fiscal constraints, political indifference or opposition, and Trenchard’s unshakeable belief in the bomber.

Although Trenchard had fought to create and preserve the air force, the so-called ‘Father of the Royal Air Force’ was a confirmed ‘Bomber Baron’. Indeed, many influential civilians and militarists firmly believed in the ‘knock-out blow’, the single devastating strike destroying an enemy’s capacity to fight, delivered from the air, by bombers. Trenchard considered it unnecessary ‘for an air force, in order to defeat the enemy nation, to defeat