Sunday Book Review: Bomber Champion
By Last month I alluded to Vincent Orange’s Bomber Champion: The Life of Marshal of the RAF Sir John Slessor. Whereas there’s a wealth of information about Hugh Trenchard and Arthur Harris, Slessor’s contribution to the RAF is less well-studied. Slessor is known mainly for Air Power and Armies, an influential collection of lectures and essays published during the inter-war period. In the post-war period, he contributed to the understanding of the relationship between airpower and nuclear weapons.
Slessor was part of Britain’s hereditary military elite. He ended up in the Royal Flying Corps because polio had made him unsuitable for Army service. Having served both in the colonies and on the Western Front in World War I, Slessor participated in many of the colonial policing operations that characterized the RAF’s effort to make itself relevant in the post-war period. He pursued (and evaluated) these projects with great enthusiasm, but Orange is careful to point out that their spectacular effects were often short-lived. Nevertheless, their “success” was enough to ensure that the RAF would not be sucked back into its constituent bodies, even as the British Army took a dim view of the new service and the Royal Navy struggled to gets its air arm back.
In the course of describing Slessor’s career, Orange gives a wealth of good information about the inter-war RAF; this would serve, in many ways, as a good (if skeptical) introductory text to the early history of the service. Orange conveys the logic behind the RAF’s rhetorical commitment to strategic bombing (preserving independence), as well as the practical reasons for its inability to make good on that commitment (colonial policing, air defense). The RAF, unlike the US Army Air Corps, had not devoted sufficient attention to the technical details of strategic bombing, a problem which proved tragic to pilots and crews early in the war. Opinion about the logic of airpower was not uniform with the RAF, but Slessor was a committed Trenchardist, to the point of accepting the old man’s grandiose (and obviously flawed) expectations of the contribution that bombers could make in the early months of the war.
Slessor had his flaws, but he was no dummy. Whatever the drawbacks of RAF promotion policy (which serially put him in charge of fighters, bombers, and ASW aircraft), it did accord him a good view of almost every part of the RAF’s application of airpower. Slessor was a capable administrator at Coastal Command, and over time came to believe in the importance of the mission. Coastal Command’s responsibilities were two fold; first, to spearhead the anti-commerce campaign, and second to destroy German coastal commerce. The first mission is considerably better known than the second, as it involved blunting the Kriegsmarine’s submarine offensive, as well as cutting off opportunities for surface raiders. From a very poor beginning, Coastal Command grew sufficiently in resources and expertise to make the transit of U-boats to operational areas an exceptionally iffy proposition. Managing relations between the RAF, the USAAF, the USN, and the RN was a tremendously complex proposition, especially as it required the production, analysis, and diffusion of data about U-boat locations in what amounted to real time.
The other major mission undertaken by Coastal Command was the destruction of Axis coastal shipping. A considerable portion of the economy of occupied Europe depended, despite Allied naval dominance, on coastal shipping rather than on land transit. Coastal Command’s job was to hunt down and destroy this shipping, undercutting Axis war production. Slessor argued (and Orange agrees) that this was a key, under-rated contribution to the war effort.
After Coastal Command, Slessor was C-in-C RAF in the Mediterranean. This afforded him the opportunity to observe and manage RAF policy in Greece, Italy, and Yugoslavia, where he developed a great deal of skepticism about the ability of tactical airpower to defeat an experienced, committed land army. Slessor watched as the Wehrmacht, despite having only minimal air support, managed to bog down Allied efforts on the Italian peninsula. This experience didn’t necessarily sour him on the general strategic bombing project, but it did serve to create doubts about the decisiveness of airpower in tactical and operational context.
We should be clear; Vincent Orange does not like John Slessor. He repeatedly refers to the drawbacks of Slessor’s theoretical commitments, and often notes the insufficiency of Slessor’s memoirs. This is refreshing on the one hand, because of course I’m deeply unsympathetic to the vision of warfare that Slessor built his life around. At the same time, as with any deep attachment between biographer and subject it creates concern about bias and perspective. Although Orange tells us a lot about the history of the RAF, he isn’t quite convincing on why Slessor was regarded as important at the time, and why his contribution is still remembered in some circles.
This is a fun read if you’re even faintly interested in the subject of interwar airpower theory. Even if you’re not, it works as a surprisingly effective introduction to many of the main themes of the topic. Orange is an engaging writer, and the account carries a lot of detail. Reservations notwithstanding, it’s worth a look.