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support for Edward VIII’s marriage. To the general public, his talk of “cataracts of masonry and fire and smoke” made Churchill seem like a “wild man,” and also something of a warmonger, and to most people Baldwin seemed an even more steady and reliable figure by comparison.
    The dispute on rearmament between Baldwin and Churchill became so bitter that when, later, during the war, Churchill was told that the Baldwin family’s ironworks had been bombed by the Germans he remarked grumpily, “How ungrateful of them,” and after being congratulated by Harold Nicolson on his eulogy for Neville Chamberlain in the House of Commons, he replied, “That was not an insuperable task, since I admired many of Neville’s great qualities, but I pray to God in his infinite mercy that I shall not have to deliver a similar oration on Baldwin—that would indeed be difficult to do.” 3 But their disagreement was misleading in the sense that both of them were talking about the number of aircraft available to the RAF and the Luftwaffe , rather than about type and quality, which were harder to define.
    The argument was further muddled in most people’s minds by an artificial distinction between “frontline aircraft” and those “in reserve,” and the confusion was made worse by the Germans’ habit of exaggerating their air strength when they wanted to frighten people, and playing it down when they wanted to claim that they sought no more than “parity” with the United Kingdom and France. That the Germans were building military aircraft faster than the British was obvious enough to most people, though Baldwin and his supporters in the House of Commons continued to deny it soothingly, despite ample evidence to the contrary. But were they building fighters or bombers, and in what proportion, and how effective were the latter? These were the critical questions, and for the most part they remained unanswered, or even unasked.
     
     
    The truth is that despite Göring’s bombast, the one task the Luftwaffe was not prepared for in 1936, or even in 1939, was bombing London, let alone destroying the city in the kind of surprise raid that Churchill had described and that so many people feared, particularly those who had seen Things to Come . Between 1933 and 1936 the Germans, like the British, were infatuated with the idea of the Schnellbomber (“fast bomber”)—faster than the fighters that would be available to intercept it. In England the eccentric millionaire Lord Rothermere, owner of the newspaper the Daily Mail , and an aviation enthusiast, ordered for himself from the Bristol Aircraft Company the fastest private transport plane in the world—a twin-engine all-metal monoplane, called, a typical Rothermere touch, Britain First , which would carry six passengers and a crew of two at the then unheard of speed of almost 300 miles per hour. When it was delivered to him in 1935 he gave both the aircraft and the blueprints of the design to the Air Ministry as a patriotic gesture; the ministry then modified the plane to create the Bristol Blenheim Mark I bomber.
    The Blenheim was faster than any fighter then existing, as were its rivals the Dornier (Do) 17, the Heinkel (He) 111, and the Junkers (Ju) 88 in Germany. * The problem with all these aircraft, however, was that they carried a relatively light bomb load, made up of fairly small bombs; even the largest of them, the He 111, could carry only eight 500-pound (250-kilogram) bombs, held nose upward in a modular rack like eggs in an egg container. This seemed like a reasonable bomb load in the mid 1930s, but to put the matter in perspective, only six years later RAF Bomber Command would be sending deep into Germany at night hundreds of four-engine Avro Lancasters that were able to carry a “Blockbuster” bomb of up to 12,000 pounds, and eventually, with some modifications, the enormous 22,000-pound “Grand Slam” bomb.
    By one of those curious strokes of good fortune for