With Wings Like Eagles Read Online Free PDF Page B

was hard even for Labour’s pacifist fringe to argue that having the ability to defend oneself if attacked was morally wrong. Baldwin seems to have been moved by the same idea. As a businessman, he saw fighters as a kind of insurance policy against the failure of diplomacy or the remote possibility that Hitler might actually mean what he said, or worse still what he had written in Mein Kampf . Bombers offended Baldwin’s moral scruples; fighters did not.
    He spoke movingly of his belief that “since the day of the air, the old frontiers are gone. When you think of the defense of England you no longer think of the chalk cliffs of Dover, you think of the Rhine.” What appeared to horrify him was the idea that England could defend itself only by dropping bombs on the men, women, and children of the Rhineland (since this was the only major target in Germany that the current generation of RAF bombers could reach). Whether the victims were British, French, or German, the prime minister rejected the notion that “two thousand years after Our Lord was crucified, [we] should be spending our time thinking how we can get the mangled bodies of children to the hospitals and how we can keep poison gas from the throats of the people,” and worried (prophetically) about the future, when “the bomb no bigger than a walnut” 4 might blow up whole cities. (Can he have been imagining nuclear weapons, or reading H. G. Wells instead of Trollope?) Sincere and sympathetic as this kind of speech was, it was hardly a rousing call to arms.
    Baldwin had other, more practical concerns about the cost of rearming the RAF. The projected cost of building a single modern fighter plane was estimated at between £5,000 and £10,000 each, whereas one big four-engine bomber was expected to cost more than £50,000, and perhaps twice that. In addition, fighters could fly from grass strips at what were then still called aerodromes, whereas bombers, because of their heavier weight, required long, expensive concrete runways and hardstands, much bigger hangars, and of course bigger aircrews, all of which would cost enormous sums of money. In the war of numbers that was going on between Baldwin and Churchill, it seemed possible that the latter might be silenced at much less expense by building fighters rather than bombers.
    The argument about numbers was in any case complicated by the fact that both men counted “frontline airplanes” and reserves separately. What most politicians, including those in France, Italy, and the Soviet Union, meant was that “frontline airplanes” would be of the latest type, whereas the “reserves” would consist of older but still usable machines. What the air marshals meant, but did not always say, was that all their airplanes must be of the latest type, the “frontline” planes being those delivered to combat-ready squadrons, the “reserves” held back to supply new squadrons as they were formed or to replace machines that had been lost in combat or in accidents. As war would prove, when it finally arrived, only the latest and most up-to-date aircraft were useful in combat. Each side would work incessantly to improve the performance and armament of its aircraft and to bring in new types at a dizzying rate, so that the machines with which Britain and Germany began the war in 1939 were already rendered obsolete by 1940 (those of the French were, unfortunately for them, already obsolete in 1939). This was a hard point to get across—the majority of the Royal Navy’s battleships had either served during World War I or been completed and updated shortly after it ended; the British Army, like the German, was still using a slightly modified version of the same rifle its soldiers had carried in World War I * ; and most of the field artillery in both armies would have been familiar to a veteran of the 1914–1918 war. In the air, however, obsolescence was such a rapid process that it was hard to avoid—once war broke out ground