A shrilly discordant voice on the RAF's performance in the Battle of Britain.

 

 It is uncommon to hear discordant opinions about the RAF's achievement commemorated on Battle of Britain Day but possibly the most strident came from one of the service's highest profile leaders: Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Arthur Harris, AOC-in-C of Bomber Command. His words aimed to put the praise usually given to Fighter Command for victory in the Battle of Britain in a broader context. However they read as astonishingly mean spirited.  They give valuable sidelights on the internal dynamics and mindset of the RAF.

He claimed that "[i]t was definitely Bomber Command's wholesale destruction of the invasion barges in the Channel Ports that convinced the Germans of the futility of attempting to cross the Channel", thus claiming final credit for his own arm of the service. He gave no evidence for this view and there was none to give. Perhaps one tenth of the barges were destroyed by bombing.

He also plays down the sacrifice of Fighter Command pilots by describing its rate of losses as lower than that of Bomber Command. He describes German bombers as "almost unarmed", by which it can only be assumed he meant that they did not have powered gun turrets, which the RAF believed falsely conferred near-invulnerability on its own bombers. Moreover, "[a]lmost the only danger was from the German escort of fighters and the escort was by no means always there."  The casual reader is left with the impression that Fighter Command suffered only sporadic losses. In reality over one in six fighter aircrew in the Battle died which is admittedly far below Bomber Command's 44% death rate, but still no neligible death toll.

Harris further implies that Bomber Command won the Battle of Britain at little cost. The ports were "easy targets" suitable for training inexperienced crews. He seems to brush aside the fact that one of two Victoria Crosses earned by the RAF in its fight against the invasion preparations was won by a Bomber Command radio operator in a raid on Antwerp.

Fighter Command's victory in the Battle of Britain redeemed the RAF from its  poor showing in the Battle of France and, more important, from huge over-investment in Bomber Command as it rearmed ahead of the war. Obedient to Trenchardian dogma the Air Staff set a minimum numerical ratio in favour of bombers of two to one. Given the growing disparity between the cost of fighters and bombers as the RAF adopted multi-engine bombers, the financial ratio was even more heavily skewed. In its final post-Munich Scheme M the Air Staff proposed to spend at least eight times by my estimates as much on bombers as fighters. 

Fighter Command was by some measure the junior partner in the RAF and its victory threw the error in the Air Staff's strategy into sharp light. It would not be until mid-1942 that Bomber Command did significant damage to Germany.

In pratice Harris's opinion served to  reassert the Trenchardian doctrine that victory went to the nation which put the greatest effort into bombing. To give Fighter Command the overwhelming credit for winning the Battle of Britain would have been to acknowledge that this calculus was questionable to say the least.