Safety in numbers: Ideas of concentration in royal air force fighter defence from Lanchester to the Battle of Britain

History

Volumn 96, Issue 323, 2011, Pages 304-325

  Mackay, Niall ^a   Price, Christopher ^b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF YORK   (United Kingdom)

^b YORK ST JOHN UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

AIRCRAFT; DEFENSE CRAFT; HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE;

UNITED KINGDOM;

EID: 79960449369     PISSN: 00182648     EISSN: 1468229X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-229X.2011.00521.x     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. The Most Dangerous Enemy:This view is most powerfully expressed in Stephen Bungay, A History of the Battle of Britain (2000) [hereafter Bungay, Most Dangerous Enemy]. For an unusual, information-systems perspective see S. Holwell and P. Checkland, 'An Information System Won the War', IEE Proceedings Software, xclv 199895-9
2. A controversy arose when former journalist Brian James published a sensationalist article (History Today, lvi, 38-40) arguing that the Navy, rather than the RAF, prevented German invasion. His case rested on interviews with three historians, Gary Sheffield, Christina Goulter and Andrew Gordon. All three argue that their words were removed from context, which stressed the importance of the entire British defence effort in preventing invasion, and that they would have insisted on numerous changes to James's text had the opportunity been presented to them. A joint response (Royal United Services Institute Journal[JRUSI], cli (2006), 66-7) argues that the furore amounted to 'a silly season story par excellence'2006
3. This view is largely based on divination of Hitler's intentions by German witnesses to his statements, though it should be noted that the Führer's emphatic utterances were many and often contradictory. His likely actions in the event of a clear and decisive Luftwaffe success over England are also open to question. Ian Kershaw, in a recent distillation of this debate in Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World 1940-1941 (2007), p. 75, dismisses invasion in a few sentences as a briefly considered but unattractive option. He does not, however, account for the intensity and extended duration of the Luftwaffe's daylight campaign
4. M. Kirby and R. Capey'The Air Defence of Great Britain1920-1940: An OR Perspective', Journal of the Operational Research Societyxlviii 1997555-68
5. Maurice W. KirbyOperational Research in War and Peace: The British Experience from the 1930s to 1970 [hereafter Kirby, Operational Research], ch. 32003
6. Lanchester's laws first appeared in a series of articles in Engineering magazine in 1914 (see in particular xcviii (1914), 422-3 and 452-3), and later as a chapter of F. W. Lanchester, Aircraft in Warfare: the Dawn of the Fourth Arm (1916). But similar ideas emerged in the United States (due to J. V. Chase in classified work of 1902 for the US Navy) and Russia (see M. Osipov, 'The Influence of the Numerical Strength of Engaged Forces on their Casualties' (1915), translated by R. Helmbold and A. S. Rahm, in Naval Research Logistics, 435-90). Clearly such models were a natural product of the science of the agexlii1995
7. J.F.C. Fuller (anon.), 'The Principles of War, with Reference to the Campaigns of 1914-15', JRUSIlxi19161-40
8. N. Parton'The Development of Early RAF Doctrine', Journal of Military History[JMH], [hereafter Parton, 'Development of RAF Doctrine']1155-77lxxii2008
9. R.M. Brooke-PophamRAFSC 4th course, commandant's lectures on Air Warfare, AIR69/41 (1925) [hereafter Brooke-Popham, Air Warfare]. The RAF Staff College lectures are collected in AIR69 at RAF Museum London. Lectures on The Principles of War and Air Warfare were delivered by successive commandants, from Brooke-Popham in the early 1920s through to Barratt in 1939
10. J.F.C. Fuller The Foundations of the Science of War [hereafter Fuller, Foundations]1926
11. For the scale of the influence of Lanchester's laws on military thinking through the second half of the twentieth century see, for example, J. G. Taylor, Lanchester Models of Warfare (Arlington, 1983
12. Fuller, Foundations, ch. 13, sect. 8
13. The letter from Jellicoe, dated 15 June 1916 (two weeks after the battle of Jutland/Skaggerak), is reproduced by Lanchester (Lanchester archive B3/18); the original apparently does not survive
14. Fuller Foundations, ch. 13, sect. 8. Confusion over what is meant by concentration in Lanchester's equations continues among modern writers. For example, Azriel Lorber, in Misguided Weapons: Technological Failure and Surprise on the Battlefield (Washington, D.C.,p. 13, writes that 'Lanchester's work has shown, in a mathematically rigorous way, that under certain circumstances quantity is more important than quality', and that 'Bader empirically (presumably) came to the same conclusion [over Big Wings]' 2002
15. Fuller, Foundations, ch. 12, sect. 6
16. S.J. Deitchman'A Lanchester Model of Guerrilla Warfare', Operations Research, 818-27[hereafter Deitchman, 'Guerrilla Warfare']1962x
17. I.R. Johnson and N. J. MacKay'Lanchester Models and the Battle of Britain', in Naval Research Logistics, 210-22, published online December 2008, DOI: 10.1002/nav.20328 [hereafter Johnson and MacKay, 'Lanchester Models']2011lviii
18. Brigadier General Hugh Trenchard was in command of the RFC in France at this time, having taken over from Major-General Sir David Henderson, who became Director-General of Military Aeronautics. Both later came to be regarded as founding fathers of the RAF
19. Claims of Lanchester's influence may be found, for example, in Robin Higham, The Military Intellectuals in Britain 1918-1939 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1966), and John Buckley, Air power in the Age of Total War (Bloomington, 1999). J. E. ('Johnny') Johnson, in Full Circle: The Story of Air Fighting (1964), asserts that RFC tactics were influenced by the N2 law, or 'end-squared law', and provides an arithmetical example. The relevant documents in the Lanchester archive are items on loan from Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, among 514 9916-514
20. Kirby, Operational Research
21. J. Ferris'Fighter Defence before Fighter Command: The Rise of Strategic Air Defence in Great Britain, 1917-1934', JMH, lxiii (1999) [hereafter Ferris, 'Fighter Defence'], 845-84. Ferris actually states, surprisingly, that OR grew out of the RAF's inter-war work, and casts the scientific community in the role of villains, who overstressed the importance of radar and thus erased the effective work of RAF officers from the historical record
22. Before the existence of radar was revealed, Staff College lectures hinted that a technological means of early interception enabling concentration would soon be available
23. Inevitably rather less has been written about fighters and defence in British interwar air power theory than about strategic bombing, for which a classic reference is Malcolm Smith, British Air Strategy between the Wars (Oxford, 1984); also P. S. Meilinger, 'Trenchard and "Morale Bombing": The Evolution of RAF Doctrine before WW2', JMH, xl (1996), 243-70. A wide-ranging introduction is P. S. Meilinger, 'The Historiography of Air Power: Theory and Doctrine', JMH, lxiv (2000), 467-501, while J. R. Ferris, 'The Air Force Brats' View of History: Recent Writing and the Royal Air Force, 1918-1960', International History Review, 118-43, is a pungent critique of the cliquishness of some writing on the subject1998xx
24. T.D. Biddle'British and American Approaches to Strategic Bombing: Their Origins and Implementation in the World War II Combined Bomber Offensive', in Airpower: Theory and Practice, ed. John Gooch (1995); also T. D. Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 (Princeton, 2002
25. R.M. Brooke-Popham RAFSC lectures on The Principles of War, RAF Museum London AIR 69/20
26. Brooke-Popham, Air Warfare
27. S. Robertsonin 'The Development of RAF Strategic Bombing Doctrine between the Wars', Airpower Journal, xii (1998), 38-52, has analysed the shortcomings of Bomber Command, including a failure to take account of the effectiveness of the RAF's own fighter defence in exercises between 1927 and 1933
28. A.B. Ellwood RAFSC 17th course, Air Warfare III: Fighter Operations, March 1939, AIR 69/223 [hereafter Ellwood, Air Warfare]
29. Ferris, 'Fighter Defence'
30. RAF Cranwell, College Hall Library, The Royal Air Force Cadet College: Provisional Syllabus of the Course of Instruction (Two Years)
31. Ellwood, Air Warfare
32. Air Vice Marshal Sir Arthur Sheridan Barratt. Barratt specialized in army cooperation, and in 1940 became AOC in C of the Command of the RAF in France. After the collapse of France he was appointed AOC in C of Army Cooperation Command
33. Parton, 'Development of RAF Doctrine', 1167
34. Brooke-Popham, Air Warfare
35. A.S. Barratt Air Policy and Strategy, AIR69/213 1939
36. A.P.M. SandersThe Principles of War, AIR69/398 (January 1940
37. J.W. Baker Air operations 1914-18 pts 2 and 3: Fighting and Formation Flying, AIR69/238 and 239 (February 1939
38. Ellwood, Air Warfare
39. C. Price, Britain America and Rearmament in the 1930s (Basingstoke, 2001); G. Post Jr, Dilemmas of Appeasement; British Deterrence and Defense, 1934-1937 (Ithaca, 1993); P. Bell, Chamberlain, Germany and Japan, 1933-1934 (Basingstoke, 1996); C. Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (1972); and G. C. Peden, 'The Burden of Imperial Defence and the Continental Commitment Reconsidered', Historical Journal xxvii1984405-23
40. Dowding explained his plans in a May 1937 Staff College lecture on Employment of the Fighter Command in Home Defence, held at the National Archives, Kew, as AIR16/60, and reprinted in the US Naval War College Review, xlv (1992), 35-50. He makes plain his strategic view that Fighter Command's aim must be to maintain itself in being, while the enemy's will be to 'paralyse [the air force and keep it paralysed' by destroying 'machines, reserves, factories and fuel supplies'
41. Leigh-Mallory's views, expressed in 'The Maintenance of Air Superiority in a Land Campaign', RAF Quarterly, ii (1931), 245-52, appear to have developed little in the decade before 1940. He says: 'The best the fighters can hope to achieve is to be able to intercept the bombers on their way back.' Further 'it is misleading to think that the fighters can easily disperse the bombers; the very reverse is the case', while 'for fighters to stand a good chance of defeating a bombing formation, they must have a considerable superiority in numbers; one squadron would obviously be little good'. This contrasts strongly with Park's 1968 letter to Dowding, RAF Museum London AC95/124/12 [hereafter Park, 1968], in which he describes pithily how in Malta he replaced such tactics with forward interception, to great effect
42. For the importance of R/T to the principle of concentration, see Ferris, 'Fighter Defence', 860-2. The importance of concentration is echoed, for example, in the views of Arthur Tedder, whose career began in the RFC in the First World War and included spells at RAFSC and in the Air Ministry, and who in Air, Land and SeaWarfare, RUSI lecture 9/1/46, in Lectures and Articles on Air Power from JRUSI 1937-1954 (1955), wrote that 'air power in penny-packets is worse than useless'. In contrast Trenchard wrote in 1941 of the Battle of Britain that 'in mechanical warfare numbers are of infinitely less importance than the quality of the equipment' (in the foreword to J. M. Spaight, The Battle of Britain (1941), although in context this reads as less anti-numbers than pro-'Few'
43. John A.Warden III The Air Campaign: Planning for Combat (Washington, D.C., 1989), pp. 102-4, describes concentration in the Battle of Britain in terms familiar to RAF proponents of the Big Wing. He argues that the German change of focus to London was a mistake, whereas in fact it achieved (from the German point of view) the advantages of concentration and of bringing Fighter Command to battle en masse
44. Johnson and MacKay 'Lanchester Models'
45. Park's recurring appeal to experience is noted in John Ray, The Battle of Britain: Dowding and the First Victory, 1940 p. 113, as is Dowding's distribution of his forces (ibid., 1042000
46. Johnson and MacKay'Lanchester Models'; also N. J. MacKay, 'Mathematical Models of the Battle of Britain', proceedings of Mathematics in Defence 2009, QinetiQ, Farnborough, November 2009
47. Bungay, Most Dangerous Enemy,362
48. The conspiracy position has been articulated in J. E. G. Dixon, The Battle of Britain in Victory and Defeat: The Achievements of Air Chief Marshal Dowding and the Scandal of his Dismissal from Office (Bognor Regis, 2003) and, most famously, in Robert Wright, Dowding and the Battle of Britain (1969). The minutes of the Air Ministry meeting are reproduced in full in Dilip Sarkar, Bader's Duxford Fighters: The Big Wing Controversy (Worcester, 1997) and in Douglas Bader's 1969 notes on the controversy (provoked by Wright's book), RAF Museum London MF10073
49. Peter Townsend, Duel of Eagles 1970470-1
50. While Bader in his 1969 notes is rather rancorous (mostly against Wright), he takes strongly the position that there was no conspiracy, and that Park's tactics were correct for his forward position: 'at no time was it in Leigh-Mallory's mind' that Park should have operated large formations. For Bader, 'Park was fighting an 11 Group battle which should have been a Fighter Command battle', and this was Dowding's fault ('Dowding failed'). He clearly believes in using large numbers to wreak large destruction, and, perhaps owing to the disproportionate over-claiming we have noted, believes that this would have led to a greater victory. He sees his own views as 'classic air defence in depth'; in not adhering to them 'Fighter Command [displayed an utter inability to grasp the basic and proven rules of air fighting'
51. Sholto Douglaswriting on the matter in his second autobiographical volume Years of Command (1966), claims to have been a pragmatist who formed his views on the efficacy of wings while flying in the First World War, but not to have been one-sided on the issue
52. T.W. Lucas and J. E. McGunnigleFor related views in a modern context 'When is Model Complexity Too Much Illustrating the, Benefits of Simple Models with Hughes' Salvo Equations', Naval Research Logistics, l (2003), 197-217; also T. W. Lucas, S. M. Sanchez, L. Brown, and W. Vinyard, 'Better Designs for High-Dimensional Explorations of Distillations', in Maneuver Warfare Science 2002, eds. G. Horne and S. Johnson (Quantico, VA, 200217-45
53. A brief general introduction to Lanchester models may be found in N. J. MacKay, 'Lanchester Combat Models', Mathematics Todayxlii2006170-3
54. Johnson and MacKay'Lanchester Models'
55. Deitchman, 'Guerrilla Warfare'
56. Aside from the quality of fit of the model, this approach exposes a classic problem with mathematical modelling unsupported by microscopic physical law. Is Park responding to the model, and the associated defensive advantage, or is he creating it The question is impossible to answer within the data, which are limited to the battle as actually fought
57. Remarkably, it is the claimed figures rather than the true ones which appear on the RAF website at The figures we use are the claims for aircraft 'Destroyed' plus half the 'Probables' (and none of the 'Damaged')