he RAF lied about what it could do and was caught, somewhat, by the Munich Crisis.
Both Belgium and Holland were neutral and BC would have to fly around, not over them. Result of this was that neither the Battle or Blenheim I, BC's most numerous bombers in 1938 and 1939, could reach the Ruhr and return.
Other countries with short ranged aircraft used them in support of their army and navy, or used limited numbers of slow long range planes in support of the navy. The RAF simply doubled down and said "not our job/s" and continued the long range bombers plan while sucking up a large part of the defense budget.
The problem I have with this is that your picking on Britain is a bit disingenuous and obviously loaded with expectation when almost every armed force in every country in the Western world at the time was doing exactly the same thing and had been for years. Regarding the other countries operating jointly with the other branches of the services, that's an exaggeration and is wholly untrue. In peacetime between the wars, very few countries' services were working together, most were squabbling for funding for their own pet projects, the Japanese armed forces were the extreme example of this.
As it's been pointed out elsewhere, no one else could have attempted what Britain had to undergo in 1939 through 1941 with its bomber force without searching results that were less than inspiring, as Bomber Command's experiences were. We tend to forget that the USAAC promoted
unescorted daylight bombing raids while the RAF had turned to night bombing as an expeditious means of continuing the bombing offensive because of operational experience, not to mention the sheer hopelessness of the first experiments using B-17s in combat in British hands in 1941.
The Luftwaffe won the bombing war in the first two years of WW2 with a sizeable fleet, good tactics and Douhet's strategic imperative of bombing populations into submission (which proved fallacious), as well as a good grasp of technological innovation, but failed due to the country's leaders' hubris, with help from the first and best integrated air defence network of the time in place in the UK. Its bombers, however, couldn't reach Britain from Germany; Germany had to invade France and Norway. Britain's, for all their faults,
could reach Germany from Britain.
But going back to the pre-war era, the lie of Britain's defences was not building obsolete or irrelevant aircraft or perpetuating their unshakeable belief in their strategies - uh, every other military in the world was doing the same at the same time, look at Italy (glaring example here of pre-war hubris), Germany, France, the USA, the Soviet Union, etc.
These incapable aircraft and the policies that surrounded them were not created in a vacuum, they were overtaken by events their conceptualisers couldn't foresee without loads of hindsight they didn't have. Let's also not forget the large number of bomber specifications that emerged in that period immediately before the war when the Air Ministry was throwing lots of specs out into the world in the hope that something stuck, so dwelling on the past was
not what was happening. The British policy was to write a replacement specification for a new type the moment that type had been approved.
The lie was things like the He 177, the US torpedo debacle, the
German torpedo debacle, the Blackburn Firebrand and other continuations of technical overreach, ignorant of the fact that the weapon or policy being perpetuated was a big mistake and continuing to pour vast resources into it. You could argue that continuing the production of obsolete types is the same thing, but under the circumstances, what would you have them do? Was Britain the only country that kept obsolescent types in production and service? Aircraft like the Handley Page Halifax and its myriad problems made good despite themselves, and could only have done so in wartime, but other examples like the P-39 were found out to be less than what was expected and couldn't redeem themselves in the crucible of war, again because figures were tweaked and expectations raised beyond reality beforehand.
The other thing that negates the premise of your argument is that the British armed forces evolved once the shooting started, their experiences changed them. Pre-war policy and technology was bared for the world to see, but the realisation of their inadequacies led to changes in policy and equipment. Had things stayed the same, then it would be easier to accept your argument, Shortround. Where the silliness belongs is in that those who had not experienced what the British forces had then refused to take the hard-won advice and apply it to themselves, like Ernie King not heeding the British Admiralty's advice and allowing US ships sunk off America's coast by German U boats.
The only goal was a Douhet style strategic bombing campaign! What other possible goal was there!
Correct. Virtually all European air forces followed in Douhet's wake. His influence was enormous and the Germans, in particular subscribed to his idea of bombers wreaking havoc on civilian populations to bring them to the negotiating table and it almost appeared that it worked for them in 1939 and early 1940, but Douhet also missed the point of combined operations between forces and tactical innovation, which was the secret to German success in those periods and both of which Douhet studiously ignores.
Pricy but if you really want to know the full story of how RAF requirements were set this book is it.
It's a good book. I have a copy and have used it for research.
