Further to my mention of the German 'Giant' bombers attacking London, I received information from a friend who knows about these things. He tells me that the Kew Bridge Pumping Station was bombed by a Giant bomber in 1918. It took out the Gatehouse and Workshop and some pipework and killed two employees. He added; “We know the machine, the route, the crew and the victims”. Quite amazing what you can discover if you raise a subject like this.
Just before the end of the war, on All Fool's Day 1918, the RAF was created. In January 1919 Winston Churchill was appointed Secretary of State for War and Air but with the understanding that the RAF could not retain its autonomous role. In February Churchill appointed Hugh Trenchard as Chief of the Air Staff and made it quite clear that they were going to fight for an independent RAF.
The old inter-service rivalries surfaced in the round of defence cuts after the Armistice but Churchill saw a way of turning the cuts to his advantage. He and Trenchard proved that it was cheaper to police the colonies by using air power than supporting large numbers of troops on the ground. Key to the success of this policy was the 'moral effect' of machine gunning and bombing from the air of insurgent forces and their villages. In early May 1919 the theory was put into practice in what we call 'The Third Afghan War', in Afghanistan 'The War of Independence'. A young RAF officer called Arthur Harris was involved in the campaign on the North West Frontier and by 1921 was serving in a similar role in Mesopotamia, present day Iraq. There he cut a hole in the floor of the Vernon aeroplane, fitted bomb racks and turned it into what he described as the best bombing plane in the world. This man of course eventually became 'Bomber Harris' in WW2 and it is said that he learned his trade in these colonial policing raids.
It's worth remembering that the 'policing' involved bombing tribal villages and machine-gunning the inhabitants as they ran away in order to force them to pay taxes. The flyers wanted to use gas bombs but this was vetoed by Churchill. (But the army used gas shells in Mesopotamia and it's worth remembering that when the modern 'crusade' against Saddam Hussein was launched there were still people alive in Iraq who could remember this.) This policy of terror from the air was said to be 'extremely effective'.
Similar tactics were used in Egypt, India and other parts of the Empire and in the end this was what saved the RAF as an independent force. In the run up to WW2 this was undoubtedly an advantage but one can't help regretting the roles it had to play in order to get there. The RAF saved us from invasion in 1940 but to this day there is still controversy about Bomber Harris and area bombing.
The Vickers Vernon bomber.
