Birth of a Spitfire

Pre-amble

“Max Aitken (Lord Beaverbrook) was born in Newcastle, New Brunswick. It was too small for him. So he went to Halifax in Nova Scotia. It was too small for him. He left for Montreal, the commercial capital of Canada. It was too small for him. He came to London. It is too small for him. He will go to hell. It won’t be big enough”.

J.H. Thomas, political opponent

Lord Beaverbrook held a tight grip on the British media as an influential press baron, owning The Daily Express newspaper, as well as the London Evening Standard and the Sunday Express. His political career included serving as a Minister in the British government during both world wars. His friend Winston Churchill, appointed Beaverbrook as Minister of Aircraft Production and later Minister of Supply. Under Beaverbrook, fighter and bomber production increased so much so that Churchill declared: “His personal force and genius made this Aitken’s finest hour.” An energetic man, Beaverbrook immediately also set about a coordinated British propaganda programme, responsible for the dissemination of war information at home. This is the Story of Beaverbrook’s Ministry and its First £10,000,000…

 

 

 

 

THE STORY OF BEAVERBROOK’S MINISTRY AND ITS FIRST £10,000,000 by GORDON BECKLES

COLLINS 48 PALL MALL LONDON 1941

CHAPTER I

The WIND blew angrily across the hill-top plateau, as if it wanted to blow the hangars and huts down into the valley below.

A young Squadron Leader, his hands in pockets and his “Mae West” bulking over his shoulders, gazed out of one of the hut windows. He yawned as he listlessly fingered an empty packet of cigarettes.

“Have one of these,” said a Flight Lieutenant. He alone of the dozen men lounging in the hut was not in flying kit.

“Ah!” said the Squadron Leader, “And where did you get these atrocious things from?” “They happen to be a present from my admirers,” said the Flight Lieutenant. “They cost fifteen shillings a hundred and are handmade. You may take two.”

“This George here,” explained the Squadron Leader to me, indicating the Flight Lieutenant, “is one of those glamour boys from over the way who fly Spitfires. They have fans just like Gary Cooper and Ginger Rogers. Write letters back to the people who paid for their Spitfires.

You know the sort of thing? ‘Dear Girls. Thanks for your sweet little note. Last Sunday afternoon, while thinking of you, I brought down eleven and a quarter Messerschmitts in your Spitfire.”‘ “Shut up!” said the visiting Flight Lieutenant “He always starts shooting a line like this.”

“He’s jealous,” he added, “Because his is only a Hurricane squadron.”

“Jealous!” said the Squadron Leader, now roused, “I like that! It’s only because you have a fancier name. The Hurricane is a better machine, and it costs more. They roll out Spitfires like so many stamps. Hurricanes are like your cigarettes—they’re hand-made.”

Through the window we could see some of the Hurricanes of his squadron. They were at their dispersal point on the edge of the field. This hut was, indeed, a “dispersal hut.” The pilots were at “Readiness.” Soon they would be at “Fifteen Minutes.” And, soon after that, off-duty and able to relax without flying boots and Mae Wests, and the possible necessity of running to their machines through the special brand of R.A.F. mud which is laid down at all R.A.F. stations.

Below the grey sky not so very far away sprawled London. And these were some of the men who for months had fought in defence of the capital by day, and whose prayer—if they thought of phrasing it that way, which they don’t—is that soon they will have the means to defend it by night. Neither their machines, nor the Spitfires at the station “next door” (a matter of some miles, but only a minute to them) were quite as glossy and clean as they look in the pretty pictures, or are suggested to be by models in the toy-shop windows.

They were all battle-scarred, and it was sometimes difficult to see whether a certain patch was the crest of a Spitfire Fund donor or just some machine-gunned-off paint. “You can do anything in these Hurricanes,” said the Squadron Leader. “Except get height,” corrected the Flight Lieutenant. “Yes, we still leave that to you. The Hurricane may be out-moded, but it’s got everything else in the world that you can want except height.

But I daresay that by this time next year everyone will have forgotten all about Hurricanes, and it will all be Whirlwinds and Tornadoes, and God knows-what-all.” “Do you really keep in touch with the people who ‘gave’ your Spitfire?” I asked the Flight Lieutenant. “Oh yes. Some of us give a report officially. A sort of tally. There are twenty-three pilots in our squadron, and only sixteen machines, but as the senior pilots all have their own, each machine is quite distinct, if you know what I mean.” “Tell me,” he went on, “Why do people give all this money to Spitfire Funds and so on? It’s very patriotic but it is extraordinary, isn’t it?

We’ve got a machine paid for by girls in shops. You’d think they would have better things to spend their money on.” “They don’t think so,” I said. A Hurricane pilot strolled over. “I’ll tell you a funny story,” he said, indicating his Squadron Leader. “We were down at the pub the other day playing darts, and he cleaned-up a kitty of four bob. And what do you think he did with it?” “Lay-off it,” said the Squadron Leader. “He popped it in a Spitfire Fund box on the bar! In a Spitfire Fund box!”

The Squadron Leader put his cap on the side of his head and we strolled out to his machine. He looked up at the January sky and shook his head. “That’s one of our next station’s Spitfires,” he said nodding at a machine racing over. “Yes, I think it must be the name that caught on. It gives the Jerry something to think about. You can hear them shouting to each other in the air ‘ Spitfieren! Spitieren! Achtung! Achtung!’”

“The word ‘Hurricane’ doesn’t seem to strike the same note,” he added, perhaps wistfully. “Who thought of this Spitfire Fund Scheme?” “

As far as I can make out,” I said, “Nobody did. It just happened.” “Jolly good show anyway,” said the Squadron Leader, giving his blessing to the £10,000,000 given in pennies, shillings and pounds up to the second month of the heroic year of grace 1941.

CHAPTER II

ON the Sunday night of May 12th, 1940, the telephone bell rang in a gloomy London mansion which hides away its bulk in a side street between St. James’s Palace and the Green Park. The voice on the telephone came from the other end of the Mall, only a few hundred yards away. It informed the owner of the mansion that the Prime Minister would like to see him as soon as possible.

Such a request, if made forty-eight hours before, would have implied an interview with Mr. Neville Chamberlain; but much had happened in two days. Belgium had been again invaded by the Hun, Holland was already coming under the same yoke, while the brittle-cabinet of Mr. Chamberlain had fallen to pieces after a verbal bombardment, the fury of which had seldom been equalled in the House of Commons. Since Friday night the Prime Minister of Great Britain had been Mr. Winston Churchill. He had already chosen and announced the major members of his Cabinet. He could still keep a close eye on his beloved Admiralty from the windows of No.10 Downing Street, and had great faith in the new First Lord, Mr. A. V. Alexander.

Mr. Ernest Bevin and Mr. Herbert Morrison were two Labour stalwarts whose inclusion characterised the catholic nature of Mr. Churchill’s inner council, and the fact that it was to be a business as well as a political Cabinet. There was nothing that the new Prime Minister could do at this late hour which was likely to affect the immediate fate of the British Army. It was already in action, under French leadership, and the efficiency of its training would soon be proved. A general shaking-up of departments, and a rehabilitation in the public eye would probably be the first effects of Mr. Churchill’s changes.

Yet there was one thing, apart from the tremendous events of the moment, that was of immediate concern, and that all winter long had been causing Mr. Churchill and other Cabinet members great anxiety: the country did not possess sufficient aircraft to wage war against the enemy or even to defend it against a total onslaught. On this night, the third of the campaign in the Low Countries, there was in this lamentable fact much to cause the new Prime Minister to curse wholeheartedly the dilatory instincts of most of his fellow countrymen.

He knew, even if the country was blissfully unaware of it, that the French Air Force was still in a dangerously enfeebled state. There was, of course, at Rheims and near Metz a force of British fighter and bomber airplanes. But were their number to be dissipated in the days ahead, then England might be in no position herself to meet mass attacks. What had happened? Why were there not enough airplanes? A few noisy fellows had been shouting about the scandal for years past, but aircraft (like many other things) respond badly to diatribe.

It was one thing to say that we ought to have the biggest air force in Europe, another thing to declare that we actually were going to have it; but quite a different thing to get airplanes into the sky. The bitterest aspect of the position was that, in the terms of the music-hall song, “What was there, was good.” Britain-made machines not only often actually had Rolls-Royce engines but were in every other way worthy of that elegant hall-mark. British aircraft were custom-made as Savile Row clothes are custom-made. There was no mass-production smudge on a British machine when she was turned over to the Royal Air Force, whose pilots in the opinion of every neutral air attache in the country formed the finest flying corps in the world. But British aircraft production had proceeded to obey Mr. Baldwin’s order to “expand,” at the leisurely tempo of a professional cricket match when the players were watching their averages.

The manufacturers were determined to lose none of their hard-earned reputation for a beautifully finished product. Nor were they over-inclined to see their business rivals forging ahead with a new type of aircraft when they themselves had several fine new types on the stocks. The result was that British aircraft factories always had a nice display of new types, improved new types, and super-improved new types, the brains on top being concentrated on the evolution of these new models instead of on the task of how to deliver more machines—whether or not the machines were the finest product of the factory concerned.

All this irritated Mr. Churchill intensely. For years past he had watched the muddle grow worse, impotent save for a pen that had done its best to rouse public apprehension into a state where something would have to be done. But no! It seemed that if there was one thing more than another that gave the tax-payer a yawn it was the thought of all this “bigger air force” nonsense. Mr. Churchill had had an active ally in Lord Rothermere, who had made it his duty to keep the future Prime Minister well posted with all his private information concerning the growing Luftwaffe of Germany. “The trouble with this country,” said Rothermere to Churchill, “is that we are never ready for an international crisis, no matter how plainly its approach is announced.”

And Mr. Churchill could but agree. Yet the English had only recently ceased calling him a Die-Hard warmonger when he began to talk of Germany’s growing air might: and as for Lord Rothermere, he was merely trying to boost the sale of the Daily Mail with sensational matter which even Mr. Baldwin himself had condescended to show as dangerously alarmist. And surely Mr. Baldwin ought to know. There were a few others, of course, who made public the evidence of Germany’s ambitious plans. In 1933 that clever French Jew, M. Mandel, had told of Goering’s plans for factories capable of turning out 2,500 machines a month. The figure seemed fantastic, until one remembered that the Armistice had seen Britain with a force of 20,000 machines.

On the eve of Germany’s seizure of the Rhineland, of her open challenge to the Versailles powers, England’s air power at home had sunk to about 400 first-line machines, although there were reserves in other parts of the Empire. Lord Londonderry, then Secretary of State for Air, had said proudly that as “soon as the boundary line into Asia is passed, the Royal Air Force becomes the symbol of British power.” Lord Rothermere, fuming at Whitehall’s indifference, told Londonderry that he ought to say, with greater truth, that, as soon as the boundary line into Europe is passed, the Royal Air Force becomes the symbol of British weakness.

Finally Mr. Baldwin was induced to stir. Big things were promised. The day came when the Prime Minister rose in the House of Commons and announced his Government’s plans for the next four years. He had decided that 41 new squadrons would be added to the Royal Air Force, of which 33 squadrons would be for home defence.

 

 

How Herr Goering must have chuckled! With what intense delight the men busy rebuilding the Luftwaffe read the news! It meant that by 1939 the island kingdom would have for its defence only 75 squadrons, or less than a thousand first-line airplanes. And Germany already had nearly 5,000 machines at her disposal!

Nor was it the Luftwaffe plan to build large numbers so much as to organize the German aircraft industry on such a scale that at a few months notice it could be thrown into top-gear. Lord Rothermere, with the confidence of one who had dealt in large figures all his life, read Mr. Baldwin’s plans with amazement and disgust.

“We need twenty thousand R.A.F. airplanes” was all that he could say at first; but he said it with confidence and he went on saying it. He was not the only one appalled at Mr. Baldwin’s conservative ideas. Mr. Churchill had risen in the House and, in acid tones, had warned Mr. Baldwin in so many words that he did not know what he was talking about. To allocate only 17 per cent of our defence outlay on the R.A.F. was fantastic to anyone conversant (as Mr. Churchill was conversant) with the real object of those ruthless men who had fought their way to power in Germany and were determined to force their way to supreme power in Europe.

With a few hundred machines around the coast, Mr. Baldwin could rise in the House on March 11th, 1935, and say: “Our Air Force is fifth among – the air forces of the world. We do not seek equality with the largest. We adhere to the position of equality with any Power which may be within striking distance.” Few seemed to know precisely what he meant by that, but British Prime Ministers had come to talk rather oddly. Germany certainly had at the moment that Mr. Baldwin spoke several thousand first-line aircraft. The weeks went by. Mr. Churchill fretted as he ferreted out new facts about the Luftwaffe. Finally he had the dim satisfaction of seeing Mr. Baldwin get up and confess that he had been completely wrong. Mr. Baldwin said “With regard to the figure I gave in the House on November, 28, 1934, of German aeroplanes, nothing has come to my knowledge since that makes me think that figure was wrong.

Where I was wrong was in my estimate of the future. There I was completely wrong. I tell the House so frankly, because neither I nor any advisers from whom we could get accurate information had any idea of the exact rate at which production could be, and actually was being, speeded up in Germany in the six months between November and now. We were completely misled on that subject”. “I will not say we had not rumours, but we could get no facts, and the only facts at this moment that I have are those which I have from Herr Hitler himself. “Herr Hitler told Sir John Simon he had achieved parity with this country in the air – or words to that effect. Subsequent examination in Berlin revealed the fact from those authorized to speak for him that he had at that time from 800 to 850 first-line aircraft. “In those conversations, Herr Hitler made it clear that his goal was parity with.

Now we are basing our estimates on that strength. We have taken a figure round about 1,500 first-line aircraft. That is the figure to which we intend to proceed with all the speed that we can.” That had been five years ago. Our aim had been fifteen hundred first-line aircraft. But it was considered by the Intelligence of the Royal Air Force that the German aviation industry were aiming to produce machines, of all types, at a rate of sixty a day. It was conceivable that since the declaration of war alone the Luftwaffe had been provided with 14,000 new aircraft. Possibly that figure was excessive, but even if the figure was only 10,000, it still made the British air production a Tom Thumb against the Teuton Giant.

On this night of May 11th Mr. Churchill’s inner thoughts could hardly be other than mixed. After a lifetime of struggle and disappointment and disillusion he was at last to occupy that high-backed chair half-way down the long table at No. 10 which, as a Cabinet Minister, he had so long and passionately envied. Now he, Winston Churchill, was the man to whom the nation was about to entrust its destinies. He was at last Prime Minister! He was on the eve of his greatest hour! And thus he was soon to phrase it. On his desk were already despatches and urgent telegrams telling of what had happened in the past two days. Liege had been ruthlessly bombed. Its citizens were the first of the victims. Amsterdam had been given a taste of what might happen to other Dutch cities if the forces of the New Order were not welcomed more warmly.

Bombers had on Friday morning skimmed over the rooftops of the British Embassy in Brussels. Ostend had had its first bombs of World War II. This Sunday night was warm and still. The sky above Whitehall was starlit and clear. The great city slept in security and comfort – but for how long? It was in Mr. Churchill’s mind that in 1918, when London was last bombed by German flyers only forty machines had been at the High Command’s disposal. Those were the days of short ranges and small bomb-loads. But to keep – not with complete success – the Huns from London, a force of some five hundred British fighters had been necessary. Such was the ratio between defender and attacker twenty years ago. Was there any proof that it had altered? Mr. Chamberlain had the assurance of Sir Samuel Hoare, the retiring Air Minister, that by 1941 there would be a great contingent of pilots from Canada. But what machines would they fly? Mr. Churchill read his newspaper assiduously.

He was not so imbued with the popular spirit of wishful-thinking as to imagine that all the headlines on the American cables were accurate reports of the aid that the United States was actually giving. He knew that Britain’s own Spitfires and Hurricanes were superior to anything being produced across the Atlantic. We were being sent some fine “trainers,” a number of first-rate reconnaissance, bomber and patrol aircraft. But nothing as yet with which to fight a major war, such as it seemed the Allies were now about to embark upon. Yet here, within a radius of a hundred or so miles from where he was sitting, were the factories capable of turning out the world’s finest machines. Why was it that they were failing to do so in sufficient quantities? Inefficiency? Lethargy? A precious respect for their own dividends and prestige? What was the remedy? A kick in the pants for the men in charge?

Or a sweet flirtation with boards of directors? Or outright nationalization? These were problems with which Mr. Churchill had often wrestled during the winter months when, nominally in charge of an Admiralty that was already in charge of itself, he had occupied his thoughts with how better to prosecute the war. So it was, that on May 12th the telephone call was put through from the Prime Minister to Stornoway House, where Lord Beaverbrook lived.

CHAPTER III

MR. CHURCHILL had already decided to make a change at the Air Ministry and to employ the talents of Sir Samuel Hoare, the Minister under Mr. Chamberlain’s Government, in another direction. He offered the post of Air Minister to Lord Beaverbrook, who, declining it, had argued that an entirely new Ministry should be set up to concern itself solely with aircraft production.

There was much to be said for this point of view. The task of the man in charge of the Royal Air Force differed basically from the task of the man who was responsible for building its airplanes. Or to reverse the argument, whether or not to promote an Air Commodore, or to pay Pilot Officers more, was no direct concern of aircraft manufacturers in Bristol or Coventry. One was an active fighting department, the other essentially a commercial proposition. Mr. Churchill had already acquiesced to the point of appointing Sir Archibald Sinclair, a Liberal leader, to the Air Ministry. Now he had a few moments to consider just with how much power it would be necessary to invest a Minister for Aircraft Production. And the more he considered the whole issue, the more it appealed to him that Beaverbrook should be given a chance to invigorate the British aircraft industry.

Lord Beaverbrook had spent eight months fretting over the neglect of his talents. Just before the outbreak of the war (which he had firmly believed could never come) he had been in Canada. When hostilities appeared inevitable, he had booked his return passage on what was destined to be the last peace-time crossing of the Empress of Britain, and landed back in England on the eve of the fateful declaration of September 3rd.

There had been some talk of making him Minister of Information, an office which he had been the first to hold during the last year of World War I. But Mr. Chamberlain and his advisers seemed quite unable to comprehend the value of propaganda or how it should be done. The embryo Ministry had got into the hands of the professional Civil Servant, who proceeded to stock its departments with the flotsam and jetsam not only of Whitehall but of Oxford, Cambridge and most of the learned societies.

 

 

Lord Beaverbrook soon realized that, even were he offered the post, the Ministry as constituted was not only useless but even dangerous to the national cause. He could only agree with the suggestion that the attack on London be anticipated by the placing of a large and highly explosive bomb under the strange collection of “experts” in the Ministry’s palatial Bloomsbury home.

So Beaverbrook went hungry for work. And the fact that he was long used to Downing Street’s neglect did not make his spell of waiting any easier to bear. He had now been in the political wilderness for nearly two decades, denied even a House of Commons forum by his acceptance of a peerage from Lloyd George. He had attacked with savage fury the amateurish handling of the American Debt settlement by Mr. Baldwin in 1922, and had pursued that strange gentleman year after year of his mixed periods of high office.

The neglect by the men-in-charge he shared with Mr. Churchill, who also had long been out of office. Three years before, when Beaverbrook had been about to take another North American holiday, news of an impending crisis set him about face on a hurried return voyage. He told inquisitive New York reporters that he was taking regular Atlantic sea trips as a cure for his asthma. The truth was that he had been summoned back by the close friends of Edward VIII (of whom he was one) who wanted his advice on the best course to pursue. That had been in November, 1936. He found himself ranged beside Mr. Churchill in criticising Mr. Baldwin’s dilatory handling of the Constitutional crisis, which had suddenly broken with terrific force not only upon the nation, but upon the hapless monarch himself. Their advice to the King, had it been asked for earlier, might have altered the course of history. As it was, Beaverbrook’s role in the last-minute effort to save the situation remained a secret to the public, and it was Mr. Churchill who earned the scorn of the House of Commons, entranced yet once again with the high falutin’ Mr. Baldwin.

But there was a stronger bond than this between the two men, despite the dissimilarity of their upbringing. Both were unconventional, ruthless, and careless of what the world thought. Both had tough hides, sardonic humour, and ability to handle men – even the ones whom they brushed the wrong way. Both had possessed, at an early stage, dictatorial powers, and that stamp was upon them for life. Beaverbrook had arrived as Max Aitken in England in 1910, armed with a fortune and an acquaintance with another Scots-Canadian from New Brunswick, Mr. Bonar Law. Aitken’s youthfully rough manner and biting sarcasms might have gone unappreciated. It is even possible that, with the purchase of an English country estate at Cherkley in Surrey, he would have been slowly absorbed into the English social scheme and been lost to a wider world. But the war came, and it was no time for Balliol modes of thought or the elegancies of peace-time Party politics. Men of vigour and originality were at a premium.

Beaverbrook rose quickly. He had laid the foundations of a wide circle of friends and acquaintances to whom, in the years of his political exile, he was always willing to tender shrewd advice. Mr. Churchill knew all about his whirlwind entry into the world of Fleet Street when he asked Beaverbrook to become Air Minister. That had been twenty years ago, and Lord Northcliffe was then the reigning monarch of daily newspapers. He controlled publications ranging from The Mmes to Comic Cuts. Yet Northcliffe was a stickler for deportment in his ventures. He liked to see Daily Mail reporters neatly dressed, preferably with gloves and bowler hat. There was a certain ritual about the conduct of affairs of Carmelite House. It was seldom the custom of young sub-editors to hail the august Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Mail as “Tommy.” Indeed, it was not the custom of the organization to encourage any sort of familiarity between even sub-editors and reporters. When Beaverbrook came down to inspect the property in Shoe Lane, of which he was becoming the owner, he found little of this atmosphere in the Daily Express office, and as far as he was concerned, decided to make it less.

It did not matter to “Max” as he was called by his new staff, whether a man worked in his shirt-sleeves or a sweater. The point was—could he deliver the goods? He himself was untidy, wearing what he still does to this day, a plain and usually crinkled blue serge suit, the trousers braced rather high. They were the kind of clothes admirably suitable to an owner who liked to sprawl on the floor of his office-cum-flat, the better to examine the news pages and contents bills of his more prosperous rivals. One by one he watched those rivals disappear, as his own Daily Express crept higher and higher in the circulation field. The Westminster Gazette went, the Daily Graphic melted; the powerful Daily Chronicle dissolved into the Daily News. What was the secret of Beaverbrook’s success? Perhaps it was that of a man who saw clearly the target to be aimed at and allowed nothing to deflect him from his aim.

It did not matter whether he broke the hearts and nerves of a dozen staffs as long as he reached his goal. He was a man who always started a job with the pre-supposition of success, and by sheer nervous driving force and the eagerness to try anything and anybody once, had nearly always got what he wanted. Was he now the man to put revolutionary drive into the British aviation industry? Would it not be risky to confront him with experts whose lives had been spent at their highly technical tasks and who might resent the appearance of such a driving and often cantankerous newcomer? Yes, it was a risk.

CHAPTER IV

THE ANNOUNCEMENT on May 14th of Lord Beaverbrook’s appointment as Minister of Aircraft Production was received with the customary mixed feelings. His friends said: “Max has got something at last.” The public at large, absorbed in the tremendous battles being waged in France and Flanders, felt that, as it was all part and parcel of Winston’s new broom, it was probably a good move. The aircraft manufacturers wondered just what sort of a time they were in for, and hoped that he would not interfere too much with their careful long-range plans. If there was one thing that British aircraft manufacturers had learned through bitter experience, it was to be careful.

They had suffered their lean years, and doubtless would suffer them again; in the meantime, they had balanced their production with due consideration to their tens of thousands of shareholders. They had evolved a certain number of successful leading types of airplane and these were now being produced in slowly increasing numbers. There was a reasonable state of accord between the factories and Air Ministry. Lord Beaverbrook, with a red Cabinet dispatch box in his hand again after twenty years, found that he had inherited a complex section of Civil Service administration. It was called “The Department of the Air Member for Development and Production,” and it was presided over by a man whom the new Minister was delighted to know both as a Scot and a Presbyterian.

Air Chief Marshal Sir Wilfrid Freeman was fifty-two and a man of considerable brilliance as an executive. He had watched over the R.A.F.’s aircraft at a period of great development, and he controlled a host of directorates and red-tape nests. There were scientific and, technical officers by the score who woke up to find themselves no longer under the Air Ministry for which they had been working the night before. There were directorates of Sub-Contracting, Aircraft Equipment Production, Statistics and Planning, and of Aeronaticaul Inspection. The Department now to become a Ministry was several thousand Civil servants strong. It had not always been so lavishly constituted.

For the greater part of the period after World War I it had had little enough money to spend on technical encouragement. In 1934 Lord Rothermere had busied himself with an inspection of current types of European aircraft. He was startled to notice that whereas British workmanship was as fine as ever many of the types being produced were far behind in performance those of Germany, Italy and France, notably in bombing machines.

 

 

“Why?” he asked. The English manufacturers whom he met all had the same reply. “Because the Government won’t put up the money for building aircraft of extreme performance,” they said; “it takes a great deal of money, and a long time, to evolve a new type. Besides, the Air Ministry stipulate such a long list of requirements that before we can get any type out of it, it is usually out of date, and behind what other countries are already producing.”

“It suddenly gave British women an interest in the airplanes flying overhead in their defence.” Lord Rothermere said he would foot the bill for the finest all-round civil aircraft that could be produced. The Bristol Aeroplane Company already knew the very type of machine that they wanted to make. They signed a contract with the millionaire newspaper owner. In little over a year they were able to show him the result of their work and his money. It had two 645 horse-power engines, a speed upwards of 260 m.p.h. and a normal range of travel of 750 miles. Whereupon Rothermere, who bad no great love for flying himself but a keen sense of practical patriotism, gave the machine to the Air Ministry. It had, of course, been designed with an eye to adaptation as a medium bomber, of a type which the country needed.

It was soon converted from a low-wing to a mid-wing monoplane and in speed, range and load-carrying capacity it proved outstanding. The name given to this aircraft on its delivery to the pilots of the Royal Air Force was the “Blenheim.” Its entry into service coincided with a new upward swing in the whole industry. Already on the draughtman’s tables, or in the assembly hangars, were machines which three years later would be making history in World War II. There were Hawker “Hurricanes,” and “Supermarine Spitfires” being hatched. There were “Sunderland Flying Boats” due to come from Short Brothers, and “Whitley” heavy bombers from Armstrong Whitworths. “Battle” medium bombers from Fairey Aviation, big “Hampdens” from Handley Page, long-range “Wellingtons” from Vickers, “Skua” dive-bombers out of the Blackburn shops.

A new and unnamed fighter was shortly to engage the attention of the Boulton Paul Company. These were the types with which Britain had entered the war in 1939 and which were still the background of the country’s aerial defence and offence when eight months later Hitler had now begun his major campaign. Splendid machines – but too few of them! What was the cause? Why should the makers of the world’s fastest machines be making them at almost the world’s slowest pace? Was quality of product quite unable to walk hand in hand with speed of output? That was what Lord Beaverbrook was determined to find out, as twenty years before he had been determined to find out why one good newspaper was on the rocks with a small circulation while another bad one was minting money and sold by the million.

It had taken him five driving years of hard office work to put the Daily Express on the way to success. Five years? Five weeks! No, he could not afford to waste even five days in his new and far greater task. After all, he had been neither professional editor, writer, camera man or reporter when he had arrived in Shoe Lane. He had learned as he had gone along.

Well, he certainly knew little about airplane manufacture. He had worked the controls of one of his own machines on occasion, until warned that, for one of his impatient temperament, flying was done more safely as a passenger. Thus he entered office with a prayer on his lips and determination in his heart – and a last solemn injunction to his editors to look after the papers and watch their step when they felt acidly critical about men who were now to be Beaverbrook’s Cabinet colleagues.

CHAPTER V

THE NEW MINISTER’S first survey of the British aircraft industry confirmed his worst fears. It was in a highly organized state. This much he learned while sitting in the May sunshine on the terrace of Stornoway House, which served as his office during the first few days of his appointment. Most of the Air Ministry staff which he was now to command were – he learned with some distaste – as far away from the capital as Harrogate. One of his first decisions was that the new Ministry must be gathered together as soon as possible into one building.

He had preached against dispersal in his papers for the past eight months. Now he was able to put it into practice on his own, account – which gave him some quiet satisfaction. That the aircraft industry was so highly organized on a “balanced production” basis certainly seemed to him lamentable. He had but one remedy for this state of affairs: it must be disorganized and unbalanced without delay.

Few industrialists were so accomplished as organizer of disorganization as Max Aitken, first Baron Beaverbrook. It was a pity in a way, of course. The beautiful aircraft now being turned out were the direct result of the competitive spirit which Beaverbrook had always championed. Private enterprise had created the Spitfire and Blenheim and Defiant machines. But there comes a time in the life of nations when private enterprise have to step aside. Private enterprise was the very essence of the British aircraft industry. Beaverbrook could pick up one of the magazines devoted to flying and find its advertising pages still filled with the announcements of firms extolling the excellence of their wares.

There seemed dozens of them, and in case the enemy might not know, their factory addresses were usually attached. There were several makers of aero engines which were the “best.” Accessory manufacturers were eager to serve. It was a world of its own, jealous of its rights and still conscious of the struggle it had endured during the lean years. At any other time Beaverbrook might have been filled with admiration at the enterprise displayed. But now it was his job – and he had the powers – to nationalize the industry to a point which would result in the greatest number of aircraft in the shortest possible time. Attendance at Cabinet meetings at No. 10 had revealed the really alarming state of affairs being hidden from the public. Much was already being written about the heroic exploits of No. 1 Fighter Squadron in France.

No mention was made of the fact that the Squadron was going into the air with seven Hurricanes! He struck the keynote of the Beaverbrook method of shaking things to pieces (prior to reconstruction) in the first few hours. A suggestion had been made and agreed upon. The official concerned said that he would see that it was put into effect without delay, and by Monday at the latest: it was then Wednesday. “Monday?” rasped Beaverbrook, with the look of baffled rage that he uses when it suits the occasion, “Monday? What is Monday?” “Er, Monday, May the 10th,” said the official.

“MONDAY! WHY NOT TOMORROW?” “Yes, Lord Beaverbrook.” “No!

No! TO-NIGHT! THIS AFTERNOON!”

It was so quickly spread around that the new Minister was not to be trifled with. He had not entered with that deferential smile which the Civil Service are accustomed to see on the faces of politicians credited to their care. On these first few days of office the news from France and Belgium was already growing worse. Holland had surrendered and its Queen was in flight. The order to retreat had already been given to the British Expeditionary Force. And at home impassioned appeals for a speed-up in industry were being made by anyone likely to be heard or read. It was essential that the Ministry of Aircraft Production should lead this national drive.

One of the most effective of the Beaverbrook devices was aimed at men whom the Minister decided should either work or certainly be on the factory premises for twenty-four hours a day. It consisted in finding out when the executive concerned was likely to be off-duty and then besieging him from all angles with telephone calls. It had been employed on Beaverbrook editors in the past and it was effective from the start in his new venture. Yet before these methods could be really effective it was necessary that Beaverbrook should know at least the names of the men controlling an industry employing upwards of five hundred thousand workers.

It was not sufficient to know merely the names of the chairmen, managing directors or even the works managers. He could have those from the books of reference on his desk. What Beaverbrook wanted to know were the names of the men “who were really doing the job.”

 

 

The aviation industry was not so unlike Fleet Street in carrying “passengers.” An Editor-in-Chief at £5000 a year might be spending a week end playing golf, an Editor at £3,000 down at the seaside, a Departmental Editor concerned attending a public lunch while the man actually doing the job (at £15 a week) was unknown to the proprietor. Beaverbrook never liked that state of affairs. “Aluminium was piled house-high by the housewives of Britain” So from the start he laid plans to be informed, by impartial. envoys to the many factories, whether it was Sir Somebody Who or just a plain Mr. Jones who kept the wheels going. That, of course, was the good journalist at work.

He wanted to know the truth. He had no intention of dealing with Sir Somebody Who if that distinguished passenger could not himself see that a job was done or an order carried out. This discreetly acquired knowledge was impressive at the Ministry’s headquarters. “Get hold of Mr. Jones at that factory,” he would say to an official, “and tell him that Lord Beaverbrook wants a statement about those airframes.” “Don’t you mean Sir Somebody Who?” the official would suggest. “No! I don’t mean Sir Somebody Who at all. I mean Mr. Jones.” When it was found that, after all, it was quicker to deal with the Mr. Jones, Lord Beaverbrook won a reputation for knowing more about the inside of the industry than was generally suspected.

The industry was also soon to learn that, in the hands of the new Minister, the Emergency Powers Act was likely to prove as powerful an instrument as its architects had intended. A number of swift and clean-cut decisions showed that Beaverbrook was acting not only with the private backing of Mr. Churchill but with the assurance born of absolute legal power. One decision made within two days of taking office caused a considerable sensation. It concerned Lord Nuffield’s venture into aircraft production at one of his new works. It had been a bold scheme, backed by a man whose mechanical genius had given Britain its first mass-produced popular car. But progress was tragically slow. Many reasons were put forward for this delay.

Perhaps the most valid was that Lord Nuffield was relying too much on motor engineering methods. The same thing had happened in the United States during World War I, when automobile brains tried to build aviation engines in a hurry. Whatever the reason, the scheme was marking time. Lord Beaverbrook sent for Lord Nuffield and told him that his factory would function better under the control of the Vickers Supermarine organization, which had been making the “Spitfire” fighters. Yet all these preliminary skirmishes were no more than a boxer’s shuffling in the resin-tray before striding out into the ring. The real problem that Beaverbrook had to solve dealt with the allocation of raw materials. The big fact of the moment was that production was being held up because one factory had too little of a certain metal or alloy of which a rival factory had an abundant stock.

The Minister decided to short-circuit the Ministry of Supply by setting up shop himself as a dispenser of raw material, where and when it was needed. “You want that material?” he intended to say; “I’ll get it for you. You must trust me. I’ll steal it out of So-and-so’s stores if necessary.” Finding himself up against the Ministry of Supply at the very start failed to disturb his sleep. In the first place, that Ministry had just got a new Minister itself in Mr. Herbert Morrison; in the second, Beaverbrook liked nothing better than to fight for his own.

The Navy might want aluminium, the Army be crying for it. There was no appeal to the sentiment of the man in those facts. All he cared about was that his airplanes should have aluminium – and the rest could go to hell as far as he was concerned.

CHAPTER VI

LORD BEAVERBROOK chose for his permanent office an impressive apartment on the top floor of one of London’s tallest and most modern buildings. From its windows he presented himself with a panorama of the capital that stretched from dockland to the Houses of Parliament. He could see the Thames, St. Paul’s Cathedral and a vast sector of the sky which he hoped one day to see filled with a great armada of victorious British airplanes, in one of which would surely be sitting his son and heir, Squadron-Leader Max Aitken.

His chief adviser he inherited from the Air Ministry department which formed the nucleus of his new Ministry. This was Sir Charles Craven, the head of the great Vickers organization. It was a piquant situation when on the third day of office Beaverbrook decided to give a job to Mr. Trevor Westbrook, who had only recently parted company from the Vickers organization, of whom he had been one of the managers. Westbrook was a man of vitality and brusque temperament who was an excellent foil to the more smooth-mannered Civil Servants with whom Beaverbrook found himself surrounded. He was the first of many new men whom the new Minister was to try out in the months to come. From Sir Charles Craven and Westbrook he first learned that in addition to the raw material problem there was actually a shortage of labour. Why this was so after eight months of war—and with hundreds of thousands of men wanting jobs – is one of democracy’s mysteries.

The situation was made the subject of an appeal in the newspapers and on the wireless: “The most urgent need of this hour is a great increase in the rate of output of aeroplanes. For this purpose large numbers of fitters are immediately required for erection and assembly work in aircraft factories. There is a large number of men competent to do this work now employed in garages on repair of civilian motor transport.” It was Beaverbrook’s first appeal to the man-in-the-street. Simple as was the phrasing, it had three merits; it was brief, it was clearly understood, and it was specific in directing itself to garage workers. On the same day the information of a Light Alloys Committee was announced, under the chairmanship of the head of the Hawker-Siddeley organization, Mr. F. S. Spriggs. And in another couple of days the formation of another committee was announced.

Beaver-brook was no great believer in committees. But it might be said that he wanted the whole industry to be itself an alloy. This new board was an emergency one to deal with the steel position and at its deliberations sat the representatives of Firth Brown, Hadfields and the other leading steel groups. A day later another group was formed to deal with the urgent problem of airframe production, Hawker-Siddeley, Fairey Aviation and Vickers-Armstrong were represented.

Beaver-brook was banding together the manufacturers to run their industry themselves with a minimum of Civil Service interference. If it failed to speed up production and ease our problems, then another system would have to be improvised. On the Minister’s desk when he first assumed office were details of the Shadow Factory scheme which had been launched some years before in preparation for a war-time enlargement such as was now about to take place, and which should have taken place long before but for the dilatory Government preparations.

The chairman of the Aero Engine Committee of the scheme was Lord Austin, who, like Lord Nuffield, had put his services and that of his technical advisers at the disposal of the nation. Beaverbrook thought that here, too, a new hand might be productive of speed. He chose as the new head of the Aero Engine organization an old friend, Mr. William Rootes, whose automobile group embraced Herbert Hillman, Talbot and Sunbeam cars. Mr. Rootes, through Rootes Security, Ltd., was already interested in the manufacture of Blenheim bombers. Does it seem strange that, at so late a date in the war, it should have been necessary to make all these moves?

Perhaps so; but it must not be forgotten that the British Government did not, unlike the German Government, finance or build its own aircraft. There was nothing controlled by the Air Ministry comparable to the Admiralty ship-building yards at Devonport or Portsmouth. True, the Admiralty was dependent upon private shipbuilding yards in years of expansion. But its own naval architects in its own yards carried on year in and year out. The Air Ministry technical officials were more concerned with equipment and specifications rather than a broad approach to the whole problem of design and production.

In the same way, Woolwich Arsenal was the key of the whole military armament system. Sub-contracting was built around Woolwich. But the Royal Air Force – as such – had no facilities for turning out a single airplane.

The civilian builders made beautiful aircraft. Nobody could deny it. “But not ENOUGH!” said Beaverbrook. “Not ENOUGH!”

 

 

CHAPTER VII

THE PUBLIC in England were still in the dark as to what exactly was happening in France and Belgium. That all was not well seemed evident. German troops seemed to be in places where German troops had no business to be.

The communiqués from Lord Gort’s H.Q: were as terse as those from Paris were full of vague hope and constant reference to “strategic retreats and previously prepared positions.” The apprehension of the new Cabinet might be guessed from the increasing number of exhortations to work being made at home. The Ministry of Aircraft Production was in the van, and Beaverbrook’s first “invitation to work” was broadcast at the end of his first week in office.

Aircraft workers were earnestly “invited” to work on the week-ends on May 25th and 26th, and on the following week-end. The Minister added that any firm which found itself unable to follow this “advice” for any reason at all “should send me a telegram explaining the difficulties and I will see what I can do to smooth them out.” Like his appeal to garage workers, there was a “between you and me as men” touch in this appeal. Yet it was but a prelude to a much bigger drive in the shops.

After the second week-end of voluntary overtime a longer manifesto came from the desk overlooking the Thames. “This is an appeal to all workers in the aircraft industry,” it began. “Urgently we ask for the fullest output this week and next. “First of all, I address myself to those who work on equipment and accessories for aircraft. They have been steadfast in their labours for long. But now I must ask a great deal more of them. The branch of the industry to which they belong is of absolute importance.

The products which they manufacture are essential to sustaining an effective fighting air force. In asking them for even greater exertions I am confident that they will carry their burden, however heavy, in the maintenance of our strength in the air. But the call goes out with the same insistence to the workers in the airframe factories and the aero engine shops. “I want to reach all of you with my words: the work you do this week fortifies and strengthens the front of battle next week. The production which you pour out of your factories this week will be hurled into the desperate struggle next week. “And, make no mistake, in meeting this crisis we have none to rely on but own our energy and driving force. Britain stands or falls on her own resources. You have the power to multiply and to magnify them. The young men of the Air Force, the pilots and gunners, are waiting to fly the machines.

We must not fail them. We must provide the aircraft, engined, armed, equipped and ready for battle.” The Ministry was getting into the public limelight, and the Minister was determined to keep it there. He announced that he had appointed Admiral Sir Edward Evans to be in charge of factory protection. It came again as a surprise to many that it was necessary, so late in the day, to organize the protection of aviation factories. But there again, it had to be remembered that the factories were not Government properties. The Royal Air Force itself had to indent upon the War Office for anti-aircraft protection for its own aerodromes; how much less likely was a limited company to get what it needed? Mr. Trevor Westbrook bobbed up again as the man in charge of aircraft purchases from Canada and the United States.

This was a department which Beaverbrook’s intimate knowledge of men and affairs on the other side of the Atlantic was likely to strengthen considerably. Despite columns of cabled assurance, hesitation and the approaching elections had not kept American deliveries up to scratch. The French were over-whelmingly dependent upon American machines for actual fighting craft, but apart from Lockheed Hudsons for the Coastal Command, most of our contracts were for trainer and reconnaissance craft. The winter had been spent in bickering as to which was the best machine, and who would be the best firm to manufacture engines. As matters stood on this fateful May, no English-type aero-engines could be expected in. quantities for well over a year. Beaverbrook then brought in one of his former editors, Mr. Beverley Baxter, M.P., to be Controller of Factory Co-operation, a job which brought him into contact not only with the managers of the factories but the men themselves. Baxter, as an Editor of the Daily Express, was fully conversant with the new Minister’s peculiar methods.

A week of Canadian appointments was capped by cabling his friend Mr. Morris Wilson in Montreal that he would like him to become agent of the Ministry in Canada and the United States. Mr. Morris Wilson cabled back that he would certainly accept the post and at no salary. The name of Mr. Morris Wilson was unknown to the wider public in Great Britain. But in Canada and the United States he was a power in the land. He was the President of the Royal Bank of Canada, and one of the best-known banking men in the Dominion. Lord Beaver-brook, as plain Max Aitken, had been concerned with a Royal Bank of Canada deal thirty years before. And it was only a short time ago that he had lectured Mr. Wilson on the benefits of owning a private airplane when the banker was faced with a long train journey to the Maritime Provinces.

One morning came news to the Minister’s desk that Mr. Henry Ford was likely to accept an order for 6000 Rolls-Royce Merlin aero-engines, the first to be delivered towards the end of 1941. This was indeed good news. Beaver-brook issued it to the public. The good news was, alas! Destined to be still¬born. Mr. Henry Ford stepped backward twenty-five years to the day when he set sail on his absurd Peace Ship to stop the boys fighting in Europe and get them out of the trenches by Christmas. Not for the first had a mechanical genius been infected with some of the robot spirits of the machine. Mr. Ford declared he could have nothing to do with instruments of war.

CHAPTER VIII

DURING the first half of June, Lord Beaverbrook left his desk at the Ministry to perform a duty which, if it had something to do with flying, certainly had nothing to do with aircraft production. He went with Mr. Churchill on his flight to France when the Prime Minister made a desperate attempt to strengthen the hand of M. Reynaud, assailed then on all sides by defeatists and men who proved to be traitors.

Paris had been surrendered and the Government was in retreat, actually and morally. They had fled to Tours and then on to Bordeaux. Beaverbrook had been privy to Churchill’s bold imaginative plan to offer British citizen¬ship to all France, with a reciprocal proviso which would have made the two nations one for the duration of the war. But suspicious French politicians cried aghast that it would be making France a British Dominion, apparently preferring to let their country become a German subject race instead. And Mr. Churchill was left with as grim a burden of responsibility as had ever been shouldered by a Prime Minister of Great Britain. It was some comfort to him to hear from his Minister of Aircraft Production that things were going well in the aircraft factories.

They were indeed going well. Lord Beaver-brook was able to tell the Prime Minister that since the start of the tragic campaign more aircraft, of all sorts had been made in England than were lost both in fighting abroad or at home by accidents. The country was better off in the air than it had been on that dawn five weeks before when Hitler’s warplanes had swept over the rooftops of Brussels, Rotterdam’ and the Hague. And it needed to be! The enemy now occupied the whole coastline from Narvik to the Spanish border. A month ago such a state of affairs would have seemed incredible and disastrous. England’s beaches were in some places ten minutes away from German-occupied air bases. The whole British attitude to the war had suddenly to suffer a violent re-orientation. During the winter it had seemed that the east coast would be the first to suffer air invasion. Now Portsmouth and Devonport were in the front-line. Not in vain had the aircraft workers laboured during those days and nights when history was being written at so tremendous a pace. “The public must give thanks for this immense effort,” said Lord Beaverbrook on June 20th, three days after the Petain surrender.

Our workers have striven day and night, without time off for recreation, without any regard for the pleasures and amenities of life. Their conduct is beyond praise. We can place our future in their keeping with confidence.” Beaverbrook wrote these words with reports on his desk of dozens of splendid feats of super-production. One struck him as particularly dramatic. It concerned several hundred Lancashire women workers in a weaving mill. Had he but known it, the Mrs. Smiths of the nation were making their bow to him.

This mill had an aircraft contract, but by the ordinary trade union rules it prepared to close down at midday on Saturday, not to open again until Monday morning. The whistle blew and the seven hundred hands (nearly all of them women) trooped off to spend a nice June afternoon after several weeks of long hours. It so happened that later on that fine Saturday afternoon an urgent call came to the Ministry for an increased delivery of the product of the factory. Beaverbrook got one of the directors on the telephone.

 

 

“Certainly,” said the director; “we must open tomorrow morning, if we can round up the workers.” That night dozens of Lancashire police visited clubs, homes and dance halls, while cinema screens flashed the message that the mill was opening for Sunday work. And it opened. The Ministry became more and more in the public eye. For the public was in a grim and disillusioned mood. It was ready to clutch at any straw of hope for future victory. The excitement of Dunkirk was over, the days ahead uncertain and pregnant with dark fears. Barbed wire barricades suddenly appeared in quiet country lanes, bedsteads and old cars were piled in seafront streets, armed soldiers held up at the point of the bayonet citizens in counties far removed from any battlefield only a few weeks before. Beaverbrook himself was full of confidence, just as when others were optimistic he was often in a mood of deep depression.

Two weeks before, just as the last men were leaving the Dunkirk beaches, he had received a cable from a Jamaican paper called the Gleaner. It asked him how much it cost to build a bomber. “How much?” he repeated as he read the cable, “I should say £20,000 is a good round figure.” A week afterwards a secretary laid on his desk a cabled banking advice that £20,000 was to the credit of the Minister of Aircraft Production. It came from the readers of the Gleaner in distant Jamaica who felt that they would like to participate in the battle of Britain which seemed about to commence. “We will buy you the biggest and best bomber so far produced,” he replied. “It is a gift of the first importance in a time of dire need.” The Treasury was used to receiving Conscience Money, and acknowledging it on behalf of the Chancellor, often at a cost exceeding the amount sent.

That was an old British custom. But this was something much more imposing. A week later the Straits Times of Singapore cabled £250,000. But by that time Jamaica was well on its way with its second £20,000 bomber, while the Gold Coast hastened to cable £100,000. The affair assumed the proportion of an Empire round game, played by people who seemed to have a lot of money to spend. The people of England, groaning under heavy taxation, read the announcement with envious interest. Towards the end of June a Canadian mining millionaire, Sir Harry Oakes, cabled from the Bahamas to ask whether anyone could join in the game. He was assured that there were no restrictions at all.

So he said that he would like to purchase a Spitfire for presentation to the Royal Air Force. How much did a Spitfire cost? Again a round figure was chosen. Five thousand pounds was adjudged the most suitable amount. A Spitfire actually cost much more; but £5000 was the limit of the public’s contribution to each aircraft.

CHAPTER IX

ALUMINIUM, its control and allocation, haunted Beaverbrook’s mind at this time. Factories were crying out for the precious alloy ; for there seemed not enough to go around. Aluminium became in the Minister’s eyes more precious than the gold flowing on to his desk from. Crown Colonies. Every second telephone call, every other conference, every daily report concerned itself with aluminium. It seemed that, should there be a lack of it; the security of Britain would be endangered.

The fact was that Germany controlled a great proportion of the world’s supplies of bauxite (or aluminium-bearing clay) while the Empire’s undoubtedly great resources were largely un-tapped. The sudden defection of France aggravated the situation. And there was also the unpleasant thought that all our late Ally’s supply of aluminium would now pass into enemy hands. The Germans had for some time past been using a synthetic process, in which other clays than bauxite had been worked. We had taken no such provision. It was particularly irritating to Beaverbrook, with his Empire-mind, to look at the map and see the great expanses of bauxite territory in Nyasaland and the Gold Coast untouched. Britain’s bauxite now came from British Guiana, with smaller shipments from India, Malaya and Australia.

But we at least had protected our source of cryolite, the ice-stone from Greenland, which is an essential part of the electrolysing process by which aluminium is made. Beaverbrook has, when his interest is stirred and his ambition aroused, a one-way mind. He banished all other problems in favour of aluminium. “What is the peacetime consumption of aluminium?” he asked. The figures were given him; he raised his eyebrows. “But where does it all go?” They told him. Into pots and pans, kettles and coat hangers. Into dozens of everyday articles. “There must be a great deal of aluminium lying idle in this country,” he observed, ” not doing duty.” On July 10th the newspapers of Great Britain printed a manifesto signed ” Beaverbrook.” It was addressed to the women of Britain. Millions read it, in palaces and cottages and tenements. It was in the purest Beaverbrook style of English. The terse phrase, the slight flavour of the pulpit which this lifelong Bible student so often imparts, the direct appeal to the man in the street. But this time it was not to the men but to the Mrs. Smiths of the country that lie was metaphorically holding out his arms.

“WE WANT ALUMINIUM AND WE WANT IT NOW” it began, and went on with a slight smack of Aladdin. “New and old, of every type and description, and all of it.

We will turn your pots and pans into Spitfires and Hurricanes, Blenheims and Wellingtons. “I ask, therefore, that everyone who has pots and pans, kettles, vacuum cleaners, hat pegs, coat-hangers, shoe-trees, bathroom fittings and household ornaments, cigarette boxes, or any other articles made wholly or in part of aluminium, should hand them over at once to the local headquarters of the Women’s Voluntary Services. There are branches of this organization in every town and village in the country. But if you are in any doubt, if you have difficulty in finding the local office of the Women’s Voluntary Services, please enquire at the nearest Police Station or Town Hall, where you will be supplied with the necessary information. “The need is instant. The call is urgent.

Our expectations are high.” The newspapers leapt on this appeal with gusto. It was refreshing to set about anything with gusto in that ominous July. No cartoonist could resist the pots and pans touch. A comedian had only to bring on a kettle in one hand and a frying-pan in the other to get a laugh right away.

Leading articles appeared: “POTS AND PANS FOR VICTORY” and “OUT OF THE FRYING-PAN INTO THE SPITFIRE.”

A rather acid note was struck by a leading firm of aluminium scrap merchants who protested to The Times that, far from there being a shortage of aluminium, they had ample stocks. They were reproved with an explanation that it was the finer grades of aluminium that the aviation industry needed. And the great scrap-heap grew and grew. Pots, clocks, skates, shooting sticks, vases, cups were only at the head of a list of the aluminium articles of everyday use which were turned out of the cupboards and taken off the shelf and laid in homage before Lord Beaver-brook. It became a point of honour with hundreds of thousands of housewives to have contributed their best to the great cause.

“We gave five saucepans and two frying-pans” one would say. And a husband would retort that lie had lived for two days on tinned food because his wife had given all the best cooking utensils in the house to Beaverbrook without thinking of what would take their place. One pile of aluminium objects in a south London suburb rose a storey high. The mayor of a borough complained bitterly that he arrived one morning to find that his parlour had been chosen as the dump and was knee deep in domestic utensils of the oddest character.

 

 

After a fortnight it was decided that the campaign had carried the nation, and that there was sufficient aluminium of the best grade in the kitty for a time. “To the fine-spirited, the kind-hearted, the patriotic members of the public, who gave us their pots and pans. The collection of aluminium for aircraft closes on Saturday next, July 27,” announced Beaverbrook. “If any of you still have gifts of aluminium to send us, will you please take them to the collecting stations of the W.V.S. before that date. “The contributions have been immense. The generosity shown us, the consideration given us has been heartening to a degree. The response has been a real encouragement to us. But our needs are growing all the time. We will return again, therefore, asking on another occasion for the aluminium which is still available in the country.” Some weeks later it was announced that Beaverbrook had taken over from Mr. Morrison, the Minister of Supply, the Government control of aluminium. Later on, in October, when Mr. Morrison left that Ministry to be Minister of Home Security, Beaverbrook announced that he was “a great fellow who has bothered me plenty.

But I now forgive him.” Mr. Morrison made no adequate response. The net result of the Great Aluminium Scare was that the urgent needs of the aircraft industry were common talk in the vicarage drawing-rooms and kitchen-parlours of the nation. And Beaverbrook, of course, had got a quantity of aluminium without paying a penny of the tax-payers’ money for it.

CHAPTER X

BY JULY the nation’s newspapers had got quite accustomed to finding space at the bottom of their daily columns for stories such as: ” Lord Beaverbrook acknowledges with gratitude the sum of 30S. sent him by a housewife in Stamford, Lincolnshire. The money had been put aside for a holiday.” The ball had begun to roll. A Wolverhampton alderman, Mr. Morris Christopher, had told the editor of the Express and Star that it might be a good scheme for Wolverhampton to try and buy a Spitfire and present it to the nation. “I read that they cost about £5,000” he said. “Here is my cheque for the first £50” The paper opened a fund and in one week-end received £1250. In a few days more the total received by Wolverhampton citizens stood at £6,000.

This was an obvious challenge to the civic pride and patriotism of other cities. The Daily Express, in discussing the proposal to open a Spitfire Fund in Brighton, named “Worcester and Wallasey, Gloucester and Greenock, Wigan and Wimbledon” as likely challengers. Worcester took this alliterative hint quite seriously. By the end of July, the cathedral city had put herself in the front line with two Spitfires. The rush to participate in the war in this highly imaginative way was symptomatic of the nation’s feeling at the moment. A great pause had come in the war. For five weeks history had been written at break-neck pace. For millions in Britain the days had been punctuated by the arrival of the newspapers and the listening to the radio bulletins. Now a curtain had descended on France. And the events of the next act in the drama could only be guessed. All very well for the people to shake their fists at the raiders already coming over the coasts in ones or twos; how much more practical to put one fist into the trousers pocket and actually play a part in the coming conflict!

It was a voluntary gesture, and because it was voluntary, it appealed to the freedom-loving British. Yes, there were taxes, taxes and more taxes; one had to pay those; but here was something that you could do because you wanted to do it. The Crown Colonies were still pouring money into the coffers of the motherland. One’s shilling or guinea or tenser stood in company with a Colonial fund that, at £1,600,000 was going to provide forty heavy bombers and 16o Spitfires. Why Spitfires? Why not Hurricanes? Why not Wellingtons or Hampdens? There was a glamour around the word “Spitfire.” Even Lord Trenchard’s protest that it was, after all, a defensive weapon and that our hopes should be fixed on aircraft of an offensive type failed to lessen the appeal of the machine’s name. After all, as people well knew when they gave their money, they were really contributing to a general fund. Yet the illusion survived. People lifted their eyes to the sky with a sense of personal pride. A part of that R.A.F. squadron, its white vapours tracing delicate designs across the blue, belonged to them. Perhaps only a thermometer, or a nut and bolt. But it was their contribution.

At the Ministry’s headquarters a surprised, and almost embarrassed, staff daily found them-selves recipients of strange gifts. From Bristol came two and a half tons of aluminium powder, and on the same day three gold pieces from Dursley, a Golden Jubilee fiver and two gold coins from a grateful German refugee. Meanwhile, upstairs in the Minister’s room, Lord Beaverbrook was busy re-enforcing his staff. On July 17th he had cabled an old friend in Canada, saying “if you will come over and assist me we would welcome you.” This was to Mr. Jack Bickell, a 65-year-old mining magnate, with a downright manner and a great knowledge of men and business affairs. He, too, was the son of a Presbyterian. Beaverbrook put great faith in his judgment. As a member of the New York Stock Exchange, Bickell knew all the forces at work wrangling over war contracts in the United States. He accepted the Minister’s invitation and presently arrived, a restless, hard-eyed man with a cigar in his mouth. Beaverbrook was rapidly building a personal Cabinet. Some were not to remain long with him. But they all played their part in stirring things up. Earlier on he had sent for one of his oldest employees, Mr. J. B. Wilson, the veteran News Editor of the Daily Express, to head the Public Relations department of the Ministry. Mr. Wilson, accustomed to absorb the most sensational news as part of his daily diet, none the less found that the Ministry provided new surprises for him.

Every day, across his desk floated cheques and money orders, postage stamps and dollar bills, sent direct to the Ministry. A cheque for £100,000 was as likely to appear in the morning’s post as a half-crown money order from a schoolgirl. By the end of July the sum of, £2,048,521 had been given by members of the public to Beaver-brook to buy Spitfires and Hurricanes – over four hundred of them!

CHAPTER XI

THE STRANGE THING about this phenomenal Spitfire Fund movement was that comparatively few people knew exactly what a Spitfire either was or looked like. Schoolboys were probably as well informed as any. They knew that the Spitfire was an eight-gun fighter, of straightforward stressed-skin design whose Rolls Royce Merlin engine on 100-octane fuel shot it through the air at 387 miles an hour when at 18,500 feet; and a lot more like that. But to the Mrs. Smith of Britain the Spitfire was just an airplane flown by the pilots of the Royal Air Force which was going to knock hell out of the Nazis before long.

Whether it had one, two, or four engines; how many pilots it carried; or what it looked like in the sky was of less consequence. But soon Mrs. Smith was to learn a great deal about the Spitfire that had little to do with either cantilever oleo-pneumatic shock absorbers or controllable pitch air screws. The story that she heard began at the turn of the century in the town of Stoke-on-Trent. A local printer called Mitchell had a son who, at his elementary school, showed such great interest in science lessons that when he came to earn his living he drifted naturally into a job at the locomotive shops. Reginald Mitchell was a shy boy but clever at his work. During World War I he found himself working on aero engine-fitting at the Vickers Supermarine factory.

He was clever at this type of work, too, and when peace came knew as much as could be known about the inside of an aircraft works. He was particularly fortunate in having impressed two or three executives at the factory, who recognized that allied to the keenness of the young man was an unusual flair which triumphed over his lack of training. A slump went over the British flying industry. The collapse of Government orders was leaving many firms high and dry. The great technical progress made during the war came to a full stop.

Civil aviation marked time. The newspapers in 1919 carried paragraphs headed like this: LONDON TO BRUSSELS IN THREE HOURS. A four-engined Handley Page aeroplane, piloted by Lt.-Col. William Sholto Douglas, D.F.C., M.C., left Cricklewood on Saturday morning and made a safe landing there at ten o’clock the same morning. After which civilian aviation marked time so effectively that a decade passed and British machines were still taking three hours to reach Brussels.

 

 

But as early as 1920 young Reginald Mitchell had been made Chief Engineer and Designer at the somewhat attenuated Supermarine factory. Apart from the factory’s normal output, Mitchell had his eyes on the Schneider Trophy. The word “streamlining” in those early days of the ‘twenties had hardly come into use. Motor cars were still the knobbly contraptions of before the war. Ships were still being built with bulbous ventilators cluttering up their decks. Airplanes were bi-planes of wood and plywood. Mitchell’s first design was of a sensational nature. It was a monoplane, in a world of bi-planes. Most people will probably remember the sensation it made when first photographed in 1925; a bullet-like fuselage perched high above huge floats.

”The strangest autumn harvest that Kent had ever known and one of the richest” He called this unusual aircraft the S-4. Its fuselage was, true, made of wood but the centre section was built up around steel tubes and the floats were of duraluminium. After some years of thought, construction was started in March, 1925, and in September a world’s seaplane record of 226 m.p.h. was established, although the machine subsequently crashed in the United States through wing flutter. Mitchell, however, was already at work at his desk on a successor, which he intended to be all of metal. It was in this machine that Flight Lieutenant d’Arcy Greig flew at the then incredible speed of 319 miles an hour. That was in 1927, and had people realized it, the Spitfire was already born.

For the Spitfire which to-day shoots up into the skies in defence of Britain is substantially the same machine as that strange Schneider Cup affair of fifteen years ago, with retractable wheels instead of floats. The waters from Southampton down to the Solent, which had seen so much historic progress – from the oak ships of Buckler’s Hard to the liners of the thirties – were now to cradle the finest and fastest flying machine ever built by man. The S-6 came in 1929, with metal wings as well as fuselage, and a speed of 357 m.p.h. as Squadron Leader Orlebar sat in the cockpit. Many will remember the painful accounts of what it meant to bank in these machines at top speed, how the blood rushed to the head of the pilot with such terrific centrifugal force that he “blacked-out” for dangerous seconds at a time. Could ordinary men fly such winged bullets?

Was the Schneider Cup not just so much encouragement to freak flying? The day was soon to come when young pilots would take these machines into the air a dozen times a day and handle them with such ease that their real attention could be concentrated on the job of fighting. It was in 1936 that the first actual Spitfire flew. It had a top speed of 346 m.p.h. (as against the present model’s 387 m.p.h.) and Mitchell preserved a confident calm when he learned that the Germans had produced a Messerschmitt 109 which could do 379 miles an hour.

The machine came into service for the first time with the R.A.F. three months before that autumn day in 1938 when Mr. Chamberlain flew to Munich to plead with Hitler. When these first Spitfires were taken over by their first squadron there were handshakes and congratulations all round. Not only the experts but the ordinary pilots themselves revelled in the clean lines of the machine. The Super-marine workers knew that Mitchell had produced it without the months of fussing and fretting so often accompanying a new model. It had come to them as a finished job. Reginald Mitchell had, indeed, produced a machine which is still today of incomparable design.

It was tragic that he never lived to see an R.A.F. pilot step up into its neat cockpit, snuggle down behind the bullet-proof glass panel, open the throttle and roar off into the air. Even as his pencil traced the finishing touches to the master design, he knew that he was a doomed man. Abnormally shy and sensitive, he was frightened that people might learn of his secret. He went to a Vienna clinic run by an American, a Mr. Frederick Pearson. It was too late. In 1937, when he was only forty-two, Mitchell died.

Three years later, on an August day when Spitfires were fighting a mass attack on London from three directions, a cheque fluttered out of an envelope on to the desk of an official at the Ministry of Aircraft Production. A note said that the enclosed five thousand pounds was for a Spitfire in memory of Mitchell. The cheque was signed “Fred Pearson,” the American whose Research Foundation in Vienna had done its best to save Mitchell’s life.

CHAPTER XII

THERE IS little thrill in seeing a Spitfire stationary upon the ground. One is apt to say: “That’s a smooth looking little airplane. How do you know it’s a Spitfire and not a Hurricane?” Whereupon the knowledgeable schoolboy will reply: “Because it looks slimmer than a Hurricane.

The smooth simplicity of a Spitfire (and of a Hurricane) is confined to its exterior. Were you to start cutting one in half you would find the biggest box of tricks that has ever been crammed into so small a space. There are literally thousands of small parts and movable gadgets. The installation of eight machine guns in the wings is in itself a mechanical masterpiece. There are a vast number of recording instruments on the pilot’s cockpit panel, there are hydraulic jacks, warning horn accumulators, ditty boxes, parachute flares, first aid kits, air bottles, landing lights and the radio installation.

One August day Lord Beaverbrook received a cheque from a schoolboy for one guinea. The boy had read that a guinea was the price of a Spitfire’s thermometer. From that time on wards, you could order your Spitfire from a menu, the compilation of which gave factory executives both headaches and amusement.

Here is an early costing of a Spitfire which those who take the trouble to add up will find amounts to a sum considerably in excess of £5,000. But then it had been agreed that that sum should be the share of the voluntary contributor, and entitle him to name the machine.

Then there is another list which starts in the sixpennies and works its way up to the £1,000 wing. The “blast tube for machine gun” has a bellicose ring about it that made its fifteen shilling cost a fine bargain. “One gallon of dope” puzzled many at 17s. 6d., and there was quite a homey touch about the “roller blind for night flying” at a mere 7s. 6d. That a pair of shock absorber struts and basings should cost more than a good 14 h.p. car gave people an indication of how expensive were the essentials of a modern fighter.

A typical bomber was naturally more costly. Scarcely anything could be got cheaply until one got down to the penny screw stage and the standard £2 10s. clock. Here is a bomber price list—

 

If the belligerent spirit was very strong, your contribution to which ever fund you fancied might be marked down for purchase of bombs. It was a pleasant surprise that, for a pound saved on tobacco or film-going or beer, you could back the cost of one nice bomb. Of course, if you wanted to do the thing properly, a “general purpose” bomb cost £22, or it came in a larger size at £45.

A de-luxe model, and armour piercing, was £100, although a smaller model could be nominated for £50. But the most popular figure was the £5,000 which it was assumed would represent the cost of a Spitfire or Hurricane. That this assumption was general is amusingly shown by the balance sheet which the Intelligence Officer of a fighter squadron recently drew up for his station. “It is possible that they have been a bit conservative about the Ju.88 and the Do.17” he wrote…

This balance sheet, in its gaiety and humour, characterized the spirit of the men who actually flew the Spitfires and Hurricanes, a spirit which also came to be characteristic of the whole Spitfire Fund movement.

CHAPTER XIII

“THERE’S NEWS for you!” The voice was exultant. It came into millions of homes all over the World on July 24th. A harsh voice of the kind that is known as “Canadian” or even “American.” But a voice not to be mistaken, and, once heard, never to be forgotten. It was the voice of a deadly earnest man preaching a sort of sermon to a party sitting round the hearth. Lord Beaverbrook was broadcasting to Great Britain and America. “I have just received a telephone message from Mr. Morris Wilson, who is the agent of the Aircraft Ministry in the United States and Canada. He is authorized to say to me by Mr. Morgenthau, Secretary of the Treasury, that the U.S. Government will approve a plan to put into immediate production aeroplanes for our account up to a total output of 3,000 a month. There’s news for you! “And now for other things. There is a company in the North making aeroplanes.

The name of the firm is A. V. Roe and Co., and the manager is Mr. Dobson. He sends me a telegram on behalf of all the employees to say that they will give to the nation the latest type of fighter.” “You can’t beat those men and women of our aircraft industry. They are the liveliest of all our people, and in the best of heart, those workmen who watched through the years when we treated for peace, disarmed. “I must speak of the employers, too, and of the managers, and all those who are engaged in the technical direction of those great undertakings. In particular we must recognize the skill and the genius of the men who design our aeroplanes. They have done a wonderful job.” “I have recently inspected a Messerschmitt Me. 109, brought down in battle almost undamaged. And make no mistake, the Messerschmitt 109 is a fine machine. It has two engines of excellent workmanship. The engine is not an improvement in type on the Messerschmitt 109, but, of course, there are two of them instead of one. And here comes a very curious story. The petrol tank of this Messerschmitt 109 is self-sealing.

It is armoured. So is the oil tank, by means of a composite material made of rubber and leather. But the windscreen is not bullet-proof, and there is no armour whatever to protect the pilot. “Why no armour? That is a mystery I leave you to solve for yourselves. Perhaps the enemy has got a bottleneck in armour plate, and, if so, the bottleneck is not a German monopoly. “The public knows about our bottlenecks. They realize our difficulties. And they help us out. The people sympathise with us. They show it by the gifts they send us. We have had a flow of contributions coming in, all of them sent to us for the purpose of buying aircraft. We value the cheque for £25,000, but we value, too, the gift from the telephone operators at Winchester, who sent thirty-eight shillings to buy screws for a Spitfire. “In place of your aluminium pots and pans, take the thanks of the country – to the housewife who sent us a saucepan, to the British Automatic Company who sent us four and a half tons of their valuable metal, and American friends who give generously. For America is very necessary to us.

“Our own Aircraft Industry has always been reinforced in its labours by the American manufacturers. Since this Ministry was formed we have purchased for you in America 12,115 engines for aeroplanes. The types we have bought are powerful, modern, tried and tested on many a long journey across the American continent, reliable in cloud and storm, and in ice and snow. “But our real source of supply depends, as always, on our home production. Here we are doing better every day compared with last year. The week just out was a record in production. And the month of July’s output of aircraft and engines is more than double the output of last July. “I would like to tell you the exact figures. The news would do no good to the enemy. It would not depress our own people or hearten our foes. But don’t imagine we are satisfied. Far, far from it. “But our purpose, by every means we can develop and every device we can adopt, is to give our Air Force bigger and better advantages when we come to grips with the enemy. And here let me say, on behalf of the Aircraft Industry, that we will try to face with fortitude the ordeal of battle. Thus we may show once more in our magnificent history the same resources that built and equipped the ships that won the Freedom of the Seas. “To our Navy we have made an immense contribution.

We have given them eyes to see and a heavy fist to strike at the enemy in his harbours. We serve the pilots and crews of the Fleet Air Arm who uphold the trident of Britain over the oceans and the narrow seas. “We are reinforcing that magnificent fighting service which operates, in storm and fair weather, as a sentinel upon the highways by which we get our foodstuffs and other supplies. “And the young adventurers, the lads of the Royal Air Force, they are the heroes of history. They have known how to make use of the weapons we have put into their hands. They will bring us the victory which will be followed by the years of splendour and triumph. And we will join with them in the day of rejoicing. For the British always were a free people. And our freedom will be maintained, as it was purchased, by the valiant courage of our youth. We send the ships to the warriors of the air in such condition that they have no match in the world, for speed, or for armour, or for firing power. “That is the part we play. That is our portion of the task. And that is our post of duty in the battle. Give us more strength. Give strength and courage. Give drive and devotion to all men and women who do duty in the workshops of all the builders of the aircraft in the cause of freedom and liberty.” It was a stirring performance. People went to bed feeling that they really knew something about the secrets of the aircraft industry.

CHAPTER XIV

“AMERICA is very necessary to us.” That was only too true. But unfortunately the United States was getting more and more into the grip of the election machine. It was now August. It would be three months before it was decided whether Mr. Roosevelt would remain, or whether Mr. Wendell Wilkie would become the Republican occupant of the White House. In the meantime there was any amount of sympathy, or desire to give us-“every aid short of war.” But a regrettable lack of co-ordination due to U.S. manufacturers waiting to see which way the wind blew. The aero-engine contract refused by Mr. Ford was still being hawked about.

The U.S. aviation industry felt that it would ease the situation if the American and British Governments were to come to some sharing agreement which would justify the great outlay on new plant which expansion would demand. Beaverbrook had on his desk copies of contracts placed in the United States for well over one thousand million dollars, which would carry far into 1941, if not 1942. In Canada there were fifty million dollars worth of orders on the way, and while the Dominion was getting its first home-made “Hurricanes,” it had to turn to the States for the necessary trainers with which to keep its great Empire Air Training under way. “Harvard” trainers were also pouring into Britain in considerable quantities, for the pilots of tomorrow were coming “off the line” just the same (even though marauding Nazis sometimes joined their schools) and had to have training airplanes. But behind the scenes a group of American aircraft firms had decided that they would take a gamble on the decisions of Congress.

These five were the Lockheed, Douglas, Consolidated, Vultee and Boeing concerns. Some held back, arguing that, before the year was out, Congress might pass legislation with devastating effect to their finances. These five were willing to take the risk. During July and August they bought for their five factories £20,000,000 worth of materials, had added 2000 workers to their payrolls and had signed contracts for new plant and equipment to the tune of fifty million dollars. There was no doubt that, when production got into full swing and Britain was getting its due share, the benefits of this amalgamation would be tremendous. Sample aircraft (such as the new Lockheed interceptor, capable of a speed of 420 m.p.h.) were already available. In the meantime, the Royal Air Force was still depending upon its home-made Blenheims, Wellingtons, Hampdens, Defiants – and its Hurricanes and Spitfires. August broke with a sudden burst of energy on the part of the Luftwaffe. Since June, when the world had expected them to launch an attack en masse over Britain, their enterprise had been largely confined to tactics which gave the cliché collectors the phrase “lone or sporadic raiding.” Now full-dress onslaughts, with hundreds of Messerschmitts and Heinkels at a time, were launched on Weymouth and at Dover. The results of these attacks resulted, with almost monotonous regularity, in sweeping triumphs for the Royal Air Force. Not only were the R.A.F. pilots superior in courage, daring and tactics, but the aircraft came out with enhanced reputations.

It was a triumphant justification for the British aircraft designers. For some years past they had resisted certain new tendencies—present in German, French and American machines – with stubborn resolution. The climax had come with the development of the aerial cannon. This weapon, in the hands of the Luftwaffe, was to be the deadliest of all aerial armaments. But the designers of the Hurricanes and Spitfires, and their Service supporters, claimed that the octuple battery of machine guns in the wings was more, far more deadly. Their faith in the 8-gun fighter was being justified nearly every hour of the day. The Nazi fighter airplanes were nose-diving into the sea riddled with the stream of bullets poured into them at the touch of a button in a Hurricane or Spitfire cockpit. The whole strategy of the Luftwaffe chiefs was being riddled just as surely. They had always believed in the daylight attack en masse. It had been effective everywhere until now. Rotterdam had had a square mile obliterated in a few hours of methodical daylight bombing. But now the Heinkels, with their Messerschmitt hordes, approached the Thames estuary or the cliffs of Kent with the assurance that a Spitfire or Hurricane force one-fifth their strength would shortly make them turn tail and fly back to France.

CHAPTER XV

AUGUST continued to prove a month of sunshine and blue skies, with as clear nights and calm seas as most people could remember in what had once been the nation’s holiday time. But now barbed wire lay about the beaches, machine-gun posts were hidden in camouflaged huts, and factories hummed night and day to make up for lost time in the winter and lost equipment in the Battle of France. People still referred to the Battle of Britain as the “blitz,” although anything less lightning-like could hardly be imagined. The aerial conquest of Britain was proceeding with ponderous Teutonic deliberation. “One thing at a time” was the maxim of the German High Command, and the “one thing” on hand now was the methodical obliteration of the Kentish aerodromes where lurked the Spitfires and Hurricanes. True, the Luftwaffe seemed to be getting slowly nearer to London, now from this angle and then from that. It was the policy that had served them so well in France in World War I. Pushes were made up and down the line until what was thought to be a weak spot was found, when the full blast of a major push was launched. Hitler had only until the fifteenth to fulfil his promise to be in London on that date as its conqueror. Every day free from Nazi aerial attack in the centres where aircraft were being made was a step towards victory.

The German bombers had only nibbled at the aircraft centres until now, although they were perfectly well aware of the exact sites of most of the factories. Yet the British industrial machine was not yet able to run with the throttle open at its widest. On the very day on which Hitler had promised to be in London it was necessary for Mr. Herbert Morrison to add his own appeal to that of Lord Beaverbrook, and in phrases no less urgent. He rushed out a letter to 20,000 firms all over the country begging them to offer him for immediate purchase all spare second-hand machine tools. In the category of “machine tools” are lathes, die-stamping machines – indeed nearly every sort of machinery capable of making machines. “They are urgently required for the production of our bomber and fighter aircraft,” wrote Mr. Morrison, pointing out that he was the Minister responsible for obtaining them. “Heads of firms must see that no machine that can be spared is retained. Can you not cut down your maintenance plant? If you have been retaining certain plant in the hope of a future contract, will you not put the nation’s need first and release this plant?

Will you not re-examine your present machine tool operations and see whether by re-grouping and re-planning you cannot carry out your existing production with a smaller number of tools? “If you have machines engaged upon production of civil needs other than those which are absolutely essential will you not offer them to me for the three Supply Ministries on whose behalf I now appeal?” Ten days later the problem of finding sufficient machine tools became so acute that Beaverbrook entrusted a West Countryman, Mr. A. J. Newman, with the task of seeing that the aircraft factories had not to go begging. August the fifteenth proved a nice sunny day. Warnings had been sounded more and more frequently in the capital for a week past. But the uneven throb of the German aircraft, the whine of dropping bombs and the trump when they landed, had yet to be heard in the heart of the metropolis. Shortly after seven o’clock in the evening of the 15th the Luftwaffe showed that they still had a few pilots with dash and bravado, when a lightning attack was made on Croydon Airport. The damage done to military objectives was negligible, but for the first time a part of London knew what it was to have streets roped off, to hear eye-witness accounts by those who had missed death by a few feet, and to see its civilian defence services go into action.

Eighty-eight German aircraft had been brought down by Spitfires and Hurricanes during this day of heralded ill-omen. And those who knew the real contents of the communiqués arriving from the R.A.F. stations on the coast knew that these daylight raids were getting progressively larger. The Croydon exploit was certainly an eye-opener to those who still believed the statements of the authorities in their more optimistic vein. “A high official” and the ” was stated in well-informed circles” men indulged in a great deal of wishful-thinking during these critical days of waiting for something really big to happen – something comparable to the blitzkrieg as it had been demonstrated elsewhere in Europe. Mr. Churchill encouraged no such happy state of mind. Nor Lord Beaverbrook, whose public zeal in whipping-up of enthusiasm cloaked a private gloom that only a very much greater increase in the output of British aircraft was likely to dissipate.

 

 

CHAPTER XVI

THE FLOW of money into the Spitfire Funds kept pace with the swiftly accelerating tempo of the war in the air. In ten days the amount received by Lord Beaverbrook had leapt four hundred thousand pounds. On August 8th it stood at £2,407,434. In another week it had been boosted up by a single cheque for £100,000 and stood at just over £3,000,000 – at which the Minister of Aircraft Production expressed his “joy and gratitude.” The whole panorama of the war – its heroism, its humour, its colour, its tragedy – was reflected in this flow of gold from the “so many” into the coffers of the men charged with building aircraft for the “so few.”

The cheque for £100,000 had come from a young Canadian biscuit manufacturer who had recently won a seat in the Commons. His name was Garfield Weston, and he joined the great game of making gifts as vivid as possible by stating that it was “to make good the losses of sixteen of our fighters in yesterday’s battle in the Channel.” “Spitfire Fund” was by now a phrase embracing contributions for all sorts of aircraft, but already some communities and organizations were stipulating that it was for “Hurricanes” that they were sending their half-crowns, pound notes and fivers. A letter came to Beaverbrook from a village called Michaelston-le-Pit in south Wales. It was written by a Mr. H. H. Merrett. Beaverbrook obviously could not read every letter sent to him with a gift of money. He would have been keeping a forty-eight-hour day if he had even attempted to do so. But he read Mr. Merrett’s letter, and read it with the feeling of a father whose own son was flying a fighter airplane somewhere in that blue August sky that he could see from his desk. “On Sunday last we received the news that my son, Flying Officer Norman Merrett, had lost his life ‘somewhere in Britain ‘ while serving with the R.A.F.” wrote Mr. Merrett. “And on Monday morning we woke to find that as a result of a raid five of our store cattle had been killed and others badly maimed.

“The village in which we live is one of a thousand acres and a population of a hundred people. “These tragic circumstances have served only to strengthen the determination of this little community to prove to this despicable enemy that we have set our hearts to rise to the greatest possible heights in assisting you and your colleagues in the admirable efforts you are making to defend and feed the people of the most sacred spot on God’s earth. “I cannot provide you with another gallant son. The one who has gone was my only son. But I want you to accept from the village of Michaelston-le-Pit the enclosed cheque for £5,000 to purchase a Spitfire, so that one of the ever growing number of lads from Britain and the Dominions, so anxious to defend us in the air, may be equipped with an instrument which, combined with that indomitable spirit, courage and fearlessness, will enable him, as his colleagues are now doing, to take severe toll of those inferior beings attempting, with increasing failure, to demolish the morale of our people. “Every member of this community is subscribing towards the Spitfire.

It is not a personal gift but something to commemorate the passing of my son.” There seemed something strangely touching in combining the village’s two losses in one gesture. And there were dozens of other letters just as fervent in their determination and spirit as this one from Wales. No branch of the community seemed to be left outside this amazing movement. The contribution of five pounds from the staff and inmates of Aylesbury woman’s prison stood next on a list of £52,000 from British communities in war-tattered China, which knew what bombing meant and to what disaster a lack of defending airplanes could lead. A Lincolnshire farmer wrote to Lord Beaver-brook: “I told my missus that the first time the R.A.F. lads brought down seventy Germans I’d send you £100.

Here it is.” And there was the morning when a little vessel of the Free French Navy received a signal from the Admiralty. It was sent on behalf of the Minister, and starting with “M. le Commandant, j’ai recules nouvelles de la contribution que I’equipe de Botal Raiseau h faire h la construction d’un nouveau Spitfire . . .” and ended with “. . . Je vous salue, Beaverbrook, Ministre de la Production de I’Air.” The crew, not content with risking their lives, both from France and from Germany so that they could fight on, had out of their pay contributed £12 5s. There were odd amounts that sounded as if they had been inspired by an O. Henry story. A London cinema sent 17s. It appeared that the wife of an Aircraftman had lost £2 while at the cinema, and was destitute. The audience started a fund for the unfortunate wife. But the collection came to £2 17s., which was seventeen shillings too much. What to do with it? Why – send it to Lord Beaverbrook, of course.

CHAPTER XVII

SEPTEMBER saw Lord Beaverbrook entering his fifth month of office. He had worked harder than ever before in his life. There had been no time for even the simplest of the few recreations he enjoyed. He arrived at his office early, he spent the whole day running his Ministry in the only way he knew how – as a one-man business. He ate his lunch at his desk, a plate of cold chicken mixed with the telephone wires, a cup of coffee on a despatch box. He seldom smiled, had little time for the impish tricks in which he had once delighted. But he was happy because the British aircraft industry – free so far from major air raids, working day and night, taking on thousands of new hands, developing new designs and ideas – was now in a position in which it could say proudly that it was on a level with Germany’s production. But how much of this was really due to the Minister of Aircraft Production? Some said that it was Beaverbrook who had been lucky rather than the aircraft industry; that he had swung aboard the boat just as it was setting off after years of careful stimulation under men like Lord Swinton, Ministers of the Kingsley Wood class; to say nothing of his official Service predecessor, Air Marshal Sir Wilfrid Freeman. That the production of machines would have risen during those summer months, Beaverbrook or no Beaver-brook.

He had certainly made enemies during his months of office. He had cajoled, bullied and preached on a greater scale than ever before in his life. He had made himself a one-man Ministry, with a finger in every pie and a word in even minor conferences. He ferreted out facts with the keenness of his most determined reporter. And he had one asset which not even the most resentful of his victims could deny; he happened to know how to get hold of the money in the coffers of the Treasury. It never occurred to him that millions of people would relieve him of the task to the tune of many millions of pounds . . . . Never before had a Minister in a newly-created position bad quite so closely the ear of a Prime Minister as Beaverbrook had the ear of Mr. Churchill. He did not have to go hat in hand to the Treasury for money. He simply put on his little soft black hat, walked across to No. 10 Downing Street – and got it direct. If only for this, it could be said that Lord Beaverbrook was a success.

He had, too, in his roughness, succeeded in streamlining the administrative sections of his own department. It is difficult to explain just how he had done this. But it is doubtful if any man since Lloyd George had ever ruled on such an unconventional basis. He did not at first conceal the fact that Civil Servants were a puzzle to him. He did not care to be served by men neither of his own choosing nor free from the risk of being sacked if he considered them inefficient. His method was direct and brusque, and the kindliness of his normal manner was largely kept in the background for use in the peace-time ahead. He was not bothered by forms, conventions, traditions or by those vague restrictions implied by the phrase Old School Tie. He would say : “What do you think of So-and-So ? Is he any good? Does he like work? “and out of dozens of guarded or genuine or startled replies he would come to a decision. His use of the telephone was unique.

On this instrument he had long been a virtuoso of the highest standing. Many a man, who face to face would have argued with him, contested a decision, or pointed out the error of the new Minister’s ways found himself hypnotised by the insidious personality which he projected in telephonic conversation. Above all, he was a man with a mission. He felt again all the ardour and idealism that he had lavished on his Empire Free Trade and farming campaigns. One thing dominated him night and day: “We must have more airplanes. I must have more airplanes. I don’t care whose heart is broken or pride hurt or anything else at all. I don’t care whose toes I on or which ministry I interfere with. WE MUST HAVE MORE AIRPLANES!” And then the conversation would end by Beaverbrook staring wide-eyed at his listener, and in the quiet tones of a Minister not of the Crown but the Gospel say: “So now, my friend, do you understand?”

At the end of August he wrote a public announcement that perfectly illustrates his evangelical mood at that moment. “Many are they who rise up against us,” it beg. But the men and women of the aircraft industry of Britain answer the challenge. These brave defenders of the liberties of Britain, ignoring air raids and indifferent to enemy attack, have provided for the Royal Air Force in the past week more fighters and more bombers than ever before in the history in the history of aviation”

 

 

“The blessing of the nation is upon these people.” So much he also told to his Cabinet colleagues when he produced the mounting production figures. He had spoken of “air raids” and 66 enemy attacks.” But only small hurt had yet come to the sprawling aircraft factories. It was sufficient to give the aviation chiefs nightmares when they thought of what might have happened if after Dunkirk at the end of May the enemy had launched mass attacks on such centres as Coventry and Bristol. Of the many wishful-thinking prophecies about the Germans it was certainly true that they were slow to move when the programme was interfered with, and the collapse of France had certainly interfered rather too early with their plans.

The Spitfires and Hurricanes and bombers were three months to the good. And the Royal Air Force – taxed with a new front in the Near East – had three thousand more first-line aircraft with which to wage its war to the death. Yet the happiness inspired by these figures was lessened in the eyes of a realist who happened to know that the Germans also were building prodigiously. Their original rate of production at the start of the war had been about 1800 a month, or roughly 60 machines a day. Experts believed that this had been boosted during the spring and winter by another 500 machines a month. German airplanes were not as good as those made in the English factories.

The 4-gunned Messerschmitt was no match either for the more easily manoeuvrable Hurricane or the high and fast-flying Spitfire. Nor had any German machine yet made its appearance which could be compared with the new “Defiant” or “Whirlwind,” the twin-seated fighter with its power-operated turret. Beaverbrook was still making vigorous efforts to get the 1941 Models on to a mass production basis as September dawned.

CHAPTER XVIII

GALLUPIAN-MINDED PEOPLE tried to analyse the motives behind the new craze sweeping the nation. Why was tax-stricken Britain pouring its money—unasked for—into the coffers of the Ministry of Aircraft Production? What was it that really linked cocktail bars to vestries, butchers’ shops and banks, dairies and dressmakers, public houses and parish halls, barbers and police stations, orphanages and aviation factories, railway offices and cinemas, chorus rooms and chemists? For nothing quite like it had ever happened before. Millions of pounds were being freely given to a Government department which already had the full resources of the nation’s Exchequer behind it. It was all very well to say that hundreds of thousands wanted to share the fight being waged on their behalf all day long, and half the night, on the Kentish coast. But there was something else in it. A sporting element? Perhaps here was the clue to this mystery.

There once had been, in England’s peace-time calendar, a day on which the nation was also strangely united, when bartender and verger, butcher and banker, dairyman and mannequin, publican and priest, barber and copper, orphan and chorus girl were inspired with the same thought. This day occurred every year on the first Wednesday in June and was the occasion of a horse race on Epsom Downs. So now, as you put your daily shilling in the collection box, there was the feeling that it connected you – intimately, if indirectly – with tremendous and heroic events and in a way that a cheque to the Income Tax collector rather failed to do. Your son may have lost his life fighting and your husband his job, your savings might be going and your brother be a prisoner of war. Yet here was a shilling willingly dedicated to the men whom Mr. Churchill so rightly said were owed so much by so many.

The Spitfire Funds were like altars at which the man, woman and child in the back lines could light a candle for the men fighting the nation’s fight in the front line. It was a safe bet that, whatever time of the day you gave your money, there would be somewhere on England’s southern downs and valleys a gong ringing, a tumbled rush to airplanes hidden on the edges of fields, a growing roar that in a minute or two would fade into a high drone – and a Spitfire or Hurricane squadron would have gone into action again. Young R.A.F. men in London on leave had been both puzzled and embarrassed by the phenomenon of the Spitfire Funds. “Makes the whole show look so damned serious,” said one young Squadron Leader as he put half a crown in his club’s collecting box. And one tavern in the town had a special fund just for its R.A.F. patrons. Letters came in like this: “Charles made a bad landing on Tuesday so we have made him send this pound to the Fund.” The members of a certain anti-aircraft battery on duty at an R.A.F. station one day made a pardonable mistake.

An unexploded bomb suddenly went off just as a British bomber was passing overhead.. It was on a murky morning, and cause and effect got a bit twisted. The gun crews let off a few rounds, happily without much damage. How could the Royal Artillery make an amend honourable? Easily. They started a little Spitfire Fund of their own, and were able to face the Royal Air Force again with easier consciences. Later the country’s Anti-Aircraft men actually raised £5,000 for their own Fund. There were a thousand fanciful incidents as the Funds grew. A Manchester flower seller wrote to Lord Beaverbrook, enclosing a small contribution and said that she “wouldn’t mind if it only went towards engraving the name of Hitler on the biggest bomb that can be made.”

A member of the Daily Express staff, Mr. Sefton Delmer, gave half of a £100 bonus to the Ministry (adding that he would have given the whole £100, but he needed the other £50 to pay Income Tax on the bonus). One September morning as the German waves were sweeping near and nearer the capital, an envelope was opened at the Ministry and out dropped a cheque from a Mr. Alma Baker, of Perak, for £20,000.

Mr. Baker sent it as a token of gratitude and in memory of a warning made twenty years before. In June, 1920, he had written: “It is probable that an enemy will, if not prevented, try to paralyse from the air the chief centres of our Empire. In the near future it is conceivable that large bodies of troops, with all their war material, will be carried by air machines across the widest tracts of land and sea.” From the Far East came also many Dutch contributions. In the first week of September there was an exchange of royal telegrams when the Queen of Netherlands sent this wire to Buckingham Palace, leaving Prince Bernhard with the task of taking along the cheque to Lord Beaverbrook:

The donors to a fund created in the Netherlands Indies and placed at my disposal have expressed the wish that part of it should be devoted to the acquisition of military aircraft for Great Britain. I am happy to be able in accordance with this wish to offer forty Spitfires and eighteen Lockheed Hudson Bombers for the furtherance of our common cause and as a tribute to the magnificent work of the Royal Air Force and venture to express the hope that Your Majesty will accept them.

-WILHELMINA.

That was a gift of over £500,000 and the King wired back to the royal exile:

Such a noble tribute to the unremitting work of the Royal Air Force, both in attack and defence, will be a great encouragement to them, and I wish to express to Your Majesty and to the people of the Netherlands Indies the heartfelt thanks of the British nation for this magnificent contribution to our common cause.

– GEORGE R.I.

Perhaps the last big gift before the blitzkrieg struck at London on that fateful Saturday after-noon of September 7th was one of £500 in memory of a Royal Flying Corps pilot who had been killed with his squadron in a Camel machine in the World War I.

CHAPTER XIX

THE LUFTWAFFE at last managed to smash through the defences and descended on East London out of the pale sunlight of Saturday afternoon September 7th. Most people – certainly the Royal Air Force themselves – knew that the evil hour was bound to come sooner or later. September 15th was another of Hitler’s threatened dates. It was no secret that the Channel ports were packed with invasion barges and coastal craft of every description. The Luftwaffe had been pressing home the attack with increasingly large numbers for a week past. They had been peppering the outskirts of the metropolis by night and taxing the endurance of the Spitfire and Hurricane pilots by day. On this first afternoon their preliminary break through resulted in the scattering of thousands of incendiary bombs over the thickly congested districts of London’s dockland.

Then, after dusk had fallen, the procession of German airplanes was given over to the bombing machines. Hour after hour their 500-pounders whistled down on to the streets of London’s poorest districts. The death list in the next few hours ran into hundreds, the casualties into thousands, the homeless into tens of thousands. Monday, Tuesday, and then came the opening of more intense anti-aircraft barrage on the Wednesday night. The procedure became routine: an all-clear signal as late dawn came, then warnings hour after hour all day long. Stray raiders carrying only one bomb descended out of clouds above streets in ruins. This was the blitzkrieg at last. By Wednesday the focal point had moved westwards.

World-famous streets showed new scars each morning, a daring Luftwaffe pilot braved balloon barrage and anti-aircraft fire to descend upon Buckingham Palace and release his bombs, and a whole squadron of Messerschmitts droned over the capital at noon. The intensity of the attack grew. The Germans were sending over three and four hundred machines at a time in strongly shaped formations, and the R.A.F. Fighter Command was living again those brave days of June when Hurricane and Spitfire pilots snatched at the luxury of sleep as they lay besides their bullet-pocked machines in France. Hundreds of Heinkels, Dormers and Messerschmitts were being shot down, and the toll of our own machines was as heavy as ever it had been.

 

 

CHAPTER XIX

THE LUFTWAFFE at last managed to smash through the defences and descended on East London out of the pale sunlight of Saturday afternoon September 7th. Most people – certainly the Royal Air Force themselves – knew that the evil hour was bound to come sooner or later. September 15th was another of Hitler’s threatened dates. It was no secret that the Channel ports were packed with invasion barges and coastal craft of every description. The Luftwaffe had been pressing home the attack with increasingly large numbers for a week past. They had been peppering the outskirts of the metropolis by night and taxing the endurance of the Spitfire and Hurricane pilots by day.

On this first afternoon their preliminary break through resulted in the scattering of thousands of incendiary bombs over the thickly congested districts of London’s dockland. Then, after dusk had fallen, the procession of German airplanes was given over to the bombing machines. Hour after hour their 500-pounders whistled down on to the streets of London’s poorest districts. The death list in the next few hours ran into hundreds, the casualties into thousands, the homeless into tens of thousands. Monday, Tuesday, and then came the opening of more intense anti-aircraft barrage on the Wednesday night. The procedure became routine: an all-clear signal as late dawn came, then warnings hour after hour all day long.

Stray raiders carrying only one bomb descended out of clouds above streets in ruins. This was the blitzkrieg at last. By Wednesday the focal point had moved westwards. World-famous streets showed new scars each morning, a daring Luftwaffe pilot braved balloon barrage and anti-aircraft fire to descend upon Buckingham Palace and release his bombs, and a whole squadron of Messerschmitts droned over the capital at noon. The intensity of the attack grew. The Germans were sending over three and four hundred machines at a time in strongly shaped formations, and the R.A.F. Fighter Command was living again those brave days of June when Hurricane and Spitfire pilots snatched at the luxury of sleep as they lay besides their bullet-pocked machines in France. Hundreds of Heinkels, Dorniers and Messerschmitts were being shot down, and the toll of our own machines was as heavy as ever it had been. On September 15th, after seven days and eight nights of almost incessant bombardment, the climax was reached. Only the High Command knows how many German machines left their French and Belgian bases on that Sunday to put the finishing touch to the bombardment of London. But the world was soon to know how many were left behind on English meadows and London streets. One hundred and eighty-five was the official figure for that memorable day.

The total German loss probably ran into another fifty machines which failed to re-cross the Channel. From that day on the mass attacks by day languished. It was too costly an affair, even for the Luftwaffe, while from every R.A.F. Fighter Squadron engaged in the Battle of London went up the same cry: “Give us more machines quickly!” For the Royal Air Force had by this September lost – in its defence of Britain – some 800 fighters, twice as many as its whole first-line home strength three years before! It mattered not that the Luftwaffe had lost in August over 1000 machines definitely shot down, and in September almost exactly the same amount. Their loss was not necessarily our gain. The Luftwaffe had probably lost—shot down, fallen in Channel and crashed on landing – around 3000 aircraft as September closed, when its High Command decided that tilting against the R.A.F. in daytime resulted in only ersatz, victories. How many machines had Germany left?

This was one of the best-kept secrets of the war, and even the Air Ministry could but make expert guesses. But even a little simple arithmetic indicated that they were still too strong, and that Britain still had a long way to go before achieving superiority. The Luftwaffe’s total airplane strength at the start of the war on September 3rd, 1939, was around 20,000 machines, of which a generous estimate would apportion 3,500 as first-line, i.e. machines to be used in daily operations. The remainder were specialised craft, the majority of which were obsolete, but quite useful on occasion, and if used against a weak enemy. Four-year-old biplanes were effectively used, for instance, on the Allied troops retreating towards Dunkirk. Germany had been building machines for a year at the rate of at least 2000 a month probably more. Fortunately the majority of these were now on the borderline of being obsolete. The Ju.88 was a poor affair, and the Messerschmitt 109 was absolutely no match for our own fighters. But twelve times two is twenty-four, and even if you subtract the six or seven thousand German machines lost in action in Poland, Norway, Holland and France the Luftwaffe was still a formidable affair.

They had the machines; we had the pilots. Of the 800 R.A.F. fighters shot down 414 pilots were now flying again. In a few months new crews would come streaming in from the Empire Training Centres in Canada, while new training schools were being opened in the very front-line in Britain. Pilots’ training courses were being streamlined towards a speedier attainment of the coveted “Wings.” But again on the debit side, a heavy drain had been made since the fall of France by the Near Eastern forces. We were building up reserves in Malta and Egypt in anticipation of the almost inevitable extension of the war to the Mediterranean. The Royal Air Force hoped for great things from its younger brother, the Fleet Air Arm, when the day came. Meantime the cry went on: “Give us more and more machines – quickly!”

CHAPTER XX

KENTISH FIELDS were certainly seeing the strangest autumn harvest in all history. A farmer with a sense of wit suggested that he should rope off his meadows, put up a board saying “The Only Field In East Kent In Which No German Airplane Has Yet Fallen” and charge sixpence admission, the money to go to the local Spitfire Fund. There were certainly areas in which, during the course of a quiet afternoon’s walk, you could come upon a round dozen of Heinkels, Dormers, Junker 88’s and Messerschmitts lying in varying degrees of unheroic dilapidation. They constituted a scrap heap of proportions undreamed of three months ago when the Mrs. Smiths of the nation offered up their aluminium pots and pans in a fortnight of whirlwind sacrifice.

The problem of what to do with all this treasure from the skies became a major one, so Beaverbrook appointed Mr. Eric Bowater to the post of O.C. Salvage of Crashed Aircraft. A certain number of the German machines were in almost perfect condition, and were of great value to both the R.A.F., its technical experts and the designers of aircraft firms. A number of different types were brought together in a hangar as a sort of museum. Inspection showed that, far from being the shoddy and ill-equipped affairs that wishful-thinking reporters had sometimes claimed them to be, they were of good workmanship, some of them of a quality worthy of British factories. Some unbiased experts even considered the German engines—with their fuel injection system, which eliminates the carburettor, and prevents icing—to be much superior to the British engines. A certain number were reprieved in order that they might tour the country in circus-like state and show people how shabby a thing was a monster of the skies when it was propped-up with one wing missing in the local market place. Sixpence to be allowed to sit in the Nazi pilot’s seat was a bargain.

Half a crown towards the local Spitfire Fund was a more usual charge. The shadowy form of a Dornier rising alongside the Town Hall or a brutal-looking Junkers 88 at the entrance to the bowling green was a customary attraction in an autumn when the black-out and petrol rationing had dealt such a death-blow to the rather jollier pleasures of the local fair. Certainly the opening of real blitzkrieg tactics on London stimulated the Spitfire Funds. Every post at the Ministry brought fresh surprises. Durham’s coalfields are not a notoriously rich area. The dole is as much part of the daily round as food and sleep to many of its workers. For twenty years Fate has been dealing them a succession of hard blows, and now the collapse of the coal export trade had brought fresh worry to the miners. Yet almost the first letter received by Lord Beaverbrook after the start of the London bombing was one from Mr. Will Lawther, the President of the Mineworkers Federation, en-closing a cheque for £10,000 collected in pennies and shillings around the Durham pitheads. The letter said: “Our members feel that this was the least that they could do, despite the economic plight of our industry at this moment due to the collapse of our export trade.

“We trust that these Spitfires coming as they do from miners will be of that value and help to our brave airmen in facing whatever dangers lie in front of them. “It is the growing realization of the task that we have to keep intact the spirit of Trades Unionism that leads us to add our help.” Beaverbrook wrote with sincerity when he said that no gift towards new aircraft had moved him more deeply. “From members of an industry which has known cruel hardship in the past has come a gift so generous that it must kindle the imagination of freedom loving men and women the world over, giving them irrefutable proof of our determination to gain total victory over our enemies,” he said. “Your Spitfires will shortly be bringing added strength to our Air Force. I propose with your consent that they shall be named the ‘Miners of Durham ‘ 1 and 2. And the victories they achieve will bring glory to all who subscribed to your fund.” Next to the Durham miners contribution came a scrawled note, pinned to ten shillings “from a poor Italian who is very grateful to England.” And next £259 which an aged Welsh nurse sent, all in old notes.

The stream never dried up, nor even showed signs of doing so during these first terrible weeks when the nation slowly awakened to the knowledge that there was no effective weapon yet against night bombing. Thirty-seven pounds came from a factory at Charlton, “in the bombed district.” A money order for £16 was sent by telephonists in the Guildford area. A cheque for £150 arrived from African-speaking people of the Schweizer Reneke district of the Transvaal. And workers in a Vickers-Armstrong factory building Wellington bombers contributed £20,000 and sent it to the Minister. But they made a stipulation. No Spitfires or Hurricanes for these men and women. They wanted to buy one of the very bombers they themselves were building – which they seemed to consider the best – and not only must it have the factory’s name on it but they wished to be informed of the first bomb it dropped on. A few weeks later these workers were to find peculiar satisfaction in knowing that they had made this personal contribution to the country’s offensive armament.

CHAPTER XXI

THE CASE-BOOK of the Spitfire Funds, treasured in the Ministry of Aircraft Production, deserves an important place in the history of World War II. A thousand-and-one stories of sacrifice and humour and idealism lie alongside each other, in column after column. Scarce one but is more eloquent of the Empire’s war temper than a dozen average political speeches, or score of broadcast pep-talks. These samples are chosen at random. Perhaps that is scarcely correct; most of them have been chosen in their consecutive order, as they arrived. In short, they are not hand-picked, but taken as they come: The 30,000 people of the islands of Lewis and Harris, mostly crofters and fishermen, have sent £6,400, raised in one week, to the Minister of Aircraft Production to buy a fighter plane. “Patsy” Hendren played for Sir Pelham Warner’s XI against Ealing C.C. in a Spitfire fund match at Corfton Road, Ealing. Other Middlesex players in the team were J. Smith, J. Sims, L. Compton, L. Gray and R. H. Twining. £5,000 has been sent to Lord Beaverbrook for the purchase of a second Newfoundland Spitfire.

A third fund was then opened. The Mayor of Colchester received a donation to the town Spitfire fund from a woman who is giving up “perms” for the duration and sending the money to the fund. Nearly 4,000 “Dorothys” at home and overseas contributed nearly £2,500 to the “Dorothy” Spitfire Fund. Their gifts ranged from 6d. to £100. Western Samoa raised £5,000. Mombasa, in Kenya, collected £10,000 to buy two fighters. Uganda sent £22,500. A calf auctioned at Colchester in aid of the town’s Spitfire Fund was bought and re-bought repeatedly until it had realized £70 10s. Mr. R. Stedman, a local man, collected £60 by touring the main streets of the town with a barrel organ. A Spitfire, to be named Carbine, after the Australian racehorse, was presented to Britain by Australian race goers. A further gift of £5,000 for the purchase of aeroplanes was made jointly by Leslie W. F. de Saram, a Ceylon solicitor and his wife. £1,000 was the opening gift of a ‘George’s’ Bomber fund from Mr. George B. Parkes, Managing Director of a Midlands Works. Bertram Gentry, a London boy evacuated to West Moulston, sent 6d. to the Mayor of Taunton for the town’s Spitfire Fund. He wrote a note: “I am very happy to give this week’s pocket-money towards a Spitfire. Hoping it will help to win the war soon.” Cinema page boys, usherettes, and the rest of the 14,000 employees of the Gaumont British Picture Corporation formed a fund to buy a flight of Spitfires for the nation. Gaumont-British Picture Corporation announced that all their 14,000 employees were taking part in a scheme to buy a flight of Spitfire fighters for the nation to be called “The Gaumont-British Flight.” A second gift of £7,600 for the purchase of a fighter for the R.A.F. has been received by the Air Ministry from the Indian Province of Sind. The Maharaja Holkar of Indore presented to the Air Ministry a £3,000 “Air speed envoy” aeroplane, construction of which was recently completed in this country.

Two towns in Southern Rhodesia, Gatooma and Hartley, sent £2,200 towards the purchase of a fighter plane. An anonymous donor, “a Trinidadian,” has given £10,000 worth of Three-and-a Half per cent War Loan for the purchase of aircraft. The people of Worcester raised £8,000 for fighter aircraft in 10 days. Coventry subscribed £6,000 to buy a Spitfire, and a further £1,326 towards a second plane. A further sum of £2,000 towards the cost of bombers and fighters has been sent to the British Government by the Georgetown Committee, British Guiana. Aden Settlement contributed Rs.100,000 to a Hurricane Fund. Mrs. Millsom, of Buckfast, Devon, drew her first old-age pension of ten shillings. She gave it to Lord Beaverbrook. One day’s gifts included:

“Domestic Worker Middletown, nr. Welshpool”	£0 5 0
Workers on Bridge St. Farm, Long Melford, Sudbury Suffolk	2 14 0
Managers and Clerks of London Stock Exchange	5,000
Fair Bros. Steels & Busks Gummed Paper Mfg. Co. John Taverner & Sons (Machine to be named St. George)	5,000
National Employers’ Insurance Association (machine to be named “N.E.M.”)	5,000
Members of the Baltic Mercantile & Shipping Exchange, Ltd.	5,000
Sir Michael Mitchell-Cotts, Bt.	500

Malta’s Anglo-Maltese League has sent £6,000 to Lord Beaverbrook, Minister of Aircraft Production, as a first instalment from the Maltese Fighter Plane Fund. Woodbridge, Suffolk, with a population of 4,700 started to buy a fighter and claimed to be the smallest town to attempt the task. The Gold Coast sent a third instalment of £5,000 to their Spitfire fund. Nigeria’s “Win the War” fund contributed an initial sum of £10,000, and the Kenya-Uganda Railway made a loan of £100,000 free of interest to the British Government. Two Spitfires, named Portsmouth and Southsea, were paid for by a Portsmouth newspaper fund. An anonymous patriot sent £50. A letter accompanying the gift said: “It is a small sum which it has taken years to save.

I have the greatest pleasure in sending it to you to help build aeroplanes to defend England.” By July more than £18,000, sufficient for three fighter planes, was subscribed in Coventry to the fund opened by the Midland Daily Telegraph, which originally aimed at raising money for one plane. Mr. A. A. Ralli, of Frimley Park, Surrey, saw a German raider aimlessly dropping bombs. He sent £5,000 for a Spitfire. Ninety-one year-old Miss Slee, formerly living in the South of France, now at Bournemouth, was the first subscriber to the Spitfire plane fund in the New Forest Parliamentary Division. She gave £50. A man at Rayleigh, Essex, sent £1 “my wife’s and my own old-age pension for this week.”

All in a breath, one day just before Christmas, this news message flashed out: Minister of Aircraft Production acknowledges following gifts for aircraft: Gorman and Rupp, Ohio, U.S.A. (sent through a correspondent to the Watford Spitfire Fund) 10 dollars; Edward and Peter Bishop, aged 11, Welling, Kent (second contribution), £1; Inmates and staff of Newhaven Institute (most of the inmates are permanently bedridden), £5; Madame Aimee Calipe (given to the Prime Minister towards a Spitfire), £5; Air-raid Wardens of Wembley Park, £90. Just an ordinary afternoon’s receipts. “How much does a Spitfire cost?” asked a shabby, white-haired man who walked into a newspaper office in Wellington, New Zealand. “Oh, about £5,000″ replied the counter clerk, adding: ” Would you like to buy one?” “Yes,” replied the stranger. He strolled over to a writing-desk and returned a moment later with a cheque for £5,000 he had just written out.

“Make this contribution anonymous,” he remarked to the clerk. Then, turning up the collar of his shabby overcoat, he walked out. The point of this story was that (unlike so many “anonymous stranger” tales) it was true! Then there was the thrilling incident of the sinking of the Western Prince by a submarine on December 13th. She was torpedoed in a gale. Mr. George Franks, the captain’s steward, was in charge of the ship’s Spitfire Fund. Not enough for these seamen just to brave the submarines in winter. One might have thought it would have been enough for any company of men. As the vessel began to founder, Franks suddenly remembered that the Fund’s takings of just on £100 was in the purser’s safe. He borrowed the keys, jumped out of the lifeboat in which he was preparing to leave, and ran below. He was never seen again.

 

 

The day that the story became known, Lord Beaverbrook received from the Prince Line, who owned the vessel, a cheque for £100 to replace the money subscribed by their crew. And later in the day arrived a telegram from a French sportsman, M. Maurice Olivier, who had read the story, and of the heroic death of her Captain Reed, who refused to leave his ship and as it sank gave three blasts on the siren. “Deeply concerned glorious death Captain Reed remitting you hundred pounds to replace Spitfire fund as token admiration from free French passenger to very gallant British skipper” said the telegram. The Spitfire Fund was interwoven into the fabric of Britain’s war life as inevitably as red, white and blue into the Union Jack.

CHAPTER XXII

BEAVERBROOK was feeling again the “get-’em together” urge that had so endeared him to the wide open spaces in American offices and had prompted his dislike of what he called the “rabbit warrens” of London, where every other man had a door at which one had first to knock. He was talking one day to a young R.A.F. officer about a certain process in aircraft construction. “Now you know,” he said, “how they go about doing that in most factories, don’t you?” The question was rhetorical; but the officer did not take it that way at all. “In point of fact,” he said, “I don’t. I’ve never seen them building a Spitfire.” “You haven’t?” said Beaverbrook. “But you must!” Here was the germ of a splendid idea! He would get ’em together, bring the aircraft workers to a Fighter Station and then take the pilots to an aircraft factory. His concern was, of course, not that many R.A.F. officers had never seen built the machines they flew, but that his factory workers needed a refreshing new tonic. No one knew better than Beaverbrook the dividends which a happy and interested worker paid to his employersnd as far as this war went, Beaverbrook was indeed the employer of all aircraft workers.

So it was that, on an October morning, a certain 22 year-old Miss Hilda Brown looked up from her work in a Spitfire factory and was pleased to see a young R.A.F. officer standing by her side. He was, she noticed, wearing the Distinguished Flying Cross medal ribbon. A shop steward introduced the pilot to Miss Brown. He was on a visit to the factory. They shook hands. “What’s that you’re doing exactly?” he asked. Miss Brown explained. But she went on working. Good-looking pilots or not, work must go on at the same rate. “Afraid I’m in your way,” said the R.A.F. pilot. “Oh, no,” said Miss Brown, smiling, “I can talk as well as work at this job.” Miss Brown is important in this story only because she was the first of many of the more than a hundred thousand women engaged in building British aircraft to-day to meet a visiting R.A.F. pilot. The particular one to whom she had spoken, she learned, had 17 Nazis to his credit while flying one of the Spitfires which she was helping to make. “You are making a pip of a machine,” said the pilot to the next group of workers. “And,” he added. “Don’t think we like having too few machines. What I mean is, we don’t send up ten Spitfires against fifty or sixty assorted Heinkels and Messerschmitts for the fun of it.

We are just doing the best we can in the circumstances.” “One day there happened to be thirty of us up. Quite a rare occasion. And we met fifteen Jerries – quite a rare occasion; too. Well, what do you think happened?” “You shot them all down?” suggested a girl worker. “As a matter of fact, we did,” said the R.A.F. pilot. “Anyway, there’s a moral in it. If we had been at our usual odds of about four to one we probably would not have pipped more than two or three Jerries, and lucky to have got away ourselves.” On that October day the Spitfire factory was invested, in the eyes of most of its workers, with an atmosphere that far transcended time-clocks, overseers and the daily routine of doing the same job hour after hour.

One flying officer watched reflectively a squad of girls preparing parts of a Spitfire for painting. “We don’t keep your Spitfires looking so clean and nice,” he said. “No?” said the girls. “No,” said the Flying Officer. “We ought to have you girls down to the station every now and then just to shine things up for us. All we have is a lot of Aircraftmen.” It was really quite a jolly party, and a good time was had by all. A week before, the R.A.F. pilots themselves had been hosts to a party of workers from this same Spitfire factory. They had visited the Sergeants’ Mess, they had lunched in the Officers’ Mess, and they had watched aircraft-men making minor repairs with critical, and even envious eyes. The Commanding Officer of the Station read a message from the Minister of Aircraft Production: “May I send my good wishes for a happy meeting between those who make and those who man the fighter aircraft of the Royal Air Force. Yours is a gathering in which the unity between the factory and the Squadron finds an appropriate expression. And upon that unity in this hour of crisis the safety of our people and the future of our race depend.

For all that you have done, I thank you, certain that I speak for your fellow countrymen. And it is my conviction that from your meeting to-day will emerge a resolve to strive still harder, to endure with unbroken courage, so that victory may bring us peace, and the hope of happiness in years to come.” “You know,” said one of the visiting workers, lighting his pipe, “there ought to be more days like this.” And there were; visits between workers and flyers became an important part of the campaign to whip-up production.

CHAPTER XXIII

BEAVERBROOK held the keys to Britain’s aircraft factories, and he guarded the right most jealously. Millions were privy to ordinary military secrets, could spend their Sunday afternoons in danger zones and watered the back lawn by permission of the sergeant of the machine-gun post at the end of the rose-beds. Millions more wound their way through barbed wire and across trenches to the little patch of beach left to them, or even surrendered their houses to howitzer crews and searchlight parties. These were experiences common in wartime to all civilians in the front line. But of all the country’s secret areas none was so hidden from the public eye as the interior of the aircraft factories. If only for this, the peculiar nature of the Spitfire Funds was valuable. It kept the business of building aircraft in the limelight, yet without undue display. It drew attention to the task of the aircraft workers without direct public show.

The Funds had a splendid psychological effect in the factories—indeed, so appreciative were the aircraft workers that before many months had passed there was scarcely a major factory which was not paying for the building of a £5,000 machine, in either their own or a rival plant! Industrial history was certainly being written within the four walls of steel framework and beneath the glass roofs of the dozens of factories building aero-engines and air-frames. Beaverbrook was besieged with applications from M.P.s, writers and distinguished visitors for permission to see Britain’s airplanes being built. He did not encourage such applications. Workers do not like being watched like animals in the Zoo. Besides, it wasted their time. And time was among the most valuable things the nation could not afford to waste. The hours kept in a factory building bombers were typical of this 84-hour week. Here one could see young women clocking in at 7.30 in the morning, dressed in green aprons and wearing rubber shoes. Their job was the putting together of ribs, riveting and assembling small parts.

They kept at their benches until 7.30 in the evening, with an hour for midday dinner and a break for tea at five o’clock, and maintained these strenuous hours for some weeks, working over the week-ends and knowing that during the twelve hours that they were out of the factory a night-shift was carrying on the job until they got back to their benches in the morning again. After a time new regulations came into force which gave them a two-day week-end every three weeks. The pay was good, of course, but there was little enough time to enjoy it at the time, and one of the first things these ex-shop girls, domestic servants and textile workers sacrificed was any hope of manicured hands until the war was over.

 

 

So complex was the industry that it was difficult to estimate how many were actually employed in the construction of aircraft by midsummer. The Luftwaffe claimed that 500,000 German workers were directly engaged in building machines. It is possible that, with the numerous equipment firms and accessory makers, a million British workers could say that they were contributing to the rising tide of production. It was against these factories that the Luftwaffe, foiled in London, was preparing to strike. A golden moon rose as darkness fell on Thursday night, November 14th. It flooded England from the Channel coast to Yorkshire, for the night was coldly clear. Many remarked on the appearance of so “harvest” a moon in November. Whether or not the Luftwaffe meteorological experts had prophesied a night so brilliantly illuminated, the fact was that by dusk their bombers were already crossing the Channel from several different directions.

They swept across Dorset, but forswore Bristol and Cardiff; they flew high over East Anglia but failed to turn south towards London. Their target was the manufacturing city of Coventry, eighteen miles south-east of Birmingham. Coventry had become industrially swollen to the point of danger as a potential target. It was a secret to no one that the city was one of the centres of the British aircraft industry. In the great boom of the late ‘thirties it had enjoyed a prosperity not known since the last war. Workers from all the country thronged its workshops. That Thursday night, and until dawn was breaking on the Friday, the Nazi bombers rained destruction on the centre of Coventry. Nothing since the blitzkrieg hit London’s dockland, two months before, could compare with the fury of this attack. Daylight found Coventry’s main streets a pile of smoking rubble. Word had been passed quickly to the Cabinet, and both Mr. Morrison and Lord Beaverbrook were soon on the spot.

Beaverbrook had long known that the time would come, sooner or later, when the great provincial manufacturing centres would be the object of bomber attack. But as he walked through the stricken city there were two things to cheer him. First, the thought that the German bombers might have done even more damage fourteen months before, in September, 1939, if they had been as trained in night tactics as our own bombers, and that we were thus thousands of airplanes to the good; second, that the damage was not nearly as bad as at, first sight it appeared to be! The day, in fact, when the Luftwaffe could knock out a considerable portion of the aircraft industry with one big blow had gone! It was London all over again. A lightning attack at the time of the Munich crisis might have thrown London into the confusion which the Nazis were now claiming. But we had been given time to prepare, to build reserves, to steel the nerves of the nation.

The Luftwaffe were apparently pleased with their success at Coventry. Their propagandists referred to the bombing as “coventrating.” In short, the Nazis were attempting – with more machines but less accuracy – what the Royal Air Force had been doing regularly in Germany ever since May. Birmingham, Bristol and Southampton were soon to undergo the same gruelling experience, awaking to find their churches, hospitals and shopping streets in ruins, and dozens of homes laid waste. But nowhere followed the breakdown of productive work which the raiders in-tended. Prudent and careful Englishmen even shook their heads in bewilderment and wondered why the Nazis wasted so many bombs on things of no importance and were such shocking bad shots. Most of the fury on the first night of the Coventry attack had been directed against a landmark which the moonlight certainly made prominent, but was of little direct value to England’s war effort; it was Coventry’s historic Cathedral. So Beaverbrook drove back to No.10 Downing Street to make his report on Coventry with a lighter heart than he had expected. England has seen the tide turn.

No amount of “coventrating” would now completely upset her factories. The enemy had struck once again too late. There was great comfort to be drawn, too, from the Spitfire Funds which were now established as barometers of the nation’s temper; and the temper of our Allies. One morning the Minister received a call from Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. He brought with him a cheque for £323,377 17s 11d. as a further contribution from the Dutch East Indies. This was to pay for eighteen Lockheed Hudson bombers, and was in addition to the forty Spitfires already purchased. Another cheque arrived which brought back memories of his youth to Beaverbrook. This was £1,000 from the Halifax Chronicle in Nova Scotia.

It was in this Maritime Province of Canada that young Max Aitken had made some of his first dollars in life. And it was the city of Halifax that knew, perhaps more than any British city previously, the devastation of war and the nature of high explosive. On December 6th, 1917, it had been razed by the biggest single explosion in history. Not to join in the Spitfire movement was a thing that no self-respecting community could now afford to do. It was as obligatory as the poppy on November 11th. Even rival Services joined in. The anti-aircraft units throughout the country turned in sufficient of their hard-earned pay to raise £5,000 for their own machine.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE TRAGIC yet glorious year of 1940 waned, and Beaverbrook took stock of the situation that he had created at the Ministry of Aircraft Production. He had embarked upon a great gamble eight months before. It had involved nothing less than the disbalancement of the British aircraft industry’s long-term plans, its purpose being to get the greatest number of machines into the air in the shortest possible time. What might happen in 1941, 1942 or 1943 was of less consequence. Dunkirk and the defection of France hung like a threatening shadow over the country, and the mood of the moment was one of urgency. By 1941 Beaverbrook hoped that the American aircraft industry would be in full swing and doing its share. This hope was only partially fulfilled as the year drew to a close. Mr. William S. Knudsen, head of the U.S. National Defence Commission, announced that in the autumn quarter production of airplanes had been one-third below earlier estimates. America just simply could not make up her mind. This gave certain British interests a further chance to criticize the Beaverbrook policy.

Some had already been apprehensive of the future prosperity of the British aircraft industry. Their criticisms found a ready echo in the ranks of Beaverbrook’s political enemies. Yet these were mostly the same men who had sat supine and complacent during Baldwin’s air misrule. On Beaverbrook’s desk were some figures which certainly made all the ballyhoo about the American airplanes pouring across the Atlantic look a little absurd. They showed that during the first year of the war only 743 airplanes were shipped from the United States to Great Britain. This was about ten days’ production of Germany’s war machine. The actual figures were: September, 1939, 34; October, o; November, 4; December, 53; January, 1940, 41; February, 19; March, 2; April, 23; May, 19; June, 97; July, 173; August, 278. But what was a little disappointing, to say the least of it, was the September quota, which totalled only 136 machines. Next year, by the Spring, in the Autumn, by 1942 America would be the dominant factor, but Roosevelt’s “Lend & Lease” Bill lay ahead in the dim mists of uncertainty. There were going to be hard days ahead. British interests a further chance to criticize the Beaverbrook policy. Some had already been apprehensive of the future prosperity of the British aircraft industry. Their criticisms found a ready echo in the ranks of Beaverbrook’s political enemies.

Yet these were mostly the same men who had sat supine and complacent during Baldwin’s air misrule. On Beaverbrook’s desk were some figures which certainly made all the ballyhoo about the American airplanes pouring across the Atlantic look a little absurd. They showed that during the first year of the war only 743 airplanes were shipped from the United States to Great Britain. This was about ten days’ production of Germany’s war machine.

 

 

The actual figures were: September, 1939, 34; October, 0; November, 4; December, 53; January, 1940, 41; February, 19; March, 2; April, 23; May, 19; June, 97; July, 173; August, 278. But what was a little disappointing, to say the least of it, was the September quota, which totalled only 136 machines. Next year, by the Spring, in the Autumn, by 1942 America would be the dominant factor, but Roosevelt’s “Lend & Lease ” Bill lay ahead in the dim mists of uncertainty. There were going to be hard days ahead. Beaverbrook’s term of office had certainly been as ruthlessly conducted as his friends and enemies prophesied. He minced no words. Half the nation’s ills, as he saw them, were due to mediocre and mealy-mouthed Ministers of State.

Not without reason had jibes at the Old School Tie attained in Max’s eyes the dignity of a symptom of national disease. Beaverbrook had interpreted Mr. Churchill’s mandate with all the energy at his command. He had made enemies in the aircraft industry, he had made enemies in the Civil Service. To work with men whom be could not sack if necessary was inevitably a strain. Many another brilliant executive had been irritated to the point of exhaustion by the serene and unhurrying Civil Service methods. Beaverbrook stood the strain well. But the point was that snore British aircraft were now in the air than would have been the case if the long-distance Mans sanctioned by the Air Ministry had been followed. What else had mattered for the moment? The American problem was of a different character. Apart from bombers, the American factories had as yet no fighters proven to be better than the latest models of our own Spitfires and New types.

The job was to sort out what they did have to offer and adapt it to our own needs. Sir Hugh Dowding, of the Fighter Command, was engaged on this task. The U.S. bombers would certainly be useful, and the long-distance flying boats a valuable re-enforcement to the Coastal Command whose duties were now being made so much more onerous by the submarine menace. The Consolidated Aircraft Corporation of San Diego was ready to deliver the giant XB-24 bombers, and a Model 31 Flying Boat of unusual quality. At a cruising speed of over 200 m.p.h., and a heavy load, it was said to have a range of 4,000 miles. There were seaplane bombers due from the Northrop works, and the well-tested Lockheed Hudsons were still arriving. But for the moment America’s greatest contribution was probably in her supply of machines to the Empire Air Training Scheme in Canada, whose 30,000 men were already sending their first contingents across the seas to Britain. The R.A.F. had originally thought that the task of supplying the majority of the training machines for the Scheme would fall on the home factories. But not only the U.S. but Canada were able to supply these machines, and to export them to the air schools being rapidly developed in England itself. Canada was building her own Hurricanes and Bolingbrokes, the latter being a development of the Blenheim bomber.

The American-built Harvard was almost a standard machine for intermediate training. But it was certainly true that, as the American air authorities could not agree on their construction plans, the supply of machines to Britain must inevitably suffer. What the United States badly needed was a Beaverbrook of its own to talk sense to its industrial magnates. In these last December days Beaverbrook could look back on eight months filled with anxiety and achievement, but on nothing with more pleasure than the voluntary contributions to the Spitfire, Hurricane and Bomber Funds. The amount was now approaching the £10,000,000 mark. It was a dramatic – and undreamed of – reward for a man who had preached Empire, Empire, Empire up and down the country, whose panegyrics in praise of Empire had earned him ridicule from not only the Right but the Left political wings. For here, in these pounds and pennies streaming across his desk every day, was such a parade of Empire strength and unity as only a poet might have conceived. The lists read like Kipling recited by a chartered accountant.

A bomber and three fighters from British Guiana; two Hurricanes from the Bahamas; fifty Spitfires from the Gold Coast; three hundred Spitfires from Ceylon; seventy-five more from Hyderabad; twelve bombers from Malay; a bomber and two fighters from Mauritius; two Spitfires from Mombasa; ten more from Sarawak; three bombers from Trinidad; one Spitfire each from St. Vincent and Granada; four more from Zanzibar; nine from the Fiji Islands; and ten from the lonely Falklands; from the Scillies to the Shetlands, from Palestine to Penzance, from Delhi to Durban came the one cry: “Here is our money, here is something to show you what we think, spend it that the men who fight in the sky may know that an Empire stands behind them!” Thrilling, indeed, it was to know that all the fighters and bombers lost during the, four months in which the battle raged over Britain were paid for in full by public contribution!

Could anyone fail to be profoundly moved? For it had all been so spontaneous. No appeal had been made. No official encouragement given. If only that Beaverbrook became the target of this mass uprising of Empire sentiment his tenancy of the Ministry of Aircraft Production would have been notable. The position was summed-up in a broadcast which he made on December 17th: “Hitler is making an immense attempt to bring out a huge air force in the spring months. You can see signs of it in the German newspapers every day,” he said.

“The advertisement columns of these papers show the most immense demand by the German aircraft establishments for designers, for aircraft engineers and mechanics, for architects to lay out new factories, for experts on radio equipment, for technicians in the petroleum industry. “There are sure and certain signs of a feverish development of production. Then a most determined recruiting campaign is being carried on for the German Air Force. Young men are being offered immense advantages if they volunteer as pilots and air gunners. “They are being fired with enthusiasm. They are exalted with the prospect of high adventure and splendid enterprise. And all of these vast preparations are directed at one objective – the invasion of Britain. “So we are warned.

We know that the same measure of preparation was carried out in Germany last winter. Tanks and dive-bombers to destroy the French. The same thoroughness will be employed against us when the time comes. How are we going to meet and overcome this danger? By industry. By enterprise. By endurance. And by fortitude. “In the first four months of the year the programme in fighters and bombers was not realized. We fell short. But with the month of May things improved. From the time the Churchill Administration took office, the response of the managers and the men has been magnificent. “Month by month, and every month from the first of May to the first of November, the output of fighters and bombers exceeds the programme laid down in January, 1940.” He dealt also with the American side of his Ministry’s efforts. “According to our programme, according to the contracts we have entered into and the bargains we have made, there will be an increasing flow of airplanes coming to us from the United States, reaching 26,000 in the year 1942. During that year the famous 3,000-a-month scheme will be realized. “Now are we over-confident? Yes, we are. Much too confident. And there is no justification for over-confidence now. For it must be acknowledged that Hitler is still the military master of Europe.

But not quite so much the master as he was.” Beaverbrook had played another, and less spectacular, role during the eight months since the day when he flew with Mr. Churchill to France in that forlorn effort to give British citizenship to the faltering Republic – an offer to this day concealed from the French people by its Vichy rulers. It was no secret that Beaverbrook was probably closer to Mr. Churchill than any other member of the Cabinet. This was scarcely surprising. There was a definite affinity of thought and purpose between them. Beaver-brook was, in his own peculiar way, an elder statesman, although he had graduated to that status during the twenty years that he had been out of office. He knew as well as anyone the pains and pitfalls that assail the man upon whom has been suddenly thrust the office of Prime Minister: for had he not stood behind Mr. Bonar Law, his greatest friend? Was he not second only to Mr. Churchill himself in the extent of his inside knowledge of the political game? Innocents may have thought, hopefully, that politics were packed safely away for the duration.

Such an ideal is not likely to be attained as long as elected men sit on the benches at Westminster. The Minister of Aircraft Production was well aware of that aspect of the democratic machine. Beaverbrook’s drive and energy and knowledge were undoubtedly invaluable to the War Cabinet in these trying months. His own Ministry had been largely a one-man affair. Four telephones, and a tendency towards insomnia, had been his five best aides-de-camp. And if the duty of a war-time Ministry is to get jobs done in a hurry, then the Ministry of Aircraft Production had served the nation well. 1941? 1942? Such a lot remained to be done by men of the calibre of Max Aitken, first Baron Beaverbrook, in the great task of rousing a nation so ready any at moment to be complacent. He was worth the money to any Ministry in Whitehall merely as five feet eight inches of dynamic irritation. “Beaverbrook? Beaverbrook?” one of his more illustrious friends said to me. “If he had only waited one more war for his peerage he have chosen a much better title.” “Which one? “

“Max Aitken, first Baron Spitfire,” was the answer Beaverbrook’s drive and energy and knowledge were undoubtedly invaluable to the War Cabinet in these trying months. His own Ministry had been largely a one-man affair. Four telephones, and a tendency towards insomnia, had been his five best aides-de-camp. And if the duty of a war-time Ministry is to get jobs done in a hurry, then the Ministry of Aircraft Production had served the nation well. 1941? 1942? Such a lot remained to be done by men of the calibre of Max Aitken, first Baron Beaverbrook, in the great task of rousing a nation so ready any at moment to be complacent. He was worth the money to any Ministry in Whitehall merely as five feet eight inches of dynamic irritation. “Beaverbrook? Beaverbrook?” one of his more illustrious friends said to me. “If he had only waited one more war for his peerage he have chosen a much better title.” “Which one ? ” “Max Aitken, first Baron Spitfire,” was the answer.

APPENDIX I

NOTE: For those technically interested, the newest Spitfire model is described officially in the magazine ‘The Aeroplane’ as of straightforward stressed-skin design. The elliptical cantilever low wing, which tapers in thickness, is built up on a single spar with tubular flanges and a plate web. Forward of the spar the wing is covered with a heavy-gauge light-alloy sheet which forms the torsion box with the spar. Aft of the spar the covering is of thinner gauge sheet with light-alloy girder ribs. The wing tips are detachable for ease of maintenance and repair. Split flaps are between the ailerons and the fuselage. The fuselage is an all-metal monocoque, built on four main longerons with transverse frames and a flush-riveted light-alloy skin.

The front frame forms the fireproof bulkhead and is built as an integral part with the centre portion of the main wing spar. To help in maintenance the tail portion of the fuselage with fin and tailplane is detachable. The tail unit is of the cantilever monoplane type. The fin is integral with the rear fuselage. The tailplane is of metal with smooth metal covering. The elevator and rudders have light alloy frames and fabric covering. There are trimming tabs on elevator and rudder. The undercarriage is fully retractable outwards into the under surface of the wings.

There are two Vickers cantilever oleo-pneumatic shock absorber legs which are retracted hydraulically. An emergency hand system is fitted to lower the wheels should the hydraulic system be damaged. The first Spitfire had a tail skid, but the production models have a fully castoring tail wheel which does not retract. The Rolls-Royce Merlin II 12-cylinder Vee liquid-cooled motor when operating on 87-octane is rated at 990 h.p. at 12,250 ft., and has a maximum output of 1,030 h.p. at 16,250 ft. and for take-off. The forward-facing intake effect gives a top speed at a rather greater height. The motor is slung in a steel tube mounting. The radiator, which is fully ducted to give low drag by low velocity cooling, is in a duct underneath the starboard wing with a hinged flap for temperature control. The oil tank of 55 gallons capacity is underneath the engine with its surface forming part of the body contour.

There are two fuel tanks with a total of 85 Imperial gallons capacity in the fuselage in front of the pilot. Feed is direct to the engine through fuel pumps. There is an electric starter and hand turning gear. The enclosed cockpit is set over the wings with a sliding canopy and hinged panel in the fuselage for entry and exit. The armament is eight Browning guns mounted in the wings, four on each side of the fuselage. Access to them, for inspection and maintenance, is through doors in the top and bottom surfaces of the wings. A camera gun is also installed and has proved of use in showing details of fights with enemy aeroplanes. There is full radio installation, electrical, night flying and blind flying equipment.

APPENDIX II

A B C OR R. A. F. (N.T.) = New 1941 type (U.S.) = American-made

Albacore.—This is a Fleet Air Arm biplane, with rounded wing, a crew usually of two and carrying either bombs or a torpedo. Anson.—Used for coastal reconnaissance. Speed about 170 m.p.h. Notable for its big-windowed cabin. It also has a machine-gun turret. Battle.—This is a medium bomber, with a range which makes it more serviceable as a military machine. It has one engine and a speed of 255 m.p.h. It is armed with two machine guns.

(N.T.) Beaufort.—Another medium and torpedo bomber. Its open nose makes it useful for reconnaissance work.

(N.T.) Blenheim.—A development of the machine ordered by Lord Rothermere when Britain lacked a good all-round bombing type. Its range is over 1,800 miles, it has a speed of 285 m.p.h. The armament is two machine guns, but when used as a fighter mounts four guns under the fuselage. Bombay.—A big troop-carrying machine. Can be used for bombing, as it has a range of 2,25o miles. Machine guns in nose and tail.

(U.S.) Boston.—An American light bomber twin-engined, with a tricycle type undercarriage. Also fighter and dive-bomber.

(N.T.) Botha.—A Blackburn torpedo bomber, or bomber. (U.S.) Buffalo -T.—A fast Fleet Air Arm fighter. Defiant.—A two-seat fighter now being used largely for night work. It has a new type of power-operated turret. Speed is not as fast as either Hurricane or Spitfire. Flamingo.—A fast troop-carrying airplane, smaller than the Bombay. Adapted from a peace-time model.

(N.T.) Fulmar.—A Fairey machine which has been nicknamed the ” Spitfire” of the Navy. Gladiator.—A fighter biplane, once the leading R.A.F. type. Six machine guns in wings and fuselage and a top speed of about 250 m.p.h. Gloster T5-14.—A single-seat fighter with a speed a little less than the Hurricane. Armed with eight machine guns.

(N.T.) Hampden.—One of the bombers used over Germany. Notable for its very slender fuselage and tapered wings. Three machine-gun positions and 265 m.p.h. speed. Hereford.—A twin of the Hampden, but with different engines. Hudson.—Most useful of the American importations. A bomber and reconnaissance machine, used mostly by Coastal Command. Speed of 245 m.p.h., range of 1,700 miles. Has a gun turret in rear.

(N.T.) Hurricane.—Eight-gun fighter, the improved models almost as fast as the Spitfire. Probably the best all-round machine of its type ever made. Lerwick.—A twin-engined flying boat. Three power-operated turrets. Machines of this type are helping to fight the raider and submarine menace off Ireland.

(U.S.) Lightning.—A twin-engined fighter, details not yet available. London – Another big flying boat, but with a speed of only 155 m.p.h. It’s range is a little over 1,000 miles. Lysander.—One of the Army monoplanes, a two-seater, with three machine guns and fitted for bomb carrying. Speed of 235 m.p.h. Lightwings allow observer uninterrupted view from cockpit. Magister.—A wooden monoplane used for training, with a speed of 145 m.p.h. (U.S.) Martlet —Another Fleet Air Arm fighter with a speed of over 320 m.p.h. Maryland —A day bomber with a crew of three. Master.—Another training monoplane, but with a speed of 270 m.p.h. (U.S.) Mohawk.—A fighter-bomber with a distinctive “hooked” nose. Oxford.—A large twin-engined trainer with a speed of 195 m.p.h.

(N.T.) Roc.—A Fleet Air Arm fighter and dive-bomber with a gun-turret, very much the same as the Skua. Skua.—A Fleet Air Arm dive bomber. It has no turret, as in the Roc. Used in operations against Italian fleet.

(N.T.) Spitfire.—New models have cannon-guns, and ” clipped” wings. The Spitfire is still the fighter de luxe. (N.T.) Stirling.—A big bomber made by Short Bros., probably biggest yet standardised in any Air Force. Stranraer.—A flying boat with a range of 1,000 miles and a speed of 165 m.p.h. Sunderland.—The biggest of all flying boats, with a range of 2,800 miles and a speed of 21o m.p.h. Two gun-turrets fore and aft, and a gun position amidships. Swordfish.—A Fleet Air Arm machine used for torpedo work. It is a biplane with a speed of 154 m.p.h. (U.S.) –Tomahawk.—A Curtiss fighter, said to do 360 m.p.h. and using six guns. Fine climber.

(N.T.) Tornado.—A new single-engined fighter with an enormous engine. Vildebeest.—Another torpedo-carrying machine, with a similar speed. It also is a biplane. Wellesley.—A heavy bomber with a range of 1,800 miles and a speed of 228 m.p.h. Both pilot and observer have separate cockpits.

(N.T.) Wellington.—This heavy bomber has a range of 3,200 miles, with a distinctively large tail rudder. Three gun positions and a speed of 165 m.p.h. (N.T.) Westland Whirlwind.—A twin-engined fighter, and one of the 1941 machines still on secret list.

(N.T.) Whitley.—A twin-engined heavy bomber with a range of 1,25o miles and a speed of 245 m.p.h. Armed with six machine guns, mounted front and rear.

 

Lord Beaverbrook calls on the nation to keep up the good work in supplying materials, money and time for the vital production and repair of fighter planes. He thanks everyone for their efforts, from the manufacturing company that sent four and a half tons of metal to the housewife who donated a saucepan.

Listen to his broadcast here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/battleofbritain/11423.shtml