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Aviation History
1919
1919 - 0096.PDF
intention to leave well alone. It seems to us that the mere fact that ah Under-Secretary of State is, under the amended Orders, to perform the functions of an Air Minister necessarily connotes a change in status which cannot be camouflaged by any form of official denial so long as the new ideas are persisted in. At the present moment—or until the names of the new Cabinet were announced—the Air Minister ranks as a first-class Secretary of State, responsible only to the Cabinet as a whole and to Parliament in his own proper person. For the future, the Air Minister is to occupy a nebulous sort of position, apparently responsible to no-one for his Department, with a somewhat glorified Under-Secretary to act as a buffer between the Minister and the public. It seems pertinent in the circumstances to ask if the War Office is to be reorganised on the same basis, and if Mr. Churchill is to be placed in the same happy position of semi-responsibility as he apparently occupies at the Air Ministry ? Clearly, if it is a desirable arrange ment in the case of the one, it should certainly be equally so in the other. We confess we do not under- . stand the position at all, except from the point of view that the official dementi we have quoted is meant, not to explain the intentions of the Government but to conceal them. *fi» <- «*» The action taken by the Prime Minister R . takes us back to the state of muddle Step ancl confusion from which the Air Services emerged at the end of 1917, when the R.A.F. was created and the Air Board changed its status to that of a Ministry. It is in explicable except from two standpoints. Either the reactionaries of the Admiralty and the War Office have " nobbled " the Premier and are in a fair way to regain control of the Air Service, or the duality of office is consequent upon the admitted difficulty of fitting in the personnel of the new Cabinet. We have seen the latter given as the more probable reason, but we cannot agree. If it were merely a question of picking the men for the jobs, it would surely have suggested itself to someone that Mr. Churchill should have succeeded Lord Weir at theAir Ministry and that General Seely should have gone back to his old post as Secretary of State for War. Alternatively, if the latter is really a big enough man to carry a great Department of State, he might have been given actual rank at the Air Ministry instead of being put there as a mere appanage of Mr. Churchill. Therefore, the difficulty of fitting in the new personnel will not do as an explanation of an extraordinary situation. Our own opinion, for what it may be worth, is that the rabid reactionaries are, as we know, fighting desperately to get the Air Service back to the control of the Admiralty and the War Office. Mr. Lloyd George, with the lessons of the War still fresh in mind, has not been able to arrive at a concrete decision in the matter, torn as he has been between the reaction ary influences on the one hand and his own better judgment on the other, and has made the present appointment in order to tide over in the meantime and in the hope that matters will more or less settle them selves. Indeed, it has been hinted in official quarters that the dual arrangement is only a temporary one, and it has been defended on that score. But why tinker with temporary appointments and arrange ments in one of the most vital offices of the recon- JAJTOASV 23, 1919 struction period ? If temporary arrangements are necessary in the Government, there are half-a-dozen directions in which a hand-to-mouth policy would do no particular harm in the meantime, but there are others—and the Air Ministry is one—in which appointments should have as much of an air of finality as is possible. The R.A.F., formed a bare twelvemonth ago by the fusion of the Naval and Military air services, has cut its teeth. It is just getting past the dangerous age, and if it is handled properly and with a due sense of responsibility now it will come through and prove that it has an enormous future of usefulness. If, on the other hand, it is made the sport of politicians and reactionary admirals and generals, the admirable esprit de corps that has been created during the War will crumble. The position to-day is exceedingly bad for the morale of the Force. Everything is uncertain—neither officers nor men know what the future is likely to hold for them, and when they see the Service being played with as it is, it is no wonder that many who had intended to make the R.A.F. their life's profession are strongly minded to get back to civilian life, as soon as may be and take their chances in business or commercial life rather than to find themselves thrown on the world a little later on. No one can blame them for this outlook on the matter, which is entirely due to the utter uncertainty as to what is going to happen in the near future. The whole concensus of opinion seems A Ministry to Y,e n favour of leaving the position Defence where it was before the re-shuffle of the Cabinet cards. That is to say, all opinion is for a separate Air Ministry and a separate Flying Service, divorced from all control by or association with either of the other fighting services so far as the main lines of administration and inde pendence of command are concerned. That is the doctrine we have consistently upheld all along, since long before the R.A.F. became a separate Service. The suggestion has been seriously made in responsible quarters that the time is ripe for the formation of a Ministry of Defence, under which all three fighting services should be grouped, with a Minister responsible to Parliament for the readiness and efficiency of all three, the latter each to be actively administered by an Under-Secretary responsible to the Minister of Defence. Under such a scheme the three Services would remain separate, with civilian aviation in much the same relation to the R.A.F. as the mercantile marine bears to the Royal Navy. So far as the basic idea in concerned, there does not seem to be any great objection to it. There is just this, however, to be said : that the defensive arrangements of the British Empire are of necessity of so stupendous a character that it may well be found after a strict examination of the project that they cannot be properly co-ordinated under a single head. Central isation may be a good thing up to a point, but -when that point has been passed it brings certain evils in its train that completely negative its other manifest advantages. We believe we are right in saying that no first-class Power has ever seriously considered placing the whole of its naval and military affairs under a Ministry of Defence. The idea works very well in the case of the self-governing Dominions, but it must be pointed out that their forces are relatively small. Their armies are quite small, while the same
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