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Aviation History
1941
1941 - 0835.PDF
FLIGHT, April loth, 1941. c ON ACTIVE SERVICE : Short-nosed Blenheims have been used extensively J»th Greek army in Albania tactics, and the longer they remained at this work the r>f PranrpH more expert they became. Most of them found the work so absorbing that they wanted to remain at it, but of course they were often transferred by the Air Ministry to other branches of Air Force work. The Air Ministry admitted in general terms that an Army in the field would need bombers as long-range artillery and fighters to protect the other classes from enemy fighters, and it proposed to supply them out of its own pool. It did not, and it does not, admit that the Army needs a contingent of either of these two last-named classes per- manently attached to it and specially trained to work with it. The argument is that bomber crews are trained to find a target and hit it, and it does not matter to the crews whether it is the General Staff or the Air Staff which wants that target destroyed. Likewise fighter pilots will fight with equal efficiency whether they are working in the interests of the Air Ministry or of the War Office. (or hbombing an< maissaoee to help the Strategical Reconnaissance There is, however, another need of the Army which, it appears, was only recognised rather late in the day, namely, the need for strategical reconnaissance far behind the enemy's front lines. The Lysanders (or whatever might be the current type) of the Army Co-operation Squadrons could not undertake this work, as their machines were not suited for it. The work would have to be done by machines of the medium bomber class, though when they were, engaged on "it they would not be working as bombers but as reconnaissance machines. Before the present war broke/ out a small number of squadrons of medium bombers] (Blenheims, to be exact) were put through a course of train-\ ing in this work. Photography has always been acknow- * ledged to be one of the jobs at which bomber crews must be expert. It is doubtful whether practice in photography does quite meet the case. One would imagine that for strategical reconnaissance a certain special knowledge of military matters would be highly desirable, though admittedly the observers would not need such detailed knowledge as is necessary in the case of tactical reconnais- sance. Movements of armies are more easy to recognise than movements of battalions and field batteries. In a recent issue of Flight some account was given of the composition and doings of the Air Component which accompanied the B.E.F. to France before the Germans advanced through Holland and Belgium to the conquest PHOTOGRAPHIC RECCO : The easily removed side panels of the Lysander make the installation of cameras and such- like very simple. of France?* and afso of/fne 'Advanced Air Striking Force which was later combined with the Air Component to form a new Command* To be frank, the story does not make a very creditable record. During this war there are many ways in which the Air Staff has shown that it is fighting with its brains, but its relations witl*"fhe Army is not one of them. .That a major reorganisation should take place during a caliipaig»"shows,' at the very least, lack of fore- sight. That, at a time when we were all boasting that unity of command had been achieved without having to wait three years for it, an Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief should be placed alongside the Commander-in-Chief of the B.E.F. indicates muddled thinking somewhere. Perhaps some authority could explain what were the precise relations between Air Marshal Barratt, the A.O.C.-in-C., and General Vuillemin of the Armee de I'Air, or between the former and General Gamelin, who was the supreme Commander of the Allied land armies, but those relations are not obvious to the ordinary student. To the actual working of the Air Component the appointment of the A.O.C.-in-C. made very little difference, and to that extent the appointment appears to have been superfluous. The parts to be played by the two bodies. Air Component and A.A.S.F., were radically different, the one being concerned purely with work for the Army and the other (theoretically) with attacking targets in Germany on behalf git the Bomber Command; and therefore the partial ampfcamation of ,the two was hardly logical. The lack of plan is tjrt; new Command cannot be condoled by say^ig tfWt*s the B.E.F. was.at first facing
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