LORD TRENCHARD'5 AIR FORCE
sTR,—Mr. Spaight says that the total strength of the Air Force in all theatres of the war and at home never exceeded 300,000 officers and men. When Sir Hugh Trenchard left the Air Force he said that during the war he had worked with an Air Force which had consisted of 30,000 officers and 300,000 men. If there were as many as 3o,000 officers, the total would be nearer 350,000, as I said, since the proportion of officers is too high. I did not mean to say that this huge number be- longed to the Independent Air Force, but to an independent Air Force.
Mr. Spaight is right when he says that the Independent Air Force came into existence in June, 1918. The inde- pendent Air Force only came into existence two months before. Nevertheless, it was in September, 1917, that the War Cabinet decided to wage a counter-offensive against targets in Ger- many. Trenchard was instructed at the beginning of October to take immediate action against German objectives which could be reached from the neighbourhood of Nancy, and the special unit he then formed, the Forty-first Wing, became a few months later the VIII Brigade, which, in turn, became the Independent Air Force. The latter, therefore, carried on the life of a force formed for the independent bombing of Ger- many in October, 1917, and there can be no doubt that it had a considerable effect on the development of the war.
My article, however, was written to emphasise the import- ance of the Air Force being fully independent and not merely ancillary to the Army and Navy, a point of view which was most impressively expounded by General Smuts to the War Cabinet and accepted by it in August, 1917.—Yours, &c.,
SZRATEGICUS.
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