The Troubled All

Tim CENTRAL BLUE. By Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir John Slessor. (Cassell, 30s.) THE war and post-war years were no respecters of persons. Who in, say, September, 1938, would have been the more surprised,

and dismayed, if they had been told that they would be fairly closely associated over the next fifteen years—Group-Captain Slessor, the rising young Air Stall Officer, struggling with rearmament after Munich at the Air Ministry, or John Strachey,

one of the three selectors of the Left Book. the author of The Coining Struggle for Power, sitting on Ellis Island, because the American authorities considered him too dangerous a 'radical to

admit to the United States?

And yet, whether we liked it or not, we were so associated.

By 1941, 1 was Air Vice Marshal Slessor's PRO at the Head- quarters of 5 Group of Bomber Command. In the latter part of the war I was a very junior Air Stall Officer in the Air Ministry while Slessor held the variety of staff appointments and commands which he describes in this book, and was brought into contact with him from time to time. Then in 1945 we found ourselves

fellow members of the Air Council, he as Air Member for Per- sonnel, 1 as Under-Secretary of State for Air. Finally, in 1950, we

sat together on the Defence Committee, he as Chief of the Air Stall, I as Secretary of Stale for War.

The first thing that made me admire Slessor was something

almost opposite to the conventional military qualities. 1 saw that he had so deep a confidence in himself that he was not afraid to pause and to hesitate, when hesitation was needed. This quality arose out of his concern, his care, his troubled, painful anxiety for the air crews of his command. In 1941 the commander of a Bomber Group usually sat in the Group Ops room before and during the start of an operation, making the final decisions, in the light of the latest met. reports, as to whether the operation should start or not, or, if the aircraft were already airborne, as to whether they should be recalled to base by wireless. I had watched several officers making these critical decisions. They

had done so, no doubt to the very best of their abilities, in a short, sharp, soldierly sort of way, intent a little, one couldn't help thinking, on getting through with the job. Then I saw Slessor making those decisions in a different way. He would sit there, silent and abstracted from the Ops room activity; you could see him weighing the opposed considerations in his mind; the necessity to wage the war, the safety of his aircraft and his crews, the ever-changing weather pattern. At the last practicable moment, and with a sort of resignation, Slessor came to his decision, and issued his orders.

Those nocturnal decisions in the Grantham Ops room have evidently stayed in Slessor's mind also, for he describes them in this book. With generosity he gives much of the credit—it was well deserved—for one of the most notable of them to 'the Grem-

lin, Mr. Matthews, his remarkable Met. Officer. Slessor writes of one night when Matthews vehemently urged a last-minute

diversion because of icing conditions, contrary to Bomber Com- mand's operational plan.

This solicitude, combined with an iron determination to prose- cute the war, made ine sense in Slessor something extra, some- thing over and above the qualities possessed by the other able idicers whom I met. Not only his brilliant subsequent career but also this long, interesting, characteristic book, shows that Slessor does indeed possess this something extra. It is the book of a military statesman rather than of an Air Commander-in-Chief, merely. It is not that all Slessor's judgements and opinions are, from my point of view, statesmanlike. For, contrary to some opinion, Slessor has always been at heart a Tory of the old school. Nevertheless he has always attempted to face the facts of the contemporary world as they are, rather than as they looked when riding home, for example, after the Camberley Drag (of which we hear a great deal in these pages) in 1930. This combination of a basically traditional turn of mind with a con- temporary awareness, leads Slessor into what seems to me contra- dictory attitudes. For instance, I can make nothing of the combination of his eloquent plea, in the last pages of the book, l'or what amounts to peaceful, if vigilant, co-existence with the Russians, with his endorsement of Kipling's: `There is no truce with Adam-zad the Bear that looks like a man.' Can one really co-exist peacefully with someone with whom one passionately urges that there can be no truce? Again, several passages in the work make me feel that Slessor has not really made up his mind to the dissolution of the British Empire in its old form, founded upon the physical power of Britain, and to the attempt to put in its place a voluntarily associating Commonwealth. However, none of us are likely to escape such contradictions amidst the ferment of the contemporary world. The thing which distinguishes Slessor is that he wrestles with these basic issues- -that he is usually aware of the passing of the world into which he was born.

Much of the present book is taken up with the detailed history of the major campaigns, conferences and air operations of the Second World War, with a surprising number of which Slessor was intimately concerned. As such it will be compulsory reading for anyone who wishes to make a serious study of the late war. For Slessor is nearly always a little franker and more outspoken than the other memorialists and historians who have covered the same ground. Again, there is something extra about