The German Air Force Is Already "The Most Powerful in Europe": Two Royal Air Force Officers Report on a Visit to Germany, 6-15 October 1936
In October 1936, two exceptional Royal Air Force pilots flew privately to Germany to see what they could discover about the Luftwaffe. Their report, now in Britain's National Archives, has never been published, but was used by Winston Churchill in his efforts to alert the British government to the danger of aerial attack. The airmen were well received everywhere and permitted to fly on their own over Berlin. They examined and even flew the latest bombers and met members of the élite Richthofen Squadron, Ernst Udet, and Heinrich Koppenberg. Greatly impressed by German air power, they urged the British Air Ministry to focus on a Wellington-Blenheim strike force, backed by Hurricane and Spitfire fighters.
In October 1936, Squadron Leader Herbert Rowley and Flight Lieutenant Dick Atcherley of the Royal Air Force (RAF) decided to visit Germany and find out what they could about its air force and the society that nurtured it. 1 Their forty-four-page typewritten report—all [End Page 1011] Rowley's work—is now in Britain's National Archives, London, formerly the Public Record Office. It has never been published and "probably went unread, for the minute sheet is blank." 2 No one suggested they go and no one interviewed them on their return, for they were only pilots, not at all important persons such as diplomats, politicians, or businessmen and certainly not agents of the Special Intelligence Service. Yet they learned a great deal. The Air Ministry's lack of interest in their report and its failure to see that the report reached senior government officials help to confirm the low opinion formed by several historians of that institution. 3 The Air Staff apparently ignored a detailed report written by experienced, observant airmen about an air force that even then was believed to pose a serious threat to British security.
Rowley knew the officers then serving in the Air Ministry and may well have expected them to file his report unread, because he sent a summary to Wing Commander (Lieutenant-Colonel) Charles Anderson, formerly a member of the Directorate of Training, and at that time commanding an RAF station at Hucknall, near Nottingham. Between 1936 and 1939, Anderson secretly supplied Winston Churchill with information on what he perceived to be weaknesses in RAF organization, training, equipment, and personnel. Nominally a mere back-bench Member of Parliament, with little prospect of returning to office, Churchill's persistent, widely publicized, and apparently well-informed agitation had persuaded the government to appoint him a member of the important Air Defence Research Sub-Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence in July 1935. 4
In that capacity, Churchill received official information in addition to an ever-growing unofficial flow from Anderson and other RAF officers, from sympathisers in the Foreign Office and other government departments, [End Page 1012] and from men who travelled between Britain and Germany on general industrial or specifically aviation business. Anderson forwarded Rowley's summary to Churchill, supplemented later by an edited version of the full report, and arranged for him to meet the great man. Churchill never referred directly to this or any other information, but he used its substance when criticizing government policy. Rowley's report, plus what he had to say in private, also confirmed Churchill's opinion of the Air Ministry as "a most cumbersome and ill-working administrative machine," where "jealousies and cliquism" were rampant. 5
Rowley and Atcherley doubted if they would see or hear anything of real value because they had hardly a word of German between them, but they guessed rightly that fellow pilots would welcome them even if those inexplicable persons who were not happy in a cockpit snubbed them...
