For some years after the Second World War the UK maintained a high level of air defence. The Berlin crisis and the airlift in 1948, and then the Korean War in 1950, did much to offset the idealists’ beliefs that all arms could be laid aside at once, and while the threat was possibly not very great in those days wartime memories of 1940 were still vivid. As a result Fighter Command’s resources up to the first half of the 1950s remained considerable. Indeed, in 1957 it boasted some 600 jet fighters and a sufficiency of airfields and radars to support them.
But in 1957 there was a major shift in policy that was to leave the country denuded of adequate air defence for nearly twenty years. Evaluation of the nuclear missile threat from the USSR in the early fifties, at a time of overwhelming strategic nuclear power in the USA, had led to the contemporary strategy of trip-wire and retaliation. In 1957 it was decided, with impeccable logic, that all that was needed was a fighter shield to protect our nuclear-armed V-bomber bases to ensure that they could get into the air on their retaliatory missions just as soon as the ballistic missile warning system indicated that they must go. (For a discussion of this phase of British defence policy see Chapter 4.)
Whether or not the policy of trip-wire and massive retaliation was appropriate to the circumstances of the time, it was later to demonstrate a fatal flaw. As Soviet missile strength grew and the retaliatory strategy had to give way to the flexible response, with its emphasis on the ability to fight with conventional as well as nuclear weapons, so the basic assumption on which this minimal air defence was predicated disappeared. But by then the demands on government spending from many quarters left no room for the costly rebuilding of a comprehensive air defence system to counter the growing Soviet capability to attack the UK in a phase of conventional war.
By the time intelligence assessments had finally (and rather belatedly) recognized the conventional air threat it was not just a matter of numbers of aircraft — though heaven knows they were short enough; it was also a matter of numbers of men in the air and on the ground. Both were difficult to come by with the competing attractions of industry and commerce in an affluent society. Radar communications and control centres were also insufficient in capacity or availability for the changed situation. The shortage of airfields gave particular concern. By the end of the 1939-45 war there had been an airfield every fifteen to twenty-five kilometres throughout most of the country; now there were only a handful — all the others had gone back to the plough or had been handed over to municipalities or other users for a variety of purposes. The shortage of airfields was critical.
In the seventies it was necessary to think of air defence on an immeasurably larger canvas than that on which the Battle of Britain was portrayed. Not only did the stand-off weapons of an attacking force require the defences to be pushed out hundreds of kilometres if the launching aircraft were to be destroyed in time, but the areas to be defended now reached across the Eastern Atlantic, where it was necessary to protect shipping which would no longer have air cover from large fleet carriers in the Royal Navy. In addition to the central task of the defence of the United Kingdom and its base facilities, SACLANT and SACEUR assigned air defence responsibilities to the British in an area that extended from the Channel to the North Norwegian Sea in the north and out very nearly to the coast of Iceland in the west. It was a tall order. If the worst NATO fears were ever to be realized then the air resources available in the mid-seventies would be decidedly inadequate, for in those circumstances the United Kingdom — as a rearward base for SACEUR and a forward base for SACLANT, roles decided by the strategic geography of the British Isles rather than by defence planners — could not hope to escape the close attention of the Soviet Air Forces.
