The Air Force Act

On 29 November 1917 it was announced in the House of Lords that two acts had received royal assent. One of them was the act on the air force, known by its full title as the Air Force (Constitution) Act 1917. According to its title it was “to make provision for the establishment, administration and discipline of an Air Force” and to set up an Air Council. This was the legal birth of a third branch of the British armed forces, alongside the army and the navy. Until then Britain had had two air services: the Royal Flying Corps, subordinate to the army, and the Royal Naval Air Service, belonging to the navy. The act did not merge them at once, but it created the basis for doing so.

From the Gothas to the Smuts report

The change was brought about by German air raids. After the daylight attacks by Gotha bombers on London on 13 June and 7 July, the government set up a committee whose work was in practice conducted by General Jan Smuts, a member of the War Cabinet. He was assisted by General David Henderson, the first commander of the Royal Flying Corps. Smuts’s first report dealt with the air defence of the capital. The second, submitted on 17 August, went far beyond it. Smuts wrote that the creation of an air ministry and an air staff had become urgent, and that air power could be used as an independent means of waging war. He foresaw that the day might not be far off when aerial operations, with their devastation of enemy lands and destruction of industrial and populous centres on a vast scale, might become the principal operations of war. On 24 August the War Cabinet accepted the report in principle. Over the following months a dozen or so expert committees worked out the details, and the Gothas’ night raids in the autumn only spurred the government on.

The bill in Parliament

On 12 November the second reading of the bill in the House of Commons was opened by Major John Baird, parliamentary secretary to the Air Board, because the Colonial Secretary, who was to have spoken, had fallen ill. Baird recalled the history of aviation since 1912, the unsuccessful attempts to reconcile the two services, as well as Lord Curzon’s Air Board of 1916 and its successor under Lord Cowdray. He admitted that the present system diffused responsibility: the Air Board supplied the aircraft and the Army Council the men, so a shortage of training machines meant a shortage of pilots, and vice versa. The act created the air force on the model of the Territorial Forces Act of 1907 and applied military law to it, with amendments. Army and navy airmen could transfer to the new service only with their own consent and that of the Admiralty or the War Office. At its head was to be an Air Council with a minister of the rank of Secretary of State, because only such a minister could take over towards the airmen the duties hitherto performed by the Secretary of State for War.

The bill was well received, although critics, among them the MP Noel Pemberton Billing, charged that it was vague and did not say what would happen to the two existing air services. The House of Lords considered it from 20 November. The Lord Privy Seal, the Earl of Crawford, asked for speed so that the act could come into force as soon as possible. The Lords made amendments, which the Commons accepted on 28 November, and the next day the act was ready.

Who would run the air force

Work on the act was overshadowed by a political row. Lloyd George offered the new post to the press magnate Lord Northcliffe, that is, Alfred Harmsworth. In mid-November Northcliffe refused in an open letter published in The Times, criticising the government in passing. Lord Cowdray, chairman of the Air Board, who had been counting on the post, learnt of it all from the newspapers and resigned. On 26 November Northcliffe’s brother, Lord Rothermere, became president of the future Air Council, that is, the first Secretary of State for Air. The Council was formally established by an Order in Council of 21 December, and on 3 January 1918 the Air Ministry began work. On 1 April 1918 the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service were merged into the Royal Air Force, the first air force of a great power independent of the army and the navy.