Creation of the Independent Force

On 5 June 1918 Major-General Hugh Trenchard took over from Field Marshal Douglas Haig operational command of VIII Brigade of the Royal Air Force, a group of bombers stationed in Lorraine, around Nancy. The next day the brigade officially became the nucleus of a new formation, the Independent Force. It was to bomb industry, railways and airfields in western Germany, and in this role Trenchard was subordinate neither to the command of the British Army in France nor to Marshal Foch, but directly to the Air Ministry in London. According to H. A. Jones’s British official history of the war in the air, the formation “officially came into being” on 6 June, while on 5 June Trenchard assumed tactical command. He took over full authority, administrative as well, on 15 June.

The Independent Force did not start from scratch. Since October 1917, 41st Wing had operated from airfields near Nancy, and in February 1918 it was expanded into VIII Brigade under Brigadier-General Cyril Newall. According to Jones, from the first raid on 17 October 1917 to 5 June 1918 its squadrons carried out 57 raids on targets in Germany, among them Mainz, Mannheim, Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, Koblenz and Saarbrücken, and in May they attacked Cologne in broad daylight. When Trenchard took over, the brigade had five squadrons: three day squadrons (Nos. 55, 99 and 104), flying single-engined Airco DH.4s and newer DH.9s, and two night squadrons: No. 100 Squadron with obsolete F.E.2b biplanes and No. 216 Squadron, a former naval air unit, with twin-engined Handley Page O/400 bombers. Newall became Trenchard’s deputy.

Trenchard returns

The new post ended several awkward weeks for Trenchard. In March, in a dispute with the Air Minister, Lord Rothermere, he had resigned as Chief of the Air Staff, and in mid-April the resignation was accepted. The new minister, William Weir, offered him several posts, but Trenchard turned most of them down as nominal. On 13 May the Air Council informed the War Cabinet that the time had come to create an independent force to bomb Germany on a large scale, and proposed that VIII Brigade be made a separate command under Trenchard, answerable directly to the ministry. Trenchard arrived in the Nancy area on 20 May.

Behind the idea lay a view set out in August 1917 by General Jan Smuts in his report: that air power could on its own destroy the enemy’s industry and break his morale, and that this required forces not tied to the needs of the front. Weir believed that long-range bombers needed a degree of independence similar to that of a naval command. Trenchard himself later defined his aim as the breakdown of the German army in Germany, its government and the sources of its supply. He judged that he could not destroy individual industrial centres, so he decided to attack as many towns as possible so that none would feel safe. In a report from early 1919 he wrote that the moral effect of bombing stood to the material effect “as 20 to 1”.

French opposition

The French viewed the new formation with distrust from the start. At a meeting of the Inter-Allied Aviation Committee of the Supreme War Council at Versailles on 31 May, General Maurice Duval, head of aviation at French general headquarters, asked how the word “independent” could be reconciled with the pursuit of unified command. He argued that in a battle no one knows in advance how many aircraft will be needed, and that “from the military point of view orders are better than requests”. The committee reached no agreement, and the dispute over the formal status of the Independent Force dragged on all summer. It broke out at the worst possible moment for the Allies: the Germans had just broken through on the Aisne and reached the Marne, and the French wanted every aircraft over the battlefield.

Three days after Trenchard took command, on 8 June, twelve DH.9s of No. 104 Squadron attacked the Metz-Sablon railway junction. During the summer further squadrons joined the Independent Force, mainly with Handley Page bombers, and at the end of October it was renamed the Inter-Allied Independent Air Force under Foch’s authority. According to Jones, by the armistice it had dropped 543 tons of bombs, about 220 tons of them on German airfields. The raid on Berlin planned for November never took place.