With Wings Like Eagles Read Online Free Page A

answer was more and larger battleships. The French were not much interested in bombers (perhaps because they lived in fear that their beloved Paris would be bombed), or indeed in military aircraft of any kind; Marshal Foch himself had said, “Aviation is a sport—for war it’s worth zero.” To protect itself from the Germans, France continued to rely on a mass army of citizen conscripts, trained by fulfilling, with whatever reluctance, their annual period of military service; and on immense, elaborate fortifications, particularly the famous Maginot Line. The Germans, forbidden by the terms of the peace treaty to rearm, dreamed first of all of rebuilding their army. The Soviet Union relied, as always, on its millions of conscript peasant soldiers. During World War I the British had put off conscription for as long as they could, as a deeply un-English notion, and the moment the war ended they swiftly demobilized their army—conscription, obligatory military service, and a large army went against every tradition of British life; and the idea of a small regular army of long-term professional soldiers, commanded by officers who were so far as possible members of the upper class or the younger sons of the landowning aristocracy, was deeply treasured. In the circumstances, the idea of a powerful bombing force whose very existence would prevent war, and which would involve a comparatively small number of professional airmen, was undeniably attractive. Nobody in the United Kingdom, from King George V down, wanted to repeat the experience of World War I, in which more than 750,000 Britons had been killed and more than 2 million seriously wounded, most of them in the mud of Flanders.
    The idea of the bomber as the weapon of the future—even the near future—moved rapidly from the quiet places in Whitehall where British military policy was somewhat lackadaisically discussed—for it was not one of the subjects in which Baldwin showed much interest—to make its way into the mind of the public, thanks to the immense power of the popular press, and was reinforced by the growing power of what was beginning to be called popular culture, i.e., radio, magazines, popular fiction, and above all films. In 1936, my uncle, Alexander Korda, a friend and admirer of H. G. Wells, produced an ambitious, immensely successful futuristic film based on Wells’s novel The Shape of Things to Come , which began with the destruction of a major European city (recognizably London) by a huge fleet of bombers darkening the sky, without a declaration of war. Designed by my father, Vincent Korda, Things to Come held audiences breathless, presenting them with a convincing picture of a world in which war would come, literally, out of the blue, wiping out whole cities in one blow with bombs and poison gas. Alex and my father were not, to be sure, attempting to buttress the arguments of the air marshals for more money, or to instill fear in the public; they were merely attempting to brings Wells’s ideas to the screen as faithfully (and dramatically) as possible. But the film (which deeply impressed Hitler) nevertheless had an immense effect on the public, and indeed on the government.
    For despite the phlegmatic, calm, peace-loving appearance of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin—a man who looked exactly like a character in a novel by R. F. Delderfield about the English countryside, puffing contentedly on his pipe and determined to avoid full-scale rearmament and war, or even talk about full-scale rearmament and war—some radical notions were quietly being put into preparation. Baldwin, a cousin of Rudyard Kipling, had a somewhat inflated reputation for sagacity, blunt talk, and plain common sense, thought to be part of his heritage from a family of wealthy, tough-minded West Midland iron-masters. * It was also his misfortune to be almost comically uninterested in foreign affairs and foreigners at a time when nothing was more important, and even his most