ABSTRACT
It will be remembered that in February 1937 the Chiefs of Staff had prepared a paper outlining the strategy to be pursued in the event of a war with Germany in 1939. The recommendations contained in this paper were approved by a ministerial committee under the chairmanship of the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and in May 1937 the Committee of Imperial Defence called upon the three services to prepare detailed operational plans based on that strategy. And so for the first time since the doctrine of the offensive was formulated in the summer of 1923 the Air Ministry were faced with the task of translating their strategic ideas into operational plans which could be carried out by the bomber squadrons. If the assurance with which these ideas were proclaimed had been a measure of the nature of the task, it should have presented few problems; but in fact it proved to be a most difficult one and pointed all too clearly to the wide gulf which existed between strategic theory and operational reality.
