ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to survey the non-military thinking in Great Britain concerning air warfare through the year 1931. An early indication of this mental linkage between commercial and military aircraft was made by the first British Civil Aerial Transport Committee, established in May 1917. Naturally, the belief that commercial planes were potential bombers increased British anxieties with respect to its aerial defences during the interwar years. According to Sir Walter Raleigh, the official historian of England’s fledgling years in the air, the highest officers in the English military services resisted the concept of aerial warfare just because that threatened loss was involved. The interwar evidence is conclusive; the great and lesser lights alike, within British political circles, were in agreement over the potentiality and tendencies of aerial warfare. The 1922 air estimates debates evidenced far more concern over the potentials of aerial warfare than had the previous debates — even though the earlier ones were impressive enough in this regard.
