In his article ‘Liberal Militarism and the British State’ (nlr 185, January–February 1991), David Edgerton questions certain facts, calculations or interpretations of mine in my book The Audit of War about the British aircraft industry between the wars and during the Second World War. Let me take his points one by one.
First. Edgerton does not agree with me that the British aircraft industry in the 1920s and early 1930s was kept alive by a trickle of orders from the Air Ministry, its civil side being backward compared with, say, the German or American or Dutch. But on p. 5 of M.M. Postan’s official history, British War Production (1952), we read: ‘With financial provisions and new output at a very low level, the Air Ministry had great difficulty in maintaining its industrial reserves [circa 1934]. The aircraft firms, including the principal engine firms, found themselves in a position of chronic penury. . .very few could have survived without the tutelage of the Air Ministry. . .[which] had to ration out all new work among some sixteen substantial aircraft firms. . .But for the time being the diet, though just sufficient to keep the bulk of the firms alive, was too meagre to enable them to keep pace with the aircraft industry abroad, especially in the United States.’ At this period the British aircraft industry manufactured no civil or military aircraft of monoplane all-metal construction, like the Junkers 52 or the Douglas dci, and its exports only consisted of light aircraft of obsolescent technology.