The Air Debate: British Ideas of Air Power in the Inter-War Period

Speaker: Neil Datson, Independent Scholar

Chair: Alan James, Senior Lecturer in War Studies

In the early 1920s the future of the RAF was in doubt. One consequence was a protracted and damaging struggle between the Air Ministry and the Admiralty for the control of naval aviation. That circumstance – and anecdotal evidence of some RN officers’ derision of aviation – has tended to obscure the efforts that some were making to think through the likely future influence of aircraft on maritime strategy and tactics. Some such thoughts and ideas were outlandish, not to say cranky, but from within the navy as a whole much good sense was emerging.

Neil Datson reads Modern History at Magdalen College, Oxford, graduating in 1977. He has spent his working life in agriculture, contributing occasional articles to the agricultural and general interest press. As an independent scholar he is presently engaged – on a part-time basis – in researching and writing about the development of British air power from the beginning of World War I in 1914 through to the fall of Singapore in 1942, focusing especially on the relationships between the services.

Hosted by the Laughton Naval History Unit of the Sir Michael Howard Centre for the History of War on behalf of the British Commission for Maritime History and the Society for Nautical Research