These are the British

by Drew Middleton

The services and their officers thus had established themselves as a much more important part of society in Britain than had their counterparts in the United States. They were always in the public eye. The Army and the Air Force fought campaigns on the north-west frontier of India. The Navy chased gun-runners and showed the flag.

Socially, the Army was the more important. The sons of the very best families—which means the oldest and most respectable, not the richest—went into the five regiments of the Brigade of Foot Guards or into the Household Cavalry or into the old, fashionable, expensive cavalry regiments like the 16th/5th Lancers or the Queen's Own Fourth Hussars (which once, long ago, attracted a young subaltern named Churchill). It was the fashion among the intellectuals of pre-war England to laugh at the solemn ceremonials of the Foot Guards and to snicker at the languid young men who protested when their horses were taken away and replaced by armored cars and tanks. (It might be remarked that when the time came there was nothing to laugh at and a good deal to be proud of. The account for the parties at the night clubs and the hunting, shootin', and fishin' of the careless days was rendered and paid in blood. You could see them in France in May and June of 1940 going out with machine guns and horribly antiquated armored cars to take on the big German tanks.)

If the Army was predominant socially, the Navy held military pre-eminence. It was the Navy which was the nation's "sure shield," the Navy which had been matchless and supreme since Trafalgar. It was the Navy which time and again had interposed its ships and men between the home islands and the fleets of Spain, France, and Germany. The naval officer standing on his bridge in the North Sea or off some tropic port was a watchman, a national symbol of security.

As the two senior services were so firmly implanted in the public consciousness, it is easy to see why the Royal Air Force, the youngest of the three, lived on such short commons before the war. Socially it did not count. "He's one of these flying chaps," a young Hussar said at Lille one day in 1939, "but a very decent fellow." It did not attract the young men who entered the Guards or the Cavalry, for the RAF dealt with machines and grimy hangars smelling of grease and oil, and it planned for the future without much hope of governmental financial assistance or any real support from tradition. Whereas the Loamshire Hussars had been fighting since Blenheim, the Secretary of State for War was an ex-officer, and the port at the mess was beyond praise.

Militarily, the RAF meant a great deal more. When the war began, it became the savior of Britain—for a few years the one service through which the country could strike directly and powerfully at Germany. The rise of the RAF to pre-eminence among the fighting services in post-war Britain began with its long, bitter, successful battle against the Luftwaffe in the summer of 1940.

The ascent of the RAF to its present position is the first of the changes that have overtaken the services in Britain, which is a martial if not a militaristic nation. Of course, the development of air power as the means of carrying the new nuclear weapons would have ensured an improvement in its position in any case. But the expansion of the RAF during the war, the post-war necessity for continued experimentation in associated fields such as the development of guided missiles, and the creation of a large, highly trained group of technical officers provided an opportunity for the new middle class and the upper levels of the industrial working class, the planners and technicians, to win advancement in what is currently the most important of the services.

The Battle of Britain was won by public-school boys. But the modern RAF, although it has its share of public-school boys especially among the combat units, is increasingly manned, officers as well as the higher noncommissioned officers, by products of the state schools. The RAF needs now and will need increasingly in the future the services of the best technical brains Britain can offer. The main source of supply will be not the officers' training units at the public schools or the universities but the new technical colleges and training courses in Britain.

It follows, then, that in time the military defense of the realm will rest primarily not upon the class who have always considered themselves ordained by birth and education to carry out this task but upon a new group springing from the new middle class and from the proletariat. This is a social development of the first importance.

The change in the character of the officer class is not confined to the RAF, although it is most noticeable there. There has been a change, too, in the composition of the commissioned ranks of the Army.