The British Aircraft Industry and American-led Globalisation

1943-1982

Takeshi Sakade

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000512182
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: History

Sakade challenges the narrative that the focus of British manufacturing went "from Empire to Europe" and argues rather that, following the Second World War, the key relationship was in fact trans-Atlantic.

There is a commonly accepted belief that, during the twentieth century, British manufacturing declined irreparably, that Britain lost its industrial hegemony. But this is too simplistic. In fact, in the decades after 1945, Britain staked out a new role for itself as a key participant in a US-led process of globalisation. Far from becoming merely a European player, the UK actually managed to preserve a key share in a global market, and the British defence industry was, to a large extent, successfully rehabilitated. Sakade returns to the original scholarly parameters of the decline controversy, and especially questions around post-war decline in the fields of high technology and the national defence industrial base. Using the case of the strategically critical military and civil aircraft industry, he argues that British industry remained relatively robust.

A valuable read for historians of British aviation and more widely of 20th century British Industry.

Part I

The post-war British aircraft industry, 1943–1964

DOI: 10.4324/9781003127901-1

The conventional narrative of British history during the immediate post-war period is one of unmistakeable and ineluctable decline. Part I of the book re-examines this narrative through an analysis of the British aircraft industry during the two decades after the Second World War. To be sure, and in keeping with the conventional narrative, the British aircraft industry did, indeed, seem to be suffering reverses on every front during this period. And yet, a single British aero-engine maker (Rolls-Royce) was quietly making a case for itself as the principal supplier to American airliners. Ultimately, Part I shows how the seeds of Britain’s future role as a key player in an American-led process of globalisation were sown during the two, apparently bleak, decades after the Second World War.

1 The origins of Anglo–American production collaboration in the first jet-age, 1943–1956

DOI: 10.4324/9781003127901-2

Introduction

An examination of the US–European order in the post-war era must begin from the premise that evolving European integration was profoundly connected to the Atlantic Alliance. This was, to some extent, an inevitable result of the disintegration of the British Empire. Up until the end of the Second World War, the Americans anticipated the post-war breakup of the British Empire. After the war, however, they belatedly came to appreciate the Empire’s strategic value in a burgeoning confrontation with the Soviets. This was to some extent complementary to the guiding principles of British foreign policy at the time, as based on Winston Churchill’s famous “three circles”.¹ According to Churchill, “the three circles” encompassed the three roles that Britain was obliged to embody after the war if it hoped to preserve its great power status – as leader of the British Empire, as a close ally with special ties to the United States, and as a dominant power in Western Europe. This elaborate foreign policy framework was taken up by successive administrations.

Did US aid play a significant role in British post-war recovery? This question lies at the centre of a significant scholarly controversy. According to Michael J. Hogan, the Marshal Plan was critical to West European recovery, whereas Alan S. Milward has argued that, even without Marshal Aid, Western Europe would still have recovered.² This chapter touches on this controversy through an exploration of US aid and British post-war reconstruction. It offers a close analysis of US Plan K aid and the Offshore Procurement Program (the OSP), both of which have been afforded rather less attention in the scholarly literature.

US aid and British military production were intimately connected because the United States made continued aid conditional on the nature of British rearmament. At the centre of this rearmament programme lay the aircraft industry. The military historian Correlli Barnett has argued that Britain essentially wasted its portion of Marshal Aid on a doomed attempt to maintain and even extend its military aircraft industry. This was a “neo-Edwardian dream”,³ and competition with the United States a clear case of “technological overstretch”.⁴ Indeed, stiff competition against BOAC’s route network came from the other side of the Atlantic in the form of Pan American World Airways (Pan Am), the flagship international airline of the United States. Although a private company, Pan Am had emerged against the backdrop of the Second World War and was regarded as a “chosen instrument” of American foreign policy. For Barnett, Britain hoped to maintain its aircraft industry for the purely irrational reason of “[p]restige”.⁵

This chapter offers a different assessment of Britain’s post-war pursuit of airpower. This encompassed the wartime manufacturing of airliners from the Brabazon programme, the attempted production of interim airliners converted from military bombers, an initial British superiority via jet airliners, and the survival of Britain’s aero-engine sector despite the rise of US airliners after 1955. As mentioned, many historians consider these programmes to have been profligate and pointless. Alongside Barnet, Keith Hayward has stated that, “[s]adly, most of the others in the [Brabazon] programme were disappointing, and some were quite disastrous, commercially and technically”.⁶ And yet, as this chapter shows, the wartime British attempt to establish an independent aircraft industry later provided the basis for the renaissance of this same industry.

The Arnold-Towers-Slessor agreement of 22^nd June 1942

The Battle of Midway on 4^th–7^th June 1942 changed the war in the Pacific – not just for, but also among, the Allied Powers. The Royal Air Force (RAF) Coastal Command called on the United States to build Consolidated B-24 Liberators and Boeing B-17 Fortresses.⁷ Anglo–American discussions on this question began at the end of May. At this time, H.H. Arnold, the Commanding General of the US Army Air Forces, and J.H. Towers, US Chief of the Bureau of Aeronautics, Navy Department, visited London. On 21^st June 1942, Arnold, Towers and J.G. Slessor, Air Vice Marshal of the RAF, signed the so-called Arnold-Towers-Slessor agreement in Washington DC. According to this agreement, the United States would allocate aircraft to Britain. Notably, this agreement stipulated that allocations of transport aircraft to Britain for 1943 would remain open to discussion and revision.⁸

After the Arnold-Towers-Slessor agreement, British dependence on US aircraft – and especially transport aircraft – remained evident. In The Central Blue, his autobiography, Slessor wrote that:

We [British] were unable to shake Arnold on the subject of transport aircraft, for supply of which we were depending entirely on U.S. production. We were in no position to embark on the production of any class in the U.K. at this advanced stage, and it was agreed that we should in the main have to rely upon American air transport units to lift British airborne troops when required.⁹

Before US officials finalised their production programme for 1943, Oliver Lyttelton, Minister of Production, visited Washington in an attempt to organise the integration of British and American aircraft production. He frankly assumed Britain’s “nearly 100 per cent” dependence in the area of transport aircraft.¹⁰ This effectively entailed a virtual US monopoly over the post-war airliner market (4 engine reciprocal). As John Wilmot, Minister of Supply, and Lord Winster, Minister of Civil Aviation, would later state in a Cabinet memorandum, “[t]the war time concentration of production of transport aircraft in American hands” would pay “handsome dividends”¹¹ to the United States after the war.

The Churchill War Cabinet was understandably rattled by the prospect of an exclusive British concentration on fighters and bombers, and thus a prospective loss of transport technology. Indeed, in early 1943, the Cabinet recognised that supremacy in post-war “control of the construction, use, servicing and piloting of the air transport”¹² was essential to post-war reconstruction and the preservation of the Empire. This prompted the British government to summon an advisory committee – the Brabazon Committee, chaired by Lord Brabazon of Tara – to select specifications for domestic and commercial airliners after the war. The first meeting of this Committee was held on 23^rd December 1942.¹³

The Brabazon programme

In 1943, the Churchill Cabinet began to engage more intensively with the question of post-war reconstruction. On 22^nd February 1943, the Subcommittee on Civil Aviation in the Committee on Reconstruction Problems conclu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of abbreviations
• Foreword
• Preface
• Britain’s “new role” between Europe and the United States after 1945
• PART I: The post-war British aircraft industry, 1943–1964
• PART II: The British dilemma, 1964–1969
• PART III: European co-operative airliner projects and Anglo–American industrial collaboration, 1968–1982
• Conclusion
• Appendix I: Types of jet aircrafts from the 1950s to the 1970s
• Appendix II: UK balance of payments, 1946–1970
• Bibliography
• Index