April 1957 Great Britain announce: no need for manned military aircraft

Michel Van

Michel Van

ACCESS: Above Top Secret
Senior Member
Joined
13 August 2007
Messages
7,151
Reaction score
6,527
i need more Information about this notorious announcement from april 1957
that Great Britain need in future no more military manned aircraft

sadly the Wikipedia page about this, got deleted :mad:
 
thx for Info Hobbes

Is there a more precise publication Date as just April 1957 ?
 
That paper had repercussions as far out as the Soviet Union. I'm about to wrap up Soviet Secret Projects: Bombers... and apparently the White Paper even had Moscow fooled into thinking manned aircraft were old-school. Thus leading to the cancellation of many bomber projects by the various OKB's.
 
The proper title is Defence Outline of Future Policy, Cmnd. 124.
Publication date is Apr. 4, 1957

You can find the preliminary text of the paper here:
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documentsonline/details-result.asp?queryType=1&resultcount=1&Edoc_Id=7974000

Note that this is a draft dated March 30th, the last of several drafts which are in the archive. I haven't been able to find the final text. There are some cabinet minutes for dates up to March 28 that deal with revisions of the paper, but I haven't seen those for March 30-Apr 4, so this draft may be close to the final version.
 
You might find this useful:
www.ccbh.ac.uk/downloads/sandys.pdf

'No more manned aircraft' was and is a bit over the top; what the White Paper did say was that the threat to the UK was no longer from manned bombers but from ballistic missiles - which was quite true. Hence all those interceptor aircraft not needed.

If you actually look at the cancellations involved, it was just the P177 and the F155 requirement.

But it also was looking at the UK strategic bombers. They would be obsolete by 1960, and not even the AVRO 730 would have been any use.
 
CNH said:
If you actually look at the cancellations involved, it was just the P177 and the F155 requirement.
Click to expand...

If you look at what was cancelled immediately after the 1957 decision, maybe, but in the final analysis you can tell that the whole British aviation industry was reduced to bits all within a 12-year timeframe.
 

Attachments

  • major cancelled programmes (Flight, 1965).gif
    major cancelled programmes (Flight, 1965).gif
    182.6 KB · Views: 302
Okay - which of those on the list would you think it would have made sense to keep?
 
CNH said:
Okay - which of those on the list would you think it would have made sense to keep?
Click to expand...

I am not an expert, just giving the figures! Now if you ask for my personal opinion, every step that leads to a state procuring foreign material instead of home-made products is a move against common sense. Economic reasons are usually at stake, but I very strongly believe it is the state's rôle to help the industry to remain competitive against unfair competition. Unfortunately it didn't happen then and it sure doesn't happen now. Probably never will any more...
 
Well, the UK didn't buy any foreign aircraft apart from the Hercules [and Phantom for the Navy]. It was going to buy the F111, but that went in defence cuts.

I think almost any Defence Minister would have cancelled almost all those projects if he'd any sense.
 
sg: every step that leads to a state procuring foreign material instead of home-made products is a move against common sense. Why? What was unfair about dumping HS681 for C-130K - surely common sense? CNH is right: see Israel, which welds little, but wields well.

UK 1951-53 spent 10% of our wealth on Defence, plus cascades of US MSP to part-fund all those Gannets and Javelins, Sea Hawks and Valiants. In 1954 US cut us off MSP, yet Churchill's last Cabinet initiated most of the projects in the Flight obituary. Finance is the 4th. Arm of Defence. If we had tied up the resources needed to try to deploy even some of them, NATO would have had a bankrupt to stand on the Luneberg Heath. Instead PM Macmillan put a professional Force there, sharing the burden with...W.Germany, who had rather more at stake than we did. Share. We stopped trying to be gendarme of the Universe. In 1967 we let S and SE Asia share, for the same reason - it was their backyard, not ours.

The wonder is not that we cancelled things, but that we puffed so many for so long.
 
By "common sense", you imply "realism." I can't go against that logic, but every time a foreign product was procured instead of encouraging local development, hundreds of capable engineers and technicians found themselves displaced, useless or otherwise redundant. For a country to lose one's technological edge and industrial uniqueness, that's what goes against "common sense" to me, but it's true that I place myself in a bigger picture. 50 years down the line, the Chinese industry will provide 80% of all modern technology, and no other country will be in a position to counterbalance that because we'll have long surrendered to the sirens of profitability.
 
but every time a foreign product was procured instead of encouraging local development
Click to expand...
But one of my points is that Britain has very rarely bought foreign.
 
CNH said:
but every time a foreign product was procured instead of encouraging local development
Click to expand...
But one of my points is that Britain has very rarely bought foreign.
Click to expand...

True enough. And the same holds true of France too, in fact. But how much longer can we sustain that balance?
 
What manned aircraft will we need? We've Eurofighter, and they've got to keep that in business for a few years yet. Transport - A400. Do the rest with drones.
 
Issues (mostly addressed by others),


1) Sandys did not terminate manned aircraft, what he mainly terminated was the high altitude/high speed wonder weapons then being pursued- so goodbye rocket fighters/Blue Envoy/F-155, Chris Gibson points out that the RAF had already decided Avro 730 should die


2) Note the things he kept and even acquired, Blue Streak with Thor as an interim, Bloodhound/Thunderbird/Seaslug, and Blue Steel


3) He also reduced the drag on the UK economy that was defence spending, so, 2nd Tactical Air Force (to be RAF Germany) cut by 50% amongst other measures including the end of conscription and a personnel cut from over 700,000 to 375,000 all of which would be volunteers


4) Stargazers list, most of the items there were either cancelled in the sense that they lost one way or another to a competitor for the same requirement (ie Avro 720) or the services decided they had become redundant (ie Thin Wing Javeline), the point being that in most cases that list consists of natural wastage from the procurement process rather than economy cuts
 
Ken mentions 1950 UK expenditure at 10% GDP, original British and American Combined Chiefs of Staff plan was for 12% before Whitehall scaled it back, Sandys inherited expenditure of 7.2% of GDP in 1956/7 and took it down to 6.1% by 1959/60, let us also not forget considerable US economic support throughout the 1950s in the form of both direct dollar loans, MDAP/MSP funding for the Armed Forces (Sabres, Washingtons, Type 16 frigate conversions, etc) and ultimately technology transfer and design assistance through the 1958 mutual defense agreement. In short the UK was spending well above what it could afford even with considerable US support.

For reference, spending appears to have crept back up to 7% of GDP by 1966 with one of the key aims of that years white paper being to drag it back down to 6% by 1969/70.
 
An interesting read. All good stuff. The real impetus comes from Macmillan, who in his brief tenure as Minister of Defence, wrote a paper entitled 'No More Biggin Hills', saying that Fighter Command was out of date.
When he became PM, he called Head in to confirm his post as Minter of Defence, and told him to cut spending. Head threatened to resign and his bluff was called. Sandys was effectively appointed as Macmillan's axeman.
A lot of the work on the 57 White Paper has been done before Sandys came in [in part, by Brundrett], and Sandys applied himself to it in his tenacious and abrasive fashion.
 
What I find interesting is how rapidly the RAF starts to fall behind the US in technological terms, the UK is playing with liquid fuelled missiles whilst the US is working on minuteman, hunters are being converted to FGA-9 standard as F-105 Thunderchiefs are rolling of the line, the F-106 has the first airborne digital computer, OR.1182 demonstrates that UK industry can not make something as good as Skybolt, from Blue Steel onwards ever more US content has to be used in UK strategic weapons, the Nike family evolves continually into an ABM system etc, etc, etc. Obviously the huge budget disparity goes someway to explaining this but there also seems to be a fundamental industrial weakness.
 
Industrial weakness, lack of decently qualified engineers, and the dead hand of the Ministry of Supply.
 
IMO, there were a number of factors at play:
- Britain had a huge amount of talent, but it was spread thin, e.g. 26 different aviation companies with little cooperation between them. This meant a lack of manpower, but also no room for specialization and the acquiring of 'deep knowledge'; everybody had to know a little about everything so nobody knew everything about one subject. It also affected available funding.
- Lack of vision by Government, too many projects that were cancelled just as they were starting to yield results. No long-term planning.
- the automotive industry was plagued by a strike-happy workforce, IDK if that was a factor in the aviation industry as well.
- the automotive industry showed another collateral to having a limited amount of engineering manpower: they didn't have the resources to work out all the little niggles.
 
... or the services had a change of heart ...
Click to expand...
To be fair, it was a time of very rapid technological change. Blue Streak seemed the bee's knees in 1955; by 1960 it was looking distinctly obsolete.
 
One can see that the UK is spreading its resources too thinly, in terms of industrial capacity, in terms of the breadth of projects and in terms of the limited finances. Factor the sheer pace of developments as well and I think we get the results of history. Its all too diffuse.


If one wants to explore how things could have been done better, then in each of these areas there is scope to achieve that, mainly through a more condensed industry, a limited number of projects and this in turn means better finances for whats left. In a word focus.


Considering the era this doesn't mean not producing alternative prototypes, but it does mean being more ruthless with chopping things when its clear which is the more likely to achieve the desired results.


There is also the problem of overreach in requirements, too much hyperbole when a more pragmatic 'belt and braces' approach will do. The military like everyone else suffers from the problems of glamour and doesn't seem to take too long after WWII for the hard dirty realities to fade from the minds of those making the decisions. Nothing quite seems to suffer this like aviation, too much glamour and not enough dirt.


And that in turn takes us to another facet, the realm of analysis of needs and the writing of requirements themselves.
 
Take the RAF in the early 60s and the two big combat aircraft programmes initiated then, TSR-2 and P.1154, requirement for both was approximately 150, by comparison the original requirement for the F-105 Thunderchief programme (prior to it being swapped for the Phantom) was for roughly 1,500 aircraft- 10 times the requirement of any single British programme. Even in Sweden SAAB delivered over 300 Drakens over the course of the programme.

The original RAF V-Bomber plan was for 240 operational aircraft in 30 bomber squadrons, 2 recce squadrons and 1 special ELINT/EW squadron (later scaled back to 180 aircraft in 23 squadrons), for this force no less than 7 bomber aircraft were prototyped and/or procured (Sperrin, Valiant Mk1/Mk2, Vulcan Mk1/2, Victor Mk1/2), 8 if one includes the Avro 730 on which work was apparently started prior to cancellation- all in a period of barely 10 years, then add the multitude of fighter projects on top of that; Hunter, Swift, DH110, Scimitar, SR.177, Supermarine 545, Javeline, thin-wing Javeline, Lightning, F155T, Sea Vixen, Supermarine Type 556, not to mention the multifaceted guided weapons programme.
 
Yeah. Obviously Britain still saw itself as a potent international player, while in fact, it had lost India and was about to lose Nigeria, Zambia, Kenya and many more places where those aircraft might have been deployed. In wartime Britain, 1500 fighters might have made some sense. In the post-colonial United Kingdom it made none.
 
CNH said:
Okay - which of those on the list would you think it would have made sense to keep?
Click to expand...

Almost none. The problem was not so much too many projects cancelled, as too many started.
 
If you go through that list a lot of projects there are ones that if built would have little or no use or commercial success. Like the Brabazon, Princess, Sturgeon ASW, rocket interceptors, Red Rapier, Blue Envoy and Orange William. Others were duplication of effort against real world successful projects or competitors with non aircraft systems (Polaris). Like DH.110, Swift, Avro 730, Blue Streak, Blue Steel Mk 2. Etc.

Apart from these categories there are the Vickers V.1000, Fairey Rotodyne, supersonic Hawker, Fairey supersonic fighter, Blue Boar, Red Dean, Blue Water and PT.428. Of these one can argue that the Fairey OR.329 and Red Dean were huge efforts for minimal gain, even USAF didn’t introduce an equivalent (F-108) and that Blue Boar couldn’t work with the available technology.

Leaving the Vickers V.1000, Fairey Rotodyne, supersonic Hawker, Blue Water and PT.428. All of which probably would have been very successful if they had been realised. Of which the V.1000 and supersonic Hawker were potential projects when the UK had the money to pay for them. One wonders if the V Bomber had been wisely left to a single aircraft type rather than three and the investment in rocket interceptors had been belayed then the money would have been there for a British 707 and something to capitalise on the Hunter’s success.
 
There's perhaps a case for the V1000, although the RAF were very anti. As for the Rotodyne, I gather one of its major problems was noise.
 
What I think is sometimes missed in discussion the 'should have', 'could have', 'would haves' of the 20th Century is Britain's most fundamental and pernicious problem after 1914 - the want of money. This was particularly accute after 1945.

Britain's lack of financial resources coupled with the incredible range of commitments the government had taken on, meant that everything was done on the cheap. The crucial decisions that wrecked the UK economy were; the return to the gold standard in 1926, the decision to fight on beyond national bankruptcy in 1940, the attempt to fund an empire and 'new Jerusalem' after 1945. One was just the right thing to do, the other two were avoidable errors that seemed like the right thing to do.

There is a tendency among some (I accuse no-one who posts here of this) to see the staggering American technological advance of the 1940s, 50s and 60s as partly a product of German technological transfer. It wasn't, it was partly a product of British financial transfer. I would argue that the American boom of the 40s 50s and 60s was kick started by Britain's payment of the entirety of the UKs gold and dollar reserves to the US in 1937 to 40 (a sum double the size of US annual GDP) and the fire sale of UK assets of 1941 - 42. There were other things, like the disadventageous terms of Bretton Woods, the loss of the Saudi oil concession, the bond crisis of 1914, turning the Empire from a commercial undertaking to a mutual aid club - we could go on and on, but the basic problem was Britain's political class failed to grasp that big commitments take big money to see through and there was no willingness to accept the unpalatable fact that you can't spend money you don't have.
 
I'm not going to engage in this thread on the wider economic issues for the UK over the period.


But I will say that a lot of 1957's white paper makes a great deal of sense, irrespective of the economic situation.


Fact is, the danger was clearly going to be ballistic missiles. The idea the RAF was going to be refight the Battle of Britain with jet aircraft toting radar guided missiles is (for the time as they saw the future) sheer nonsense.
Large conventional forces slugging it out in Germany was off the cards, they saw the future was measured in exchanges of nuclear warheads. They saw it as very hard to stop a massive strike, some would always leak through. Only the strike element made sense, and once you look at how long it takes to get the strike airborne, and how little warning time they would have.....


No only missiles of our own would stand a chance if they where quick enough to ready, and if we had ABM then maybe we could accept a longer readying time, because enough of them would survive the initial phase of a enemy first strike.


This is also why Mountbatten argued so successfully for the RN, which could in theory have fought on even after the UK's command and control ceased to function (all command and control under a nuclear exchange is disturbingly rapid to degrade once the weapons start going off). It was their mobility that made this attractive. They could carry on and fight almost anywhere.


What was left was vicariously Police Actions (Korea-like), Colonial actions (Kenya, etc...) and local conflicts (Borneo, Darfur). Suez had showed the limit of what was possible.
For these you needed more of a small but highly professional force and aircraft that would be rugged and flexible.


Now some things where missed or not funded enough.
Hypersonic aircraft seemed to be one way through this. But the basing needs and time to be airborne were still a problem.
ABM was of crucial importance.


But most crucial of all was simply detection and tracking. Getting the picture on which to base your decisions.


So the whole business of pandering to the RAF over the TSR.2 is a sideshow. In fact from their own logic the P1154 was more important a project if it delivered what they thought it would and the P1127 offered exactly the sort of rough field, rugged jet capabilities needed for these limited actions.
 
Sandys had a job to do and he did it, defence spending needed to be curbed and across the board he made unpopular decisions. As discussed here there were far too many projects and too much wasted on duplicated efforts or development programmes that dragged on in the hope of success in the end. Other projects were cancelled just when success was around the corner. Really you get the sense that the MoS was not in control and perhaps it would have been better if there had been a proper Ministry of Aviation to sort the industry and make a long-term plan. Of course much is made of number of small firms in 1945, all those were private companies. There were several choices, nationalise the entire industry in 1945 and seperate the design teams into central bureaux and rationalise the production facilites (too many factories had no airstrips near them, many prototypes and production airframes were driven for miles through country roads just reach a seperate assembly hangar). That would have been called Communism at the time and of course all those firms would need compensation. Choice two is to feed certain jobs to certain firms and let others wither away (partly done) and the final option was to amalgamate. TSR.2 was used as the tool in the 60s but perhaps the V-Bomber Fleet would have been a better time to have forced design teams together?

I don't think there was anything seriously wrong in inusrance policies, but then was the MoS too over-concerned about failure or were they correct to assume that for every one good design two or three were failures? Or was the RAE unable to adeqautely assess what was on offer and offer decent guidance to the MoS about what prototypes to continue with.

Commerically any hopes of huge exports are probably wishful thinking, Britan had never been a large exporter even pre-war, Viscount should perhaps be assessed as a rare success. Had Comet not crashed its still hard to think they would have sold another 100-200 over the latter 50s. I feel the VC.7 would have had a strong position but by 1960 the 707 and DC-8 would have pushed it too far. Rotodyne was smart, a lot was made of the noise but real tests at Battersea didn't seem to show a particular problem, but even so no market for VTOL airliners or even heliliners has ever really emerged apart from a few in Japan and BA's brief use of Chinooks for the oil industry.

Generally we have to look at the decline of the aircraft industry against the decline of vast sectors in Britain from cars, textiles, shipbuilding, electronics etc. Poor investment, unwise government intervention and nationalisation and a lack of decent management hampered all aspects of the economy and IMO still does today. Perhaps though we shouldn't be too harsh, after all its not as though the cancellations after the 1957 Paper mattered. F.115T didn't save us from an onslaught of Blinders, Supersonic Hunter (which IMO should have been completed for export reasons if for no other) didn't fight off MiG-17s, Blue Streak didn't flatten Minsk and later P.1154 didn't fend off MiG-21s over West Germany. The 1960s, 70s and 80s were surprisingly quiet for the RAF, they didn't see half as much sustained combat as the modern RAF has since 1991 and the few products of that era that did serve until recent years did so remarkably well. Had the Fairey Delta III entered service in 1961 it probably wouldn't have lasted much beyond 1980 and would not have been a multi-role type, Avro 730 would never have been practical, Blue Streak might have lasted until the 70s but Europa would still have suffered from the other multi-national stage failures, of the later projects TSR.2 would have needed extensive electronic upgrades at the end of the 70s or early 80s, P.1154 would not have been as flexible, practical nor as cost-effective as Harrier (perhaps dooming any US interest for the Marines) and the HS.1181 would have been a useful conventional load-lugger but VTOL was a non-starter. Had the Sandys Review not happened we may have very different views on those products we lament today. Whether the continued acqusition of these weapon systems would ahve changed the outcome of the Cold War is too something that with hindsight we can question (though of course at the time were deemed essential for the defence of the UK).
 
zen said:
I'm not going to engage in this thread on the wider economic issues for the UK over the period.
Click to expand...
Fair enough, but the context is vital to understanding the history of the British aircraft industry, indeed the relationship between government and all of the UKs industries. Most of the literature skims over it - I'm not saying that you do zen - but I've found very little of it makes much sense until you take Britain's ongoing financial apocalypse into account.
 
Context is good, but if we're really going to go into the much broader picture, then an appropriate thread is called for.
In fact I tried at one point to get such a thread started, albeit one more limited to post 1945. People did not want to engage with it.


Rather as I tried to get people to engage in the concept of choosing to do some things better than we had at the sacrifice of others.


An example would be focusing efforts on our own Deterrent, at the cost to other areas.
 
Had the 1957 White Paper coincided with an increase of military involvement across the world in wars similar to what we see today in terms of commitments then perhaps the focus would have shifted from just countering the Soviets. Most of the projects we've outlined about were all about deterring the Soviets and defending against their deterrent and air forces. The Navy too focused on anti-submarine operations. Had the Armed Forces found themselves in greater involvement in Malaya, Arabia, perhaps Middle Eastern wars most of those projects like F.155T, Blue Streak and Blue Water would have been useless in most smaller 'hot wars'. Supersonic Hunter might have been more useful but the basic FGA.9 proved adeqaute at ground attack. We might then from historical hindsight have said Sandys got it right (whatever disintegration the industry would have undergone). As it was the RAF wanted the nest equipment it could get with all the toys added on and the Exchequer couldn't afford it. The Cold War never turned hot but could have, we faced a potential enemy of great strength but had to compromise. How well the Lightining Force would have coped with the few Bears and Blinders that would have come our way is perhaps open to question, would F.155T have done any better when the chips were down? For all that nothing could stop the ICBMs and projects like Violet Friend never got off the board at all.
If MAD was all about lobbing as much East as they launched West then the cancellation of Blue Water and Blue Streak made no sense unless we could rely on getting American equipment sooner and cheaper. We did and probably saved money but at the expense of the technical brains and engineers.

I think Sandys has been the scapegoat, a convient point in history to say "things went wrong from here" when in reality things had gone wrong much earlier. The aircraft industry would have dwindled and declined anyway as orders dried up and requirements became fewer and money got tighter and exports got less. The country couldn't afford to keep up with the Soviets, let alone the Americans, it couldn't keep on subsidising thousands of draughtsmen, engineers, designers for ever spread over a multitude of programmes. As to those cancelled programmes, were they really fit for purpose, were they essential and were they cost effective? Thin Wing Javelin seems a duplication and given the tortorous development of the basic Javelin was it wise to keep Gloster in the fighter business? Avro 730 was pushing state of the art at a time when the government couldn't even be bothered the fund the Fairey Delta Two speed record and when Bristol's Type 188 promised much but delivered very little. Blue Streak was re-hashing American technology, covering paths already covered. Red Dean and other AAM programmes were years behind the Americans. Much has been said about Dassualt stealing a lead over Fariey with the Mirage but to be fair there was no RAF requirement that fitted a Mirage-type fighter and no interest in such an aircraft. P.1121 was a brave gamble but whether it would have seriously completed with Starfighter and Phantom seems unlikely. The answer was tighter planning of needs and resources and concentration on core fields on which Britain could compete on equal terms or lead. Sadly Sandys did the cutting but not the essential other half in time.
 
http://www.rafmuseum.org.uk/research/documents/Journal%204%20-%20Cecil%20James%20on%20the%201957%20White%20Paper%20and%20Prof%20Horst.pdf

This is an interesting historical perspective on the 1957 White Paper that you might find useful.
 

Similar threads

Back
Top Bottom