Winston Churchill is popularly supposed to have instituted a policy of ‘Aerial Policing’ over Iraq in 1920, whereby air power was used to suppress insurgency rather than a more expensive ground-based solution. BBC News claims ‘It was a policy Churchill had first mused on in the House of Commons in March 1920, before the Iraqi uprising had even begun.’
The policy actually goes back eight years. On 31 March 1912 Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, wrote a minute for his colleagues concerning the ‘Situation in Somaliland’, the British colony on the Coast of Africa:
In a few years time when aeronautics have developed the question of dealing with this fellow will become a reasonable proposition. It is purely a question of expense. He is not worth a 4,000,000l. expedition. But if 200,000l. or 300,000l. would do the work, as it may easily do in the near future, I should be quite ready to approve the expenditure. We must be certain of our tackle, however.
First Lord’s Minutes Vol. I. 1911-1913.
This ‘fellow’ is presumably a reference to the leader of the Somali Dervishes, Sayid Mohamed Abdullah Hassan, ‘the Mad Mullah’, who had already been harassing the British for over a decade. Fast forward eight years and many skirmishes later (including one where Adrian Carton de Wiart lost an eye) to 1920, and a flight of Royal Air Force Airco DH.9As is popularly supposed to have helped crush the Mullah’s revolt at the same time air power played a part in suppressing the Iraqi revolt.
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