The force mainly composed of light De Havilland DH-9 bombers had little success. Crew had an average of 17 hours flying experience, were poorly trained for accurate navigation and target-finding, and carried 250-lb and 500-lb bombs that were later found to have inflicted little damage. The newly formed Air Policy Committee encouraged the crews to ‘attack the important towns systematically’ if they could not find a target, with the object of creating widespread disruption and demoralizing the workforce.12 This offensive was also met by an effective German air defence system which, like the British, was first activated in 1915 in response to Allied incursions. The same year an Air Warning Service (Flugmeldedienst) was established using observation aircraft and ground-based observation posts. By 1917, when heavier Allied raids began, the defensive system combined interceptor aircraft and an extensive network of 400 searchlights and 1,200 anti-aircraft guns of different calibres. To hamper night-time raids, an extensive blackout was introduced in western Germany, together with illuminated fake targets. As in Britain, local civil defence measures were introduced to protect the civilian population. In total, 746 were killed and 1,843 injured; as in Britain, German propaganda deplored the ‘frightfulness’ (Schrecklichkeit) of attacks against the defenceless civilian population.13
The intention to mount a serious bombing offensive against Germany, as an indirect contribution to the ground war, finally resulted in April 1918 in the establishment of the Royal Air Force, a merger of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service. A Cabinet ruling on 13 May 1918 stressed that the force’s independence was deliberately linked to the purpose ‘of carrying out bombing raids on Germany on a large scale’. To underline this commitment, an integral element of the new RAF was activated on 5 June as the Independent Air Force (to distinguish it from the RAF aircraft still supporting the Army) and placed under the command of General (later Marshal of the Royal Air Force) Sir Hugh Trenchard.14 Two weeks later an elaborate review of British air strategy was submitted to the War Cabinet by the RAF staff which laid out the principles on which all subsequent air offensives were to be based. Air power, it was suggested, was the most probable and efficient way of securing peace by attacking the ‘root industries’ of the enemy and ‘the moral [sic] of his nation’. A detailed list of precise targets in the Ruhr-Rhineland industrial region was drawn up based on Tiverton’s original plan; in cases when these could not be attacked, bombers were to raid ‘densely populated industrial centres’ in order ‘to destroy the morale of the operatives’.15
The opportunity to test what a bomber force could do was never realized. In June the Independent Force dropped just 70 tons of bombs on Germany, in August only 100, in the last weeks of war a further 370 tons. Of this quantity most were dropped on tactical targets, either enemy airfields or communications serving the front line. For example, the thirteen attacks carried out during 1918 on the Baden town of Offenburg, within easy range of British bombers, were almost all aimed at the railway station or rail lines.16 Overall the strategic force dropped just 8 per cent of the tonnage of bombs dropped by British aircraft throughout the war. Only 172 of its 650 mainly small-scale raids were on the German homeland and losses were high, 458 aircraft in total.17 The French High Command was unenthusiastic about longer-range bombing, and the American and Italian bomber units that were supposed to join an expanded Inter-Allied Independent Force, formed in October 1918, had no time to see serious action.18 Like Wells’s science-fiction fantasies, the independent bombing offensive was more imagined than real.
The post-war assessments of the bombing of Germany carried out by a British Bombing Commission and a United States Bombing Survey in 1919 indicated very modest material achievements. But there were to be exaggerated expectations of the probable effect of bombing on home morale. Trenchard famously remarked that the moral, or psychological, effect of bombing was twenty times greater than the material effect, though there was little evidence to confirm this beyond occasional but temporary moments of panic during the war in British, French and German cities, and the class prejudices of those who asserted it.19 The report on the 1923 annual RAF exercises, with Trenchard now chief of the air staff, assumed that modern war was ‘a contest of morale’, in which the febrile urban crowd would prove to be ‘infinitely more susceptible to collapse’.20 Much the same argument was formulated by the Italian general, Giulio Douhet, whose Command of the Air (Il dominio dell’aria) has become one of the classics of air-power theory. He argued that the nature of warfare had been changed irrevocably by the advent of the aeroplane, to the detriment of armies and navies. Future wars, he argued, would be based on the rapid destruction of the enemy’s air force, in order to attack, as swiftly and ruthlessly as possible, the enemy civilian economy and population. The temporary inhumanity (Douhet also advocated using gas or bacteriological agents) was designed to make wars short and sharp and, by implication, at lower human cost than the long war of attrition that Europe had just experienced. ‘A man who is fighting a life-and-death struggle – as all wars are nowadays – has the right,’ Douhet claimed, ‘to use any means to keep his life.’21 Douhet’s vision of future war owed something to Wells – ‘This is a dark and bloody picture I am drawing for you’ – but it was first and foremost an expression of what soon came to be termed ‘total war’.22
Although Trenchard and Douhet are now hailed as pioneers in air power theory, their conclusions were over-imaginative and unscientific and, for the military establishments of the 1920s, an invitation to indulge in what were still widely regarded as morally unacceptable violations of the laws of war. Despite the subsequent status enjoyed by both men, they remained relative outsiders in the 1920s. Douhet was briefly Air Minister in Mussolini’s first Cabinet in 1922, but was then retired from military service, sacked as minister, and left to argue his case from the wings. Trenchard spent much of his term as chief of staff fighting to retain air force independence and to forge a distinct strategic identity for his force. Neither was a household name in the 1920s, though Douhet’s works became more widely known in the decade that followed. No air force in the 1920s (or indeed in the 1930s) deliberately created a strategic bombing capability to eliminate an enemy rapidly and ruthlessly by assaulting civilian morale, a strategy crudely described in the interwar years as ‘the knockout blow’. What was significant about both Douhet and Trenchard, and a great many other post-war military thinkers, was the assumption that future war would be waged between whole societies in which the citizen, whether in uniform or in a factory, or driving a train or ploughing the fields, whether male or female, would contribute to the national war effort. This assumption made industries, cities and workers objects of war as much as the armed forces and put into sharper focus the pre-war fiction about the menace to civilization.
The European public in the 1920s saw the limited bombing of the Great War in much starker terms than most of the military establishment. The critical change brought about by the war was the widespread realization among Europe’s population that there was no possibility in any future war of civilian immunity. Small though the bombing effort had been during the Great War, it was taken to symbolize the crossing of an important threshold, in which science in the service of war could subvert conventional forms of military conflict in favour of a wilful assault on civilian society. Commenting in 1923 on a claim that hostile aircraft could poison the whole of London in three hours, the English historian, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, wrote: ‘war now means extermination, not of soldiers only, but of civilians and of civilisation’.23 Lowes Dickinson was not a military expert, but much of the scaremongering literature in the interwar years was made more chilling because it was written by soldiers or ex-soldiers, or by scientists and engineers who paraded their expertise to the public to give their conclusions greater weight. The Earl of Halsbury, the author in 1926 of 1944, a novel about a future gas attack to annihilate London, was the same Lord Tiverton (now elevated to higher noble rank) who had planned the strategic offensive against Germany i
n 1917. He claimed in his preface that there was nothing fantastic about his description of the gas attack, which he had based on current expertise on the possible effects of chemical weapons. In 1927 he elaborated for a popular newspaper audience the lessons of his novel: ‘The central organisations essential to modern warfare are carried out in “open towns” and largely by civilians … The first conclusion that emerges is that an attack will be made upon the civilian population.’24 These sentiments had much in common with Douhet, and with a wave of alarmist literature on air warfare produced by military experts in France. In 1930 Lieutenant Colonel Arsène Vauthier in The Aerial Threat and the Future of the Country warned that in the next war French cities would be smothered with gas and bombs: ‘the entire future of the country is at stake, the entire civil population will be placed abruptly on the warfront’.25
Two particular arguments can be identified in the scaremongering literature of the interwar years: first, that the destruction would be aimed at major cities; second, that the destruction would be swift and the degree of damage annihilating. In most imagined accounts of bombing there were standard tropes about the surprise, speed and scope of air attack. Douhet wrote in ‘The War of 19—’, published in Italy’s leading aeronautical journal in March 1930, shortly after his death, about an air war between France and Germany in which four French cities are attacked by German aircraft with 500 tons of incendiary and poisonous bombs, enough to destroy the cities completely. The raid takes just one hour, and the four cities are burnt to the ground.26 Frank Morison in War on Great Cities, published in 1938, just months before the outbreak of the next war, talked of a million dead in London from a gas attack, and millions more following swift British retaliation on Paris, Rome or Berlin. One 5,000-lb bomb would be enough, he suggested, to destroy completely the whole administrative and government centre around Whitehall. Like many of the experts writing on bombing he assured his readers that this was ‘no fanciful picture’ but a cold statement of fact.27 Tom Wintringham, a former soldier and later a commander of the British International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, painted an equally lurid picture in 1935 of the end of Europe’s major cities: 5–6 million killed in London, Paris and Berlin by a combination of gas, high explosive, exposure, disease and hunger.28 In all these accounts, and with special emphasis in Douhet, there is little effective defence against bombing, and none against gas or germs.
Most of these pessimistic representations of air warfare were indeed fanciful portraits, divorced from technical and scientific reality. What they all shared was an understanding of the apparent vulnerability of the modern city to the ‘knockout blow’. This was so widely discussed and endorsed that it requires some explanation. By the 1920s much of urban Europe was of relatively recent construction, with cities filled with migrants from the villages or immigrants from abroad. The large new populations lived in congested, quickly constructed terraces and tenements, and serviced the burgeoning ports and industries stimulated by the rapid development of European trade and manufacturing. The new cities were regarded by many social critics (and most of Europe’s conservative elite) as socially amorphous and alienating, with an underdeveloped sense of community and unstable values. They were sites of pre-war and post-war political radicalism and, in the case of Russia, of revolution. The new cities were also popularly associated with a rising tide of crime, vice and genetic defects. These views of urban life reflected profound class and regional prejudices; they surfaced regularly in accounts of future bombing precisely because the rootless urban crowd was expected to be more prone to panic.29 The account of the psychology of the crowd by Gustave Le Bon published in 1895, or William Trotter’s study of the herd instinct which appeared in 1916, gave popular sanction to the view that the character of modern urban life predisposed individuals to merge at moments of crisis into an unmanageable mob. A British Air Ministry official reflecting in 1937 on what he regarded as the unstable behaviour of ‘aliens’ and ‘the poorer sections of the community’ during the German bombing of London in 1917, concluded that ‘the capital cities constitute the popular nerve centres where the danger is greatest’.30
City vulnerability was also regarded as a product of the complexity and interconnectedness of the modern infrastructure that supported urban life. The sudden dislocation of any one part by bombing was expected to unravel the whole and provoke a social catastrophe. The working of this process was explained in an article by the British philosopher Cyril Joad, writing in 1937:
Within a few days of the outbreak of the next war it seems reasonable to suppose that the gas and electric light systems will have broken down, that there will be no ventilation in the tube [metro] tunnels, that the drainage system will have been thrown out of gear and sewage will infect the streets, that large parts of London will be in flames, that the streets will be contaminated with gas, and that hordes of fugitives will spread outwards from the city, without petrol for their cars or food for their stomachs, pouring like locusts over the country in the hope of escaping the terror from the air.31
The military thinker J. F. C. Fuller suggested that within hours of a major bomb attack on London, the city would become ‘one vast raving Bedlam’: ‘traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for help, the city will be in pandemonium’. As city life collapses, Fuller continued, government would be swept away in an ‘avalanche of terror’.32
Such anxieties reflected more profound fears about the ambiguous nature of modern ‘civilization’ and its capacity to survive after the descent into mass industrialized warfare between 1914 and 1918. The result was a profound paradox. There was throughout Europe and the United States in the interwar years a genuine and enthusiastic fascination with what the aeroplane represented. For the European dictatorships, right and left, aviation was commandeered as a way to express the vibrant modernity and technological sophistication of the new political movements.33 In France, Britain and the United States aviation was a key product of the modern consumer age, capable of transforming lifestyles, easing modern communication and providing exhilarating opportunities for organized leisure. Here was science genuinely at the service of man. On the other hand, military aviation was regarded not only as a fascinating technical expression of the modern age, but also as the harbinger of its possible dissolution. Much of the apocalyptic language used to describe the threat of bombing was directed not so much at the threat from the air as such but at the self-destructive nature of a civilization capable of generating the technical means for obliterating modern cities in the first place. ‘It is poor consolation,’ Lord Halsbury told the British House of Lords in 1928, ‘that the only answer we can find to the destruction of half of civilisation is that we should be able to destroy the other half.’34
The experts and novelists and film producers who sustained the idea of a bombing apocalypse had mixed motives for what they did. Some wanted the bombing scare to encourage pacifism and international agreement by making the image of future war unbearably bleak. Some wanted the opposite, using the fear of bombing to encourage higher levels of state spending on defence. Winston Churchill, for example, in 1934 spoke of an air threat that was ‘ready to … pulverise … what is left of civilisation’, but his aim was to encourage the government to speed up rearmament.35 Military experts, scientists and architects hoped that civil defence preparation would be taken more seriously. Literature appropriated bombing because it presented easy metaphors or sold copies. Yet the fears that the future bombing war provoked were real enough and became embedded in popular public perception of what the terms of total war were likely to be. Psychiatrists expected air war to provoke widespread mental disorders. The existence of a specific psychological condition of ‘air-raid phobia’ was detected by psychologists in Britain once raiding began.36 The public was easily stirred by the idea of destruction from the air, but the fear – or rather a nexus of ‘fears’ – was the product of uncertainty about the future and ignorance of the exact nature of the threat.37 The popular view of science
increased that fear, because science had evidently sprung numerous unpleasant surprises in the Great War. Scientists themselves could be confounded by what the military sciences might do. The Cambridge geneticist Joseph Needham, sketching notes for a lecture in 1936 on ‘Can Science save Civilisation?’, concluded that if science could be used ‘for destroying civilisation by air warfare’, saving it was unlikely.38
This catastrophic view of future air war did not take place in a vacuum. Politicians were easily persuaded of the fear themselves, often equally ignorant about the true state of possibilities, and sensitive to their responsibilities in trying to reduce any risk that bombing civilian populations might actually happen. The British prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, claimed in 1936 that after a gas and bomb attack ‘the raging peoples of every country, torn with passion, suffering and horror, would wipe out every Government in Europe’.39 A strong case can be made to show that the willingness of British statesmen to concede the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia during the 1938 Munich crisis was based on fear of air raids on British cities.40 Since bombing was always imagined as a war directed at cities and civilians, the search in the interwar years for ways to avert or reduce the threat to the civilian population became a political question rather than a strictly military one, not least because ‘total war’ would mean reliance on civilian industry and workers if it were to be waged successfully. At first governments pursued ways of outlawing the bombing of non-military targets, or even outlawing military aircraft altogether. When that effort broke down in the 1930s, governments across Europe reacted by introducing national programmes of civil defence to try to mitigate the disastrous social and political effects bombing was expected to provoke.
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 5