There was a profound irony in the fact that the one force in which commitment to a bombing offensive at some point was a matter of principle lacked the capability to conduct it, while the United States, with the necessary industrial and technical resources, had no intention of doing so. In the end, of course, both air forces did undertake large-scale and complex bomber offensives. It is therefore worth reflecting on why Britain and the United States, both liberal states committed in the 1930s to trying to keep the peace, both states in which there was widespread public condemnation of bombing civilians, whether in Ethiopia, China or Spain, should be the ones where the idea of destroying the ‘vital centres’ or ‘the social body’ were most fully elaborated. Part of the explanation lies in the geopolitical and military realities confronted by both states. Force projection for both had seldom involved a large army and the army remained, even after the Great War, a component of the defence establishment rather than its driving force, as it was in France, Germany or the Soviet Union. In conjunction with large navies, on which home security had been dependent, air power could be projected overseas with greater flexibility and potential striking power than overseas expeditionary forces. In Britain, defence of the Empire against threat meant that Germany was not the only potential enemy. In the discussions surrounding the development of the ‘Ideal Bomber’ in the mid-1930s, range was called for that could reach targets in Japan or the Soviet Union (in case of a Communist threat to India), as well as provide Empire reinforcement in areas as geographically distant as Canada or Sierra Leone. The threat from Soviet long-range bombers – anticipating the later Cold War – was expected to spread to British interests in the Middle East and eventually to menace British cities. The only response was expected to be a British strike force for use against Soviet cities.118 In the United States, the arguments from the Air Corps for the survival of a heavy-bomber programme were all based on the idea that force would have to be projected across oceans to American Pacific possessions, and perhaps against targets in Europe from American airbases.
There was also in both Britain and the United States a real attraction to the idea that air warfare was a more modern and efficient form of fighting than the recent experience of a gruelling and costly land war. Since both were democracies, with political elites sensitive to popular anxieties and expectations, air power was intended to reduce the human costs of war on the ground. Arthur Harris famously argued that the army would fail next time to find ‘sufficient morons willing to be sacrificed in a mud war in Flanders’, but for Germany, France or the Soviet Union, a ground army and effective ground defences were essential elements in their security planning.119 The idea that modern technology and science-based weaponry enhanced military efficiency was central to the American view of the potential of a bombing war. At the Air Corps Tactical School, airmen emphasized that air power was ‘a new means of waging war’, and one that would supply ‘the most efficient action to bring us victory with the least expenditure of lives, time, money and material’.120 Air power also appealed because it could make optimum use of the technical and industrial strengths of the two states, while minimizing casualties. In the United States, planning for possible industrial mobilization of resources to support large-scale air activity began in the 1920s and by the early 1930s produced detailed mobilization planning for 24,000 aircraft a year; in Britain plans for industrial mobilization dated from the mid-1930s with the development of so-called ‘shadow factories’, ready to be converted to military output if war broke out. In both cases, extensive manufacturing capacity and advanced technical skills were regarded as a critical dimension of future war-making, particularly in the air.121 The modernity of air power was emphasized in other states as well, for propaganda reasons as well as military ones, but much less autonomy was allowed to those air forces to campaign for strategies that could be presented as more efficient and less costly than traditional ground war.
One important consequence of the equation of air power and modernity was the willingness of airmen in Britain and the United States to accept that modern ‘total war’ reflected a changed democratic reality, that war was between peoples as well as armed forces. In an age of modern industry, mass political mobilization and scientific advance, war, it was argued, could not be confined to the fighting front. Although the term ‘total war’ was first popularized by Erich Ludendorff, the German general who had masterminded much of Germany’s war effort between 1916 and 1918, it was appropriated as a description of whole societies at war much more fully in Britain and America than it was in Continental Europe. ‘There can be no doubt,’ wrote the British aviation journalist, Oliver Stewart, in 1936, ‘that a town in any industrial civilisation is a military objective; it provides the sinews of war; it houses those who direct the war; it is a nexus of communications; it is a centre of propaganda; and it is a seat of government.’122 As a result, he continued, ‘blind bombing of a town as a town might be logically defended’. In a lecture to the Naval Staff College, also in 1936, Air Vice Marshal Arthur Barrett asked his audience to recognize that it was no longer possible ‘to draw a definite line between combatant and non-combatant’. This was, he claimed, a result of the ‘power of democracy’; the more governments depended on the support of the governed, the more the morale and resources of the civil population became a legitimate object of attack.123 The United States air force also based its argument in favour of offensive bombing on the nature of a modern democratic state:
Where is that will to resist centered? How is it expressed? It is centered in the mass of the people. It is expressed through political government. The will to resist, the will to fight, the will to progress, are all ultimately centered in the mass of the people – the civil mass – the people in the street … Hence, the ultimate aim of all military operations is to destroy the will of those people at home … The Air Force can strike at once at its ultimate objective; the national will to resist.124
It may well be that in both Britain and the United States popular fears about a war from the air were more powerfully and publicly expressed, given the previous geographical immunity both states had enjoyed before the coming of the aeroplane, and that as a result popular phobias fuelled military speculation that bombing the home front would have immediate results. But whatever the source of this conviction, it governed most air force expectations about how the next war should be fought.
Did this make the bombing offensives of the Second World War inevitable? Certainly no force in 1939 was prepared to carry out an annihilating, war-winning ‘knockout blow’ of the kind Douhet had envisaged, with thousands of massed bombing aircraft, using every possible weapon to destroy the popular war-willingness of the enemy in a matter of days. The RAF was the only air force to consider the possibility, but it was restrained by everything – inadequate technical means, a shortage of aircraft, the prevailing political and legal restrictions on attacking civilians – from carrying out such a strike. In other air forces different cultures prevailed and produced contrasting strategic choices. Nevertheless, an independent, potentially war-winning air offensive was difficult to resist by air forces keen to assert their organizational independence – as were all three air forces that eventually mounted major offensives – and anxious to profit from the expansive commitment of scientific, industrial and research skills to air force procurement. Each air force was also very aware of the imperatives imposed by ‘modern’ war, not only the ‘civilianization’ of warfare implied by total war, but the need to keep abreast of technical developments (atomic weapons, jets, rockets, radar) that might transform the nature of air warfare itself and make escalation unavoidable.
In addition, there was the pervasive popular image of future war. Despite its apocalyptic language and fantastic imagery, there can be little doubt that the constant fictional representation of a bombing war created a widespread expectation that this is how the war was going to be waged, and would have to be waged to prevent one side or the other from gaining an overwhelming advantage.
On 1 September 1939, the day that Germany invaded Poland, the air-raid sirens sounded in blacked-out Berlin in the early evening. Berliners panicked, grabbing gas masks and rushing for the shelters in case Polish bombers had somehow succeeded in breaking through to the capital. ‘The ugly shrill of the sirens,’ wrote the American journalist, William Shirer, ‘the utter darkness of the night – how will human nerves stand that for long?’125 During the night of 3 September, the date Britain declared war on Germany, the air-raid warning sounded all over southern England. The population braced itself for mass bombing and gas attack. The following morning, wrote one wartime diarist who had sat terrified all night, ‘practically everyone is now carrying a gas mask. What a reflection on our civilisation!’126 Both cases were false alarms, and they remained false for many more months. Yet it is a reasonable, if unverifiable, assumption that knowledge of such intense popular fear prompted air forces to go further than they would otherwise have gone when bombing offensives were finally launched. In this case imagination and reality became fatefully entwined.
2
The First Strategic Air Offensive, September 1940 to June 1941
In April 1939 Adolf Hitler sat in his private apartment at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in conversation with the Romanian diplomat, Grigore Gafencu. He used the opportunity to complain vigorously about the obstructive policies of the British government and the pointlessness of a contest between the two states. In a rising temper he told Gafencu that if England wanted war, ‘it will have it’. Not a war as in 1914, but one in which Germany would use new and terrible weapons, the fruit of her technical genius. ‘Our Air Force leads the world,’ he exclaimed, ‘and no enemy town will be left standing!’ Gafencu, silenced by the diatribe, listened as Hitler’s voice grew calmer and graver. ‘But after all,’ he continued, ‘why this unimaginable massacre? In the end victor or vanquished, we shall all be buried in the same ruins.’ Only Stalin, he reflected, would benefit from a destructive air war.1
It would be a simple step to conclude from this that when German air fleets were unleashed against British cities from the autumn of 1940, Hitler was fulfilling his promise to annihilate the source of his strategic frustration with a campaign of terror bombing. In a speech to the assembled organizers of the Winter Help organization on 4 September 1940 Hitler apparently gave vent to that frustration following a number of small-scale air attacks on the German capital. He promised his listeners that German bombers would repay the British tenfold for what they were doing ‘and raze their cities to the ground’. The American journalist William Shirer, who was present, observed the effect on a largely female audience, which by the end was on its feet baying approval.2 The SS Security Service (SD), monitoring popular opinion, found that Hitler’s speech made a deep impression on the public when it was reported, but most of all the threat to obliterate British cities.3 Yet neither Hitler’s prediction to Gafencu nor his promise to the German public can be taken at face value. Both were clearly designed for political effect and the threats rhetorical. In the confines of his headquarters Hitler took a more modest view of air power, whose development he had influenced to only a small degree. The air force that was turned against Britain in 1940 had not been designed to carry out a long-range ‘strategic’ campaign and when ordered to do so that autumn there was no directive to carry out obliteration bombing, though the effects on the ground were often construed as such by the victims. Though the popular view in the West has always been that German bombing was ‘terror bombing’, almost by definition, Hitler for once held back. In the first years of the war, until British area bombing called for retaliation in kind, Hitler refused to sanction ‘terror bombing’ and rejected requests from the German Air Staff to initiate it. Not until the onset of the V-Weapon attacks in June 1944 did he endorse the entirely indiscriminate assault of British targets.4
FROM WARSAW TO PARIS
For the first year of the war the German Air Force conducted what was called ‘Operational Air War’ as it had been laid down in the ‘Guidelines for the Conduct of Air Warfare’ drawn up by the infant force in 1935 and issued in a revised version in 1940. Although the air force sought to distinguish air strategy from that of the army and navy by virtue of its exceptional mobility, flexibility and striking power, in practice German air strategy was linked closely to the ground campaign. Air forces were expected to defeat the enemy air force and its sources of supply and operation; to provide direct battlefield support for the army or navy against the enemy surface forces; and to attack more distant targets, several hundred kilometres from the front line, which served the enemy air effort. These targets included energy supply, war production, food supply, imports, the transport network, military bases and centres of government and administration. The list did not include attacks on enemy morale or residential centres, which the air force regarded as a waste of strategic effort, but it did include provision for revenge attacks if an enemy bombed German civilians. All operations, except these last, were designed to undermine the enemy’s capacity to sustain front-line resistance. Operational air warfare contributed to the central aim of forcing the enemy armed forces to give up the fight.5
In practice the limits of German air technology, with a heavy multi-engine bomber still at the development stage, meant that the air force was regarded principally as a powerful tool to unhinge the enemy front by using fighters to destroy the enemy air force while twin-engine medium bombers, heavy fighters and dive-bombers attacked the enemy field formations and more distant economic and military targets. The instructions for air support of the army, issued in July 1939, acknowledged that air power could be exercised indirectly in support of the army by undermining enemy supply and production and reducing the war-willingness of the enemy nation. But it was emphasized that the air force would be needed primarily to help speed up the movement of the army by attacking a wide number of targets, fixed or fleeting, on or just behind the battlefront, which stood in the army’s way.6 The decision to organize the air force in integrated air fleets, each with its own component of bombers, fighters, dive-bombers and reconnaissance aircraft, and each allocated to a particular army group, enhanced the flexible, multi-tasked character of air warfare, but also tied the air force to the land campaign. The critical element in air-army cooperation was rightly seen to be effective communication between ground and air, and air force directives in 1939 and 1940 made something of a fetish of precisely described links by radio or signal or liaison officer.7
This joint effort was the core of what later came to be called ‘Blitzkrieg’ and it was used to devastating effect in all the German land operations of the first two years of war (and would have been used in southern England, too, if German forces had got ashore in the autumn of 1940). Yet it is difficult to reconcile the idea of a German Air Force tied flexibly but surely to the land campaign with the popular recollection of the German bombing of Warsaw in September 1939 and of Rotterdam eight months later. Long before the onset of the ‘Blitz’, the Western world had come to assume that the German Air Force, for all its vaunted support of German armies, was an instrument for perpetrating aerial terror, as it was widely believed to have done at Guernica in April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. A British wartime account claimed that Germany’s earlier bombing would go down in history ‘as an outstanding example of depraved conduct … murder on a scale that Christendom had never before experienced’.8 So powerful is this conventional view of German bombing atrocity (which helped to legitimate the heavy bombing of German cities later in the war) that it is worth looking in greater detail at the story of German city-bombing before the onset of the campaign against Britain in September 1940.
The German aggression against Poland which began on 1 September 1939 was a model of the modern exercise of air power. On that day the 397 aircraft of the Polish Air Force, including 154 mainly obsolete bombers and 159 fighters, faced two German air fleets, Air Fleet 1 under General Albert Kesselring and Air Fleet 4 under Lt General Alexander Löhr, with a tota
l of 1,581 aircraft including 897 bombers and 439 fighters and fighter-bombers. Polish combat aircraft were outnumbered by more than four to one. During the first three days of the campaign waves of German bombers and dive-bombers attacked airfields, rail centres, military depots and radio stations. So rapidly was the Polish Air Force overwhelmed that resistance almost entirely disappeared; half their planes were lost in combat and those that remained flew on 17 September to bases in Romania rather than risk destruction or capture. From 4 September the German air fleets were able to concentrate attacks on communications to slow down the Polish army as it tried to re-form in the Polish interior. Between 6 and 13 September air attacks spread out further east towards the Vistula River and targets in Praga, the part of Warsaw on the far bank of the river. Resistance was light but the military targets which German aircraft were told to hit were obscured by smoke and haze and suffered little in the preliminary attacks. As the German armies closed the ring around Warsaw and the nearby fortress at Modlin, the air forces were ordered to bomb enemy troop concentrations in and around the city, but not to attack ‘the streaming columns of refugees’ on the roads leaving the Polish capital.9 On 16 September the Polish commander in Warsaw was given six hours to surrender. He refused, declaring the capital to be a ‘special military zone’, and as a result German planes dropped leaflets warning the population to leave. As Warsaw was a defended city, it was legitimate for German air forces to join the German Army artillery in the siege. On 22 September Hitler ordered the final liquidation of Polish resistance in Warsaw, including air strikes on important military and economic targets, as well as buildings housing the military and political authorities.10 The German Foreign Office requested that the air force make every effort to avoid damaging the Belvedere Palace; Hitler ordered special care to be taken not to hit the Soviet diplomats leaving the city after the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland on 17 September.11 On 25 September there was extensive incendiary bombing and heavy damage to the centre of Warsaw in an attack which dropped some 632 tonnes of bombs, the largest air attack made by any air force until then. Troops of the German Third Army were killed when German aircraft strayed too far into areas already occupied by German forces, and on 26 September all bombing ceased. The following morning Warsaw surrendered.12
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 9