The early experience of the bomber force during the Phoney War confirmed the wisdom of not pressing for an immediate bombing offensive. The political restrictions confined the RAF to attacks on German naval vessels at sea and naval targets on the North Sea islands of Sylt and Heligoland, and on the German coast at Wilhelmshaven. Even these limited operations brought insupportable casualty rates: a small raid on the German coast on 4 September cost 23 per cent of the bomber force; a raid by Hampdens against Heligoland on 29 September cost half the force. In October 1939 the ‘heavy bombers’ were ordered to operate chiefly at night, as the Air Ministry had always expected.19 The only operations permitted in German air space were propaganda runs, dropping millions of leaflets. Some aircrews, struggling to cope with the excessive cold, chucked out the heavy bundles without cutting them first, making them a potentially more lethal weapon than had been intended. By March 1940 it was reported that the morale of Bomber Command crews was close to cracking after long and dangerous propaganda operations which seemed to contribute nothing to winning the war and exposed crew to excessive risk of accident.20 The night-time flights posed all kinds of difficulties. Interviews with operational crews confirmed that intense cold and long, risky flights over sea were compounded with the difficulty experienced over Germany itself, which they found to be ‘very black’. It proved almost impossible to find and hit a specific target in the midst of the blackout, even with leaflets, a fact that RAF planners had already realized some months before when drawing up a ‘Night Plan’ to accommodate the shift from daylight to night-time operations, in which it was admitted that hitting anything at night ‘will be largely a matter of chance’.21 In late March, shortly before the campaign in Norway, the chiefs of staff concluded that Bomber Command was too weak and unprepared to be able to do anything effective in the foreseeable future.22 In April, just prior to the German invasion of the Low Countries and France, the new head of Bomber Command, Air Marshal Charles Portal, who replaced Ludlow-Hewitt that month, told the air staff that he had only 260 serviceable bombers and 384 crews; he estimated that they would be capable of dropping 100 tons of bombs in the first week of bombing operations but only 30 tons by week three. Because of the high rate of loss anticipated, the force would be capable of only 36 sorties a day after two weeks of conflict.23 This was a negligible effort on the eve of the German offensive.
It is all the more surprising under these circumstances that the RAF should have decided to take the gloves off in May 1940 when the German invasion began. The decision to permit British bombers to attack military-economic targets on German soil close to civilian populations was not an invitation to undertake the heavy city-bombings of the later war years, if only because Bomber Command was manifestly incapable of inflicting them. But it was a threshold that had to be crossed consciously, given the heavy weight of political and ethical restrictions laid on the force from the start of the war. What was judged to be illegal in August 1939 had to be presented as legitimate when it was undertaken in the summer of 1940. Most explanations for the start of the British campaign have assumed that it was a response to the German bombing of Rotterdam on 14 May, but the first raid, on München Gladbach, had already taken place three days before, while Rotterdam was not mentioned in any of the Cabinet discussions about initiating the bombing of German targets. The decision was taken because of the crisis in the Battle of France, not because of German air raids.24 The actual circumstances surrounding the onset of bombing were more complex. By chance the German attack in the west on 10 May 1940 began on the same day that the Chamberlain government was replaced by a new one headed by Winston Churchill. Chamberlain had always opposed the use of bombers against urban targets, but Churchill had no conscientious or legal objections. As Minister of Munitions in 1917, he had been a prominent supporter of an independent air force and a campaign of long-range bombing against German industrial objectives. Later, as Minister for Air after the war, he had played a key role in securing the independent future of the RAF. He accepted the argument that bombing could be expected to produce important strategic results. A government headed by Churchill rather than Chamberlain was always more likely to endorse a bombing campaign.25
One of the first issues discussed by Churchill’s new War Cabinet on 12 May was the virtue of initiating what was described as ‘unrestricted air warfare’. It was agreed that the RAF should no longer be bound by any moral or legal scruples to abstain from bombing; Germany’s wartime actions, Churchill claimed, had already given the Allies ‘ample justification’ for retaliation. The chiefs of staff had since the outbreak of war approved the idea that if urgent military necessity made bombing imperative, it should not be limited by humanitarian considerations. On 13 May the Cabinet considered again whether the crisis in the Battle of France was severe enough to justify bombing. Though there were arguments against running the risk of German retaliation, approval was given for a bombing attack against oil and rail targets in Germany on the night of 14–15 May. On 15 May the Cabinet finally took the decision to approve a full bombing strategy against German targets where civilians might be casualties, as long as they were ‘suitable military objectives’.26 The driving force behind the decision was the deputy prime minister, Clement Attlee, who had been absent from the earlier Cabinet discussions but who strongly favoured raids on Germany, and continued to do so throughout the war. Churchill was anxious about the effect on American opinion if Britain began the bombing war, but the dire state of the ground campaign turned the tide. It was hoped that German bombers would be forced to strike back at Britain, while German fighters would be withdrawn from the land battle to defend Germany, though neither eventuality materialized. On the night of 15–16 May Bomber Command launched its first large-scale raid with 99 medium bombers on targets scattered across the Ruhr. To prevent further heavy losses of bombers in the land campaign in France the air staff decided on 19 May to use the medium bombers only for attacks on Germany; on 30 May as the front in France collapsed, Bomber Command was ordered to stop using any bombers for direct support of the land battle and to concentrate on German industry, an admission of just how disastrously the British light bombers had performed in battlefront conditions against an air force which had advanced air technology and a sound doctrine for aircraft use.27
The change in priorities necessitated a revision of the rules on the conduct of air warfare laid down in August 1939, which had made it illegal to attack targets in which civilians might be ‘negligently’ killed. On 4 June 1940 the Air Ministry issued new guidelines for Bomber Command, cancelling the earlier instructions. The intentional killing of civilians was still regarded as a violation of international law, but attacks could be made on military targets ‘in the widest sense’ (factories, shipyards, communications, power supply, oil installations) in which civilian casualties would be unavoidable but should be proportional.28 ‘Undue loss of civil life’ was still to be avoided, which meant returning to base or jettisoning bombs safely if the target could not be properly identified.29 Nevertheless, the ethical restraints imposed at the start of the war were eroded step by step as a result of the decision to initiate ‘unrestricted’ bombing of targets in urban areas. In July, Bomber Command War Orders were modified to allow pilots discretion in choosing any military or military-economic target (defined increasingly broadly) if the primary target was obscured or difficult to find, a policy almost certain at night to involve extensive damage to civilian life since, as Portal reminded the Air Ministry, a high percentage of bombs ‘inevitably miss the actual target’.30 The final restraints were lifted in September and October 1940 after the first German attacks on London, though there had already been growing pressure from Bomber Command to be allowed to bomb less discriminately.31 In September the policy of bringing back unused bombs was suspended in favour of bombing anything that could be found worth bombing, though not merely at random. On 30 October Bomber Command was directed to focus on enemy morale by causing ‘heavy material destruction in large towns’ to teac
h the German population what bombing could do.32 This decision brought to an end the first stage in setting aside the political and legal limitations that had operated during the Phoney War, and it paved the way for the escalation of the RAF campaign during 1941 and 1942 into full-scale city-bombing.
The onset of the RAF bombing campaign in summer 1940 can certainly be explained by the change in government and the military necessity imposed by the German breakthrough and triumph in the west, but neither argument is entirely convincing. Unrestricted (though not yet unlimited) air warfare against Germany owed its genesis partly to the intense pressure applied by the RAF from the start of the war to be allowed to commence bombing operations over Germany regardless of the possible human cost. Military expediency also played a part, for RAF leaders had a force whose chief purpose was long-distance bombing; used in any other way, the strike force would no longer give the RAF the chance to demonstrate what strategic bombing could achieve. Bombing policy was predicated on offensive action and nourished by the idea, widespread among RAF leaders, that total war, if it came, would see the erosion of any distinction between the fighting man and the civilian war worker.33 In the first few months of the war senior airmen argued repeatedly for attacks on the Ruhr as Germany’s Achilles’ heel. It was always recognized, by politicians as well as airmen, that such attacks would involve heavy civilian losses, as a War Cabinet paper in October 1939 made clear:
Germany’s weakest spot is the Rhur [sic], the heart of which is about the size of Greater London, and in which is concentrated approximately 60% of Germany’s vital industry. It contains, moreover, a population which might be expected to crack under intensive air attack. Such attacks would involve a heavy casualty roll among civilians, including women and children.34
A planning document in October 1939 claimed that Bomber Command could, if allowed, bring industry in the Ruhr ‘practically to a standstill’; a few weeks later the Air Ministry produced a precise schedule of sorties needed to ‘K.O. the Ruhr’ in a matter of weeks.35 By the spring of 1940 there was a chorus of demands to allow the Ruhr plan to be put into action. Early in May Viscount Trenchard, the doyen of the bombing lobby, expressed his regret to Portal that bombing had not yet been attempted ‘when I and others think it would probably have ended the war by now’. Portal himself, two days before the start of the German invasion, pressured Newall, the chief of the air staff, to reserve Bomber Command for attacks on German industry, rather than fritter it away in direct support for the army.36 All such views were represented by Newall to the chiefs of staff and the War Cabinet. The decision in May was clearly influenced by the widespread but unverifiable assertion that bombing would achieve something worthwhile.
The bombing lobby rested its case on a number of evident exaggerations. Both the accuracy and power of British bombing and its capacity to inflict decisive material and psychological damage on Germany were presented in terms quite incompatible with the reality of Bomber Command’s strength, range and capability. The detailed study on the Ruhr bombing suggested that somewhere between 1,000 and 4,000 sorties were all that was required to knock it out. Calculations suggested that 8 bomb hits would eradicate a power plant, 64 hits destroy a coking plant and 12 hits destroy an aqueduct; average bombing error was given as 75 yards (69 m) from low level, 300 yards (276 m) from high altitude, figures that had never been verified under combat conditions (and proved entirely unattainable in practice).37 It would take Germany months, so it was claimed, to recover from such an assault. There was no sense in this, as in other planning documents, of the exceptional operational and technical difficulties that would be encountered in carrying out such a programme.
The effects these operations would have on the German war economy and German morale, even if they could be executed, were subject to similar distortions. In the late 1930s intelligence assessments of German economic capacity for war almost all emphasized the fragility of an industrial economy regarded as taut and overburdened. Planners in the Air Ministry assumed that they faced an enemy whose strength was a facade, ‘politically rotten, weak in financial and economic resources’, and that the results of bombing were likely to be ‘decisive’ for the outcome of the war.38 This remained the prevailing view for much of the war despite all the evidence to the contrary. It also coloured the first over-optimistic reports of the impact of RAF raids in summer 1940 once the gloves were off. A Foreign Office intelligence report compiled from neutral eyewitnesses on 30 May suggested ‘terrible effects’ in the Ruhr and a serious crisis of morale spreading through the German home front; a second report sent on to Churchill in early June by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, talked of the profound depression in Germany caused by the ‘violence and efficacity’ of British bombing.39 An Air Intelligence evaluation suggested ‘general dislocation of rail traffic’ throughout Germany. The RAF planning staff considered that the first three weeks of bombing had produced ‘valuable results’, apparently justifying the decision to start it in the first place.40
There was also the moral dimension. To abandon the principle that killing civilians from the air was wrong owed a good deal to the British perception of the German enemy. The legal issue involved was sidestepped by two arguments: first, that the Germans had begun unrestricted bombing and would do it again, given the chance; second, that Hitler’s Reich represented such a profound menace to Western civilization that the greater moral imperative was to use every means available to destroy it. The view that the Germans were responsible for bombing civilians first had a long pedigree, stretching back to the Zeppelin and Gotha raids of the First World War, which many RAF commanders had experienced as young officers just over 20 years before. During the 1930s, popular prejudices revived about German science and the German military conniving to produce lethal weapons of mass destruction to be unleashed from the air on an unsuspecting opponent.41 The bombing of the Basque town of Guernica in April 1937 by the German Condor Legion was popularly regarded in the West as evidence that the Germans had once again abandoned any pretence of civilized behaviour. The campaign in Poland was scrutinized for evidence that German bombers were deployed for terrorizing and murdering civilians. Although the evidence was ambiguous – since it was understood that the German raids were directed at military targets as part of a combined-arms ground campaign – the RAF preferred to assume that the Germans had bombed indiscriminately. A report published by the RAF Tactical Committee in October 1939 of a speech made by a German air staff officer on the Polish campaign claimed that on the Germans’ own admission their operations went beyond the terms of The Hague Rules.42 That same month Newall told the commander of the Advanced Air Striking Force in France that because of German action in Poland, ‘we are no longer bound by restrictions under the instructions governing naval and air bombardment … Our action is now governed entirely by expediency.’43 Churchill himself later came to cite the German bombing of Warsaw and Rotterdam as moral justification for what was to be done to the German civilian population.
The assumption in all the discussions about restricting bombing was that it had force only so long as the enemy observed the same limitation, and in this sense Poland played an important part in paving the way for British action. Of course, German bombers had not yet bombed British cities, so the argument for attacking Germany came to be based on pre-emptive retaliation. Even before the war the RAF had taken for granted that the German Air Force would be bound by no scruples and would be ‘ruthless and indiscriminate’ when the time came for a knockout blow.44 When a German raid on the Royal Navy base at Scapa Flow in March 1940 killed a nearby cottager (the first civilian casualty of the war), Churchill angrily berated the Air Ministry for not giving it maximum publicity as the likely start of ‘deliberate horror raids on civilians’, for which the Germans would carry the blame.45 In April the propaganda department of the new Ministry of Economic Warfare recommended describing German reconnaissance missions as frustrated bombing raids – ‘driven off before they were able to drop their bombs�
�� – so as to justify any British retaliation.46 In May 1940 one of the arguments for bombing Germany was that sooner or later German leaders would do the same when it suited their strategic interests. ‘Do [the government] think,’ wrote one bombing lobbyist, Marshal of the RAF Sir John Salmond, ‘that Hitler, who does not consider for a moment the slaughter of thousands on the ground and of devastating countries with which he has no quarrel, will shrink from killing civilians in this country?’47 In the Cabinet discussion on 15 May, Sir Hugh Dowding, commander-in-chief of Fighter Command, argued in favour of anticipatory attacks because he felt convinced that sooner or later the German Air Force would start indiscriminate bombing.48 Yet very soon the argument that Germany started the bombing became the standard version, both among the wider public and in the RAF, and it has remained firmly rooted in the British public mind ever since.
The view that German crimes, or potential crimes, made British bombing legitimate was legally dubious, since it amounted to claiming that two wrongs make a right, but it was morally rooted in the belief that German bombing was just one manifestation of the profound threat that Hitler and the National Socialist movement represented to the survival of the West. The terms of the contest in 1940 were easily presented as a struggle of light against dark, civilization against barbarism, to a public anxious not to see the war as a repeat of the pointless slaughter of 1914–18. The claim to the moral high ground gave an ethical purpose to British strategy that could be used to justify an air policy that in the 1930s would have been widely regarded as a moral lapse, like the Italian bombing of Ethiopians or the Japanese bombing in China. Churchill was among the foremost champions of the idea that every effort should be made to root out the source of Europe’s political poison. ‘The whole world is against Hitler and Hitlerism,’ he announced in a radio broadcast in November 1939. ‘Men of every race and clime feel that this monstrous apparition stands between them and the forward movement that is their due, and for which the age is ripe.’49 And although Churchill sometimes made the distinction between ‘Nazis’ and ‘Germans’, he commonly used the pejorative ‘Huns’ to describe the enemy, a term deliberately chosen in the First World War to contrast German barbarity with Western civility.
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 34