The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

The political imperatives are exemplified by the brief aerial assault on Bulgaria. The idea of what is now called a ‘political dividend’ is a dimension of the bombing war that has generally been relegated to second place behind the more strictly military analysis of what bombing did or did not do to the military capability and war economy of the enemy state. Yet it will be found that there are many examples between 1939 and 1945 of bombing campaigns or operations conducted not simply for their expected military outcome, but because they fulfilled one, or a number, of political objectives. The early bombing of Germany by the Royal Air Force in 1940 and 1941 was partly designed, for all its military ineffectiveness, to bring war back to the German people and to create a possible social and political crisis on the home front. It was also undertaken to impress the occupied states of Europe that Britain was serious about continuing the war, and to demonstrate to American opinion that democratic resistance was still alive and well. For the RAF, bombing was seen as the principal way in which the service could show its independence of the army and navy and carve out for itself a distinctive strategic niche. For the British public, during the difficult year that followed defeat in the Battle of France, bombing was one of the few visible things that could be done to the enemy. ‘Our wonderful R.A.F. is giving the Ruhr a terrific bombing,’ wrote one Midlands housewife in her diary. ‘But one thinks also of the homes from where these men come and what it means to their families.’³³

The political element of the bombing war was partly dictated by the direct involvement of politicians in decision-making about bombing. The bombing of Bulgaria was Churchill’s idea and he remained the driving force behind the argument that air raids would provide a quick and relatively cheap way of forcing the country to change sides. In December 1943, when the Mediterranean commanders dragged their feet over the operations because of poor weather, an irritated Churchill scribbled at the foot of the telegram, ‘I am sorry the weather is so adverse. The political moment may be fleeting.’ Three months later, while the first Bulgarian peace feelers were being put out, Churchill wrote ‘Bomb with high intensity now’, underlining the final word three times.³⁴ The campaign in the Balkans also showed how casually politicians could decide on operations whose effectiveness they were scarcely in a position to judge from a strategic or operational point of view. The temptation to reach for air power when other means of exerting direct violent pressure were absent was hard to resist. Bombing had the virtues of being flexible, less expensive than other military options, and enjoying a high public visibility, rather like the gunboat in nineteenth-century diplomacy. Political intervention in bombing campaigns was a common feature during the war, culminating in the decision eventually taken to drop atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. This (almost) final act in the bombing war has generated a continuing debate about the balance between political and military considerations, but it could equally be applied to other wartime contexts. Evaluating the effects of the bombing of Bulgaria and other Balkan states, it was observed that bombing possessed the common singular virtue of ‘demonstrating to their peoples that the war is being brought home to them by the United Nations’.³⁵ In this sense the instrumental use of air power, recently and unambiguously expressed in the strategy of ‘Shock and Awe’, first articulated as a strategic aim at the United States National Defense University in the 1990s and applied spectacularly to Baghdad and other Iraqi cities in 2003, has its roots firmly in the pattern of ‘political’ bombing in the Second World War.