The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

Bombing was, of course, much more than a set of convenient political tools and much of what follows describes the organizations, the forces and the technology that made bombing operations possible. Strategic bombing was a military activity which had to be organized very differently from operations of the army and navy and it was one fraught with difficulty under the technical conditions of the time. Air force commanders wanted to deliver what the politicians wanted, but as a consequence bomber forces were always trying to run before they could walk. All the major air services faced a long learning curve during the war as they struggled to overcome a whole range of inherent problems and limitations. Power was generally projected onto distant cities or industrial installations and in most cases involved long and hazardous flights, hampered by fickle weather, by enemy defences, and by complex issues of navigation and effective bomb-aiming. Fixed bases had to be secured near enough to enable the bombing to take place. The rate of loss of aircrew was high, though not exceptional if a comparison is made with other front-line forces. The most distinctive feature of bomber operations was the capacity of aircraft to penetrate enemy airspace and to inflict damage on the domestic economy, military capability and population according to the prevailing directives. No other service could project power in this way, so by default the bomber became the supreme instrument for waging what was defined at the time as total war. The belief that modern, industrialized war was now to be fought between whole societies, each mobilizing the material energies and willpower of their entire population for the task of fighting, arming and supplying the mass armed forces of the modern age, took root in the generation that grew up after the Great War. While it was generally understood by the air forces themselves that bombing enemy populations for the sake of exerting terror was contrary to conventional rules of engagement, attacking and killing armaments workers, destroying port facilities or even burning down crops could all be construed, without too much sophistry, as legitimate objectives of total war.

Before the coming of the Second World War those air forces that had considered the implications of war against the enemy home front had to choose a set of targets which made strategic sense. These included all military installations, heavy industry, energy supply, armaments production and communications. The German campaign against Britain was based on a detailed gazetteer of industrial and military targets scrupulously compiled before 1939 from photo-reconnaissance evidence and industrial intelligence.³⁶ In the summer of 1941 the United States Army Air Forces drew up a plan for bombing Germany that identified six key target systems and a total of 154 individual industrial targets, whose destruction was supposed to lead to the collapse of the German war economy and its supporting services.³⁷ Air force commanders were reluctant to endorse operations that could not demonstrate some clear military or war economic purpose, however broadly the net of total war might be spread, or however forceful the political pressure. Even in Bulgaria, the brief political directive from Churchill was watered down when it was passed on to the military chiefs to give it a spurious military justification: ‘Sofia is a centre of administration of belligerent government, an important railway centre, and has barracks, arsenals and marshalling yards.’³⁸ The reluctance of the air commanders on the spot to carry out the bombing of Bulgaria with the single-mindedness demanded by Churchill, reflected their view that bombing was not likely to achieve very much in practical terms, while the bombing of, for example, Romanian oil supplies or the Viennese aircraft industry would clearly have significant consequences. The short campaign against Bulgaria illustrated the tension that existed between the exaggerated expectations of politicians and public about the likely political and psychological results from attacking an enemy from the air, and the demonstrable value of doing so in military and economic terms. This ambiguity underlay many of the wider wartime arguments between politicians, airmen and the military chiefs over what bombing could or could not deliver and it helps to explain a feature characteristic of all bombing campaigns: the escalation of the degree of indiscriminate damage.