The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

The pattern of bombing in Bulgaria, from a limited raid on the railway facilities and the Vrajedna airfield in November 1943 to the final raids in March and April 1944 when the extensive use of incendiaries produced much higher levels of urban destruction, was not an accidental progression. In all the major campaigns in Europe (and in the campaigns mounted in eastern Asia) there occurred an evident escalation the longer the bombing went on and the more uncertain were its results. Air force commanders had an urgent need to demonstrate that their operations were militarily useful in the face of hostile criticism from the other services or the impatience of their political masters. This was true of the German bombing of British cities, the British bombing of Germany in 1940–42 and the Combined Bomber Offensive between 1943 and 1945. Perhaps the best example is the shift in British planning from the 1939 Western Air Plans for limited attacks on Ruhr industrial installations to the decision taken in 1941 to attack the central areas of German industrial cities with large quantities of incendiaries to destroy working-class housing and to kill workers. The reasons for escalation – the phenomenon that explains the exceptional or disproportionate level of civilian deaths in all bombed states – differ in historical detail from case to case. Nevertheless they suggest a common process dictated partly by technical frustration at poor accuracy and navigation or high losses; partly by political frustration at the absence of unambiguous results; partly by air force anxiety that failure might reflect badly on its claim on resources; and finally, and significantly, by the slow erosion of any relative moral constraints that might have acted to limit the damage to civilian targets. Among the many questions about the military conduct of the campaigns, the issue of escalation and its consequences remains the most important. It has significant implications for the current exercise of air power in the wars of the twenty-first century.

For the societies that suffered the bombing during the war there was only one reality that mattered: ‘The bomber will always get through.’ The famous remark by the British deputy prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, on the eve of his departure for the Geneva Disarmament talks in November 1932, that the man in the street ought to understand there was no power on earth yet available to stop him from being bombed, has usually been taken for deliberate hyperbole, to scare delegates at Geneva into accepting a ban on bomber aircraft. Yet though it proved possible during the war to detect aircraft with radar and to intercept them by day and increasingly by night, and to inflict high-percentage rates of loss on an attacking force, in the context of the Second World War, Baldwin was right. Most bombers did reach the approximate target area and disgorge their bombs with limited accuracy on the ground below, turning wartime civilian society into an effective front line. That this would be so was widely expected by the 1930s among the populations of the world’s major states, who saw bombing fatalistically, as something that would define future conflict. ‘It is the height of folly,’ wrote the British Air Minister, Lord Londonderry, to Baldwin in July 1934, ‘to imagine that any war can be conducted without appreciable risk to the civil population.’³⁹ Brought up on a diet of scaremongering fiction and films, subject by the 1930s to regular drill or instruction or propaganda for air-raid precautions, civilian society came to take it for granted that it would become an object of attack, even that there might be some degree of democratic legitimacy in bombing if all of modern mass society had to be mobilized for war. The British pacifist Vera Brittain, writing in 1940 at the height of the Blitz, observed that in the First World War there had grown up a ‘barrier of inconceivable experience’ between the soldiers on the Western Front and the civilians at home in Britain. During the current conflict, she continued, ‘both suffering and suspense are universal in England herself… There is no emotional barrier between men and women, parents and children, the old and the young, since the battle is shared by all ages and both sexes.’⁴⁰