The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

Mumford was one of hundreds of Europeans and Americans whose powerful imaginative writing helped to define the popular idea of what a bombing war would be like long before it became a possibility or a reality. The most famous of them all was the English novelist H. G. Wells whose The War in the Air, published as far back as 1908, set the pattern for all subsequent literature, fiction and non-fiction, that addressed the possible effects of a bombing war. In the novel, a fleet of malevolent German airships destroys New York in a matter of hours, ‘a crimson furnace from which there was no escape’. The worldwide war that develops engulfs civilization, whose misplaced sense of security and progress is blotted out more rapidly than the fall of any earlier civilized order: ‘And this was no slow decadence that came to the Europeanized world; those other civilizations rotted and crumbled down, the Europeanized civilization was, as it were, blown up.’² Wells used the book to highlight a theme that he returned to regularly in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Second World War: that the application of modern science to war was fraught with danger. The destruction of New York in the novel was, he suggested, ‘the logical outcome’ of this unfortunate marriage. In a less well-known sequel, The World Set Free, written five years later in 1913, Wells anticipated the nuclear age, in which 200 of the world’s great cities are destroyed in the ‘unquenchable crimson conflagrations of the atomic bomb’.³ Like Mumford, Wells saw urban life as both defining the modern age (‘gigantic cities spreading gigantically’) and uniquely susceptible to obliteration by the very science to which it had given birth.⁴

Neither the alleged fragility of the modern city nor the fears for the end of civilization were realized in the war that broke out in August 1914, yet they remained dominant tropes in the thirty years that separated Wells’ early predictions from the reality of mass city bombing after 1940. Aircraft in the Great War were in their technical infancy. Although the war did witness the origins of what came to be called by its end ‘strategic bombing’, the scale of such bombing was tiny and its direct impact on the warring states subjected to it was negligible. The first major raids were mounted by dirigibles, as they were in Wells’s novel. The German Navy approved long-range attacks by Zeppelin airships against British port cities and, eventually, against targets in London. The first of 52 raids was made on the night of 20–21 January 1915. Altogether during the war airships dropped 162 tons of bombs, mostly haphazardly, and killed 557 people.⁵ Attacks by aeroplanes away from the front line began on 22 September 1914 when a handful of aircraft from the Royal Naval Air Service, on the orders of the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, attacked Zeppelin sheds in Cologne and Düsseldorf, followed on 23 November by a raid on the city of Friedrichshafen, where Zeppelins were built. The first German aircraft to bomb Britain did so in retaliation on 24 December. There were small raids by German, French and British units for the next two years but they achieved almost nothing until the German Air Force formed an ‘England Squadron’ in late 1916, commanded by Captain Ernst Brandenburg, to begin a series of day and night attacks against British ports, including 18 raids on London. The first raid was made on Folkestone on 25 May 1917, the last a year later, on the night of 19–20 May against London. The mixed force of Gotha-IV and R-Gigant multi-engine bombers dropped 110 tons in 52 raids, killing 836 and wounding 1,982. The original object had been to destroy ‘the morale of the British people’ to such an extent that the British government might consider withdrawing from the conflict. But the weight of attack failed entirely to support what was at best a speculative strategy. Small German raids were also made on French industrial targets in Paris, killing 267 Parisians, but achieving little. The offensive petered out in spring 1918 following mounting losses.⁶ Its principal achievement was to provoke the British into retaliation.