The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

The German bombing, sporadic and limited though it was, helped give birth not only to an integrated air defence system, but also to what would have been the first strategic air offensive. The first anti-aircraft guns were in place across south-east England by spring 1915. The air defences were established formally as the Air Defence of Great Britain. At the heart of the system was the London Air Defence Area, set up in July 1917 under Maj. General Edward Ashmore. By the summer of 1918 the defence boasted 250 anti-aircraft guns (based on artillery developed on the Western Front), 323 searchlights, eight fighter squadrons for day-and-night interception and a personnel of 17,000. To track incoming aircraft, observer cordons were set up some 50 miles from vulnerable areas, manned by soldiers and policemen.⁷ In the threatened cities a primitive civil defence structure was established in 1917, with improvised shelters, air-raid wardens and policemen armed with whistles for sounding the alarm. The system was seldom needed over the last two years of war, and not at all after the last raids in May 1918, but it created a precedent that was later revived in the 1930s when lessons from the Great War were needed for British air-raid precautions planning. The raids gave rise to moments of panic in the bombed towns; in the east coast port of Hull, an easy Zeppelin target, a portion of the population trekked out of the city to the surrounding countryside, as they were to do during the next war. In London, estimates of those who sought shelter in the Underground ranged from 100,000 to 300,000.⁸

The air raiding was widely condemned as a vicious and cowardly attack on the innocent. The final death toll of 1,239 from all Zeppelin and bomber raids included 366 women and 252 children. Bombing represented, according to The Times, ‘relapses into barbarism’, a language regularly applied to aerial bombing for the next twenty-five years.⁹ There were widespread appeals for retaliation, using much the same language of moral justification that would later be used during the Blitz, and there followed a number of deliberate reprisal raids. The government, however, wanted a more systematic response. An Air Board, appointed in 1916, planned to create a separate, independent air force and, with the government’s approval, to use it to undertake a systematic long-range bombing offensive against German military and economic targets within the limited range of the existing aircraft. In July 1917 the South African soldier and politician, Field Marshal Jan Smuts, visiting London during an Imperial Conference, was invited by the prime minister, David Lloyd George, to produce recommendations for organizing Britain’s air effort. Smuts suggested the establishment of a separate air ministry and air force and also endorsed the idea of long-range attacks against the enemy home front.¹⁰ The idea was accepted and an initial bombing plan was drawn up by Lord Tiverton, a senior Royal Flying Corps staff officer, at the request of the first chief of the newly created air staff, Sir Frederick Sykes. The industrial plan picked out German iron and steel, chemicals, the aero-engine and magneto industries as the key objectives, and from October 1917 the RFC VIII Brigade, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Cyril Newall (the future chief of the air staff in the late 1930s), began a limited assault on the cities that housed them.¹¹

The force mainly composed of light De Havilland DH-9 bombers had little success. Crew had an average of 17 hours flying experience, were poorly trained for accurate navigation and target-finding, and carried 250-lb and 500-lb bombs that were later found to have inflicted little damage. The newly formed Air Policy Committee encouraged the crews to ‘attack the important towns systematically’ if they could not find a target, with the object of creating widespread disruption and demoralizing the workforce.¹² This offensive was also met by an effective German air defence system which, like the British, was first activated in 1915 in response to Allied incursions. The same year an Air Warning Service (Flugmeldedienst) was established using observation aircraft and ground-based observation posts. By 1917, when heavier Allied raids began, the defensive system combined interceptor aircraft and an extensive network of 400 searchlights and 1,200 anti-aircraft guns of different calibres. To hamper night-time raids, an extensive blackout was introduced in western Germany, together with illuminated fake targets. As in Britain, local civil defence measures were introduced to protect the civilian population. In total, 746 were killed and 1,843 injured; as in Britain, German propaganda deplored the ‘frightfulness’ (Schrecklichkeit) of attacks against the defenceless civilian population.¹³