The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

The intention to mount a serious bombing offensive against Germany, as an indirect contribution to the ground war, finally resulted in April 1918 in the establishment of the Royal Air Force, a merger of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service. A Cabinet ruling on 13 May 1918 stressed that the force’s independence was deliberately linked to the purpose ‘of carrying out bombing raids on Germany on a large scale’. To underline this commitment, an integral element of the new RAF was activated on 5 June as the Independent Air Force (to distinguish it from the RAF aircraft still supporting the Army) and placed under the command of General (later Marshal of the Royal Air Force) Sir Hugh Trenchard.¹⁴ Two weeks later an elaborate review of British air strategy was submitted to the War Cabinet by the RAF staff which laid out the principles on which all subsequent air offensives were to be based. Air power, it was suggested, was the most probable and efficient way of securing peace by attacking the ‘root industries’ of the enemy and ‘the moral [sic] of his nation’. A detailed list of precise targets in the Ruhr-Rhineland industrial region was drawn up based on Tiverton’s original plan; in cases when these could not be attacked, bombers were to raid ‘densely populated industrial centres’ in order ‘to destroy the morale of the operatives’.¹⁵

The opportunity to test what a bomber force could do was never realized. In June the Independent Force dropped just 70 tons of bombs on Germany, in August only 100, in the last weeks of war a further 370 tons. Of this quantity most were dropped on tactical targets, either enemy airfields or communications serving the front line. For example, the thirteen attacks carried out during 1918 on the Baden town of Offenburg, within easy range of British bombers, were almost all aimed at the railway station or rail lines.¹⁶ Overall the strategic force dropped just 8 per cent of the tonnage of bombs dropped by British aircraft throughout the war. Only 172 of its 650 mainly small-scale raids were on the German homeland and losses were high, 458 aircraft in total.¹⁷ The French High Command was unenthusiastic about longer-range bombing, and the American and Italian bomber units that were supposed to join an expanded Inter-Allied Independent Force, formed in October 1918, had no time to see serious action.¹⁸ Like Wells’s science-fiction fantasies, the independent bombing offensive was more imagined than real.

The post-war assessments of the bombing of Germany carried out by a British Bombing Commission and a United States Bombing Survey in 1919 indicated very modest material achievements. But there were to be exaggerated expectations of the probable effect of bombing on home morale. Trenchard famously remarked that the moral, or psychological, effect of bombing was twenty times greater than the material effect, though there was little evidence to confirm this beyond occasional but temporary moments of panic during the war in British, French and German cities, and the class prejudices of those who asserted it.¹⁹ The report on the 1923 annual RAF exercises, with Trenchard now chief of the air staff, assumed that modern war was ‘a contest of morale’, in which the febrile urban crowd would prove to be ‘infinitely more susceptible to collapse’.²⁰ Much the same argument was formulated by the Italian general, Giulio Douhet, whose Command of the Air (Il dominio dell’aria) has become one of the classics of air-power theory. He argued that the nature of warfare had been changed irrevocably by the advent of the aeroplane, to the detriment of armies and navies. Future wars, he argued, would be based on the rapid destruction of the enemy’s air force, in order to attack, as swiftly and ruthlessly as possible, the enemy civilian economy and population. The temporary inhumanity (Douhet also advocated using gas or bacteriological agents) was designed to make wars short and sharp and, by implication, at lower human cost than the long war of attrition that Europe had just experienced. ‘A man who is fighting a life-and-death struggle – as all wars are nowadays – has the right,’ Douhet claimed, ‘to use any means to keep his life.’²¹ Douhet’s vision of future war owed something to Wells – ‘This is a dark and bloody picture I am drawing for you’ – but it was first and foremost an expression of what soon came to be termed ‘total war’.²²