The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

Although Trenchard and Douhet are now hailed as pioneers in air power theory, their conclusions were over-imaginative and unscientific and, for the military establishments of the 1920s, an invitation to indulge in what were still widely regarded as morally unacceptable violations of the laws of war. Despite the subsequent status enjoyed by both men, they remained relative outsiders in the 1920s. Douhet was briefly Air Minister in Mussolini’s first Cabinet in 1922, but was then retired from military service, sacked as minister, and left to argue his case from the wings. Trenchard spent much of his term as chief of staff fighting to retain air force independence and to forge a distinct strategic identity for his force. Neither was a household name in the 1920s, though Douhet’s works became more widely known in the decade that followed. No air force in the 1920s (or indeed in the 1930s) deliberately created a strategic bombing capability to eliminate an enemy rapidly and ruthlessly by assaulting civilian morale, a strategy crudely described in the interwar years as ‘the knockout blow’. What was significant about both Douhet and Trenchard, and a great many other post-war military thinkers, was the assumption that future war would be waged between whole societies in which the citizen, whether in uniform or in a factory, or driving a train or ploughing the fields, whether male or female, would contribute to the national war effort. This assumption made industries, cities and workers objects of war as much as the armed forces and put into sharper focus the pre-war fiction about the menace to civilization.

The European public in the 1920s saw the limited bombing of the Great War in much starker terms than most of the military establishment. The critical change brought about by the war was the widespread realization among Europe’s population that there was no possibility in any future war of civilian immunity. Small though the bombing effort had been during the Great War, it was taken to symbolize the crossing of an important threshold, in which science in the service of war could subvert conventional forms of military conflict in favour of a wilful assault on civilian society. Commenting in 1923 on a claim that hostile aircraft could poison the whole of London in three hours, the English historian, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, wrote: ‘war now means extermination, not of soldiers only, but of civilians and of civilisation’.²³ Lowes Dickinson was not a military expert, but much of the scaremongering literature in the interwar years was made more chilling because it was written by soldiers or ex-soldiers, or by scientists and engineers who paraded their expertise to the public to give their conclusions greater weight. The Earl of Halsbury, the author in 1926 of 1944, a novel about a future gas attack to annihilate London, was the same Lord Tiverton (now elevated to higher noble rank) who had planned the strategic offensive against Germany in 1917. He claimed in his preface that there was nothing fantastic about his description of the gas attack, which he had based on current expertise on the possible effects of chemical weapons. In 1927 he elaborated for a popular newspaper audience the lessons of his novel: ‘The central organisations essential to modern warfare are carried out in “open towns” and largely by civilians… The first conclusion that emerges is that an attack will be made upon the civilian population.’²⁴ These sentiments had much in common with Douhet, and with a wave of alarmist literature on air warfare produced by military experts in France. In 1930 Lieutenant Colonel Arsène Vauthier in The Aerial Threat and the Future of the Country warned that in the next war French cities would be smothered with gas and bombs: ‘the entire future of the country is at stake, the entire civil population will be placed abruptly on the warfront’.²⁵