The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

Two particular arguments can be identified in the scaremongering literature of the interwar years: first, that the destruction would be aimed at major cities; second, that the destruction would be swift and the degree of damage annihilating. In most imagined accounts of bombing there were standard tropes about the surprise, speed and scope of air attack. Douhet wrote in ‘The War of 19—’, published in Italy’s leading aeronautical journal in March 1930, shortly after his death, about an air war between France and Germany in which four French cities are attacked by German aircraft with 500 tons of incendiary and poisonous bombs, enough to destroy the cities completely. The raid takes just one hour, and the four cities are burnt to the ground.²⁶ Frank Morison in War on Great Cities, published in 1938, just months before the outbreak of the next war, talked of a million dead in London from a gas attack, and millions more following swift British retaliation on Paris, Rome or Berlin. One 5,000-lb bomb would be enough, he suggested, to destroy completely the whole administrative and government centre around Whitehall. Like many of the experts writing on bombing he assured his readers that this was ‘no fanciful picture’ but a cold statement of fact.²⁷ Tom Wintringham, a former soldier and later a commander of the British International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, painted an equally lurid picture in 1935 of the end of Europe’s major cities: 5–6 million killed in London, Paris and Berlin by a combination of gas, high explosive, exposure, disease and hunger.²⁸ In all these accounts, and with special emphasis in Douhet, there is little effective defence against bombing, and none against gas or germs.

Most of these pessimistic representations of air warfare were indeed fanciful portraits, divorced from technical and scientific reality. What they all shared was an understanding of the apparent vulnerability of the modern city to the ‘knockout blow’. This was so widely discussed and endorsed that it requires some explanation. By the 1920s much of urban Europe was of relatively recent construction, with cities filled with migrants from the villages or immigrants from abroad. The large new populations lived in congested, quickly constructed terraces and tenements, and serviced the burgeoning ports and industries stimulated by the rapid development of European trade and manufacturing. The new cities were regarded by many social critics (and most of Europe’s conservative elite) as socially amorphous and alienating, with an underdeveloped sense of community and unstable values. They were sites of pre-war and post-war political radicalism and, in the case of Russia, of revolution. The new cities were also popularly associated with a rising tide of crime, vice and genetic defects. These views of urban life reflected profound class and regional prejudices; they surfaced regularly in accounts of future bombing precisely because the rootless urban crowd was expected to be more prone to panic.²⁹ The account of the psychology of the crowd by Gustave Le Bon published in 1895, or William Trotter’s study of the herd instinct which appeared in 1916, gave popular sanction to the view that the character of modern urban life predisposed individuals to merge at moments of crisis into an unmanageable mob. A British Air Ministry official reflecting in 1937 on what he regarded as the unstable behaviour of ‘aliens’ and ‘the poorer sections of the community’ during the German bombing of London in 1917, concluded that ‘the capital cities constitute the popular nerve centres where the danger is greatest’.³⁰

City vulnerability was also regarded as a product of the complexity and interconnectedness of the modern infrastructure that supported urban life. The sudden dislocation of any one part by bombing was expected to unravel the whole and provoke a social catastrophe. The working of this process was explained in an article by the British philosopher Cyril Joad, writing in 1937: