The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

Within a few days of the outbreak of the next war it seems reasonable to suppose that the gas and electric light systems will have broken down, that there will be no ventilation in the tube [metro] tunnels, that the drainage system will have been thrown out of gear and sewage will infect the streets, that large parts of London will be in flames, that the streets will be contaminated with gas, and that hordes of fugitives will spread outwards from the city, without petrol for their cars or food for their stomachs, pouring like locusts over the country in the hope of escaping the terror from the air.³¹

The military thinker J. F. C. Fuller suggested that within hours of a major bomb attack on London, the city would become ‘one vast raving Bedlam’: ‘traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for help, the city will be in pandemonium’. As city life collapses, Fuller continued, government would be swept away in an ‘avalanche of terror’.³²

Such anxieties reflected more profound fears about the ambiguous nature of modern ‘civilization’ and its capacity to survive after the descent into mass industrialized warfare between 1914 and 1918. The result was a profound paradox. There was throughout Europe and the United States in the interwar years a genuine and enthusiastic fascination with what the aeroplane represented. For the European dictatorships, right and left, aviation was commandeered as a way to express the vibrant modernity and technological sophistication of the new political movements.³³ In France, Britain and the United States aviation was a key product of the modern consumer age, capable of transforming lifestyles, easing modern communication and providing exhilarating opportunities for organized leisure. Here was science genuinely at the service of man. On the other hand, military aviation was regarded not only as a fascinating technical expression of the modern age, but also as the harbinger of its possible dissolution. Much of the apocalyptic language used to describe the threat of bombing was directed not so much at the threat from the air as such but at the self-destructive nature of a civilization capable of generating the technical means for obliterating modern cities in the first place. ‘It is poor consolation,’ Lord Halsbury told the British House of Lords in 1928, ‘that the only answer we can find to the destruction of half of civilisation is that we should be able to destroy the other half.’³⁴

The experts and novelists and film producers who sustained the idea of a bombing apocalypse had mixed motives for what they did. Some wanted the bombing scare to encourage pacifism and international agreement by making the image of future war unbearably bleak. Some wanted the opposite, using the fear of bombing to encourage higher levels of state spending on defence. Winston Churchill, for example, in 1934 spoke of an air threat that was ‘ready to… pulverise… what is left of civilisation’, but his aim was to encourage the government to speed up rearmament.³⁵ Military experts, scientists and architects hoped that civil defence preparation would be taken more seriously. Literature appropriated bombing because it presented easy metaphors or sold copies. Yet the fears that the future bombing war provoked were real enough and became embedded in popular public perception of what the terms of total war were likely to be. Psychiatrists expected air war to provoke widespread mental disorders. The existence of a specific psychological condition of ‘air-raid phobia’ was detected by psychologists in Britain once raiding began.³⁶ The public was easily stirred by the idea of destruction from the air, but the fear – or rather a nexus of ‘fears’ – was the product of uncertainty about the future and ignorance of the exact nature of the threat.³⁷ The popular view of science increased that fear, because science had evidently sprung numerous unpleasant surprises in the Great War. Scientists themselves could be confounded by what the military sciences might do. The Cambridge geneticist Joseph Needham, sketching notes for a lecture in 1936 on ‘Can Science save Civilisation?’, concluded that if science could be used ‘for destroying civilisation by air warfare’, saving it was unlikely.³⁸