The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

The international effort to limit the air threat continued for at least the decade that followed the drafting of The Hague Rules. In June 1925 at Geneva the major powers agreed to a Protocol outlawing the use (though not the possession) of poisonous chemical or bacteriological weapons. The instrument came into force in 1928 but was ratified slowly by the states that might be affected by its provisions: Germany confirmed adherence in April 1929, Britain in April 1930, the United States only in 1975. The Protocol did not prevent continuing anxiety about the use of gas warfare, which many men had experienced at first hand in the trenches of the First World War. The persistent mistrust of the stated political intention not to use chemical or germ warfare highlighted a major problem in the attempt to create a legal framework to outlaw bombing, and indeed during the subsequent World War it was mutual deterrence rather than law that inhibited their use. The most important initiative to control the deployment of military aircraft came with the Geneva Disarmament Conference which convened in February 1932. All the major states that took part expressed a willingness to explore a number of distinct possibilities, including the international control of civil aviation, the abolition of bomber aircraft and the creation of an international air police force. The most comprehensive proposal, the French ‘Tardieu Plan’, presented to the conference in a revised version in November 1932 contained all three: a European Air Transport Union to oversee all civil air transport; the complete abolition of all bomber aircraft; and an ‘organically international air force’ run by the League of Nations to enforce its regulations with ‘immediate intervention’.⁴³

This and all other plans failed to produce any agreement on limiting the air threat. The French and British air forces remained opposed to any suggestion that offensive military aircraft should be abolished, while the loss of sovereignty implied by an international air police force could not be reconciled with fears for national security. The only delegation to support the abolition of all military aircraft was Spain; the only country to endorse the complete abolition of aerial bombing was the Netherlands.⁴⁴ In July 1932 a resolution from the Czech Foreign Minister, Edouard Beneš, that ‘air attack against the civilian population shall be absolutely prohibited’, was approved, but its significance was much reduced by the failure to reach any agreement restricting the bombing aircraft that might carry it out. In March 1933 a fresh proposal was made by the British delegation, outlawing air bombardment and limiting the number of military aircraft on a sliding scale from 500 for the major powers (though none for Germany, which was still disarmed under the terms of the Versailles Settlement) down to just 25 each for Portugal and Finland.⁴⁵ The new proposal carried an important rider that bombing could still be carried out ‘for police purposes in certain outlying regions’. Romania, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia at once tabled an amendment to add ‘outside Europe’, from fear perhaps that they might be regarded as outlying regions. But the rider was in effect an oblique reference to the British policy of using bombing as a cheap and efficient means to police the Empire and it suggested to other delegates that there would be one rule for Britain, another for the rest. The project finally collapsed, not to be revived during the brief surviving life of the conference.⁴⁶

The idea of internationalizing aviation or creating an international air force or outlawing bombing did not disappear in 1933 for all its evident contradictions. For the following five years politicians and the wider public supported calls to restrict the air threat by agreement. In Britain, the Labour politician Philip Noel-Baker and the Liberal peer Lord David Davies campaigned vigorously for the idea of an air police force (H. G. Wells’s 1933 fantasy, The Shape of Things to Come, ends optimistically with a benign world ‘Air Dictatorship’ based implausibly in the Iraqi city of Basra). Noel-Baker argued for a League of Nations air force to enforce peace, but ended up with the paradoxical argument that in the event of a state launching a bombing attack, the League should be able to use gas and high explosive ‘to bombard his cities until he stopped’.⁴⁷ This paradox highlighted the central problems of trust and compliance in all attempts to internationalize aviation or control bombing in the absence of secure forms of verification. Restrictions on bombing never became a national political priority for any major state after the failure at Geneva, except in the curious case of Hitler’s appeal to Britain and France to consider outlawing bombing, which he included in a more comprehensive ‘Peace Plan’ presented to them on 31 March 1936 in the wake of the remilitarization of the Rhineland two weeks before.