The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

The failure to reach international agreement coupled with continued popular anxiety about bombing convinced European governments to look for other means to secure their civilian populations against the consequences of bomb attack. The state’s interest in protecting urban populations was evidently affected by the pervasive imagery of social breakdown and political collapse that accompanied almost all descriptions of future war. In a speech to the House of Commons on 10 November 1932, the deputy prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, had warned that any town in reach of an aerodrome would be bombed within five minutes of the start of any war: ‘the question is whose morale will be shattered quickest by preliminary bombing’. The speech is better remembered for his subsequent remark that ‘The bomber will always get through’, but Baldwin’s chief concern was to find some way once again to exempt civilians ‘from the worst perils of war’.⁵⁹ This meant finding an effective form of civilian air-raid protection. Most major states had begun to think about civil defence programmes in the 1920s. The British government established a Committee on Air Raid Precautions as early as May 1924 chaired by the permanent under-secretary at the Home Office (and the future head of wartime civil defence), Sir John Anderson. The committee concluded early on that the air menace was so great that protection would amount to essential ‘palliatives’. Anderson himself accepted the reality that in a future total war ‘the distinction between combatants and non-combatants would largely disappear’.⁶⁰ For years before the outbreak of war in 1939, the common assumption among those who planned civil defence, in Britain and elsewhere, was the unavoidability of war waged against civilians.

Most active civil defence preparations, however, dated from the breakdown of the disarmament conference and the growing international crisis spurred by the after-effects of the world economic crisis, Japanese aggression in China, German demands for treaty revision and American isolation. The failure to sustain any collective forms of security exposed all European states to the possibility of war. Because of the prevailing image of a war fought from the start by aircraft deployed swiftly and ruthlessly to knock an enemy out, civil defence became by the mid-1930s an urgent priority. The German Air Protection Law (Luftschutzgesetz) dated from 1935; an Italian inter-ministerial commission for civil defence was set up in 1930, the first civil defence legislation followed in 1932 and 1933; the British Home Office established an Air Raid Precautions department in 1935, followed by a comprehensive Air Raid Precautions law in December 1937; in France the major civil defence law dated from April 1935, in Poland from September 1934, in Switzerland (where a ‘purple cross’ association was established to oversee civil defence thinking and planning) from August 1934, in Hungary from July 1935; and so on.⁶¹

The details of civil defence organization and policies in the major states are covered in more detail in the chapters that follow. Here it is worth observing that they differed in scale and emphasis and in the extent to which the objective of even partial protection could be supplied in the few remaining years of peace. Most governments failed by the outbreak of war to do enough. One of the limiting factors was the substantial cost implied by effective civil defence measures. Many of these costs were defrayed by the central state through insisting that local authorities, who more closely represented the communities under threat, should bear much of the expense, but this resulted in uneven provision from city to city. In Britain it was calculated that the cost of providing deep (and therefore effective) shelter for the whole urban community, in a country more heavily urbanized than any other European state, was somewhere between £300 million and £400 million, more than the whole military budget for 1938, and beyond what any British government was prepared to pay.⁶² In Germany, also heavily urbanized, the state agreed to subsidize the costs of civil defence only in major cities graded Air Defence I, chiefly in the industrial western provinces. In Italy the costs proved prohibitive after the expense of wars in Ethiopia and Spain; by 1939 there were public air-raid shelter places for only 72,000 out of a population of 44 million. In France the cost of deep shelters for Paris was calculated at 46 billion francs, half the military budget for 1939; French spending on civil defence in 1939 equalled just 0.9 per cent of the defence budget.⁶³