The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

In practice, aviation in the Soviet Union moved closer to the French model during the 1930s. In the late 1920s, when the Red Army began to think seriously about future strategy, the idea of creating a mobile strategic air reserve for use at critical points in the battle, or for effecting a breakthrough for the ground army, became accepted doctrine. Under the influence of two Soviet air theorists, A. N. Lapchinskii and Vasily Khripin, encouragement was given to the establishment of independent bomber units. In 1935 these were grouped together into a strategic reserve, aviatsya osobovo naznachenya (AON), but like Cot’s plan, the object was to use them at critical stages of the ground battle. Some thought was given to the possibility of bombing distant targets in Germany or Japan in the event of war, but the thought was never enshrined in doctrine. In 1937 Stalin ordered an end to the heavy-bomber programme, partly because of the poor safety record of the aircraft, but largely as a result of the military purges in 1937 which decimated the group of army and air force leaders who favoured independent strategic operations. Priority was given thereafter to ground attack and medium-bomber aircraft designed to give direct support to ground armies. In 1940 AON was broken up and, like French bomber aircraft, redistributed to front-line army units.⁸²

The German case proved to be similar, except that Germany’s compulsory air disarmament after the Versailles Treaty of 1919 postponed the formal development of German air power until the advent of Hitler as chancellor in January 1933. In the absence of an air force, the War Ministry in the early 1920s established more than 40 study groups dedicated to evaluating the lessons of the earlier air war, but only four looked at bombing. Their conclusions shaped subsequent German air strategy. Aircraft were judged to be a primarily offensive weapon, and the principal object of an aerial offensive was the achievement of air superiority over the battlefront.⁸³ Long-range bombing of the enemy home front was not regarded as strategically worthwhile, partly because anti-air defences were expected to be able to blunt an air offensive, partly because it would disperse rather than concentrate a combined arms offensive. Among the former air force officers working in the War Ministry in the 1920s was a small group who favoured developing a more strategic role for a future air force, including Lieutenant Colonel Helmuth Felmy and the future chief of the air staff in 1935, Colonel Walter Wever. But even under their influence, the air force operational doctrine published in 1935 on ‘The Conduct of the Air War’ emphasized that the chief objective of the air force was to support the army’s ground operations and to eliminate enemy air power, followed only if necessary by attacks on enemy war production to break a front-line stalemate: ‘The will of the nation finds its greatest embodiment in its armed forces. Thus, the enemy armed forces are therefore the primary objectives in war.’⁸⁴

This remained the central principle of German air force doctrine and it owed much to the fact that almost all the senior airmen responsible for shaping air strategy, including the commander-in-chief and former Prussian army cadet, Hermann Göring, originally came from a conventional army background, in which concentration of all available force on the battlefield mission was expected to be decisive. ‘In the war of the future,’ wrote Wever, echoing the doctrine laid down in 1935, ‘the destruction of the armed forces will be of primary importance.’⁸⁵ The German Air Force Service Manual in 1936 excluded the use of aircraft in terror raids on cities in favour of bombing attacks on the depots, communications and troop concentrations deep in the enemy rear.⁸⁶ German airmen were confident that a network of high-quality anti-aircraft guns and searchlights, supported by defensive fighters and a system of effective communication, could prevent a bomber offensive from inflicting serious damage on Germany’s war effort, either in the zone of battle or on the home front.⁸⁷ The experience of the German Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War (which provided almost three years of practical combat, ideal for the refinement of the close-support strategy) confirmed the air force argument that front-line aviation made most strategic sense and that attacks on an amorphous target like morale were just as likely to be counter-productive by strengthening resistance.⁸⁸ Unlike the RAF, German airmen drew from the lessons of the Great War the conclusion that it made much more strategic sense to fight the enemy air force and to protect the ground army rather than squander men and machines on long-range bombing. The ‘knockout blow’ was to be inflicted at the battlefront, an intention dramatically fulfilled in all the German campaigns from Poland in 1939 to the Soviet Union in 1941.