The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

The concept of the independent strategic air offensive as the decisive means to undermine the enemy war effort took root between the wars only in Britain and the United States. Even here the idea was hedged about with restrictions, not only as a result of the dubious legality of a campaign waged against the civilian home front, but because of pressure from the two senior services, army and navy, to make air power conform to the general aim of the armed forces to defeat the enemy army and navy in the field. In the United States the air forces remained a part of the army, subject to army doctrine. In the ‘Fundamental Principles for the Employment of the Air Service’, published by the War Department in 1926, air force organization and training was based ‘on the fundamental doctrine that their mission is to aid the ground forces to gain decisive success’.⁸⁹ A board established in 1934 to reassess the role of what was now called the Army Air Corps was told by the army deputy chief of staff, Maj. General Hugh Drum, that in the army’s opinion no operations should be undertaken by air forces which did not contribute directly to the success of the ground forces. ‘Battle is the decisive element in warfare,’ Drum continued, whereas independent air operations ‘would be largely wasted’.⁹⁰ In 1935 the army agreed to the establishment of a GHQ Air Force, an independent component of the Air Corps, but its object, like the Soviet AON, was to bring additional reserve air power to bear at decisive points in repelling an unlikely enemy invasion, not to conduct strategic operations distant from the battlefield.⁹¹ In the absence of any real danger and faced by an unhelpful Treasury, the Air Corps mustered an exiguous force. In 1932 there were just 92 light-bomber aircraft on hand.⁹²

Under these circumstances American airmen found themselves compelled to elaborate an unofficial theory of strategic bombing in tandem with the formal commitment to support the operations of the army. The American airmen who had witnessed the bombing of London in 1917–18 were more impressed by its results than their German counterparts. In the early 1920s the chief of the Air Service, Maj. General Mason Patrick, publicly supported the idea that ‘decisive blows from the air on rear areas’ might end future conflicts, even while he endorsed his service’s formal commitment to direct army support.⁹³ His deputy, Brig. General William (‘Billy’) Mitchell, was an even more outspoken advocate of air power as a new way of war. His enthusiasm for an autonomous air arm was based on his conviction that attacks on ‘transportation and industrial centres’ with high explosive, incendiary and gas bombs could prove to be a decisive contribution to victory. Mitchell elaborated the concept of the ‘vital centres’ in the enemy’s civilian war effort, whose destruction from the air might render surface operations by the army and navy redundant.⁹⁴ Although these views were not turned into doctrine – Mitchell was court-martialled in 1925 for his outspoken demands for an independent air force – they survived in air force circles as an unspoken commitment to the idea that in a future war between modern, highly urbanized and industrialized states, air power could uniquely destroy the key targets that kept that sophisticated network in being.