The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

The idea of the vital centres lay at the root of the future elaboration of American bombing strategy in the Second World War. The commander appointed to the GHQ Air Force in 1935, Maj. General Frank Andrews, privately supported the idea that independent air operations against factories, refineries, power plants, utilities and centres of population were the most effective way to use bomber aircraft. The concept was elaborated and taught at the Air Corps Tactical School in the 1930s by a number of officers who were to become prominent organizers of the American bombing effort in the 1940s. Unlike European air forces, American airmen argued that attacking the more vulnerable home front made greater strategic sense. ‘Civilization has rendered the economic and social life of a nation increasingly vulnerable to attack,’ ran one lecture in 1935. ‘Sound strategy requires that the main blow be struck where the enemy is weakest.’ The will of the enemy population, it was argued, could be broken only by assaulting the ‘social body’, a metaphor for the elaborate web of services, supplies and amenities that held modern urban life together. In a list of factors that represented the capacity of a nation to sustain a war effort, the military system was placed fourth, behind the ‘social, economic and political systems’ that nourished the military effort in the first place.⁹⁵ Major Harold George, who later drafted the plan for the American air offensive against Germany, argued not only that modern industry had created an ‘economic web’ which could be interrupted by bombing, but that the moral effect on an enemy population ‘by the breaking of this closely-knit web’ might end the war on its own.⁹⁶ To confirm these speculations, the Air Corps Tactical School commandant, Major Muir Fairchild, conducted an elaborate exercise in April 1939 on the vulnerability of New York and its surrounding area as a model for all cities, ‘the most important and the most vulnerable’ element of the modern state. The conclusion was that two squadrons of bombers, attacking with 100 per cent precision, could knock out the entire electricity-generating system in New York and paralyze the whole city at a stroke.⁹⁷

The Air Corps operated in a vacuum in the 1930s in the absence of permissive air doctrine and the necessary aircraft equipment to justify the idea of a strategic offensive. In 1933 the Air Corps was allowed to explore the development of a four-engine bomber in order to ensure that military air technology kept abreast of the more rapid developments in civil aviation. The development contract was won by the Boeing Airplane Company, which by 1935 had produced a prototype designated the XB-17, forerunner of the B-17 ‘Flying Fortress’, with a range of 1,800 miles, carrying 4,000 lbs of bombs.⁹⁸ The army had approved the project only as a defensive aircraft for the long routes to Panama, Alaska and Hawaii, but in 1936 army thinking changed and the production order was cancelled. The army, impressed by the results of front-line support operations in Spain, thought medium bombers promised ‘greater efficiency, lessened complexity and decreased cost’.⁹⁹ The development of the B-17 was squeezed to the slenderest of margins. It was saved only by a sudden revolution in political support for the Air Corps. In late 1938 President Roosevelt authorized a large-scale expansion of American military spending, including a major commitment to the expansion of the air force (partly to ensure that France and Britain could be supplied with aircraft for the growing crisis in Europe). An Air Board appointed in March 1939 strongly supported the idea of a heavy bomber and the B-17, from a single development model, became overnight the heart of American air strategy. Plans were developed to build 498 by 1941 and 1,520 by the end of 1942, the first commitment of any air force to the employment of a heavy four-engine bomber.¹⁰⁰