The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

One of the companies asked to produce the B-17, the Consolidated Airplane Company, instead designed its own bomber model in 1939 capable of carrying up to 8,000 lbs of bombs, with a higher speed and a maximum range of over 2,000 miles. This was accepted by the Air Corps after trials and modifications in 1940 and became the B-24 bomber, nicknamed ‘Liberator’ by the RAF, when a number were sent to Britain in 1941. It eventually became the standard American bomber, with 18,400 produced by 1945. The new bomber designs, together with the revolutionary M-4 Norden stabilized bombsight, first developed by the Dutch-American engineer Carl Norden for the United States Navy in the late 1920s, meant that the United States was better placed to operate a strategic air campaign in the early 1940s than any of its potential enemies. In 1939 permission was given to begin development of a ‘superbomber’ with a range sufficient to reach Europe. What the Air Corps still lacked was any plan or doctrine which would allow it to use its enhanced power for what most airmen assumed was the primary function of the air force: to assault the ‘social body’ of the enemy.

In Britain, commitment to some form of an independent bombing offensive was kept alive throughout the twenty years that separated the unfought air campaign against Germany in 1919 and the onset of a second war in 1939. In this case, too, the RAF did not enjoy unlimited opportunity to develop either the doctrine to support an air offensive or the technology necessary to sustain it. In the 1920s there was relatively little thinking about the nature of an air offensive beyond speculation on Trenchard’s assertion about the probable vulnerability of civilian morale in any future conflict. When in the late 1920s the Air Ministry explored the possibility of a ‘Locarno’ war against France to help the Germans repel a possible French invasion in violation of the 1925 Locarno Pact, it was argued that even if the French bombed London, ‘we can count on our superior morale and striking power to ensure that the Frenchman squeals first’.¹⁰¹ In 1928 the British chiefs of staff insisted on securing a firm description from the RAF on ‘The War Object of an Air Force’. In the meetings that followed, the navy and army chiefs of staff made it clear that in their view the vague commitment to attacking the enemy economy and population was not only contrary to international law but departed from the traditional principle of war that the main effort had to be devoted to defeating the enemy in the field. An uneasy truce was established between the services on the basis that the aim of the air force ‘in concert with the Navy and Army’ was to break enemy resistance, and to do so ‘by attacks on objectives calculated to achieve this end’. This left Trenchard and the RAF with substantial leeway in defining just what those objectives were and how they might be attacked.¹⁰²

Although the other services wanted the RAF to develop a balanced force, capable of offering them support and defending the country against air attack, the air force itself remained dominated by the idea that bombing defined its purpose as a modern force capable of revolutionizing warfare. In a survey of RAF development written after the end of the Second World War, Robert Saundby, deputy commander of Bomber Command during the war, claimed that the air staff in the 1920s ‘saw clearly that the bomb was the offensive weapon of the Air Force’; and indeed in the first edition of the RAF War Manual, published in 1935, it was claimed that ‘The bomb is the chief weapon of an air force and the principal means by which it may attain its aim in war’.¹⁰³ When it came to thinking about what the bomb or bombs might be used for, RAF leaders continued to rely on unverifiable assumptions about the social fragility of the enemy. In the 1928 discussion organized by the chiefs of staff, Trenchard, like American airmen, had suggested that air power would have to be exerted against the ‘enemy’s vital centres’, where the enemy ‘is at his weakest’, but he made little effort to define what those might be.¹⁰⁴ For much of the decade that followed, those British airmen who followed the ‘Trenchard doctrine’ fell back on bland metaphors about the social body, using, like American airmen, an anatomical language that created a deliberate abstraction in place of the real bodies that bombing would damage.¹⁰⁵ The RAF War Manual claimed that all modern states ‘have their nerve centres, main arteries, heart and brain’. By attacking them, air forces would delay, interrupt and disorganize the vital centres to such a degree that the enemy’s ‘national effort’ would collapse, not only through injury to the social body, but by the effect this might have on the collective mind, as the Manual explained: