The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

Moral effect – Although the bombardment of suitable objectives should result in considerable material damage and loss, the most important and far-reaching effect of air bombardment is its moral effect… The moral effect of bombing is always severe and usually cumulative, proportionately greater effect being obtained by continuous bombing especially of the enemy’s vital centres.¹⁰⁶

The conviction that bombing must cause the physical and mental collapse of an enemy state dominated British air theory, as it dominated public anxieties about total war.

One reason why the RAF stuck with the idea that a powerful striking force of bombers would be the most effective way to exploit the potential of air power can be found in the nature of the combat experience enjoyed by British airmen in the interwar years. Instead of drawing lessons from the Spanish Civil War about the advantages of close-support aviation and air superiority, which was the conclusion drawn by other air forces, RAF doctrine was mainly informed by the experience of what was called ‘air policing’ in the Empire and Afghanistan.¹⁰⁷ The use of aircraft to enforce local control against rebel tribes and tribesmen (described in the Manual as war against ‘semi-civilised peoples’) was taken as a paradigm to explain what might happen if a civilized state were subjected to a heavier level of bombing. Even tribal communities, it was argued, had vital centres which governed their existence; target intelligence on those centres would allow the small light bombers allocated to the operation to destroy them, and in doing so, to compel compliance from unruly subjects. John Slessor, Director of Plans in the Air Ministry in the late 1930s, gave a brutally frank description in his memoirs of why air policing worked: ‘Whether the offender concerned was an Indian Frontier tribesman, a nomad Arab of the northern deserts, a Morelli slaver on the border of Kenya, or a web-footed savage of the swamps of the southern Sudan, there are almost always some essentials without which he cannot obtain his livelihood.’¹⁰⁸ A model example for the RAF was the bombing undertaken in Ovamboland in southern Africa in 1938, in which rebel chieftain Ipumbu of the Ukuambi tribe was brought to heel by three aircraft that destroyed his kraal (camp) and drove off his cattle. In this case, and others, emphasis was put on the ‘moral effect’ of coercive bombing, as well as its material impact.¹⁰⁹ The practice of air policing using bomber aircraft as a ‘strategic’ tool was shared by all those who later held high RAF office in the Second World War: Charles Portal, wartime chief of the air staff; Arthur Harris, commander-in-chief of Bomber Command; Richard Peirse, his predecessor as commander-in-chief; Norman Bottomley, Portal’s wartime deputy. Later, in September 1941, Portal used the analogy to explain to Churchill the nature of the assault on the ‘general activity of the community’ in Germany: ‘In short, it is an adaptation, though on a greatly magnified scale, of the policy of air control which has proved so outstandingly successful in recent years in the small wars in which the Air Force has been continuously engaged.’¹¹⁰