The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

This perception of bombing serves to explain the wide gap between the strategic vision at the heart of the interwar RAF and the reality of Britain’s bombing capability and defence strategy in the 1930s. Imperial air policing was undertaken in conditions of clear visibility, little or no opposition, and low-level attack, none of which would be true of an aerial offensive undertaken in Europe. As a result, colonial practice did not persuade Britain’s military leaders to bank everything on the bomber. Indeed, fear of bombing, particularly once Hitler’s Germany had been identified in the mid-1930s as the most likely potential enemy, acted as a powerful spur to change British priorities in the air to one that was more appropriately defensive. When the military Joint Planning Committee was asked in 1934 to estimate the probable effects of a German ‘knockout blow’ from the air, it was assumed that a week of bombing would produce 150,000 casualties and render millions homeless. Later estimates by the chiefs of staff continued to assume that these statistics were realistic – more than a match for the alarmist literature of the age.¹¹¹ In 1937 the newly appointed Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence, Sir Thomas Inskip, told the RAF that the role of the air force was not to inflict a knockout blow on the enemy (which it was incapable of doing) ‘but to prevent the Germans from knocking us out’.¹¹² The Committee of Imperial Defence spelt out guidelines for air strategy in which the air force would have to support the navy and army, defend the mainland United Kingdom from air attack, and try to inflict aerial damage on the enemy’s strike force. Instructions were given to prepare for a possible attack on German industry in the Ruhr, but only if political permission were given and only after the RAF had met its other commitments. Instead of a force dominated by a large component of bombers to assault the enemy’s war effort, the British defence chiefs insisted on a balanced force, a view with which a number of senior airmen agreed, despite the prevailing culture that bombing is what the RAF should do. Between 1937 and the outbreak of war this meant devoting the lion’s share of resources to Fighter Command, the air defence network and civil defence. As a result, RAF strategy seemed increasingly schizophrenic, one half emphasizing the strategic value of bombing, the other preparing to defend successfully against it.

For all the emphasis in air force circles on the value of a strike force, the technical preparations for an offensive were almost non-existent. Instead of the massed bomber fleets assumed to be necessary to inflict serious damage, the force was composed of a modest number of light and medium bombers, most of them incapable of reaching beyond the fringes of western Germany. More problematic was the absence of serious thinking about problems of navigation, bombing training, bombsights and bombing accuracy, reflecting an air force culture that played down the importance of technique and tactics.¹¹³ The RAF made generalists of the senior staff, who moved regularly between command in the field and office duty in the Air Ministry, discouraging the development of a corps of technically qualified airmen to match the Technical Office of the German Air Force. The British scientist, Sir Henry Tizard, chaired a committee set up in 1938 to give scientific advice to the RAF on bombing, but found senior commanders unenthusiastic about collaborating with science.