The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

When an Air Ministry Bombing Policy committee was finally set up in March 1938 to explore the problems of how to reach, find and hit a target, it was acknowledged that a great deal more needed to be done to be able to do any of them. The bombsight was little different from those used in the First World War and navigation was undertaken either visually by day or by the stars at night. At the committee’s first meeting, the pessimistic conclusion was reached that new technical equipment was unlikely to produce any marked improvement in navigation or accuracy. Opportunities for accurate night-time bombing were expected to be ‘rare’.¹¹⁴ Bombing trials showed that with high-level bombing by day, the form most favoured, only 3 per cent of bombs were likely to hit their target, and in a shallow dive, 9 per cent.¹¹⁵ By March 1939 the Air Ministry planning department bemoaned the failure to mobilize all the country’s scientific resources to produce a better bombsight, and suggested that political pressure should be exerted on the United States to provide the Norden gyroscopic model, but it was largely a problem of their own making.¹¹⁶ A month before the Munich crisis in late September 1938, the commander-in-chief of Bomber Command, Air Chief Marshal Edgar Ludlow-Hewitt, told the Air Ministry that under present circumstances it would be best to rely on the North Sea and air defences in the event of war with Germany. The attempt to bomb Germany ‘might end in major disaster’.¹¹⁷

There was a profound irony in the fact that the one force in which commitment to a bombing offensive at some point was a matter of principle lacked the capability to conduct it, while the United States, with the necessary industrial and technical resources, had no intention of doing so. In the end, of course, both air forces did undertake large-scale and complex bomber offensives. It is therefore worth reflecting on why Britain and the United States, both liberal states committed in the 1930s to trying to keep the peace, both states in which there was widespread public condemnation of bombing civilians, whether in Ethiopia, China or Spain, should be the ones where the idea of destroying the ‘vital centres’ or ‘the social body’ were most fully elaborated. Part of the explanation lies in the geopolitical and military realities confronted by both states. Force projection for both had seldom involved a large army and the army remained, even after the Great War, a component of the defence establishment rather than its driving force, as it was in France, Germany or the Soviet Union. In conjunction with large navies, on which home security had been dependent, air power could be projected overseas with greater flexibility and potential striking power than overseas expeditionary forces. In Britain, defence of the Empire against threat meant that Germany was not the only potential enemy. In the discussions surrounding the development of the ‘Ideal Bomber’ in the mid-1930s, range was called for that could reach targets in Japan or the Soviet Union (in case of a Communist threat to India), as well as provide Empire reinforcement in areas as geographically distant as Canada or Sierra Leone. The threat from Soviet long-range bombers – anticipating the later Cold War – was expected to spread to British interests in the Middle East and eventually to menace British cities. The only response was expected to be a British strike force for use against Soviet cities.¹¹⁸ In the United States, the arguments from the Air Corps for the survival of a heavy-bomber programme were all based on the idea that force would have to be projected across oceans to American Pacific possessions, and perhaps against targets in Europe from American airbases.