The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

There was also in both Britain and the United States a real attraction to the idea that air warfare was a more modern and efficient form of fighting than the recent experience of a gruelling and costly land war. Since both were democracies, with political elites sensitive to popular anxieties and expectations, air power was intended to reduce the human costs of war on the ground. Arthur Harris famously argued that the army would fail next time to find ‘sufficient morons willing to be sacrificed in a mud war in Flanders’, but for Germany, France or the Soviet Union, a ground army and effective ground defences were essential elements in their security planning.¹¹⁹ The idea that modern technology and science-based weaponry enhanced military efficiency was central to the American view of the potential of a bombing war. At the Air Corps Tactical School, airmen emphasized that air power was ‘a new means of waging war’, and one that would supply ‘the most efficient action to bring us victory with the least expenditure of lives, time, money and material’.¹²⁰ Air power also appealed because it could make optimum use of the technical and industrial strengths of the two states, while minimizing casualties. In the United States, planning for possible industrial mobilization of resources to support large-scale air activity began in the 1920s and by the early 1930s produced detailed mobilization planning for 24,000 aircraft a year; in Britain plans for industrial mobilization dated from the mid-1930s with the development of so-called ‘shadow factories’, ready to be converted to military output if war broke out. In both cases, extensive manufacturing capacity and advanced technical skills were regarded as a critical dimension of future war-making, particularly in the air.¹²¹ The modernity of air power was emphasized in other states as well, for propaganda reasons as well as military ones, but much less autonomy was allowed to those air forces to campaign for strategies that could be presented as more efficient and less costly than traditional ground war.

One important consequence of the equation of air power and modernity was the willingness of airmen in Britain and the United States to accept that modern ‘total war’ reflected a changed democratic reality, that war was between peoples as well as armed forces. In an age of modern industry, mass political mobilization and scientific advance, war, it was argued, could not be confined to the fighting front. Although the term ‘total war’ was first popularized by Erich Ludendorff, the German general who had masterminded much of Germany’s war effort between 1916 and 1918, it was appropriated as a description of whole societies at war much more fully in Britain and America than it was in Continental Europe. ‘There can be no doubt,’ wrote the British aviation journalist, Oliver Stewart, in 1936, ‘that a town in any industrial civilisation is a military objective; it provides the sinews of war; it houses those who direct the war; it is a nexus of communications; it is a centre of propaganda; and it is a seat of government.’¹²² As a result, he continued, ‘blind bombing of a town as a town might be logically defended’. In a lecture to the Naval Staff College, also in 1936, Air Vice Marshal Arthur Barrett asked his audience to recognize that it was no longer possible ‘to draw a definite line between combatant and non-combatant’. This was, he claimed, a result of the ‘power of democracy’; the more governments depended on the support of the governed, the more the morale and resources of the civil population became a legitimate object of attack.¹²³ The United States air force also based its argument in favour of offensive bombing on the nature of a modern democratic state:

Where is that will to resist centered? How is it expressed? It is centered in the mass of the people. It is expressed through political government. The will to resist, the will to fight, the will to progress, are all ultimately centered in the mass of the people – the civil mass – the people in the street… Hence, the ultimate aim of all military operations is to destroy the will of those people at home… The Air Force can strike at once at its ultimate objective; the national will to resist.¹²⁴