The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

It may well be that in both Britain and the United States popular fears about a war from the air were more powerfully and publicly expressed, given the previous geographical immunity both states had enjoyed before the coming of the aeroplane, and that as a result popular phobias fuelled military speculation that bombing the home front would have immediate results. But whatever the source of this conviction, it governed most air force expectations about how the next war should be fought.

Did this make the bombing offensives of the Second World War inevitable? Certainly no force in 1939 was prepared to carry out an annihilating, war-winning ‘knockout blow’ of the kind Douhet had envisaged, with thousands of massed bombing aircraft, using every possible weapon to destroy the popular war-willingness of the enemy in a matter of days. The RAF was the only air force to consider the possibility, but it was restrained by everything – inadequate technical means, a shortage of aircraft, the prevailing political and legal restrictions on attacking civilians – from carrying out such a strike. In other air forces different cultures prevailed and produced contrasting strategic choices. Nevertheless, an independent, potentially war-winning air offensive was difficult to resist by air forces keen to assert their organizational independence – as were all three air forces that eventually mounted major offensives – and anxious to profit from the expansive commitment of scientific, industrial and research skills to air force procurement. Each air force was also very aware of the imperatives imposed by ‘modern’ war, not only the ‘civilianization’ of warfare implied by total war, but the need to keep abreast of technical developments (atomic weapons, jets, rockets, radar) that might transform the nature of air warfare itself and make escalation unavoidable.

In addition, there was the pervasive popular image of future war. Despite its apocalyptic language and fantastic imagery, there can be little doubt that the constant fictional representation of a bombing war created a widespread expectation that this is how the war was going to be waged, and would have to be waged to prevent one side or the other from gaining an overwhelming advantage. On 1 September 1939, the day that Germany invaded Poland, the air-raid sirens sounded in blacked-out Berlin in the early evening. Berliners panicked, grabbing gas masks and rushing for the shelters in case Polish bombers had somehow succeeded in breaking through to the capital. ‘The ugly shrill of the sirens,’ wrote the American journalist, William Shirer, ‘the utter darkness of the night – how will human nerves stand that for long?’¹²⁵ During the night of 3 September, the date Britain declared war on Germany, the air-raid warning sounded all over southern England. The population braced itself for mass bombing and gas attack. The following morning, wrote one wartime diarist who had sat terrified all night, ‘practically everyone is now carrying a gas mask. What a reflection on our civilisation!’¹²⁶ Both cases were false alarms, and they remained false for many more months. Yet it is a reasonable, if unverifiable, assumption that knowledge of such intense popular fear prompted air forces to go further than they would otherwise have gone when bombing offensives were finally launched. In this case imagination and reality became fatefully entwined.

2 The First Strategic Air Offensive, September 1940 to June 1941

In April 1939 Adolf Hitler sat in his private apartment at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin in conversation with the Romanian diplomat, Grigore Gafencu. He used the opportunity to complain vigorously about the obstructive policies of the British government and the pointlessness of a contest between the two states. In a rising temper he told Gafencu that if England wanted war, ‘it will have it’. Not a war as in 1914, but one in which Germany would use new and terrible weapons, the fruit of her technical genius. ‘Our Air Force leads the world,’ he exclaimed, ‘and no enemy town will be left standing!’ Gafencu, silenced by the diatribe, listened as Hitler’s voice grew calmer and graver. ‘But after all,’ he continued, ‘why this unimaginable massacre? In the end victor or vanquished, we shall all be buried in the same ruins.’ Only Stalin, he reflected, would benefit from a destructive air war.¹