The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

It would be a simple step to conclude from this that when German air fleets were unleashed against British cities from the autumn of 1940, Hitler was fulfilling his promise to annihilate the source of his strategic frustration with a campaign of terror bombing. In a speech to the assembled organizers of the Winter Help organization on 4 September 1940 Hitler apparently gave vent to that frustration following a number of small-scale air attacks on the German capital. He promised his listeners that German bombers would repay the British tenfold for what they were doing ‘and raze their cities to the ground’. The American journalist William Shirer, who was present, observed the effect on a largely female audience, which by the end was on its feet baying approval.² The SS Security Service (SD), monitoring popular opinion, found that Hitler’s speech made a deep impression on the public when it was reported, but most of all the threat to obliterate British cities.³ Yet neither Hitler’s prediction to Gafencu nor his promise to the German public can be taken at face value. Both were clearly designed for political effect and the threats rhetorical. In the confines of his headquarters Hitler took a more modest view of air power, whose development he had influenced to only a small degree. The air force that was turned against Britain in 1940 had not been designed to carry out a long-range ‘strategic’ campaign and when ordered to do so that autumn there was no directive to carry out obliteration bombing, though the effects on the ground were often construed as such by the victims. Though the popular view in the West has always been that German bombing was ‘terror bombing’, almost by definition, Hitler for once held back. In the first years of the war, until British area bombing called for retaliation in kind, Hitler refused to sanction ‘terror bombing’ and rejected requests from the German Air Staff to initiate it. Not until the onset of the V-Weapon attacks in June 1944 did he endorse the entirely indiscriminate assault of British targets.⁴

FROM WARSAW TO PARIS

For the first year of the war the German Air Force conducted what was called ‘Operational Air War’ as it had been laid down in the ‘Guidelines for the Conduct of Air Warfare’ drawn up by the infant force in 1935 and issued in a revised version in 1940. Although the air force sought to distinguish air strategy from that of the army and navy by virtue of its exceptional mobility, flexibility and striking power, in practice German air strategy was linked closely to the ground campaign. Air forces were expected to defeat the enemy air force and its sources of supply and operation; to provide direct battlefield support for the army or navy against the enemy surface forces; and to attack more distant targets, several hundred kilometres from the front line, which served the enemy air effort. These targets included energy supply, war production, food supply, imports, the transport network, military bases and centres of government and administration. The list did not include attacks on enemy morale or residential centres, which the air force regarded as a waste of strategic effort, but it did include provision for revenge attacks if an enemy bombed German civilians. All operations, except these last, were designed to undermine the enemy’s capacity to sustain front-line resistance. Operational air warfare contributed to the central aim of forcing the enemy armed forces to give up the fight.⁵

In practice the limits of German air technology, with a heavy multi-engine bomber still at the development stage, meant that the air force was regarded principally as a powerful tool to unhinge the enemy front by using fighters to destroy the enemy air force while twin-engine medium bombers, heavy fighters and dive-bombers attacked the enemy field formations and more distant economic and military targets. The instructions for air support of the army, issued in July 1939, acknowledged that air power could be exercised indirectly in support of the army by undermining enemy supply and production and reducing the war-willingness of the enemy nation. But it was emphasized that the air force would be needed primarily to help speed up the movement of the army by attacking a wide number of targets, fixed or fleeting, on or just behind the battlefront, which stood in the army’s way.⁶ The decision to organize the air force in integrated air fleets, each with its own component of bombers, fighters, dive-bombers and reconnaissance aircraft, and each allocated to a particular army group, enhanced the flexible, multi-tasked character of air warfare, but also tied the air force to the land campaign. The critical element in air-army cooperation was rightly seen to be effective communication between ground and air, and air force directives in 1939 and 1940 made something of a fetish of precisely described links by radio or signal or liaison officer.⁷