The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

Through all the arguments about German strategy during July 1940 the one consistent thread was the importance of the German Air Force as the key instrument for creating the possibility of British defeat. This reality pampered air force pretensions. A later wartime account of the summer of 1940 by the air force history office underlined the novelty of a situation in which the air force could now undertake the ‘strategic offensive… on its own and independent of the other services’.⁴² A paper prepared by the commander of Fliegerkorps I in July opened with the defiant assertion that Germany was by definition an ‘air power’ whereas Britain was a sea power: ‘Its chief weapon against England is the Air Force, then the Navy, followed by the landing forces and the Army.’⁴³ Extensive intelligence on British targets had been gathered by the air force before the outbreak of war in case it should ever be needed. On 1 June 1939 the German Air Ministry had published a comprehensive volume on British air forces, anti-aircraft defences, war economic targets and flying conditions. Orientation Book Great Britain provided exceptionally detailed maps of British airbases, support depots and anti-aircraft defences. The maps of key economic targets included grain silos, oil storage tanks, the aircraft industry, the armaments industry, raw material production, iron ore fields, steelworks and aluminium plants. The graphs of cloud-cover frequency varied from an average of 40 to 50 per cent across the year over Croydon in the south to between 65 and 85 per cent over Tynemouth in the north.⁴⁴ A second gazetteer of the economic geography and meteorological pattern of the British Isles was available from 1938 and reissued in February 1940. Its 100 pages supplied a wealth of detailed information about every major city and port, including photographs of the dock areas and calculations of average wind speeds and direction over the course of a typical year. The climatic information painted a gloomy picture for a possible strategic air war. ‘All in all,’ concluded the document, ‘it appears that the British Isles, particularly in the winter months of frequent storms, fog and dense cloud, present very difficult meteorological flying conditions, which without doubt belong among the most unpleasant to be found in any of those major countries regarded as civilised [Kulturländer].’⁴⁵

Even before any decisions had been taken at Hitler’s headquarters, the air force ordered training operations over targets in southern England using small numbers of aircraft, or sometimes only a single plane. Significantly these flights, known generally by the German term Störangriffe (nuisance raids), were undertaken both by day and by night to prepare German bomber pilots for raids of either kind. Some involved mining operations off the English coast. The so-called ‘schooling flights’ were intended to familiarize crews with the target areas, the pattern of enemy anti-aircraft defences, and the variety of routes available to attack a particular objective, so that when the real offensive was ordered there would be a greater prospect of operational success. Crews sent on the raids were told to alter the timings continually in order to confuse the defenders.⁴⁶ The British side found it difficult to understand what the object of the German intruders could be, since the bombs were scattered widely over often quite insubstantial targets. On one night bombs were distributed almost entirely on open country in Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Gloucestershire, Shropshire and South Wales (where a lucky hit struck Monmouth railway station).⁴⁷ It was finally assumed by the RAF that the attacks were practice runs, testing the water before a larger campaign, as indeed they were.