Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (15 page)

But these points relate to the inaccuracy of strategic bombing, not to its intention. An aerial attack against specific enemy military targets, even if it went badly astray on any particular night, was still an assault upon the other side’s total fighting capacity; it was clearly within the long-established traditions of the “rules of war.” But a dedicated air campaign to weaken the enemy’s resolve by deliberately plastering his major cities was something else. It disregarded the West’s long-established principles of proportionality. Now, the purpose of this chapter is not to analyze the
ethics
of the Second World War’s strategic bombing campaigns but to examine their
efficacy,
and especially why the Anglo-American bombing in particular failed to live up to its forecasted performance until 1944, when it finally gained command of the air over western Europe. Still, it will be important to keep these distinctions in mind as the story unfolds: tactical air fighting was clearly very different from strategic bombing, but the nature and meaning of discriminate versus indiscriminate aerial warfare introduces an even greater distinction in most people’s eyes. This is why so many books on this topic have been written with such passion.
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There is one final, intriguing point to notice about airpower theory: it lacked historical experience. When Clausewitz wrote
On War,
he distilled the lessons of hundreds of years of European land warfare that had culminated in the gigantic struggles of Napoleonic war. And when Mahan wrote
The Influence of Sea Power upon History,
his grand-theoretical arguments were followed by a detailed account of naval warfare in a specific time frame that was also part of the book’s title: 1660–1783. Airpower theorists could only look forward: there was no
past, merely hints of the potentially revolutionary effects upon war of humankind’s newly found capacity to fly. Their visions, no less than Tennyson’s, were wildly conjectural. They were hypotheses. And, the theorists felt, they needed testing.

Strategic bombing was forged in the furnace of the First World War. By 1914 most of the great powers possessed some military aircraft, often divided into army planes and navy planes, albeit of the same primitive designs. Early wartime aircraft were chiefly used for reconnaissance and artillery spotting, and it was some time before rival squadrons began tangling with each other over the trenches. But the industrialization of war in all its forms swiftly impacted the nascent aircraft industries, which began to turn out more powerful, better-armed, and longer-range planes. The first raids against enemy soil were chiefly carried out by German zeppelins against England in a campaign between January 1915 and November 1916 that claimed dozens of lives and did much damage, but more indicative of the future was the attack upon Folkestone on May 25, 1917. In this daylight raid twenty-one twin-engine Gotha bombers hit the seaside town, killing 165 and seriously wounding another 432 civilians. A new era had begun.

The Folkestone raid, and the bombings of London that soon followed, produced panic and riots, galvanizing Lloyd George’s government not just into providing barrage balloons, high-level guns, and other air defense measures but also into taking the more dramatic institutional step of creating an independent Air Ministry that would take over the separate forces of the Army’s Royal Flying Corps and the Navy’s Royal Naval Air Service. In the Smuts Report of August 1917, its author, the talented South African general who was at that point a key member of the Imperial War Cabinet, advanced in a single paragraph the case for strategic airpower:

Persuaded by Smuts’s elegant prose and by the nationwide alarm, the government not only established the independent Royal Air Force in April 1918 but also authorized funds for the building of long-range, four-engine Vickers Vimy and Handley-Page bombers that would carry the fight to the center of Berlin.

As it turned out, the war ended before such strategic bombing could begin, but there was no doubt that the aerial events of 1917 and 1918 had given birth to a totally new dimension of human conflict. Britain went further than any other country in creating an independent air arm, in part because it wanted to deter any future attacks on its island fastness by threatening to inflict even more damage upon an enemy, in part because it tended to see its own strategic bombing as a natural aerial extension of the naval blockade that had weakened Germany, and finally because it was a relatively easy substitute for sending vast future armies back to the bloodied trenches of Europe. France’s obsession, understandably, was with land security, so air forces continued as a supplement to the army—the service itself was called L’Armée de l’Air. Russia was first convulsed in civil war, then preoccupied by early Bolshevik reconstruction, then concerned almost exclusively with homeland defense. In Japan the mutual dislike between its army and navy was such that two parallel air forces were created, each to support the operations of the mother service, and neither of which called for building large, expensive bombers. The same service bipolarity occurred in the United States, although that did not stop the U.S. Army Air Corps from developing significant theories and designs for long-range strategic bombing during the interwar years. Only in Mussolini’s Italy was a separate air arm developed to match the British structures, though in that case only with a mix of medium-range bombers and fighters.

Though Smuts’s concept of a transcendent war-winning weapon was nowhere near developed in the years after 1919 because of service jealousies and because the newfound air services were being slashed to
the bone by postwar financial retrenchments, nevertheless the
theory
of airpower’s unique capacities and even greater potential gained more and more conviction. This was due, in no small measure, to three remarkable prophet-propagandists: the redoubtable General Billy Mitchell in the United States; the first head of the Royal Air Force, Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard; and the Italian airman-author Giulio Douhet.
¹²
Each of them had begun his career as an army officer and been witness to modern, expensive land warfare before he was moved on to his country’s fledgling air service. Each was attracted to the possibilities of fighting offered by this new dimension of conflict. Each faced hostile criticism from many sides and, as a consequence, tended to advance the claims of airpower much further than was practicable at the time: they were laying claim to the future, and the more they did so, the more the traditionalists tried to block them. Mitchell, indeed, was reverted to the rank of colonel in 1925 and shortly afterward court-martialed for his public attacks upon the army and navy’s leadership.

None of the three was as simplistic—or as immoral—in his advocacy of bombing the enemy’s heartland as later portrayals would suggest. For example, Trenchard, in his first comprehensive statement of air doctrine (1927), made a distinction between scaring enemy workers away from their factory or dockyard by frequently bombing their workplaces and “the indiscriminate bombing of a city for the sole purpose of terrorizing the civilian population,” which would be “contrary to the dictates of humanity.”

Notwithstanding that caveat, Trenchard’s claim that the best way to defeat any future foe was to strike at his industrial heartland produced robust and withering retorts from the professional heads of the British Army and the Royal Navy, both of whom pointed out not only the dubious accuracy and thus immorality of bombing civil-industrial targets but also the lack of empirical evidence that such a strategy would bring an enemy to his knees.
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If any group was responsible for painting the horrifying specter of cities and civilians devastated by future aerial attack, it was the professional politicians of the interwar years and the popular press. The best-known and most-quoted statement of all came from the Tory leader Stanley Baldwin in November 1932:

Grim words; and the fact that Baldwin was generally regarded as a mild-mannered and soothing figure made this opinion seem even more disturbing to public opinion. “Fear of the bomber” grew and grew, and as the 1930s progressed, news from the fighting in China, Spain, and Ethiopia—especially the reports of poison-gas bombings—only increased the feelings of terror.
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Yet the fact was that powerful, long-range, independent strategic air forces had still not arrived when the Second World War broke out. For the geopolitical and political reasons mentioned above, neither the French, Soviet, nor Japanese armed service placed value or priority upon strategic air campaigning—the threats were much closer to home. The Luftwaffe was more balanced in its air doctrines and weapons systems, and by 1939 it possessed large numbers of medium-range bombers, but the building of a true strategic force (like, perhaps, German aircraft carriers) had been postponed because Hitler was obsessed with nearby European conquests. The Italian air force still dallied with Douhet’s strategic boldness, at least in theory, but its situation as by far the weakest of the powers in industrial and technological terms meant that there was a massive gap between rhetoric and reality.

Thus in 1939 the only air forces that even came close to independent aerial power were the RAF’s Bomber Command and its American equivalent. Both had carved out self-standing structures from skeptical or even hostile military and naval establishments to pursue that aim (the American strategic bombing enthusiasts worked in disguised form at the U.S. Army Air Corps’s so-called Tactical School at Maxwell Air Force Base until Congress finally became alarmed at the rise of German and Japanese airpower). Both inherited the Mahanian, navalist assumption that economic pressure upon the foe, now applied from the air as well as by sea, would cause a crumbling from within, and also assumed
that the Allies had deeper purses than the Fascist states to sustain such a conflict, especially after the United States joined the conflict openly in December 1941. Both countries also enjoyed a “moat”—a stretch of water that kept them from a foe—but, curiously, they felt that bombers (rather than short-range fighters) were the best instrument to effect a surprise attack from over the horizon. Here they were totally different from the continental European powers. How could Prussia-Germany, surrounded on all sides, not stress the primacy of land power and, with the coming of aircraft, not emphasize planes that chiefly supported its armies? Only the British and the Americans had the privilege of choice.

Ironically, however, those American and British bombing advocates still did not have the capacity to implement what their theories of strategic warfare called for. They had prototype four-engine “heavies” on their testing fields or still on the drawing boards, but their air staffs were also under increasing pressure to give priority to antisubmarine aircraft, carrier planes, and fighters for defense of the homeland. Scared of the Luftwaffe’s rise, the British government and public in the late 1930s wanted the security of fighters overhead more than anything else. Thus bomber programs had no monopoly on production during those years, nor would they when war broke out.

What was more, the early stages of the air war pushed strategic bombing further to the margins. The United States military would be sitting on the sidelines for another twenty-five months, watching the conflict spread across Europe and planning for its great future demonstration of airpower, but (obviously) without any direct experience of what it was like to conduct an aerial offensive day after day. By contrast, RAF Bomber Command was in the thick of it from the beginning, although under highly constrained circumstances. The French would not let them fly from French bases out of a fear of reprisal attacks, and the Air Ministry at first thought its bombers should drop propaganda pamphlets on northern Germany rather than explosives. Even in assaults using explosives, the existing aircraft were rather slow, did not fly at very high altitudes, carried a meager amount of bombs, and had few defenses against Luftwaffe fighters in daytime encounters. As a result, by April 1940 Bomber Command had confined itself to nighttime bombing. While this reduced losses, it massively reduced accuracy as well.

In any case, all eyes were on the Luftwaffe’s stunning successes in 1939–40. Working with the relatively few but massively effective Wehrmacht panzer and motorized infantry divisions, the German air force swept into Poland, not only wiping out the less modernized Polish army but also inflicting horrific, indiscriminate bombing raids upon Warsaw and other cities. All the imagined nightmares of civilian slaughter, collapsed buildings, and panicked crowds so luridly described in the interwar literature were now realized in the attacks of the loud, screaming Stukas or the steady aerial bombardment of the Dorniers and Heinkels. After seven months of “phony war,” the same happened to the Netherlands, Belgium, and Norway in the late spring of 1940. What could stop the vultures from the sky, especially when they were followed up by paratroops, tank columns, and assault forces? How could, say, the city of Rotterdam avoid the devastation that had hit Warsaw? Nothing would suffice—or, at least, nothing in the slim armories of the Dutch and Polish states in 1939–40. To all observers, then, it appeared that Hitler’s massive investments in the Luftwaffe had given Germany an unbeatable weapon. The astonishing defeat of France in May and June 1940, the eclipse of what had been one of western Europe’s greatest military nations for the past three centuries, totally confirmed this impression. Traditional principles of warfare were obsolete.