In accordance with the findings of the Smuts Report, the Air Ministry set about creating the world’s first independent force of aeroplanes and airships – the Royal Air Force, which finally came into being on 1 April 1918. Five weeks later one of the most influential men in the history of air power, Brigadier-General Sir Hugh Trenchard, was appointed to command an independent force of British bombers in France. His brief was to attack every German railway junction, airfield, factory and iron foundry within 150 miles of his airbase at Nancy. Since most of these targets were in heavily built-up areas, bombing them would have the added effect of undermining civilian morale.
The new commander of the independent bombing force took to his task with gusto. Trenchard was well known among the British establishment for his tremendous efficiency and enthusiasm for air power. Known affectionately as ‘Boom’, because of his booming voice, he was a man of strong opinions who had a talent for finding and nurturing gifted subordinates. His many disciples included the future leader of Bomber Command in the Second World War, Arthur Harris, and the American prophet of air power, William Mitchell, who regularly sought Trenchard’s help and advice in 1917 and 1918.
According to Trenchard, the aeroplane was almost exclusively a weapon of attack, and any use of aircraft to defend against enemy bombers was at best useless, and at worst recklessly wasteful. In 1917 when two squadrons of fighters were withdrawn from the Western Front to defend London he was greatly angered, and argued that the British were merely playing into German hands by diverting men and equipment away from the one place where they were most useful. The destruction the Germans were wreaking on British and French cities had to be borne until the RAF’s own bomber attacks on Germany threw the enemy on to the defensive. Trenchard recognized the limitations of bombers in the First World War, but saw their future potential, particularly in the breaking of enemy morale.
As Trenchard began his bombing campaign on the towns of western Germany, the traditional British restraint over the fate of non-combatants became a thing of the past. There is no question that this policy was sanctioned by the government. In September 1918 the air minister, Lord Weir, wrote to Trenchard: ‘If I were you, I would not be too exacting as regards accuracy in bombing railway stations in the middle of towns. The German is susceptible to bloodiness, and I would not mind a few accidents due to inaccuracy.’ Trenchard’s reply showed no squeamishness for the fate of civilians: ‘I do not think you need be anxious about our degree of accuracy when bombing stations in the middle of towns. The accuracy is not great at present, and all the pilots drop their eggs well into the middle of the town generally.’ 11For Trenchard, the main use of bombers was in breaking the morale of the German people. As he said after the war, ‘The moral effect of bombing stands undoubtedly to the material effect in a proportion of twenty to one.’ 12
The seeds sown by the German zeppelins and Gothas in 1917 had grown into a full-blown policy of indiscriminate destruction: ‘area bombing’ had been born. The only blessing for German civilians was that the policy was short-lived. On 11 November 1918 the armistice agreement was signed, and the towns of Germany were spared any further bombardment. However, the spectre of strategic bombing had been released, and would return twenty years later to haunt the entire European continent for six long, devastating years.
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The advent of strategic bombing marked a huge change, not only in the way wars would be waged in the future but in the concept of what constituted warfare. Whereas in the past the devastating effects of war had been confined to a relatively small area – the immediate ‘battle zone’ – now aircraft could leapfrog armies and bring destruction to areas hundreds of miles behind the front lines. Since aircraft could go anywhere, the battlefield had grown to encompass entire nations. Moreover, their targets were no longer specific factories or arsenals, but ‘the morale of the people’. Generals on both sides used these new weapons to take the fighting to the heart of their enemy’s cities, and they did this for the simple reason that now, at last, they could.
It is easy to condemn the actions of people like Trenchard, or the German zeppelin commanders who ordered the bombing of London and Paris, but the opposing sides were waging what the French quickly called ‘ la guerre totale’, 13and there was a dreadful but undeniable logic to their actions. When an entire nation’s resources are backing the prosecution of a war, why should a military commander draw any distinction between the soldier at the front and the civilian in a factory that produces weapons? Shortly after the war, studies on air power appeared across the world, and almost all agreed on this point: there was no longer any difference between civilian and soldier. When farmers grow food for the army, miners produce their raw materials, railway workers bring them to the front, and women and children provide soldiers with comfort while they are on leave, all these people become legitimate targets. In an era of total war there can be no holding back, because any action that produces a knock-out blow to the enemy will potentially save the lives of tens of thousands. This logic drove the military strategy of the time.
After the dreadful waste of all the static, defensive land battles of the past four years, air power soon began to be seen as the perfect way to restore movement to warfare. It was the offensive weapon par excellence, striking suddenly and giving the enemy no time to parry the blow by calling up reinforcements. It was also cheap. In the face of widespread cuts in defence spending after the war, Trenchard was able to keep the fledgling RAF intact simply because it was so much cheaper to police the British Empire with a bomber force than it was to launch expeditions by the army on the ground. Trenchard’s vision was to create a long-range bomber force with which Britain could maintain her empire and keep her European neighbours at bay, much as she had done with her navy for most of the previous two hundred years.
However, as theorists like the influential Giulio Douhet pointed out, Britain did not rule the air as she did the sea. Not only that, but air power was fundamentally different from sea power: aeroplanes were not limited in scope or direction of movement, and now even the heart of the British Empire itself was vulnerable. London, ‘the great metropolis until now rejoicing in her inviolability’, could be attacked just as easily as anywhere else. 14
That fact was not lost on the population of London, which still remembered the panic caused by the 1917 Gotha attacks. During the 1920s and 1930s a succession of lurid novels appeared in which the bombing of London produced swarms of refugees like ‘human rats’, 15or where in the post-apocalyptic ruins of the city ‘the people lived on the rats and the rats lived on the people’. 16Films like the 1936 science-fiction movie Things to Comeshowed how bombing would be used in a global war that would eventually destroy civilization throughout the world. The opinions of the professionals were no more reassuring. In 1923 J. F. C. Fuller warned that the dropping of poison gas on London might injure as many as two hundred thousand people in half an hour, and ‘throw the whole city into panic’. 17Douhet was even more graphic in his predictions, and claimed that bombing a city like London would result in ‘a complete breakdown of the social structure’, which would inevitably lead the people to rise up in revolution against their own government. 18
All these various prophets of air power singled out London in their descriptions because at that time the British capital was still by far the most powerful city in Europe, and also the one most protected by natural barriers. If London were vulnerable, how much more vulnerable must every other European city be? As a consequence, fear of bombing was fairly universal throughout western Europe between the wars. Even Canada and the USA were not immune to such anxieties, despite their geographical remoteness from any enemy – as was demonstrated by the faintly absurd air-raid scares in Ottawa and New York during the last year of the war, and again in 1942. 19But it was only in Britain that such concerns reached virtual hysteria. By the 1930s even the most enthusiastic champion of bombing, J. M. Spaight, was forced to admit to a widespread pessimism among his contemporaries, who foresaw ‘a fate comparable to that of Sodom and Gomorrah’ for British cities. 20