Governing from the Skies. Thomas Hippler

that technology would undergo a major development that would supersede all past experience. This technological optimism was inseparably bound up with the imaginary power attached to aviation as the only weapon capable of breaking the battlefield paralysis. Then, the tactical situation at the front, particularly in the West, led soldiers to experiment with all kinds of new solutions. There was thus an element of military contingency. But an improvised solution could only be lastingly applied if it met the global political situation of the European nations at war: behind military contingency, then, there were in the end profound political causes.

      As far as the military conjuncture was concerned, the stabilization of the front and the impossibility of breaking it led the belligerents to seek desperately for solutions to escape this paralysis. The first hope was to find such solutions on the front, by using ever heavier guns, tactical bombing, combat gas. It was the Central Powers, geostrategically under siege, who had the most to fear from the stalemate on the front, whereas the Entente, enjoying numerical superiority and command of the seas, could legitimately hope to sustain the war effort longer. It was not surprising, then, that it was the ‘contender’ that sought to win rapidly and by any means: from the invasion of Belgium, the German forces resorted to ever more violent means and were the first to use toxic gas against enemy forces. But after meeting with repeated failure to break the front in this way, Germany began to envisage other paths, to bypass the front and strike no longer the active armed forces but rather the sources of their power – industrial production, means of transport, and the political and moral cohesion of their peoples.

      Aerial bombing falls into the heritage of naval bombing, practised in the Crimean War and in the colonies, then theorized by the ‘Jeune École’ as a way of checking British hegemony.³³ After France’s alliance with the hegemonic powers before the First World War, the role of chief contender fell to Germany: it was thus logical that Germany should be the first to resort to the ‘terrorist’ methods that French republican strategists had already mapped out. Given the crushing British naval superiority in the North Sea, the German navy only left its home ports for lightning raids on British coastal towns at the end of 1914. One hundred and thirty-seven persons were killed, mostly civilians, and 592 injured.³⁴ It was from precisely this logic that the military high command developed its plan to attack London from the air.³⁵

      Until the Great War, the debate between the respective champions of ‘lighter than air’ (balloons and airships) and ‘heavier than air’ (aeroplanes) was not yet settled. Some nations, including France, opted for the aeroplane, while others, like Germany, rather favoured the airship.³⁶ Contrary to planes – small, unstable, and with limited range at the start of the war – Zeppelins were able to carry heavy loads of bombs and make the round trip between the front and London. The naval attacks of 1914 shocked international public opinion, and Wilhelm II initially prohibited this type of attack, authorizing it only after the bombing of German cities by French forces at the beginning of 1916.³⁷ Air attacks were a periodic feature of the rest of the war, particularly in 1917, before it was decided to stop the experiment for lack of tangible military results. Who could seriously believe that the 227 civilians dead and 677 wounded in the raids on London of June and July 1917 could have any effect on the course of the war?³⁸

      All the same, the enemy nation owed it to itself to respond to such attacks. And this is where military contingency – improvisation and resort to terror provoking reprisals, and so on – is no longer a sufficient explanation, with deep political causes coming into play. Of the two contradictory developments that characterized the relation between nation and war in the twentieth century – the convergence between citizen and armed forces on the one hand, the immunity of civilian populations on the other – the first now gained the upper hand over the second.

      It was not just that ‘nations’ were taken as targets; it was also these that mutually designated each other as targets. It was they that gave rise to strategic ideas and became the primordial actors of political life in the warring countries. To make this clear: strategy was no longer simply the domain of state military apparatuses; the ‘nation’ – that is, public opinion in the nationalized civil society – now also played its part. To give only a few examples, in August 1915, Alfred Le Châtelier, professor at the Collège de France, called for the bombing of German cities with an armada of at least 1,000 planes, while H. G. Wells held that 2,000 bombers would be needed to demolish the Essen arms factories and destroy the industrial base of the German war effort.³⁹

      It almost goes without saying that the hopes placed on strategic bombing were totally disconnected from military, technological, and industrial reality, first of all on account of the poor precision of the bombers. The reply of the champions of bombing was that it was enough to dispatch a sufficiently sizeable flotilla to a sufficiently large target – in other words, thousands of bombers to a large city – to be certain of causing damage. None of the nations at war, however, had this number of planes at their disposal. Experience at the front, moreover, showed that planes were far from being as invulnerable as was imagined, and that anti-aircraft defence posed a serious threat. No matter, the prophets of aeronautics exclaimed; if planes did not give the expected result then more would have to be built, 10,000 according to H. G. Wells. Such demands became increasingly far-fetched, especially if we bear in mind that in 1915, only Italy, the weakest of the European great powers, possessed a plane designed specially for bombing.⁴⁰