These dire predictions were a reflection of a fear that gripped everyone. ‘We had entered a period,’ Churchill wrote later, ‘when the weapon which had played a considerable part in the previous war had become obsessive in men’s minds. Ministers had to imagine the most frightful scenes of ruin and slaughter in London if we quarrelled with the German dictator.’4
Much of the alarm had been generated by the man who was regarded by both politicians and the public as the country’s greatest authority on air war. Hugh Trenchard had risen to be head of the Royal Air Force during the First World War. He was known as ‘Boom’ to his colleagues, a reference to his foghorn voice. They regarded him and his utterances with what now seems like extraordinary reverence. ‘What a character he is!’ declared Sir John Slessor, one of his many disciples and a wartime bomber group commander. ‘The enormous lanky figure; the absent-minded manner, shot with sudden flashes of shrewd and humorous insight; the illegible handwriting; the inarticulate speech – always a lap or two behind his racing brain; his wonderful capacity for getting people’s names mixed up. Boom was a constant source of joy to those who were lucky enough to serve under him.’5
Lord Trenchard, as he became, was forceful and confident and contemptuous of ideas that were not his own. He had been head of the first separate bombing force, created in 1918 to repay the Germans for having bombed England. He had started out, though, as a doubter, sceptical of what aircraft could achieve on their own. His conversion to the value of strategic bombing, when it came, was absolute. Through the Twenties and Thirties he became the foremost advocate of using aeroplanes to smash the enemy into submission on their own territory. He was to exercise a powerful influence over RAF and government policy right into the early years of the war, with dogmatic assertions which were seldom backed up by data.
An early and often-repeated dictum was that ‘the moral effect of bombing industrial towns may be great, even if the material effect is, in fact, small.’ Later he refined this into the doctrine that ‘the moral effect of bombing stands undoubtedly to the material effect in a proportion of 20 to 1’, an observation that had no basis in measurable fact. After the slaughter of 1914–18, the prospect of any war, let alone one that promised annihilation of civilians from the air, was horrifying to governments and populations alike. In the pre-Hitler years there were several international attempts to outlaw the bomber: at Washington in 1922, The Hague in 1923 and Geneva in 1932. They all ended in failure, undermined by pessimism, cynicism and the impossibility of uninventing the machine that defined the century.
Britain had been at the forefront of attempts to ban the bomber and had held back from spending on the development and production of bomber aircraft in the hope that they would not be needed. The rapid rearmament of Nazi Germany after Hitler’s victory in 1933 forced the abandonment of this policy and the start of a scramble for military parity.
The hope was that a sizeable bomber fleet might deter a German attack. If not, it would provide the means, and given Britain’s geographical position and dearth of soldiers, the sole means of striking back if Germany dared to attempt an aerial ‘knock-out blow’ at the start of hostilities.
By the end of the First World War, Britain was already committed to a policy of strategic bombing. The main work of the air force between 1914 and 1918 had been tactical: to support the army, flying reconnaissance missions, spotting the fall of artillery shells and attacking German soldiers in the field. Later, bigger aeroplanes and heavier bomb loads raised the possibility that the air force could play a strategic role in defeating the enemy, by attacking the factories and foundries and power plants that turned the engines of modern industrial war.
The possession of a long-range bombing fleet suited British needs. A Continental power like Nazi Germany saw aeroplanes largely as an adjunct to its land forces who would carry out the main work of conquest. This was reflected in its choice of versatile, medium-sized aircraft which could blaze a trail of destruction to clear the path for its advancing armies, as well as carrying out conventional bombing.
Britain’s case was very different. It had no plans to invade anyone and saw air power chiefly as a means of defence – but a defence founded on aggression. Trenchard had stimulated the offensive spirit among his pilots on the Western Front, rarely flinching from the losses that that policy inevitably entailed.
Some in the RAF argued that Germany could be defeated by bombing alone. That was always an extreme view. However everyone, including the chiefs of the other services, agreed that the air force had a major role to play in destroying Germany’s war industry, demoralizing its population, and preparing the ground for the army to finish the job.
This was the essence of strategic bombing, and in the interwar years it was the RAF’s ability to wage a strategic bombing campaign that provided the chief justification for its existence. Everything was geared to attack, with only minor consideration given to the defensive role of aircraft. Bombers outnumbered fighters by about two to one through the period. There was a brief, fortuitous diversion from this path in 1937 when the Air Staff was forced to accept the argument of Sir Thomas Inskip, brought in as Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence, that Britain needed a strengthened fighter force to ward off the immediate threat from the German air force. But the RAF’s resultant triumph in the summer of 1940, when the Battle of Britain swirled in the sky over southern England, did nothing to subvert the doctrinal orthodoxy that it was attacks that won wars.
Despite this preoccupation, the RAF started the war with a bomber fleet that was totally inadequate to carry out its own stated aims. The machines of the early Thirties were ungainly and saddled with uninspiring names. The Boulton Paul Overstrand, the Fairey Hendon and the Handley Page Harrow did not sound likely to strike fear into the enemy. They were stop-gaps, filling the ranks until the arrival of the new generation of aircraft. The programme to re-equip with giant, four-engined aircraft, which eventually produced the Stirling, Halifax and Lancaster, was launched in 1936, but it took until 1942 for them to start arriving on the squadrons. Bomber Command’s heaviest bombers at the start of the war were two-engined Wellingtons, Hampdens and Whitleys, which were reasonably advanced for the time but plainly insufficient for the task that the air force had set itself.
The RAF’s blueprint for waging war was contained in the Western Air Plans, first drawn up in 1936. They rested on the belief that bombers could find and destroy the factories, oil installations, roads and railways that were the object of a strategic force’s attentions. This was to turn out to be a hugely mistaken assumption.
The plans supposed that Germany would start the war either by attacking Belgium and France or by launching an all-out bombing campaign on Britain. In the first case, Bomber Command was to attempt to slow down the advance of the German army by striking its supply lines. In the second, it was to reduce the power of the Luftwaffe assault by attacking aerodromes and other aviation targets. At the same time, the Air Staff who directed the command’s efforts were also eager to disrupt the enemy’s supply of oil. The dream of bringing the German military to a halt by starving it of fuel would persist to the last days of the war.
In the event the Germans took their time digesting their prey before raising their eyes hungrily westwards. Britain did little to provoke them. Until the invasion of Norway in April 1940, the RAF confined itself to intermittent raids on shipping and leaflet-dropping sorties over Germany and the conquered territories. This was partly a reflection of the scrupulousness that was Britain’s official policy. Thirty months before the start of the war Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain announced to the House of Commons that Britain would only bomb purely military objectives and take every measure to avoid civilian casualties. A few days after it began, the RAF’s Director of Plans, Air Commodore Sir John Slessor, promised that ‘indiscriminate attack on civilian populations as such will never form part of our policy’.
But the caution was also a reflection of reality. The air force was weak and inadequately equipped and in no position to risk its men and machines unnecessarily. The phoney war period provided Bomber Command with a desperately needed space in which to measure its capabilities and build up its strength.