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Authors: Max Hastings
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children. Every objective I have given my bombers is a point of military importance which the guns would shell if they couldreach it. Otherwise the pilots, if captured, would be liable to be treated as war criminals.’ Both the pre-war plans of Bomber Command and the early operations of war undertaken by its crews invariably specified strategic targets: factories, rail yards, power stations.
Yet it is impossible to accept the airmen’s declarations at face value. Trenchard said in 1919 that ‘at present, the moral effect of bombing stands undoubtedly to the material effect in a proportion of twenty to one’, and ever since it had been the prospect of destroying the enemy’s morale, bringing about the collapse of his will to resist by bombing, that lay at the heart of the airmen’s vision of a bomber offensive. Most of them understood perfectly well that attack upon an enemy nation and its morale meant the killing of civilians, but they were reluctant to say so, and even at the height of their offensive in the Second World War, their political masters remained persistently deceitful about revealing the nature of what was being done to Germany. In 1927 and even 1937, it seemed unthinkable to make the kind of mathematical projection carried out as a routine daily exercise at Bomber Command headquarters in 1943, in which ‘Effort’ measured ‘tons of bombs claimed dropped per built-up acre attacked’, ‘Efficiency’ measured ‘acres of devastation per ton of bombs claimed dropped’, and ‘Success’ was calculated by ‘acres of devastation per acre of built-up area attacked’.
No scientific study had been conducted in 1917 (of the sort that would be made so thoroughly and with such startling conclusions in the Second World War) of the effects on British morale and productivity of the German air attacks. Airmen merely remembered the shock and outcry among the civilian population, and the political panic which had ensued. The notion had bitten deep of a ‘soft centre’ at the heart of a nation behind its shield of armies and navies, that air forces might and must attack.
In air operations against production [wrote the future Chief of Air Staff, Group-Captain John Slessor, in 1936] the weight of attack will inevitably fall upon a vitally important, and not by nature very amenable, section of the community – the industrial workers, whose morale and sticking power cannot be expected to equal that of the disciplined soldier. And we should remember that if the moral effect of air bombardment was serious seventeen years ago, it will be immensely more so under modern conditions. 8
Perhaps the central conscious or subconscious reason that the RAF devoted so little thought to the successful execution of a precision air attack between the wars was that, on the evidence of the 1917 experience, no very accurate aim seemed necessary to provoke the desired moral collapse. In a memorandum of 1938 the Air Staff distinguished two forms of bombing against: ‘(1) the “precise target”, eg a power station . . . (2) the “target group”, of considerable area in which are concentrated many targets of equal or nearly equal importance on which accurate bombing is not necessary to achieve valuable hits, eg parts of cities, industrial towns, distribution centres or storage areas’. If a few tons of German bombs had caused a major political crisis in London in 1917, it seemed reasonable to assume that many times more bombs on such a ‘target group’ as Berlin would provoke a veritable cataclysm. It is also worth remembering that when airmen conceived a future enemy moral collapse in which a crazed and deprived civilian population roamed the streets shooting and looting and demanding peace behind the back of their own armies, they were not weaving a fantasy but remembering the reality of Germany in 1918, albeit forgetting the military collapse that simultaneously took place.
Yet at a time when fierce public controversy
Yet it is impossible to accept the airmen’s declarations at face value. Trenchard said in 1919 that ‘at present, the moral effect of bombing stands undoubtedly to the material effect in a proportion of twenty to one’, and ever since it had been the prospect of destroying the enemy’s morale, bringing about the collapse of his will to resist by bombing, that lay at the heart of the airmen’s vision of a bomber offensive. Most of them understood perfectly well that attack upon an enemy nation and its morale meant the killing of civilians, but they were reluctant to say so, and even at the height of their offensive in the Second World War, their political masters remained persistently deceitful about revealing the nature of what was being done to Germany. In 1927 and even 1937, it seemed unthinkable to make the kind of mathematical projection carried out as a routine daily exercise at Bomber Command headquarters in 1943, in which ‘Effort’ measured ‘tons of bombs claimed dropped per built-up acre attacked’, ‘Efficiency’ measured ‘acres of devastation per ton of bombs claimed dropped’, and ‘Success’ was calculated by ‘acres of devastation per acre of built-up area attacked’.
No scientific study had been conducted in 1917 (of the sort that would be made so thoroughly and with such startling conclusions in the Second World War) of the effects on British morale and productivity of the German air attacks. Airmen merely remembered the shock and outcry among the civilian population, and the political panic which had ensued. The notion had bitten deep of a ‘soft centre’ at the heart of a nation behind its shield of armies and navies, that air forces might and must attack.
In air operations against production [wrote the future Chief of Air Staff, Group-Captain John Slessor, in 1936] the weight of attack will inevitably fall upon a vitally important, and not by nature very amenable, section of the community – the industrial workers, whose morale and sticking power cannot be expected to equal that of the disciplined soldier. And we should remember that if the moral effect of air bombardment was serious seventeen years ago, it will be immensely more so under modern conditions. 8
Perhaps the central conscious or subconscious reason that the RAF devoted so little thought to the successful execution of a precision air attack between the wars was that, on the evidence of the 1917 experience, no very accurate aim seemed necessary to provoke the desired moral collapse. In a memorandum of 1938 the Air Staff distinguished two forms of bombing against: ‘(1) the “precise target”, eg a power station . . . (2) the “target group”, of considerable area in which are concentrated many targets of equal or nearly equal importance on which accurate bombing is not necessary to achieve valuable hits, eg parts of cities, industrial towns, distribution centres or storage areas’. If a few tons of German bombs had caused a major political crisis in London in 1917, it seemed reasonable to assume that many times more bombs on such a ‘target group’ as Berlin would provoke a veritable cataclysm. It is also worth remembering that when airmen conceived a future enemy moral collapse in which a crazed and deprived civilian population roamed the streets shooting and looting and demanding peace behind the back of their own armies, they were not weaving a fantasy but remembering the reality of Germany in 1918, albeit forgetting the military collapse that simultaneously took place.
Yet at a time when fierce public controversy
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