Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare

The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945

Tami Biddle

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781400824977
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'armée et de la marine

A major revision of our understanding of long-range bombing, this book examines how Anglo-American ideas about "strategic" bombing were formed and implemented. It argues that ideas about bombing civilian targets rested on--and gained validity from--widespread but substantially erroneous assumptions about the nature of modern industrial societies and their vulnerability to aerial bombardment. These assumptions were derived from the social and political context of the day and were maintained largely through cognitive error and bias. Tami Davis Biddle explains how air theorists, and those influenced by them, came to believe that strategic bombing would be an especially effective coercive tool and how they responded when their assumptions were challenged.
Biddle analyzes how a particular interpretation of the World War I experience, together with airmen's organizational interests, shaped interwar debates about strategic bombing and preserved conceptions of its potentially revolutionary character. This flawed interpretation as well as a failure to anticipate implementation problems were revealed as World War II commenced. By then, the British and Americans had invested heavily in strategic bombing. They saw little choice but to try to solve the problems in real time and make long-range bombing as effective as possible.
Combining narrative with analysis, this book presents the first-ever comparative history of British and American strategic bombing from its origins through 1945. In examining the ideas and rhetoric on which strategic bombing depended, it offers critical insights into the validity and robustness of those ideas--not only as they applied to World War II but as they apply to contemporary warfare.

CHAPTER ONE

The Beginning: Strategic Bombing

in the First World War

THE history of strategic bombing in the twentieth century is a history of the tension between imagined possibilities and technical realities. In seeking the roots of this tension, it is necessary to turn to World War I, where combat aircraft made their first serious appearance in both tactical and strategic roles—from short-range battlefield reconnaissance to long-distance bombing of enemy cities. In the end, tactical aviation received a fuller test than did strategic flying: the latter’s demands on plane and pilot were more onerous, and armies, unsurprisingly, prioritized their tactical forces since they were of greater immediate use to the war effort. The result was that, by 1918, strategic bombing had received only a brief trial. Because its possibilities seemed farreaching, however, this experience left a legacy with an important impact on postwar thinking; it formed a foundation for extrapolation, speculation, and zealous advocacy.¹ But the perception and interpretation of the experience itself had been shaped by expectation.

AERIAL BOMBING AND PUBLIC EXPECTATION

The First World War commenced only eleven years after the Wright Brothers made their first successful but brief ascent over the windy dunes of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The airplanes of 1914 were frail machines constructed mainly of wood, cloth, and wire; their capabilities were speculative at best. Military experts had varying expectations for these craft, but even the most conservative understood that an aerial perspective would facilitate observation and reconnaissance. Indeed, the aerial perspective quickly proved so valuable that it was aggressively sought and fought for, prompting the development of purpose-built fighter aircraft. Throughout the war, increasingly capable fighters sought control of the air to allow other aircraft to carry out reconnaissance work, including trench mapping and artillery spotting. Other tactical missions evolved, such as contact patrol (for tracking ground troops), close air support, and battlefield interdiction bombing.

The role aircraft might play beyond the battlefield had long been the subject of intense anticipation.² For centuries before flying machines were invented, they were envisioned as platforms for dropping explosives onto the vulnerable earth. From the beginning, this speculation imagined bombers not only as agents of physical destruction, but also of psychological shock and social disruption; the earliest conceptions of strategic bombing assumed it would impair both the enemy’s capacity and will to fight. Much of this speculation came from futurist writers, inventors, and visionaries of various sorts.³ In 1670, Jesuit monk Francesco Lana produced an important treatise with two chapters on the “Aerial Ship.” While he believed his theoretical machine to be viable, he warned that God might not allow such a ship to be successful, “since it would create many disturbances in the civil and political governments of mankind.”⁴ The successful balloon ascents of the Montgolfier brothers and Jacques Charles in 1783 inspired an outpouring of imagination driven by a growing faith in the promise of science and technology; this manifested itself in prints and engravings depicting great flying ships dropping their deadly ordnance on those below. The emerging industrial revolution encouraged even more daring leaps. In Britain, where the people had been aroused to fear of invasion during Napoleon’s continental successes, a rash of war speculation appeared in print and prose.⁵

Even after the invasion tide had ebbed, concerns over air warfare continued. In his poem “Locksley Hall” (1842), Lord Tennyson “dipp’d into the future, far as human eye could see,” and postulated a “ghastly dew” raining from the heavens as “the nations’ airy navies” grappled in “the central blue.”⁶ Just one year later, British inventor Samuel Alfred Warner sought to interest British officials in his balloon called the “long range,” which, he argued, could ascend, travel to a point, and release its bombs on a target “with accuracy and mystery,” thus enabling a commander to destroy forts and towns, and spread consternation among both troops and civilians. Twenty years later, Henry Tracy Coxwell contemplated a kind of “ghastly dew” when he sent a letter to the Army and Navy Gazette suggesting that balloons might drop chemical agents designed to cause “stupefication” of enemy populations. Jules Verne’s widely read novel Clipper of the Clouds (1886) asserted that the future belonged to aerial warfare machines.⁷

As scientific progress continued, notions of air war were modernized, and infused with the hopes, concerns, and fears of the day. A recurring theme was that air warfare would be terrible. Like Francesco Lana, many concluded that future air battles might be so awful as to prompt men to mitigate their behavior, or even abolish war altogether—fostering a better, more peaceful world. In 1862, Victor Hugo speculated that aircraft would bring about the universal abolition of borders, leading to the end of wars and a great “peaceful revolution.”⁸ In 1893, Maj. J. D.Fullerton of the British Royal Engineers anticipated an aerial “revolution in the art of war,” arguing that the arrival of an enemy air fleet over a capital city would have such an impact as to end hostilities. A year later, inventor Octave Chanute argued that because no territory would be immune from the horrors of air war, “the ultimate effect will be to diminish greatly the frequency of wars and to substitute more rational methods of settling international misunderstandings.”⁹

In the hands of some Victorian novelists and purveyors of sensationalist fiction, however, speculation about air war was infiltrated by nationalism and xenophobia, and linked explicitly to imperialist fantasies of technical domination and subjugation of foreign peoples. These themes reflected the period’s pervasive acceptance of Social Darwinism and highly competitive forms of colonial conquest. William Delisle Hay’s 1881 novel, Three Hundred Years Hence, envisioned a war wherein a European air fleet destroys Asian armies and ravages their lands. American writers produced similar fantasies. In S. W. Odell’s The Last War; Or, Triumph of the English Tongue, published in 1898, English-speaking peoples win their final battle against inferior races via an air force that rains incendiary bombs down upon the enemy. In the end, the English speakers impose the English language and the “customs of civilization” on the “ignorant and savage inhabitants” of Russia and Asia. Roy Norton’s 1907 story The Vanishing Fleets imagined American scientists devising radioactive weapons to cope with a sneak attack by the Japanese, who were aided by communists operating within the United States.¹⁰

The fertile mind of H. G. Wells produced a more sophisticated scenario. In his famous 1908 novel, The War in the Air, bombers hold enormous power to inflict both physical and psychological damage on an enemy; indeed, they bring terror to a world in which technological developments have outstripped the political and moral means to contain them. Air war brings catastrophe as bombers destroy the very fabric of modern civilization, leaving chaos, famine, and political upheaval in their wake. Wells speculated that urban populations already weakened by the war’s dislocations would, upon the appearance of an air fleet, fall victim to “civil conflict and passionate disorder.”¹¹

From its outset, aviation was “a very public technology” in England.¹² Some military writers of the early twentieth century denounced popular speculation on the topic, expressing concern over the deleterious impact on the public mind of unrestrained imaginings about aircraft. But their own writings echoed some of the same themes, especially air warfare’s potential psychological effects.¹³ In 1905 the British War Office’s Manual of Military Ballooning argued that the balloons dropping gun cotton charges might have a “moral effect” on the enemy that “should not be lost sight of” in estimating their combat value. The moral effect (pronounced “morale” but spelled without the “e,” as in the French) reflected a widespread fixation within contemporary European militaries. It revealed in part the influence of Carl von Clausewitz, whose writings had become particularly popular after the Franco-Prussian war when von Moltke claimed that they had influenced him. Clausewitz’s On War (1832) had been translated into English by the end of the century, and was studied at the Army Staff College in Britain.¹⁴ The work of Ardant du Picq, Foch, Langlois, and Grandmaison added to a trend emphasizing the role of “will” and moral factors in warfare. The French writers argued in particular that soldiers were sustained by powerful psychological elements such as élan, espirit de corps, and a willingness to seize and maintain the offensive. These ideas helped shape strategy, war planning, and conceptualizations of future conflict in Britain. Indeed, the 1913 Gold Medal Prize Essay topic for the Royal United Services Institution was, “How Can Moral Qualities Best Be Developed During the Preparation of the Officer and the Man for Duties Each Will Carry Out in War.”¹⁵ In a 1914 volume called Principles of War Historically Illustrated, Maj. Gen. E. A. Altham argued, “The moral effect of the bayonet is all out of proportion to its material effect, and not the least important of virtues claimed for it is that the desire to use it draws the attacking side on.”¹⁶ The emphasis on moral effects reflected and highlighted the qualities valued by upper-middle-class Victorian and Edwardian society—courage, initiative, resourcefulness, tenacity, and willpower—but it also resonated with prejudices and darker trends therein, including social Darwinism, anti-intellectualism, aggressiveness, and a strict class system.¹⁷

Psychological factors could be a double-edged sword—an army’s greatest strength, but also its greatest weakness. If this were true for armies, might it not be true for nations as a whole? Would civilian populations, ever more directly vulnerable to the effects of modern war, be uniquely susceptible to social-psychological factors—especially in light of what one contemporary observer would later call “the nervous complexion of the modern mind”?¹⁸ In particular, how might untrained, undisciplined civilians hold up under the pressures of a war fought directly over their heads? In its usage relating to long-range bombing, the moral effect came to represent qualities needed not only by fighting men and their leaders but also by entire societies. Wellsian fiction argued that modern war would require the highest organization of the national polity into “one organic, efficient whole.”¹⁹ But Wells’s speculation on the behavior of urban populations was hardly reassuring. The “German School” of military thinkers had also made prominent the idea that modern war would depend on the total mobilized resources of a nation and its people. Colmar von der Goltz, in his influential bestseller The Nation in Arms (1883), argued, “War is now an exodus of nations and no longer a mere conflict between armies. All moral energies will be gathered for a life and death struggle.” But this work had a prominently racist theme, reflecting German attitudes and expansionist ambitions.Influenced by a Hegelian conception of history, von der Goltz argued that Germany was destined to take the place of older, decaying empires.To achieve this, the German people would have to embrace those martial, antiliberal qualities that would insure success and provide for continued political dominance.²⁰

This writing, emerging from an increasingly restive Germany, could not have been anything but unsettling to late Victorian and Edwardian Britons, who already felt a range of anxieties about their nation and its place in the world. Germany’s imperial and naval ambitions were particularly worrisome. But other issues entered in, elevating to new heights a sense of national foreboding. Edwardian Britain was a vigorous, dynamic society, brimming with the products of modern science:electric power, automobiles, photography, telephones, cheap newspapers, and the cinema. But it was also a society adjusting to modernity—and full of the stresses of that adjustment. Along with the new came a yearning for and sentimentalization of the old and familiar. The societal changes that technology had wrought through the industrial revolution seemed to be a cause for particularly acute concern. Would the new urban classes erode the national characteristics that were believed (by the elite) to have made Britain great? The growth of industry had concentrated working populations in congested, polluted cities. For government officials, concerns over sanitation and public health took center stage along with concerns over the political stability of vast populations forced to endure hard labor and stressful living conditions. What would be the reliability of urban masses under the burdens of modern war?Would the dislocations produced by aerial bombardment trigger social and political upheaval in dense, vulnerable urban areas?²¹ The worries of those in the military were conditioned, additionally, by longstanding organizational views on discipline: steadfastness in the face of danger, they believed, came either through breeding (as in the officer class) or through instilled training and drill (as in the enlisted ranks). The urban poor had neither.²²

Generalized concerns about the urban poor had grown throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. But the Edwardians rediscovered the problem at the turn of the century, and found it deeply troubling. Thirty-seven percent of the applicants examined for service in the Boer War were deemed unfit, and a similar percentage were turned away as too obviously unfit even for consideration. The root of the problem was not hard to find. Two important studies, Seebohm Rowntree’s Poverty: A Study of Town Life (1901) and Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People of London (1903), both reached the same conclusion: ...