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THE ONLY WAY TO WIN THE WAR
On the eve of Britain’s Second World War on Germany in 1939 Arthur Bomber Harris was single-minded in his view of how it should be waged:
“I could see only one vista through the wood which seemed to end in the faintest gleam of daylight. That was the bomber offensive. But in any case I knew that this would only be undertaken faut de mieux, after other methods had failed… In the circumstances that I foresaw… the bomber offensive would be our only hope at getting at Germany, and I determined to see to it, as far as I could, that the offensive got there, and got where it hurt.
“I certainly had faith in the bomber offensive – if it could be got going, and if the Germans did not find effective counter-measures before we had built up the force. The surest way to win a war is to destroy the enemy’s war potential. And all that I had seen and studied of warfare in the past had led me to believe that the bomber was the predominant weapon for this task in this war…” (Bomber Offensive, p.31)
In the early months of the War Harris was prohibited from bombing on land. The belief was that a bomber force needed to be built before anything of substance was unleashed on Germany lest Hitler naturally would be provoked into retaliating against London. Only when England had the superiority needed for the destruction of Germany was the bomber offensive to be unleashed. Harris played along, especially since the RAF suffered heavy losses against the Luftwaffe in its sea and air operations during 1939 (p.36). The so-called Phoney War was a “breathing space” a time of preparation for the World War to come.
After England had lost the Battle of France the emphasis was put on a bomber offensive as the main aspect of its World War on Germany. Harris realised that a naval blockade of Germany would not win the war like the last time: “like the greater part of our economic warfare at the beginning of the war, the whole plan of attack overlooked the fact that Germany was not effectively encircled as she had been in the last war.” (p.45)
Harris notes that the Germans were almost wholly unprepared for the Battle of Britain. Hitler never imagined he would have to engage in such a thing. He greatly admired the British Empire, always thought the English would see sense and share their great “civilising mission” with him when they understood he was only fighting them by accident and his real ambitions lay eastward against the common enemy, Bolshevism.
And so the Luftwaffe had only small numbers of trained bomber crews or defences on their bombers. Their defenceless aircraft were easy meat for the British fighters according to Harris and if Hitler was ever serious about invading Britain (which he wasn’t, as Churchill knew from Enigma), it was the threat of the British bomber fleet against a seaborne landing that deterred him. Churchill moved vast amounts of military hardware abroad, particularly to Egypt, when he was pretending that the British island was under mortal peril from Germany. And Harris reveals that large amounts of resources, including supposedly precious aircrew and aircraft, were diverted from waging the so-called Battle of Britain by building up a bomber force in reserve during 1940 in preparation for the main act of the War, the Bomber offensive against Germany (pp.47-8).
Britain lost the European war in 1940 and only refused a settlement in the hope that the World War it declared could be expanded into a real World War. In 1914/5 the Minister in the British Cabinet whose main aim was to spread and escalate the war was Churchill. His strategy had been to bring as much of the world as possible, regardless of consequence, into the conflict to destroy Germany. And he was the man brought back again in 1940 to do so again.
Churchill, a fierce anti-Bolshevik who had praised Hitler for preventing the Soviet poison from entering the German veins, gambled that Germany would turn on Russia, and America might be brought into the conflict if things were not allowed to settle down. He had no means or will to prosecute the World War Britain had declared to finality against Germany. His only aim was that England could at least get on the winning side. And while Britain proved incapable of fighting toe to toe with the Germans its contribution to the war was the instigation of terrorist attacks on areas under German occupation and aerial bombing – called terror bombing in Germany.
In 1940 – before Churchill took power – there was an unspoken agreement between the warring powers that civilian bombing was not a desirable development for anyone. From the fall of Poland in September 1939 until the battle for France in May 1940 there was very little fighting done on the ground or in the air. The air forces of Britain, France and Germany had ample opportunity to wage war against the civilian populations of their opponents, as a substitute for land war. But though a bombing holocaust was predicted by the press and governments issued gas-masks and evacuated children to the countryside, nothing happened. They all returned when the Luftwaffe did not appear in the form that Hugh Trenchard had envisaged for the RAF.
“The construction of bombing airplanes would soon be abandoned as superfluous and ineffective if bombing as such were branded as an illegal barbarity. If, through the Red Cross Convention, it definitely turned out possible to prevent the killing of a defenceless wounded man or prisoner, then it ought to be equally possible, by analogous convention, and finally to stop the bombing of equally defenceless civil populations.”
That quote is from Adolf Hitler, who was against civilian bombing as a form of warfare – and whose air force was nearly always used – even in the ruthless Russian campaign – primarily for military objectives in support of the German ground forces.
In 1940 the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, declared bombing to be “absolutely contrary to international law” stating that “the British Government would never resort to the deliberate attack on women and children for the purposes of mere terrorism.” Chamberlain gave instructions during the Norwegian campaign in 1940 that “it is clearly illegal to bombard a populated area in the hope of hitting a legitimate target which is known to be in the area but which cannot be precisely located and identified.” This statement is recorded in Volume I of Churchill’s History of the Second World War (p.482). But Churchill, upon taking power, instigated an illegal inversion of Chamberlain’s policy in the mass civilian bombings of German cities during 1942/5. Trenchard had told Churchill that he should not hold back just because the Germans were not bombing. They would bomb when the RAF bombed them. That, after all, was what the bomber fleet being built was for. So it was best to get in first.