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"OUR GREAT DECISION"
There has been much criticism lately of Russian bombing in pursuance of military objectives in Syria. The bombing has been purely of a military character to support the boots on the ground wresting territory from the enemy. It does not have the objective of obliterating the civilian population in pursuit of their destruction of their morale or physically.
However, those doing the criticising in Britain and calling for demonstrations outside embassies should know better. Britain, after all originated the saturation bombing of civilians as a distinct and superior form of warfare. And they wrote the book about the subject, so to speak.
It was Winston Churchill, rather than Adolf Hitler, who was the first to authorise civilian bombing in Britain’s Second World War on Germany. When Churchill had been Minister of Munitions in the Lloyd George Government in 1918 he had planned a thousand-bomber attack on Berlin for 1919. In 1925 he noted that “The campaign of 1919 was never fought; but its ideas go moving along.” He was clear what such a campaign would entail, with air warfare making it possible that “death and terror could be carried far behind the lines of the actual armies, to women, children, the aged, the sick, who in earlier struggles would perforce have been left untouched.” (Thoughts and Adventures, pp.174-6)
This was the next World War Britain decided to fight, rather than the static attrition it had got itself involved in on the Western Front from 1914.
J.M Spaight, CB, CBE., Principal Secretary to the British Air Ministry notes in his 1944 book Bombing Vindicated, that:
“Hitler only undertook the bombing of British civilian targets reluctantly three months after the RAF had commenced bombing German civilian targets. Hitler would have been willing at any time to stop the slaughter. Hitler was genuinely anxious to reach with Britain an agreement confining the action of aircraft to battle zones.
“The first ‘area’ air attack of the war, was carried out by 134 British bombers on the German city of Mannheim, on the 16th, December, 1940. The object of this attack, as Air Chief Marshall Peirse later explained, was, ‘to concentrate the maximum amount of damage in the centre of the town’.” (p.47)
Spaight also noted:
“Because we were doubtful about the psychological effect of propagandist distortion of the truth that it was we who started the strategic bombing offensive, we have shrunk from giving our great decision of May 11th 1940, the publicity it deserves.”
Spaight’s book was originally published in 1944 when the Allied bombing offensive was being escalated, but before knowledge of the great destruction of German towns and their occupants started getting out. It seems to have been written to counter the anticipated disquiet among some in Britain at the effects of saturation bombing of German cities. It reflected official policy, stating clearly that the idea of saturation bombing of civilians was initiated by Britain and that Hitler opposed this new form of warfare, refusing to retaliate in kind while German cities were bombed, in the hope that Winston Churchill would “come to his senses”.
Chapter 1 of Spaight’s book I s called ‘The Bomber Saves Civilisation’ and it says on the first page:
“Civilisation, I believe firmly, would have been destroyed if there had been no bombing in this war. It was the bomber aircraft which, more than any other instrument of war, prevented the forces of evil from prevailing… And the greatest contribution of the bomber both to the winning of the war and the cause of peace is still to come.” (p.1)
Dresden, Hiroshima, Nagasaki?
Bombing Vindicated reveals that the view “the bomber will always get through” - which held back the development of a more sizeable bomber force from the RAF to saturate bomb German cities from the beginning of the War - was never believed to be true. The Appeasers may have been deterred in unleashing bombing warfare for fear of what it might to do to their own cities. However, Bomber Command made it clear that all Britain needed to do was to prevent the German bomber getting through whilst making sure its greater number of long-range aircraft and the single-minded will to use them was there.
Spaight justified the saturation bombing of civilians on the basis that it saved the lives of British soldiers and made the Second World War on Germany much less costly than the First one:
“in the first four years of war we in Britain have not seen a generation slaughtered and mutilated on the appalling scale to which we became accustomed in 1914-18. There has been in the west, at least, no such shedding of blood as there was then… We have escaped at least the holocausts of 1915-17. We have come without having to endure them to a stage in the conflict corresponding to that which we reached in the summer of 1918. By our air raids and our blockade we have hurt Germany at least as much as we had then. We have done so at a cost in British lives almost negligible in comparison with that which we had to pay before we entered on the final round in 1918.” (p.7)
This confirms the view of Carroll Quigley that there was an intimate connection between the British policy of Appeasement and the adoption of anti-civilian bombing as the primary means of destroying the enemy. In December 1936 Chamberlain, as Chancellor, decided to put all financial resources into the RAF and its bombers and the Cabinet side-stepped the question of sending an army to the continent.
It also shows that, contrary to British mythology, the ascension of Churchill to the head of Britain’s Government in 1940 did not mark a break with Appeasement. In fact, the primary use of bombing reveals that Appeasement was weakness only in the way in which it represented a reluctance to fight Germany military to military, man to man. It was a form of cowardice that involved minimising one’s own military losses and maximising the enemy’s civilian casualties. When Churchill supposedly had done with the Appeasers he retained their primary mode of warfare, ratcheting it up when time had given England the possibility of practising it with relative impunity.