As the Second World War approached, the predictions became more and more gloomy. In 1937, the military theorist Sir Malcolm Campbell wrote the following account of the likely outcome of an air raid on London:
First would come hundreds of aeroplanes… each carrying up to a thousand small incendiary bombs. These would be dropped at a rate of one every five seconds, and each machine would leave a string of fires in its wake. If all the fire-fighting appliances in the country were concentrated in the one place, they would not be able to cope with a tenth of the fires that would rage over the whole area attacked. Even if they could, hard on the heels of the fire-raisers would follow fleets of heavy bombing machines, dropping their loads of high-explosive bombs on a city already virtually fated to destruction by fire. And as if that were not enough, then would come other fleets of aircraft to drench the flaming ruins with poison gases. Unless the people could take refuge in safety below ground, the casualties in a city like London must amount to a million or even more, while the material damage would be simply incalculable. The picture is not over-drawn – it is what inevitably will happen to a country which fails to take the elementary precaution of making itself strong enough to hold what it has. 21
When such a premonition is extended beyond just one city to ten, twenty, fifty cities, it is no longer a vision of Sodom and Gomorrah. It is a vision of Armageddon.
It must be stressed at this point that not everybody believed that such destruction was inevitable. There had been many and varied attempts to ban bombing ever since the first Hague Peace Conference in 1899 but, as is so often the case with such conferences, the proposals were always rejected by too many of the countries that really mattered. 22
In one famous instance, in March 1933, the peace conference at the League of Nations took up the question of firebombing. Poison gas had already been banned in 1926 because its uncontrollable nature threatened the lives of innocent civilians; it was argued now that fires caused by incendiaries were every bit as uncontrollable as gas when dropped on city targets, so should also be banned. Everyone agreed, and for a while it looked as though firebombing would indeed be banned. The conference was already working out the practical details when, in October that year, the newly elected Adolf Hitler walked out and withdrew from the League of Nations. Without Germany, the ban meant nothing. Ironically, Hitler’s action had ensured the death of hundreds of thousands of his own countrymen. 23
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Over the next few years the whole world rearmed itself, and rapidly sank back into the quicksand of war. It is difficult now, even with hindsight, to see how another world war could have been avoided after the Nazis took power in Germany. Repeated attempts to mollify Hitler at the negotiating table proved a waste of time: the entire doctrine of the Nazi Party was centred on preparing for war. 24By 1937 the newly formed Luftwaffe was rehearsing its tactics with the bombing of republican towns like Guernica in the Spanish Civil War. In the spring of 1938 Hitler annexed Austria. In 1939, despite frantic British attempts at appeasement, he marched into Czechoslovakia. In September he invaded Poland, followed by Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium and France. In just under ten months Hitler and his allies had taken control of virtually the whole of mainland Europe.
Despite all the dire predictions of the 1930s, the war in the air was fairly restrained until this point. At the outbreak of hostilities President Roosevelt had appealed to both sides to renounce the ‘bombardment from the air of civilian populations and unfortified cities’, and both sides had hastened to agree. 25Neither wished to provoke the ire of the world’s greatest industrial nation.
The British in particular promised that they would ‘never resort to the deliberate attack on women and children and other civilians for purposes of mere terrorism’, 26and for a long time they kept their promise. During the six-month lull between the invasions of Poland and Norway, the RAF took serious losses in coastal raids on the German Navy: these were completely unsuccessful because they were forbidden to attack ships when they were at their most vulnerable – in port – because of the possibility of hitting civilians. During the battle for Norway air crew were instructed not to use any bombs, just their machine-guns to avoid hitting innocent bystanders. 27For all Britain’s refusal to ratify international agreements on bombing, she began the war with admirable, if somewhat unrealistic, restraint.
With the exception of the bombing of Warsaw in 1939, Germany exercised similar control. It made no sense to destroy the cities and industries of the countries she wanted to occupy, and Hitler had no intention of provoking America into renouncing its neutrality. In any case the Luftwaffe was overwhelmingly a tacticalair force – it confined its activities mostly to the battle zone, by dive-bombing and strafing opposing troops. The strategicbombing they carried out was generally directed at the destruction of enemy airfields and transport links, not civilian populations.
The change came during the invasion of the Low Countries in May 1940, when the Germans surrounded the Dutch port of Rotterdam. The general in command of the 39th Panzer Korps told the Dutch defenders that unless they capitulated immediately the city would suffer ‘complete destruction’ by German bombers. 28The following day, when negotiations between the two sides broke down, the Luftwaffe was dispatched to keep the general’s promise. Soon a hail of bombs was falling on the heart of the old city, setting large areas on fire. Later it became apparent that the Dutch garrison had surrendered before the air strike had taken place, but the order to recall the bombers came too late to save the city. That evening, while the houses still burned, the German Army entered Rotterdam just as they had entered Warsaw, unopposed.
The bombing of Rotterdam had sealed the Wehrmacht’s success in Holland, but it was a propaganda disaster for Germany. Over the next few days reports appeared across the world claiming that as many as thirty thousand civilians had been killed (although in reality the figure was more like a thousand). 29Outraged, the British lifted some of their restrictions on bombing military targets inside Germany. On 15 May, the day after Rotterdam was bombed, Churchill sent ninety-nine bombers to attack rail and oil installations east of the Rhine. A few days later thirty were sent to attack the Blohm & Voss shipyards in Hamburg – the first of 213 attacks on the city. While a handful of bombs did hit the shipyards, in the darkness most fell in residential areas around the Reeperbahn, and thirty-four people were killed. The German press immediately hailed it as a ‘ruthless terror attack on the civilian population’. 30
So began Britain’s strategic bombing campaign against Germany: a long-term systematic effort to destroy all German rail links, oil installations, airfields, armaments factories, metal foundries, stockpiles of raw material – in fact, anything of military value. Hitler responded, predictably, by ordering his air force to prepare for a full-scale air offensive against Britain, as a reprisal for the attacks on Germany and as preparation for a cross-Channel invasion of the British Isles. The battle for mainland Europe was over. The battle of Britain was about to begin.
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Britain was the last piece in Hitler’s jigsaw of western Europe, and his generals set about trying to conquer it in much the same way as they had conquered the rest of the continent. Their first task was to achieve command of the air, which meant destroying as many Royal Air Force planes and airfields as possible. Only after they had gained complete air supremacy would a cross-Channel invasion be possible.