8 B. H. Liddell Hart, Paris, or the Future War(London, 1925), pp. 45–6.
9 Quoted in Andrew Boyle, Trenchard: Man of Vision(London, 1962), p. 229.
10 Quoted in the New York Times, 14 October 1917.
11 Boyle, Trenchard(London, 1962), p. 312.
12 Quoted in Max Hastings, Bomber Command(London, 1979), p. 46.
13 Leon Daudet, La Guerre Totale(Paris, 1918). Daudet is reputed to have coined the phrase ‘total war’.
14 Giulio Douhet, The Command of the Air, trans. Dino Ferrari (London, 1943), p. 151.
15 Cicely Hamilton, Theodore Savage(London, 1922), p. 75.
16 Desmond Shaw, Ragnarok(London, 1926), p. 349.
17 J. F. C. Fuller, The Reformation of War(London, 1923), p. 70.
18 Douhet, Command of the Air, p. 52.
19 See Kennett, Strategic Bombing, p. 38, for a description of the air-raid scares in Ottawa and New York in 1918; and Sir Arthur Harris, Bomber Offensive(London, 1947), pp. 65–6, for the scares in 1942.
20 J. M. Spaight, Air Power and the Cities(London, 1930), p. 162.
21 Sir Malcolm Campbell, The Peril from the Air(London, 1937), pp. 54–5.
22 For the reader who is interested in how the international community has tried to restrict the use of various weapons and military practices, I strongly recommend Michael Howard (ed.), Restraints on War(Oxford, 1979). See also James Brown Scott (ed.), The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907(London, 1915).
23 For a brief description of this international conference, see Philip S. Meilinger, ‘Clipping the Bomber’s Wings: The Geneva Disarmament Conference and the Royal Air Force 1932–34’, War in History(1999), vol. 6, no. 3. See also Lindqvist, Bombing(London, 2001), pp. 116 and 140.
24 See Richard Bessel, Nazism and War(London, 2004), whose main thesis is that ‘The ideology of Nazism was an ideology of war, which regarded peace merely as a preparation for war’ (p. 1).
25 UK National Archives, AIR 41/40, Appendix 4, Roosevelt message, 3 September 1939.
26 Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s speech to the House of Commons, 14 September 1939.
27 See Hastings, Bomber Command, p. 59.
28 Quoted in Robin Neillands, The Bomber War(London, 2001), p. 41.
29 See Hastings, Bomber Command, p. 64.
30 For a description of this ‘ruchloser Terrorangriff auf die Zivilbevölkerung’, see Hans Brunswig, Feuersturm über Hamburg(Stuttgart, 2003), pp. 43–6.
31 See Cajus Bekker, The Luftwaffe War Diariestrans. Frank Ziegler (New York, 1994), p. 172.
32 Hitler’s speech in the Berliner Sportpalast, 4 September 1940, quoted in Uwe Bahnsen and Kerstin von Stürmer, Die Stadt, die sterben sollte: Hamburg im Bombenkrieg, Juli 1943(Hamburg, 2003), p. 72.
33 Sir Charles Webster and Noble Frankland, The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany, 1939–1945(London, 1961), vol.1, p.157.
34 These statistics are taken from John Ray, The Second World War(London, 1999), p. 95; and Neillands, Bomber War, p. 44.
35 See, for example, Churchill’s speech, 15 July 1941, claiming that the people of London would certainly wish to ‘mete out to the Germans the measure, and more than the measure, that they have meted out to us’; quoted in A. C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities(London, 2006), p. 187.
7 The Grand Alliance
1 During the German Blitz on London, Sir Arthur Harris claims that he stood on the roof of the Air Ministry watching the fires and said, in an echo of this Biblical quote, ‘Well, they are sowing the wind.’ Portal also swore at this time that ‘the enemy would get the same and more of it’. See Sir Arthur Harris, Bomber Offensive(London, 1947), pp. 51–2.
2 Stanley Baldwin’s famous quote about the bomber always getting through did not account for the difficulties of navigating at night and over thick cloud, which meant that the target was often not even found, let alone bombed. When the Butt Report was published in September 1941 it showed that even when the bombers found their targets only a third managed to bomb within five miles of it. See, for example, Robin Neillands, The Bomber War(London, 2001), p. 58.
3 Professor Pat Blackett, quoted in Max Hastings, Bomber Command(London, 1979), p. 111.
4 Quoted in ibid., p. 120.
5 See Harris, Bomber Offensive, pp. 9–69.
6 Quoted in Hastings, Bomber Command, p. 135. Harris’s memoirs have the politer version – ‘tanks that ate hay and thereafter made noises like a horse’, p. 24.
7 Harris, Bomber Offensive, p. 66.
8 Quoted in Hastings, Bomber Command, p. 135.
9 Ibid, p. 135.
10 Harris, Bomber Offensive, p. 52.
11 Harris, quoted in Hastings, Bomber Command, p. 147. The figure of 60 per cent was a British estimate from reconnaissance photographs – see Neillands, The Bomber War, p. 112; German estimates directly after the attack were as high as 80 per cent – see Joseph Goebbels, The Goebbels Diaries, trans. and ed. Louis P. Lochner (London, Hamish Hamilton, 1948), 31 March 1942, p. 109.
12 Goebbels, Diaries, 28 April 1942, p. 142.
13 These figures are taken from Hastings, Bomber Command, p. 152.
14 Their policy as regarded the Japanese was very different. The firebombing of Tokyo in 1945 owed much to the lessons the Americans had learned from observing British area bombing, and probably resulted in more casualties than Hamburg and Dresden put together.
15 See Roger A. Freeman, The Mighty Eighth(London, 2000), p. 1.
16 Towards the end of the war the Americans themselves began to realize that their ‘pickle-barrel’ accuracy was a myth for these very reasons. See Summary Report of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (European Theatre), p. 4, UK National Archives, DSIR 23/15754 and online at http://www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/AAF/USSBS/ETOSummary.html
17 Quoted in Hastings, Bomber Command, p. 182.
18 Quoted in Neillands, Bomber War, p. 201.
19 The German rumours are reported in Earl R. Beck, Under the Bombs: The German Home Front 1942–45(Lexington, 1986), p. 59; the actual figures are taken from Neillands, Bomber War, pp. 218–21.
20 Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg, On the Other Side, trans. and ed. Ruth Evans (London, 1979), p. 65.
21 UK National Archives, AIR 24/257.
22 UK National Archives, PREM 3/11/8.
23 UK National Archives, PREM 3/11/8.
8 The British Plan
1 Theodore W. Adorno, Minima Moralia:Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben(Frankfurt am Main, 1962), chapter 19, p. 42. Adorno’s philosophical work, written during the war, is about the annihilation of the individual by society. His argument that technology only serves to distance us from our humanity applies equally to the new weapons employed by the Allies during the next few days and the civilian technologies of everyday life.