Air University Review, July-August 1967
Looking back over the twenty-odd years that separate us from the strategic bombing campaigns of World War II, we are sometimes dismayed that there should still be so little on which widespread agreement exists. At least in its broad outlines, the history of the campaigns has been recorded with painstaking skill. Controversy nevertheless remains alive; hindsight has been applied to the air war with an intensity usually reserved for campaigns that ended in disaster for those who undertook them.
But if we are sometimes dismayed, we should not be surprised. Controversy, after all, has been a formative influence throughout the entire history of aerial warfare. Whether or not airplanes could be used to drop bombs on targets was debated long before there was an airplane capable of doing so. Whether bombing from airplanes was “legal,” whether it was “moral,” whether it was in accord with “the principles of war”—these and other questions have a history that predates Kitty Hawk and whose end is not yet in sight.
With regard specifically to the strategic air offensives of World War II, I
think it safe to say that controversy will never die out completely; the
stakes, after all, were high, and the results, in Europe at least, could not be
measured definitively. With the passage of time, however, we may confidently
expect that the range of disagreement will be steadily reduced while the
controversy itself will become more temperate and precise. This assumption is
based on two considerations. In the first place, only time and the continuing
sifting of the evidence can provide us with a comprehensive view of an
undertaking so massive that the view of any single observer or participant
could not conceivably have encompassed the whole. And second, among the
by-products to be expected from the passage of time and continual sifting of
the evidence is the gradual opening of new approaches to the subject—new, that
is, in the sense that earlier historians addressing the same topic were not
able to employ them. Among such promising approaches are (1) analyses of the
controversy itself and (2) analyses that attempt to treat the bombing campaigns
not as a unique interruption in the ongoing course of history but rather as
part of a continuing process, one that began before 1939 and did not end in
1945. An excellent example of the former approach is Noble Frankland’s The
Bombing Offensive Against Germany.*
Mr. Frankland approaches his task with formidable qualifications. After service as a navigator in Bomber Command of the Royal Air Force during the war, he devoted twelve years to a study of the bombing offensive and was coauthor, with the late Sir Charles Webster, of the British official history, The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany. Since 1960 he has been Director of the Imperial War Museum. In his latest book Mr. Frankland’s aim, essentially, is to define the legitimate limits within which any continuing controversy should be contained. In a brief Introduction he provides a hint of what later becomes a major theme of his essay. Perhaps, he suggests, people have preferred to feel rather than to know about strategic bombing. That this might be true can be deduced from the curious fact that “the various judgements of strategic bombing which are made, are scarcely related to the knowledge of the campaign which exists.” We must, he insists, relate our views of the bombing offensive to the specific circumstances decisions, and events that governed its conduct.
His opening chapter provides a brief but thoughtful treatment of the origins of the strategic bombing concept. Particularly striking is Frankland’s suggestion that the idea may have been derived unconsciously from the need to find a substitute for the horrors of the 1914-18 trench stalemate. Naval blockade, Britain’s classic answer to problems of Continental warfare, was becoming progressively less efficacious in the twentieth century as the individual units of sea power became “too formidable and too expensive to be expendable.” Strategic air theorists, he suggests, were waiting in the wings with a new idea closely paralleling that of blockade in that it aimed at the destruction of “the sources as opposed to the manifestations of an enemy’s war power.” Then, approaching his subject from a different side, he emphasizes the long-range significance of the German bombing raids on London during the summer of 1917. One raid in particular, that of 13 June, resulted in a direct hit on Liverpool Street Station and a consequent casualty list of almost 600, including more than 150 killed. The public uproar that followed this outrage led the Cabinet to appoint a special committee, which in turn recommended the creation of a separate air “service as an independent means of air operations.” Thus was reflected, in the very birth of the RAF, the concept of retaliation in kind as the only appropriate defense against the threat of enemy air attacks.
Although less than thirty pages in length, Frankland’s opening chapter contains more food for thought than many thousands of pages that have been devoted to the early history of strategic air theory. A distinct pattern seems to emerge: technology promised a new answer to a pressing military need; men came forward with suggestions, but it took a series of incidents to create a crisis from which evolved a new institution wherein men, with their new ideas and their new technology, could work in concert toward a commonly recognized goal; in doing so, they concentrated their effort on developing a capacity for strategic, or independent, operations (as opposed to the support of ground or naval operations) because they quickly realized that their independent status as a service could logically be preserved only so long as there was something they could do “independently.” If much of this has been said before and by others, it certainly has not been done either so succinctly or so persuasively.
In his second chapter Frankland outlines the main characteristics of the bombing war from 1939 to 1945. His particular concern is to reveal precisely the stages and methods by which it developed, in the hope of showing that many of the criticisms that have since become current “are wholly groundless for operational reasons alone.” By way of illustration he shows how the RAF’s policy of “area bombing” replaced the original idea of “precision bombing” for the simple reason that the latter proved technologically impossible until very late in the war. If a few specially trained units such as the Pathfinder Force were capable of remarkable precision, we should not blithely assume that the main force was equally capable. As he later points out, much of the postwar argument about supposed alternatives open to Bomber Command makes no more sense than would the suggestion that Lord Gort made a serious mistake in not driving the German armies back across the Rhine when they launched their attack on the West in May in 1940.”
Another major theme of this chapter is that the strategic air theorists erred gravely in their assumption that they had in hand a “revolutionary” instrument of war, one that could carry the war directly to the enemy headland without taking the preliminary step of defeating the opposing air forces in battle. Here Frankland appears to line up solidly with a major element of the now famous critique by Admiral Sir Gerald Dickens that appeared in 1948, Bombing and Strategy: The Fallacy of Total War. He concludes the chapter by suggesting how the bombing offensive might have produced decisive results earlier had it only been possible to reconcile the widely differing conceptions of what should constitute the main target objectives. His conclusions here are generally in accord with those of the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey.
The final chapter, entitled “In Retrospect,” is a tour de force of reasoned thought and striking clarity of expression. All the familiar bones of contention—the immense costs of the campaign, the alleged inefficiency of the effort, the results obtained, the relevance of the campaign to the Allied grand strategy, the subsequent moral revulsion shared by many on both sides—all are put to the demanding test of how well they reflect an understanding of the actual capabilities at specific stages throughout the war. The conclusions that are drawn make it clear that this book is no attempt at whitewashing by a captive official historian. Specific decisions are singled out as at least questionable, and the contributions of the Air Ministry’s publicists in “nurturing basic ignorance and creating woolly thinking” are properly identified. The major contribution of Frankland in this discussion is persuasively to demolish the arguments of those who, like Major General J. F. C. Fuller (The Second World War, 1948), have held that the air offensive was characterized by wanton vindictiveness on the part of the Allied leaders in general and Mr. Churchill in particular. And he does this, I might add, without once referring by name or reputation to any of the more outspoken critics—a most effective tactic.
It is difficult to fault the book on any scale. There are a few minor inaccuracies 1 but none that affects the main thesis. American readers, to be sure, may fret over the emphasis given to the British side of the Combined Bomber Offensive; but I see no objection here, since many Americans might well be cured of their Hollywood-induced misconception that the bombing of Germany was an American affair from start to finish. One could argue, it is true, that Frankland’s conclusions are essentially unchanged from those that he and Sir Charles Webster published in 1961.2 Such a view, however, would fail to credit Frankland with all that his new book contains, especially its provocative Introduction and opening chapter. To his primary aim, the clarification of points at issue in the postwar controversy, he does ample justice. For this reason (as well as for the ultimate compliment he pays his readers by presenting his views in an engaging, precise, and lucid style), his book is worthy of our attention. Its insights and perspectives are of significant importance for both the present and the future.
Our second new approach, that of viewing the bombing offensives in the perspective of earlier and later developments, has been attempted in a recent book by George H. Quester, an instructor in the Department of Government at Harvard.** Mr. Quester’s thesis is that “the major strategic complications imposed by bomber aircraft actually appeared long before 1945, that they arose early in the twentieth century with the introduction of aircraft systems that first led governments to assume the bomb-delivery capabilities that only now exist.” To support this thesis the author presents a capsule history of strategic air theory and practice, one that has the particular virtue of making it clear that such terms as “deterrence” and “balance of terror” are not as modern as is often assumed. In Britain particularly, such writers as F. W. Lanchester and J. M. Spaight were writing (in effect) about counterforce and countervalue strategies as early as 1915. In 1936 Jonathan Griffin, protesting the developing bomber policy of the RAF, wrote of “….. a balance of terrors—for that is what the balance of power, loaded with bombs, should be called.” So far so good; Quester’s initial thesis is not to be denied.
But he attempts to do more than illustrate the antiquity of a number of supposedly modern concepts; he tries also “to break some ground on the analogous interchange possible between the issues of air strategy before and after 1945……” And on this rock his ship founders. Sympathetic as one may well be with his attempt to show the “new strategists” that many of their assumptions can be tested against preatomic experience, one cannot in good conscience allow Mr. Quester to rearrange the historical record to suit his fancy. Many of his errors appear to be the result of either careless research or incompetent proofreading.3 But others are not so innocent. To say, for instance, on the basis of prewar planning by Great Britain and Germany, that in 1914 “ strategic air confrontation was at hand” is to stretch the facts to fit a pattern.
Quester’s most daring foray, however, is his attempt to show that Churchill called for the bombing of Berlin in August 1940, not in retaliation or rage, but for the premeditated purpose of goading Hitler to attack London instead of the RAF bases. (p. 117) Few will deny—after all it was recognized almost immediately—that the tide turned in the Battle of Britain when Hitler shifted the raids onto London. But to read this intent into Churchill’s decision is to do rather more than the evidence allows. In this respect, Quester’s method is instructive. As “proof” he offers four quotations from Churchill’s Their Finest Hour and lists them one after another in a manner that suggests the progressive development of an idea. A check, however, shows the four to be lifted out of context and placed in an order that does not correspond to the order of their original appearance. The first is from page 330, the second from page 342, the third from page 331, and the fourth from page 332. Somehow missing from this list—although in the original it follows directly after Quester’s second extract—is Churchill’s explicit statement that he agreed to the attack on Berlin because he “believed that nothing impressed or disturbed Hitler so much as his realization of British wrath and will-power.”
Perhaps I do the author an injustice; it is not inconceivable, after all,
that Churchill consciously offered London as a sacrificial lamb. But the
evidence offered by Mr. Quester (or by anyone else to my knowledge) is not
sufficient to establish any such thesis.4
Historians, unlike lawyers and plumbers and other trade-unionists, are not congenitally hostile to the use by those outside their calling of the tools and methods of their craft. (Indeed, “amateur” historians from Thucydides to the present day have produced some of the best histories we have.) But they do insist that he who would use their tools do so with care and prudence. Mr. Quester has not done this; hopefully it shall be he and not history that is held accountable.
Forgiven his adventuresome approach to history, Mr. Quester has written a book that is not entirely without value. He does, for instance, make a good case that a major assumption of the years between the wars—the assumption that civilian morale would disintegrate under bombing—was never truly analyzed. And although it may not have been intended, his account also suggests an all but inevitable “tendency to escalate” whenever bombing is adopted as a strategy. Predicting an enemy’s response to aerial bombardment, threatened or actual, remains an uncertain science. Part of the reason for this probably lies in the fact that the historic instances of the rise of air power as an instrument of policy have been studied less diligently than we might expect. If this is true and if Mr. Quester’s book encourages others to undertake such studies, it will have more than earned its passage.
Each of these books, makes a contribution. And if it is true that many airmen today, especially those who participated, are sometimes irritated at the long life of what the British call “the bomber controversy,” it is also true that it is only through the continuing and agonizing reappraisal of the record that history can attain its proper goal—a view of the past that reflects the present to the extent that it helps us understand where we are in time and how we got there.
Durham, North Carolina
*Noble Frankland, The Bombing Offensive Against Germany: Outlines and Perspectives (London: Faber and Faber, 1965, 18s), 128 pp.
**George H. Quester, Deterrence Before Hiroshima: The Airpower Background of Modern Strategy (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1966, $6.95), xiii and 196 pp.
Notes
1. For instance, casualty figures given for the German raid of 13 June 1917 are only approximations; and Frankland, following a common error that can be traced to the famous Smuts Memorandum, speaks of a German raid taking place on 11 July 1917, whereas the correct date is 7 July.
2. The Strategic Air Offensive Against Germany (4 vols.; London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1961), III, 283-311.
3. The book abounds with examples in both categories: (1) Precise dating of events is apparently a matter of small importance. A check of the dates given by Quester on p. 18 against his own sources shows at least two errors: for September 27 (RNAS counterforce raids begin on Zeppelin sheds at Düsseldorf) read either September 22 (first attempt to bomb Düsseldorf) or October 8 (first successful raid against Düsseldorf; and for December 21 (first German bombs on British soil) read December 24. On p. 146 he gives October 10, 1943, as the date for the Schweinfurt raid and cites Webster and Frankland, who give the date correctly is October 14. (2) Among the most prominent proofing errors: “Smut” for Smuts (p. 39); “rais” for raids (p. 167); Lord Thomson becomes “Lord Thompson” in a footnote (p. 66); is “J. B. Ashmore” in the text (p. 68); the citation for a quotation on p. 103 states “italics in the original,” yet there are no italics to be found; and on p. 169 the reader is distracted by finding a closing parenthesis unpreceded by an opening parenthesis.
4. Others have suspected what Quester attempts unsuccessfully to “demonstrate.” See for example: Denis Richards, The Royal Air Force, 1939-1945 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1953), Vol. I, p. 122; Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundby, Air Bombardment (New York: Harper, 1951), p. 96; and Hanson Baldwin, Battles Lost and Won (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), pp. 402-3.
Captain David MacIsaac (A. M., Yale University) is presently working toward a doctorate in history at Duke University under the Air Force Institute of Technology. Upon completion in 1968, he will return to duty at the U. S. Air Force Academy. He was commissioned in 1957 through AFROTC. His assignments have been as Chief, Personnel Control Branch, 4245th Strategic Wing, Sheppard AFB, Texas, 1959-61; Chief, Officers Branch, Military Personnel Division, Hq Sixteenth Air Force, Torrejon AB, Spain, 1961-64; and Instructor, Department of History, USAFA, 1964-66.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this
document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression,
academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official
position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air
Force or the Air University.
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